Tag: books

“You are a boat”: Favorite Sentences of 2014

Say what you will about e-books versus the real thing; I acquired a Kindle out of necessity because my wife and I simply ran out of apartment space.  Much as the iPod replaced my CD collection, the Kindle replaced my hardcover collection; I still read/listen as much as I ever did, and my apartment is a lot less claustrophobic as a result.

It took me a long time to allow myself to mark up the pages of a book, to underline, to highlight.  Dog-earing a page was as rough as I’d allow myself to be; I’d always prefer to leave scraps of napkins as placeholders.  And this sort of thing, even though it’s one of my favorite things on the internet, would be absolute blasphemy.

Anyway:  I don’t know to what extent other e-readers do this, but Kindle’s highlighting feature is awesome, and I use it all the time, and even though it doesn’t do a terrific job of syncing highlights across my various Kindle-enabled devices*, it does collect everything online, and so I figured this would be as good a reason as any to share my favorite sentences from what I read this year.

In no particular order (although this is roughly in the order in which I read them):

from Lexicon, by Max Barry:

He’d basically fallen in love with her on the spot. Well, no, that wasn’t accurate; that implied a binary state, a shifting from not-love to love, remaining static thereafter, and what he’d done with Brontë was fall and fall, increasingly faster the closer they drew, like planets drawn to each other’s gravitational force. Doomed, he guessed, the same way.

from The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch:

“I know that the only woman with the key to that peculiar heart of yours is a thousand miles away. And I know you’d rather be miserable over her than happy with anyone else.”

– – –

“…the more we do this, the more I learn about what I think Chains was really training us for. And this is it. He wasn’t training us for a calm and orderly world where we could pick and choose when we needed to be clever. He was training us for a situation that was fucked up on all sides. Well, we’re in it, and I say we’re equal to it. I don’t need to be reminded that we’re up to our heads in dark water. I just want you boys to remember that we’re the gods-damned sharks.”

from The Secret Place, by Tana French:

“…People are complicated. When you’re a little kid, you don’t realize, you think people are just one thing; but then you get older, and you realize it’s not that simple. Chris wasn’t that simple. He was cruel and he was kind. And he didn’t like realizing that. It bothered him, that he wasn’t just one thing. I think it made him feel . . .” She drifted for long enough that I wondered if she’d left the sentence behind, but Conway kept waiting. In the end, Selena said, “It made him feel fragile. Like he could break into pieces any time, because he didn’t know how to hold himself together. That was why he did that with those other girls, went with them and kept it secret: so he could try out being different things and see how it felt, and he’d be safe. He could be as lovely as he wanted or as horrible as he wanted, and it wouldn’t count, because no one else would ever know. I thought, at first, maybe I could show him how to hold the different bits together; how he could be OK. But it didn’t work out that way.”

from Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, by David Shafer:

There is a club for these people, the people who have waited outside the burning houses knowing that they will not go back in and knowing that the not-going-back-in will ruin them.

– – –

How long do you think a weak-minded addict will stay on the shelf? Because that day you walked in? That day I saw you? I swear, my heart slowed and my breath came easier. All that rabbiting I do—it just stopped. Not stopped by like magic, but stopped with reason. You are as strange and amazing as anything my stupid little brain has ever come up with, and you are from outside of it. You have no idea what great news that is. And I’m going to lift some copy here, but there is a time for everything, that day and night here you were the still point of the turning world, and I knew for sure that I had a place in it. That place is next to you.

…

I really am quite sure that there is something we’re supposed to do together, that there is more that is supposed to go on between us. Aren’t you? Isn’t there a held breath in your life right now? I’ve missed a few boats already, and I really don’t want to miss this one too. I realize that in that metaphor or analogy or whatever, you are a boat. That doesn’t really quite get what I mean, because I am also a boat. We are both boats and we are both passengers. We should not miss each other.

from Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle:

Grandma stayed on alone in the giant house where my dad and his brothers had grown up. When, eventually, the climb up the stairs got to be too much, she moved downstairs, and the second floor became an accidental museum commemorating the last day anybody’d lived there.

from The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell (almost too many to count, really):

I consider how you don’t get to choose whom you’re attracted to, you only get to wonder about it, retrospectively.

– – –

She walks as if distrustful of floors, and sits down as if she’s had some bad experiences with chairs, too.

from Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer:

He wasn’t sure he knew the difference anymore between what he was meant to find and what he’d dug up on his own.

from Acceptance, by Jeff VanderMeer:

But, in truth, standing there with Lowry, looking out across his domain through a long plate of tinted glass, you feel more as if you’re staring at a movie set: a collection of objects that without the animation of Lowry’s paranoia and fear, his projection of a story upon them, are inert and pathetic. No, not even a movie set, you realize. More like a seaside carnival in the winter, in the off-season, when even the beach is a poem about loneliness.

– – –

Over time your memory of your mother faded, in the way of not knowing if an image or moment was something you’d experienced or seen going through the photographs your dad kept in a shoe box in the closet.

– – –

Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot—choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spiders and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting out of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before; I use my actual voice rarely enough.

from The Confabulist, by Steven Galloway:

It’s inexplicable what causes a person to love someone. It is a feeling so irrational that it allows you to believe that the person you love has qualities they don’t actually possess. And when someone loves you back, it’s nearly impossible not to feel you must never let them see what you are really like, because you know deep inside that you are not worthy of their love.

– – –

We talked in a roundabout way about nothing in particular: school, people we knew, things we liked and didn’t like. It was the sort of conversation people who haven’t known each other long but understand they will have many more conversations have, uncomplicated and almost lazy but also anticipatory.

– – –

Being a parent is a monumental thing. You shape reality for another person. You cannot be an illusion. You cannot be paralyzed by the fear that you are an illusion. If you have done a bad job, or no job at all, what remains of you is proof that the world is an unfeeling place. If you have done a good job, what remains is the part of you that was magical.

from Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel:

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

– – –

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light.

from The Book of Strange New Things, by Michel Faber:

There was a red button on the wall labeled EMERGENCY, but no button labeled BEWILDERMENT.

– – –

He walked with increasing pace, turned corners with increasing resolution, and was met each time with the same rectangular passageways and rows of identical doors. In a place like this, you couldn’t even be sure if you were lost.

* I hate to sound like an Amazon infomercial, but: I just picked up the new Kindle Voyage, and it’s pretty fabulous.  But it didn’t save the highlights I’d saved on my Paperwhite, and the Paperwhite didn’t save anything that I’d featured on my 2nd-gen Kindle, and none of them save anything I might’ve noted on my iPhone or iPad.

My Year in Reading: 2014 (and 2013, too)

I was wondering why I didn’t write a year-end recap of the books I read last year, and then I remembered:  oh yeah, I had a baby, and you don’t read books when you have a brand-new baby.  How can you read when you don’t sleep, you barely eat, and any free time you do manage to carve out is usually at work?  And reading on the subway is super difficult for me, given that the subway engineer on my evening commute makes a habit of loudly narrating pretty much every single inch of track with inane Subway 101 tips and tricks, making it impossible to concentrate on anything else unless I have headphones on.

That being said, I still kept track of what I read last year in a GoogleDoc spreadsheet because this is what I do, and, well, yeah:  I only finished 6 books last year – 7 if you include my quasi-annual re-read of Infinite Jest (my 8th or 9th time through, but 1st time in e-book format, which is far preferable when you’re on the go).  It was an embarrassingly low number for me, even if I had a pretty good excuse.

Still, in the interest of maintaining the historical record, these are the books that I read in 2013, in rough chronological order:

The Way of Kings (Stormlight Archive 1), Brandon Sanderson
I’m not a big fantasy reader, but this had been recommended by enough people over the years that I felt compelled to give it a shot, and what do you know – I was immediately taken with it.  Sanderson is absurdly prolific, as you’ll see below.

Tenth of December, George Saunders
I’m also not necessarily a reader of short stories; I generally prefer gigantic novels.  But, again, Saunders had been recommended and highly reviewed, and this New York Times profile was an incredible read in and of itself, and I picked this up and quickly devoured it…

Pastoralia, George Saunders
…and then devoured this as well.  I would’ve continued down the Saunders rabbit hole but I didn’t want to burn out on him, and so I stopped myself from buying his other books, but they’re most certainly on my to-do list.

The Mistborn Trilogy, Brandon Sanderson
Like I said above, Sanderson is ridiculously prolific.  This is but one of many gigantic trilogies he’s written, and part of what’s so astounding about him is that while these books are literally humongous, he’s still quite marvelous at world building and character work and making sure you never feel lost.

NOS4A2, Joe Hill
I’d read a few of the stories in 20th Century Ghosts and decided I wanted to read him in a longer format, and this happened to come out right when this urge was reaching a fevered pitch.  I think the first 2 thirds of this book are quite stunning, and certainly reminiscent of his father’s work; unfortunately, it fell apart for me a little bit at the end.

Night Film, Marisha Pessl
I was a huge fan of her first book, Strange Topics in Calamity Physics, and had very high hopes for this one; perhaps my expectations were too high, though, because this one never came together for me, and I found the ending quite bland.

Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon
Curiously, I didn’t give this a grade in my spreadsheet.  I’m not sure I enjoyed it very much, though I was certainly surprised at how super-aware and knowledgeable he is about popular culture.  In any event, books about 9/11 are still tough for me to read, and I’m not sure that’s ever going to change.

I picked up the slack big-time in 2014, I’m happy to say; I finished 22 books, and I feel certain that I’m going to finish my 23rd by the end of next week.

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
Normally I read rather quickly, but not so here; this took me forever to get through.  I started it in mid-December of ’13, and if Goodreads is to be believed, I didn’t finish it until March of ’14.  That’s absurd.  As for the book itself; there’s no denying that Tartt is astonishingly talented, and that her characters are memorable and real, but I found the pacing very slow and I feel a little bit like the main character got let off the hook at the end – even though I also felt that he’d suffered through some very bad luck.

Words of Radiance: Stormlight Archive 2, Brandon Sanderson
Another huge book, but I finished this in a matter of weeks, and I’m sure I’ll read the first two volumes again to get caught up for volume 3 (even though he does a terrific job of getting you up to speed).

Lexicon, Max Barry
I read this over the course of our first family vacation, and found it intoxicating.  A sci-fi concept where language can be used as weaponry, and “poets” are trained by a highly secretive organization.  Two converging narratives with an absolutely stunning and moving reveal.

Pioneer Detectives, Konstantin Kakaes
Spoiler alert: “one of the greatest scientific mysteries of our time” is not, in fact, all that mysterious after all.  An entertaining read, to be sure, but also a bit of a let down.

Niceville
The Homecoming (Niceville 2), Carsten Stroud
I was in the mood for a pulpy supernatural thriller, and these two fit the bill quite well.  Part 3 is slated to come out next summer; I’m not sure it’ll be on my list, but these were interesting.

Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill
Boy oh boy, this was absolutely one of the creepiest ghost stories I’ve ever read.

Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentlemen Bastards 1)
Red Seas under Red Skies (Gentlemen Bastards 2)
Republic of Thieves (Gentlemen Bastards 3), Scott Lynch
I wish I could remember who it was on Twitter that first brought these to my attention – whoever you are, you have my eternal thanks.  The easiest way to explain these books is as Ocean’s Eleven set in a vaguely steampunk world, except where everything turns to shit pretty much all the time, and where “success” doesn’t always mean “a big score”, but rather “not dying horribly.”

Declare, Tim Powers
I am and have always been fascinated with secret societies and hidden, occult-ish mysteries, and putting that sort of ethos inside of a Cold War spy novel is pretty much a win-win.

The Secret Place, Tana French
I’ve been a fan of the Dublin Murder Squad since the very first one, though each subsequent novel has been a little more disappointing than the previous one.  I’m happy to say, then, that this one was a lot more enjoyable than the last few, and I’m curious to know where she goes in further volumes now that she’s introduced a subtle element of the supernatural into the proceedings.  The earlier books never had it, and instead their hook was really just about how hard the ending could punch you in the stomach.  This was not a gut-puncher to that sort of degree, but it was still a good read.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, David Shafer
Having just finished watching all six episodes of Black Mirror, I feel very much like this book could exist in that sort of universe, a universe where one private corporation is attempting to become the uber-Facebook with serious sinister implications and an underground resistance is attempting to hack their way into destroying it.

Wolf in White Van, John Darnielle
I’m not at all familiar with Darnielle’s band, Mountain Goats, but I’d certainly read a volume of his collected lyrics; the man clearly has a way with words.  This is a deeply beautiful meditation on loneliness, with an ending that left me speechless.

The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell
This is my book of the year, without question.  I wrote up a thing about it here.  I want to read it again, but I also want to read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet first.

Annihilation (Southern Reach Trilogy 1)
Authority (Southern Reach Trilogy 2)
Acceptance (Southern Reach Trilogy 3), Jeff VanderMeer
The first book is a knockout; the second is somewhat of a letdown, though it expands on the first book’s backstory in rather significant ways; the third book is an attempt to reconcile the first two, answering certain questions while raising even more.  I’m not entirely sure that the trilogy is a successful one, but the first book is so incredibly good that you might as well give it a go.

Slow Regard of Silent Things, Patrick Rothfuss
This is a small side-story to the larger Kingkiller Chronicles trilogy, and it feels very much like an experiment in tone and structure and character development, but it’s also a rather beautiful read.  Rothfuss himself warns you that you might not like it in the preface, and I suppose that’s true if this is your first introduction to his work; but if you’ve read the first two proper books and are eager for anything more, this is more or less mandatory.

The Confabulist, Steven Galloway
A historical mystery novel that is somewhat reminiscent of Carter Beats the Devil, though not nearly as much fun as that book.  Still, it’s an intriguing premise – the memoirs of the man who killed Houdini (twice), and the ending is surprisingly affecting.

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
I feel bad that I didn’t enjoy this as much as everyone else seems to be; perhaps I’d just had my fill of post-apocalypse dystopia (especially since the final chapter of Bone Clocks is so shockingly devastating on that particular front).  It’s very well written, and the various threads in both present and past are woven quite delicately; I’m just not sure they worked for me.

Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti
I’m still in the middle of this one, and I’m enjoying it quite thoroughly.  Ligotti’s reputation is that of a modern-day Lovecraft or Poe; all of his stories take place in the fog in desolate towns, and which are shadowed by unsettling… things, and there’s a philosophical weariness and uneasiness in his narrators that creates a powerful and quite nerve-rattling sense of dread.  I’ll be looking forward to reading more of him, though I’ll definitely need a palate cleanser before I do.

In Which A Whole Bunch of Navel-Gazing Ensues

1.  My rental copy of Assassin’s Creed Unity has not yet arrived – it might come tonight, it might come tomorrow – and yet considering the spectacular number of glitches and game-crashing bugs that are dominating my Twitter feed, I’m not sure I want to start it until the first wave of patches arrive (and that those patches don’t further break the game).  And by that point, when enough patches have come out so that the game is in a playable state, I could very well be knee-deep in Dragon Age Inquisition and might not want to bother.  The larger problem is that the code isn’t the only thing that appears to be half-baked; Assassin’s Creed games have always been tough nuts to crack from a narrative point of view, and I keep hearing that Unity’s story is bland, boring and nonsensically enigmatic, the way it’s always been.  No amount of patching can fix a busted story.  Do I want to spend 40+ hours of my life wrestling with something this problematic?  I mean, I’ve played pretty much every AC game there is (except the Vita game and Rogue) but I haven’t been afraid to leave them unfinished (i.e., Revelations, AC3).

Furthermore, regarding Ubisoft’s actions with respect to Unity’s release – specifically, the bizarre 12-hour post-release review embargo – well, it smacks of bullshit and corporate shenanigans, a desperate flailing to reduce the number of cancelled pre-orders once the word got out that Unity was straight-up broken.  And considering how the pre-release hype failed to live up to the post-release reality of Watch Dogs, I can’t help but feel very nervous about Far Cry 4.

2.  And speaking of broken stuff, I must admit that I’ve stalled a bit on my NaNo project.  Honestly?  The subject matter started sending me into a very inward-facing, navel-gazing spiral of depression – which was exacerbated by re-reading my college diary – and so I’ve been mired in this weird melancholic funk of nostalgia and regret for the last week (which itself has been exacerbated by a nasty cold that my family has been passing around to each other for the last month or so, as well as some day-job-related stress that I can’t talk about here).  Indeed, this morning I listened to the first half of Marc Maron’s WTF interview with Allie Brosh (of Hyperbole and a Half fame) and what I heard hit me square in the face.  I go through these depressive cycles every once in a while, and they’re a real pain in the ass; I get apathetic, and then I get mad at myself for being apathetic, and then I get mad that I’d rather get mad at myself than stop being apathetic, and so on and so forth.  So, yeah – writing about one of my college friends and collaborators has turned into something a bit uglier.  That doesn’t mean I intend to give up on it, though; it means that I need to approach it in a different way.

3.  Switching back over to games: I beg your forgiveness for all the Xbox One bashing I’ve done this year.  I’ve been playing Sunset Overdrive and Forza Horizon 2 just about every night since I bought the damned thing, and I’ve become rather enamored with it.  So much so that I haven’t decided which platform to play Dragon Age on; frankly, I’m waiting for the Digital Foundry people to get their hands on it (especially once the PS4 patch is in place that supposedly fixes a lot of what was broken during the review period).  Because unless the PS4 version is noticeably and markedly better-looking and performing, I might just stick with the XB1 – even though I have a $15 credit on the PSN store.

4.  And now switching back to books:  I’m trying to keep my good-book-reading streak alive, and so I’m still trying to figure out what to read next.  In addition to the list of 10 as-yet-unpurchased books I put up the other day (as well as the countless already-purchased-and-still-unread books on my Kindle), I’m now tremendously intrigued by Michel Faber, who I’d never heard of until yesterday, when I flipped through this week’s New Yorker and saw his newest book mentioned in their Briefly Noted section.  David Mitchell, writer of this year’s “Bone Clocks” (which is my personal Book of the Year and might end up in my all-time Top 10), calls Faber’s new book “his second masterpiece”, and so I had to find out what the first masterpiece was, which is “The Crimson Petal and the White”, which a few Facebook friends also raved about; and it turns out that he also wrote “Under the Skin”, which is also a movie I’ve been wanting to see all year.  So, then:  if you’ve got anything to say about him, please let me know.

The To-Read Pile

Seeking opinions on the following books, all on my to-read-but-haven’t-yet-purchased file:

1. Orfeo, Richard Powers
2. Dhalgren, Samuel Delaney
3. Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, Javier Marias (finally on Kindle!)
4. Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
5. Mr. Gwyn, Alessandro Baricco
6. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra
7. The Last Policeman trilogy, Ben Winters
8. The Three, Sarah Lotz
9. anything by László Krasznahorka
10. The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway 

back from the break

Before I get into the vacation recap, I’ve got an update on my Vita situation.  It’s not good, though there is somewhat of a happy ending.

I came back to work this morning and saw what I assumed to be my repaired Vita waiting for me on my office chair.  But when I opened the box, I instead saw a note that said that the Vita could not be serviced because “it is not a North American product.”  I contacted Sony immediately thereafter, and quickly discovered that the Vita’s serial number does not actually exist in their records, and there’s no manufacturing region that it can be traced back to.  So then I looked at the order on Amazon, and saw that it was sold through a company called Tax Free Distributors.  The Sony customer service guy had never heard of them, and Googling their phone number turned up almost nothing usable.  I’m not sure what their deal is – they seem to operate somewhere in Nevada – but they sold me a fraudulent Vita, and I’m really, really pissed.

Amazon is getting me a full refund, which is great – because now I’ll probably wait for the Vita Slim, which is the thing I was hoping to get in the first place.

But the moral of the story is:  if you buy anything on Amazon that goes through that company, use caution.  Side note:  I left a scathing review on their feedback page and I can’t help but notice that a whole bunch of short 5/5 star reviews are going up really quickly, possibly in an effort to push mine off the page.

henryandme_beach

So, then:  I am back from the first real vacation I’ve had in maybe 3-4 years.  We flew first to Chicago for my great aunt’s 100th birthday and to see my extended family on my mom’s side.  While we were there, my kid took his very first unassisted steps, right in full view of everyone, and we caught it on video.

Then we flew to Naples, Florida, where we spent an absolutely beautiful week with my wife’s parents.  Many more kid firsts:  first time with a babysitter that wasn’t one of our parents (which went just fine), first visit to the ocean (he didn’t like it), first dip in the pool (he loved it), first trip to the zoo (I wasn’t there for this, but he supposedly liked it, even if he conked out towards the end of it).

I should also point out that the thing I was most concerned about – the actual flights themselves – were totally uneventful, as far as the baby was concerned.  He slept through the first two, and while he was a little cranky on the final flight, he did eventually sleep through the back half of that one as well.

It should also go without saying that this was not necessarily a relaxing vacation.  Don’t misunderstand – I loved not being at work, and I loved being out of the dreary NYC weather, and I loved being with my family and (especially) with my kid.  But that’s the rub – when you have a toddler, you can’t really stretch out and relax unless the kid’s asleep.

So, yeah – even if my Vita had been working properly, I probably wouldn’t have used it all that much.  Indeed, I was very nearly entirely game-free the entire vacation.  I did a few levels of Hitman Go on the iPad (which is quite good), and I did a few of the tutorial hands in Hearthstone (which is not grabbing me as much as I’d like, though I didn’t really give it my full attention).  But that’s about it, as far as gaming is concerned.

Did quite a lot of reading, though.  I can highly recommend Max Barry’s “Lexicon”, which I devoured in, like, 2 days.  I also finished The Pioneer Detectives (though it’s pretty short).  I also read through most of “Up Up Down Down Left Write: The Freelance Guide to Video Game Journalism” by Nathan Meunier, which was informative and inspiring (if also a little overly cutesy with pop culture references and is probably geared for someone about 20 years younger than me).  Being that I’m slowly starting to branch out onto other sites, it’s good information to have handy.

We also saw some movies, too, at the absurdly nice Silverspot theater, where the huge leather recliner seats are reserved in advance and where they serve you booze; we saw Captain America (which was awesome) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (which was great, and which keeps growing on me as I continue to think about it).  Also:  I can highly recommend the theater’s Italian Mojito, which was delicious.

I’m back, now, and trying to get into the swing of things, gaming-wise.  Last night I dusted off my PS4 and tried getting back into Trials Fusion – I am now up to the “Hard” difficulty levels and all I’ll say about it is that it’s inspiring me to write a column about frustrating difficulty levels, and why I’m willing to punish myself with Trials while being utterly dismissive about Dark Souls II.  Also did some fooling around with Infamous Second Son‘s new photo mode; I’m not thrilled with the photos I took, but it does seem to be a pretty cool tool.

Mario Golf: World Tour comes out for the 3DS on Friday.  I love video golf in any format, and I loved the DS Mario Golf game, but I’m not thrilled with the reviews that have been trickling out of late, especially as far as the solo campaign is concerned.  Being that I’m somewhat broke for the immediate future, I’m probably going to hold off – or at least I’ll stick with renting it from Gamefly.

Beyond that, it looks like a quiet week, gaming-wise.  I’ve got some columns I need to write up for some other sites, though, so I do need to get caught up on the last week’s worth of RSS feeds…

The Books I Read in 2012

I just finished a great book last night – “The Way of Kings”, by Brandon Sanderson.*  And it occurs to me that I’ve read a lot of good stuff of late, and this is as good a time as any to cover what I read last year.

First: the stuff I didn’t finish.

  • Elizabeth Kostova, “The Historian.”  I tried my best; it just seemed to take forever to get where it was going, and I think I just grew impatient.
  • Tom Bissell, “Magic Hours.”  Tom’s one of my favorite writers – I’ve linked to him extensively here in the past – and I picked this up specifically because a short piece he wrote about David Foster Wallace.  The book itself is a collection of non-fiction pieces, and I’ve read about half of them so far – the one about “The Room” is terrific.
  • Sergio de la Pava, “A Naked Singularity.”  I’m normally a huge fan of dense, difficult avant-garde-ish fiction, but this one was a particularly tough nut to crack.  I’d like to get back into it; at the time, though, I was too easily frustrated and was content to pick up something easier instead.
  • Umberto Eco, “The Prague Cemetery”.  Second year in a row I’ve tried and failed to get into this one.  I’m hit or miss with Eco; I adore Foucault’s Pendulum and The Name of the Rose, but couldn’t get into Baudolino and a few others that I’m forgetting the titles of.  Will probably abandon.
  • Ariel Winter, “The Twenty Year Death.”  I picked this up on some relatively decent word-of-mouth, and also because I was thinking about writing some sort of pulp mystery thing and thought this might make for a worthwhile read for research purposes.  I made it through the first third but couldn’t keep myself interested.
  • Gillian Flynn, “Gone Girl.”  Sometimes I’ll be reading a book, and at some point I’ll have to put it down because of something else.  I usually only have a one or two-week window in which to get back into the book before I lose the thread completely.  My biggest regret of the year was putting this down (I don’t even know why, at this point) and being away from it long enough to be totally disengaged from it, and so it’s on my must-read list for 2013.
  •  David Foster Wallace, “Both Flesh And Not.”  I’d already read some of the pieces in here, for one thing; for another, D.T. Max’s biography (which I’ll get to in a bit) re-broke my heart a little bit, and so I found re-reading DFW a bit more uncomfortable than I’d like.  Will definitely get to in 2013; this is a no-brainer.
  • George Saunders, “Pastoralia.”  There was a point this summer where I bought, like, 5 or 6 books all at once, and I couldn’t decide which one to start.  I’m actually about to start his new book, “Tenth of December”, which just came out today, and assuming that goes well I’ll be diving back into this one again.

And as for the stuff I did read, here it is, listed in the order in which I read them.

Alan Lightman, “Einstein’s Dreams”.  Don’t quite remember why I picked this up; I’d heard about it for a long time, and I guess I was finally in the mood to give it a go.  Each chapter is, essentially, a re-imagining of linear time.  As someone who was obsessed with the concept of linear/nonlinear/relative time back in college, this is very interesting subject matter, and it’s written well enough to get the points across.  But it also feels a bit slight and ethereal, and not in a good way.  Still, an interesting read if you’re into that sort of thinking.  7/10

Stephen King, “11/22/1963”.  He’s still got it, man.  And while he still has certain mannerisms and tics that are incredibly distracting, which is odd considering that they’re in every single goddamned book he’s ever written, and I’ve read most of them and so I should be used to them by now – like how every town in every city has vaguely racist, misspelled signage along its main street – he’s still knows how to tell a great story.  This was a ton of fun to read.  8/10

Hugh Howey, “Wool (Omnibus Edition)”.  My wife got hooked on these books and finally convinced me to jump on board, and I’m glad I did; they’re remarkably well written and relentless in their tension and pacing.  He is the golden boy of DIY publishing, and with good reason; he’s a naturally gifted storyteller.   We had the pleasure of meeting him at an author meet-up earlier this year, and he couldn’t have been a nicer guy.   9/10

John Sullivan, “Pulphead”.   I’m having a bit of trouble remembering this one at the moment.  But here’s my quick reminder to myself after I finished it:  “pretty well done, although some essays are better than others.  8/10”  That’s a high grade for what seems like a lukewarm review, but I meant it at the time, so it stays.

Rich Walls, “Standby Chicago”.  One of the cool things about that Hugh Howey author meet-up I mentioned is that, in addition to Hugh being a super-nice guy, every one of the fans who showed up was also super cool.  I’m friends with a few of them on Xbox Live and Steam now, and while Rich isn’t a gamer, he is a rather accomplished author in his own right.  This is a very sweet, delicate, sincere novella, and I found it engaging.  (Also found it hard to relate to, if only because I’ve never had so many strangers talk to me ever in my life.)   7/10

Hugh Howey, “Wool 6”.  A prequel to the Omnibus Edition; this actually raises a few more questions than it answers.  Required reading if you’re at all invested in the Wool series; it won’t mean as much to you if you come to it fresh.  8/10

Chad Harbach, “The Art of Fielding”.   Beautiful, heartbreaking.  Takes a startling turn at a certain point; I thought it was going to be the origin story of a mythic baseball prodigy, and it turned out to be something else entirely.  Well worth the journey.  8/10

China Meveille, “The City & The City”.   I tried to read another one of his books a few years ago – “Perdido Street Station” – and found it impenetrable and, for lack of a better word, un-fun.  This was a lot more my speed – a multi-dimensional murder mystery. I still find his writing style a bit annoying, but he’s unquestionably one of the most imaginative authors out there.   8/10

Patrick Somerville, “The Universe in Miniature in Miniature”.  A marvelous collection of short stories that are all sort-of interwoven.  Inspiring and brilliantly written.  Very much looking forward to reading more of this guy.  9/10

Erik Larson, “The Devil in the White City”.  My GoogleDoc comments:  “thrilling, gripping, depressing.”  It’s an interesting read, even if the two stories that he attempts to tie together aren’t quite as evenly balanced as I’d anticipated.  8/10

Tana French, “Broken Harbor”.  The fourth in the Dublin Murder Squad series; this one was not quite as good as the previous three.  Still bleak and depressing as all hell, of course.  GoogleDoc comment:  “might be the first time that the lack of a proper ending was a good thing.”  7/10

D.T. Max, “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story”.  After DFW’s death, D.T. Max wrote a beautiful celebration of his life and work in the New Yorker, and it seemed logical for him to follow that piece up with a full biography.  I’m not sure how this book would read to someone who isn’t a hard-core Infinite Jest fan; but I am a hard-core Infinite Jest fan, and so this book revealed a lot of interesting information about the creation and inspiration behind that particular work.  The ending is a bit sudden, but then, it was in real life, too.  8/10

Iain M. Banks, “The Hydrogen Sonata”.   I’m a big big fan of the Culture novels – I’ve been wanting a videogame adaptation of that universe for a long time.  As far as those books go, though, this is a minor entry at best, and made for a disappointing read. 6/10

Robin Sloan, “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore”.  I flew through this one in about 3 or 4 hours, which is why I’m not rating it higher; it feels too slim and it winds up too quickly.  But I loved everything else about it; it was fun and smart and did a lot of the things that I’d hoped “Ready Player One” would do, but didn’t.  7/10

Justin Cronin, “The Passage”.   I re-read this to prepare for The Twelve, and it was even better the second time around.  An absolute gem.  9/10

Justin Cronin, “The Twelve”.  I’m glad that I read these two back-to-back; I felt very much on top of things when the second book got started.  It must be said, however, that Cronin is not nearly as good at action scenes as he is with everything else, and there’s a lot of action in this book that just kinda falls flat.  This is the middle book in a trilogy, and I must say that I have absolutely no idea where the third book can possibly go; the ending of this one ties up about 90% of the loose ends.  7/10

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* No, I haven’t read any of the Wheel of Time stuff, and I’m not planning to, either – this particular book came recommended specifically on its own merits, and since it’s the first volume of a projected 10-volume project, I’ll be more than happy to stick with this for the foreseeable future.