Books I didn't finish in 2014 and am dragging with me into 2015

Maybe they're emblematic! But probably not.

Ruth Ozeki, A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING -- I really enjoyed this book up until the funeral (I hope that's vague enough to avoid all spoilers), a scene I found so upsetting that it was difficult for me to focus on everything that happened after. I'll probably finish it eventually, I just feel averse.
Jaimy Gordon, LORD OF MISRULE - someone left this National Book Award winner on the free shelf at work, making it easier for me to give it 10 pages before (as previously) I had rejected it as "not for me." I was fairly captivated -- but I was traveling somewhere, and it was a hardcover, so I set it down. As one does.
Sara Paretsky, BLACKLIST (no relation to the James Spader hamfest of the same name) -- started when I was at home over Christmas because my mom is a fan. Honestly, I should probably bump this one up so I don't forget all the clues in the mystery.
Gillian Flynn, DARK PLACES -- my library loan unexpectedly came up on Dec. 30 for this earlier novel by the author of GONE GIRL. So far it's even darker and bleaker -- fun! This is also an upcoming movie

My New Year's Resolution

Update this blog more now that the first draft of my novel is done.

Tournament of Books 11 -- yes, already

Buried over Christmas was the longlist for the annual Tournament of Books, The Morning News' highly idiosyncratic literature competition.

Although I always enjoy these lists, I approached this one with a little disappointment for my perceived lack of progress (only 7 titles down?!) but largely with excitement. As someone who found 2014 slightly disappointing in its offerings I look forward to this tournament proving me wrong, but -- just as when I scanned the NY Times Notable Books of 2014 -- I felt myself at the bottom of a very large hill. How embarrassing is it to admit that I'm more caught up on potential Oscar nominees than year-end notable books? Very well, then I won't.

I also noticed that a few of these books are either sequels (MY STRUGGLE, BOOK 3) or actual series in themselves (Jeff Vandermeer's), suggesting that either some judges are going to have to do a lot of extra homework or (more likely I think) they have just been included as a courtesy nod in the longlist and don't have a chance at making it to the tournament itself.

Here's my best guess at what is going to make the short list:

Megan Abbott, THE FEVER
Chloe Caldwell, WOMEN
Anthony Doerr, ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE
Roxane Gay, AN UNTAMED STATE
Nick Harkaway, TIGERMAN
Marlon James, A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS
Lily King, EUPHORIA
Catherine Lacey, NOBODY IS EVER MISSING
David Mitchell, THE BONE CLOCKS
Celeste Ng, EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU
Jenny Offill, DEPT. OF SPECULATION
David Shafer, WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT
Emily St John Mandel, STATION ELEVEN
Anya Ulinich, LENA FINKEL'S MAGIC BARREL
Sarah Waters, THE PAYING GUESTS

Round-robin 16th spot: Jesse Ball, SILENCE ONCE BEGUN; Richard Flanagan, THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH; John Darnielle, WOLF IN WHITE VAN. Darnielle will win.

Every crazy person is crazy in his own way

You could apparently go nuts contemplating how much of Tolstoy is left on the page with each new translation that comes out, writes Masha Gessen for the New York Times.

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

--Lt Colonel John McCrae of the Canadian Army, "In Flanders Fields." McCrae was a field surgeon and a field hospital chief during WWI; he died at No. 3 Canadian General Hospital in Boulogne on January 28, 1918.

It's a trajectory

"I associate happiness with having a plan. The Plan, mind, doesn’t have to be grand – “Write 1,000 pages in three weeks” or “Save the world”. It can be, “Find out if Lidl is still selling shelled pistachios” or “Please get around to replacing the water filter in the cellar this afternoon, you idiot.” Happiness isn’t a position. It’s a trajectory.

"More an ongoing affair, happiness isn’t getting something, but wanting something. It’s having appetite, being filled with desire. It’s being pointed in a direction. It’s caring about something, which means the condition always comes with the threat of disappointment, injury or loss. As giving a toss about anything or anyone makes you a sitting duck, happiness is intrinsically precarious; it entails putting yourself at risk. It has nothing to do with feeling pompously, fatuously puffed up over your wonderful self and your wonderful life. It’s being too driven, too busy, too focused on what’s on the docket for today to remember to even ask yourself if you’re happy. If you’re really happy, you’re probably thinking about something else."

-Lionel Shriver (greatest) on happiness for The Guardian.

"Gone Girl": See it or skip it?

I wanted to poll the audience here. The hotly anticipated adaptation of Gillian Flynn's GONE GIRL opens today in theatres. Anecdotally I've heard everything from "Looks terrible" to "I'm already lining up to see it," but one thing I haven't heard is the classic "I don't want to see it because I don't want it to affect how much I like the book."

Are you planning to see "Gone Girl"? Where are your expectations for it?

My Summer Reading List, 2014

Jennifer Belle, HIGH MAINTENANCE
Charlie LeDuff, DETROIT: AN AMERICAN AUTOPSY
Jesmyn Ward, MEN WE REAPED

Jeff Hobbs, THE SHORT AND TRAGIC LIFE OF ROBERT PEACE
Lawrence Wright, GOING CLEAR
Meg Wolitzer, THE TEN-YEAR NAP
Michael Gibney, SOUS CHEF
Gay Talese, HONOR THY FATHER
Alan Cumming, NOT MY FATHER'S SON
Amy Sohn, THE ACTRESS
Dylan Landis, RAINEY ROYAL
Jonathan Lethem, DISSIDENT GARDENS
Jennifer Weiner, FLY AWAY HOME
Allegra Goodman, KAATERSKILL FALLS

Gemma Burgess, BROOKLYN GIRLS
Kate Christensen, THE GREAT MAN
Chris Beha, ARTS & ENTERTAINMENTS
Emily Gould, FRIENDSHIP
Rainbow Rowell, ATTACHMENTS
Carol Rifkin Brunt, TELL THE WOLVES I'M HOME
Jennifer Haigh, MRS. KIMBLE
Roz Savage, STOP DRIFTING, START ROWING
Lori Rader-Day, THE BLACK HOUR
Lucy Grealy, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE

Sjon, THE BLUE FOX
Ann Patchett, THIS IS THE STORY OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE
Jess Walter, WE LIVE IN WATER
Megan Abbott, THE FEVER
Roxane Gay, BAD FEMINIST
Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling), THE CUCKOO'S CALLING
Jonathan Tropper, THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU
Eula Biss, ON IMMUNITY: AN INOCULATION
Peter Heller, THE PAINTER
Emma Straub, THE VACATIONERS
David Allen, GETTING THINGS DONE
Charles Duhigg, THE POWER OF HABIT
Jessica Grose, SAD DESK SALAD
Christina Alger, THE DARLINGS

"I Leave You," "Walk Among the Tombstones" open today

Now this is what I call a major week for book adaptations. Jonathan Tropper's THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU hits the big screen thanks to director Shawn Levy ("Night at the Museum," "Date Night," other movies that don't have "Night" in the title) starring Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Corey "Hemingway in 'Midnight in Paris'" Stoll and Adam Driver as siblings coming home for their father's funeral. Watch out for Ben Schwartz ("Parks and Recreation," "House of Lies") as a childhood friend turned rabbi.

For the dramatic minded, check out "A Walk Among the Tombstones," the first time mystery writer Lawrence Block's PI Matthew Scudder has appeared onscreen. (I read A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES back in 2009.) Scudder, a depressed ex-cop in AA, takes a case involving a kidnapped and murdered woman that takes him to dark places in New York City. For you "Downton Abbey" fans, this movie also costars Matthew Crawley, er Dan Stevens. (Irresistible film trivium: Block cowrote "My Blueberry Nights," Wong Kar-Wai's English-language debut.) "A Walk Among the Tombstones" is in possession of a kick-ass trailer and was directed and written by Scott Frank ("Get Shorty," "Out of Sight"). Why did I write all this when I could have just written "Liam Neeson is a badass, in the US this time"?

Also in theatres today: "The Maze Runner," based on the YA book by James Dashner of the same name, and "Hector and the Search for Happiness," based on the Paulo Coelho novel (nooope) and starring Simon Pegg. See 'em or skip 'em?

Opens today: "The Drop"

Hey, remember "Mystic River" and "Gone Baby Gone"? Dennis Lehane's work returns to the big screen today with "The Drop," by Belgian director Michael Roskam (Academy Award nominee, Best Foreign Film 2012 -- lost to "A Separation") with a cowriting credit for Lehane himself. The plot concerns a local bartender who gets mixed up with the Mafia, but the movie will probably get most of its notice from its costar, the late great James Gandolfini. (Not to diminish his work, but I'm also looking forward to seeing Noomi Rapace, who played Lisbeth Salander in the original GIRL WITH A DRAGON TATTOO adaptation, in an English-speaking role.)

Have you read THE DROP? Are you going to see this movie or skip it?

"Roll of Film: Photographer Missing"

Vines of smoke through latticework of steel

Weave the air into a garden of smoke.

And in the garden people came and went,

People of smoke and people of flesh, the air dressed

In ash. What the pictures couldn’t say

Was spoken by the smoke: A common language

In a tongue of smoke that murmured in every ear

Something about what it was they’d been forced

To endure: Words spoken in duress,

Inconsolable words, words spoken under the earth

That rooted in smoke and breathed in the smoke

And put forth shoots that twined through the steel,

Words plunged through the roof of the garages’

Voids, I-beams twisted; the eye that saw all this

Tells and tells again one part of the story

Of that day of wandering through the fatal garden,

The camera’s eye open and acutely

Recording in the foul-smelling air.

--From Tom Sleigh's "New York American Spell, 2001."

The Library of Congress now has an official landing page for resources related to Sept. 11 poetry.

At home with THE VACATIONERS

Going on vacation with other people's dysfunctional families isn't always that fun, but I'll make an exception for the Posts and co. of THE VACATIONERS, who pack all their secrets and quiet disappointments with each other off to Mallorca for two weeks. Manhattanites Jim and Franny Post are off for sun and fun with son Bobby (a not-very-successful real-estate broker in Miami), daughter Sylvia (about to head off to college), Bobby's girlfriend Carmen, plus Franny's best friend Charles and his husband Lawrence. What none of the other guests know is that Franny is using this trip to decide whether she and Jim should divorce after Jim strayed, an act of infidelity that already cost him his job.

You already know that the vacationers of THE VACATIONERS are eventually going to find the house too small, the walls too thin, and their family ties too itchy and constraining. For the most part, the reader of THE VACATIONERS feels none of these things, and can even enjoy the Spanish setting in moments when the family can't. (A private pool and the beach? Send me away!) One of the most nuanced relationships I found in here was between Franny and Charles -- it's rare, in a way, that you see that kind of friendship between older people in fiction, while the woman-and-her-gay-best-friend dynamic is all over millennial pop culture). And then there's Sylvia and her image of herself in that pivotal moment between high school and college. She could so easily have been a dumb cliche but I found her fascinating.

If I had any complaints (and alas, I always have one) I had trouble getting a handle on Franny Post, the matriarch who pushed this trip into being. She's in the book plenty, but I lacked a sense of her inner life that I got from even brief sketches of the other characters. (I think Carmen's sections are my favorite. Poor Carmen.) Perhaps I had trouble understanding why she chose to go through with the vacation in the first place, given the currents of familial strife underlining it.

Current reading: THE LAST MRS. ASTOR

Reading about Brooke Astor's multiple marriages reminds me of the debate earlier this year over the connection between marriage and financial stability and how we equip people (or don't) to take advantage of that.

Mrs. Astor was married 3 times in her life and author Frances Kiernan makes a pretty clear case that Marriage #3, to Vincent Astor, was primarily financially motivated, with #1 and #2 having contributing financial factors. The woman born Roberta Brooke Russell was of a class where it would have been unseemly for her to work, and her education (ending at 16) did not equip her to do so anyway. But Husband #1 was a feckless unfaithful alcoholic who more or less stashed her at her in-laws for years, and after her divorce from him, and in her widowhood after Husband #2, she didn't have an independent income nor a way to make it. That said, she did work for a few years at House and Garden and for interior designer Dorothy Draper -- but she had to maintain the facade that it was a lark or a diversion, something she could enlist her friends in, rather than being 'real' about (Kiernan points out that Conde Nast paid badly in those years because it was expected that editors were of the leisure class and independently supported -- so they didn't need the money. Also, they had expense accounts.)

You can fault Mrs. Astor for marrying for money, and some friends quoted in this book do -- I was surprised at how barbed they were sometimes given that this is an authorized biography. (What is your damage, Louis Auchincloss?) But her other options were to live on her annual income from her second husband's will or fall back on her mother or other relatives. Whether that annual income would have been a struggle or not to live within isn't clear -- this calculator from the terrifically named WestEgg.com estimates it would have been around $248,000 in 2013 dollars, not exactly a pittance. But her marriageability was what she had to trade for financial stability. It was all she had. And to her credit, at least she knew that she was marrying a fortune. According to Kiernan, Vincent Astor courted her quite aggressively (bizarrely, with the help of his soon-to-be-ex-wife who apparently wanted him to settle down so she could leave him), so it wasn't a question of who got hoodwinked in that trade.

In conclusion, it's another day I am grateful to be a woman in 2014, where I can hope and plan to support myself for the rest of my life no matter what happens. And this book is some real-life Edith Wharton business and if you like Old New York you should take a look.

P.S. If you follow NYC tabloids, this is the Mrs. Astor whose grandson and son went to court over charges that her son was keeping his mother in reduced circumstances while pocketing over $2 million a year of her fortune. That's her son from her first marriage. I think that is covered in this book, although I'm not there yet. I was called for jury duty right around the time they were trying to empanel jurors for that trial, which was an impossible struggle according to courtroom scuttlebutt.

Unbookening update

It's a new season and still the books are flooding in. If you didn't notice me stealthily dropping off posts about unbookening in the past few months, you probably can guess by that update that I haven't been doing very well with it. My record-keeping has been shoddy... also my will to get rid of books, or take 30 seconds to think before buying a new book.

So, I'm drawing a fat black line and starting over. I've been staycationing this weekend (in the joyous sense of the portmanteau, not the "economic necessity" sense, although the saved $$$ is nice too) so I have a nice fat stack of books to read. I don't have any out from the library right now, so I'm going to focus on reading my inventory down. 

Additionally, a friend of mine introduced me to The Minimalism Game, which is a method of getting rid of your extra stuff by making it a competition over 30 days. I'm not 100% on board with the minimalist movement, but since I moved into my apartment a year ago (whoo!) and I know there's stuff lurking around that I haven't used in the past year, this seems like a fun way to weed out. I'll update in the middle of the month, probably.

One-Star Revue: Roxane Gay, BAD FEMINIST

Roxane Gay's essay collection BAD FEMINIST will probably end up on my best-of-the-year list this year. I follow Gay on Twitter and, not surprisingly, like other women I follow who write about issues touching women, people say the most egregious garbage to her. This is hardly groundbreaking news but the strength of it makes me depressed.

Take Amazon, for instance. The lowly product review was invented as a buyer's service to other buyers: Do or don't do what I did! The product review has steered me away from many consumer products in the past (my favorite is for clothes, because clothing copy is notoriously fluffy in its lack of description). It also lends a platform to express closely held beliefs beyond the pages of the book, especially when the book contains any political matter. It's like the letters section of your newspaper, turbocharged.

It's worth considering whether the form of the anonymous content is not long for this Internet. Just kidding, of course most of us can handle it, and some people evidently can't. Last year Popular Science announced it would shut off comments entirely due to (of course) research showing such online debates negatively influenced how people viewed the science discussed, describing a "decades-long war of expertise" that has led to absurdities like (and this is my example, not theirs) Jenny McCarthy speaking as a physician on autism. In August the editors of the women's blog Jezebel.com wrote an open post to their parent company Gawker Media begging them to change the structure of anonymous comments, due to an overwhelming volume of anon. accounts depositing porn and other upsetting images in comments sections. How much time should be spent regulating online comments and reviews before it can be concluded that there's no saving them?

For now the Amazon review stays, which is great because we can examine the perspectives of people who didn't agree with me and/or are just wrong on Gay's book. But for the first time since starting this survey, I didn't have that much to choose from; there aren't too many reviews of BAD FEMINIST on Amazon, but the ones that are there are overwhelmingly positive. Granted, a well-articulated negative review can be a great provoker of thoughts, but as this series has shown, the one-star reviews on Amazon are normally not examples of that. So I dipped into Goodreads (which is owned by Amazon so it's not honestly cheating) to borrow 2: 

• ""Bad Feminist" Or The Secret Life of the Remainder Shelf Where Dust Mites Prevail Over All Things Paper" This review is signed "God" because if you write it, it's true.
• "It was pure nagging"
• "She spends half the book talking about movies, books, and articles she likes or dislikes." Yup, that's how criticism works. 
• "Instead of focusing on real events in life, she was obsessed with TV, the book wasn't even about feminism." Sigh