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Year End Lists Go Here!
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Your Favorite Reads of 2012
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All published in 2012. Listed in the order that I read them. I tried to find a single sentence from each review that sums up the "Why?" issue:Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot
This book addresses concerns so pertinent to me, and in such an agreeable and soul-penetrating manner, that I began to playfully speculate that, much like elements of this book's reality, author Ryan Boudinot had been transported from Seattle to Chicago, brought into a painstakingly detailed replica of my home, surrounded by my things and traces of habits and daily living, and slowly began to grow into my identity, like a reverse shedding of skin, the kind that cicadas and snakes adhere to the biorhythms of.
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
[V]ast networks upon the map of Human Experience lit up before me: The struggles and triumphs of striving to communicate exactly what we mean and how we feel to others, or even to ourselves within our own language-saturated inner monologues; the evolution of human beliefs and knowledge through religion and science; certitude v. uncertitude; the relentless mystery of consciousness; the building up and breaking down of social bonds—from the family unit to the whole of global civilization; the ills of dogmatic authoritarianism however well-intentioned; the dangers in having too much available information or not enough.
Threats by Amelia Gray
Gray's writing implicates such a keenly perceptive set of eyes (and ears and nerve endings) for the little things; the things swept under the benumbing rug of over-familiarity, things lost in the shuffle of daily grinds and the sheer abundance of what's on offer for human beings to notice or appreciate or to overlook or take for granted.
Hot Pink by Adam Levin
It also simultaneously validated those feelings, and made them something to temporarily laugh at, etc.
The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits
Not yet reviewed, but this trailer for the book might help sum it up.
Understories by Tim Horvath
There are numerous angles he might take toward this review, many of them feel like re-hashings of other reviews in which he finds slightly new words for basically the same broad evaluations: a balance between head 'n' heart; similar to X, Y, and Z authors but still altogether unique; intellectually sophisticated but not pretentious; surreal but not goofy for its own sake; immaculate and inventive sentences; et cetera.
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
That’s the sign of a truly riveting book: one that can tell you rather explicitly that things won’t work out the way you want them to and yet there you are, hungrily flipping pages, hoping and wanting all the same.
Cataclysm Baby by Matt Bell
Not yet reviewed, but let's just say this book is another great addition to 2012's high-minded lit-fic apocalyptic/distopian efforts.
Tenth of December by George Saunders
Not yet reviewed, but this kicked off my giving-Saunders-a-second-chance (after a disappointed brush with Pastoralia) jag that resulted in reading all of his collections in the span of a few weeks.
The Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava (though first self-published in 2008)
The Naked Singularity was a real treat, to say the absolute goddamn least—full of intelligence and beautifully-paced suspense and wit and humor and stylistic and structural innovation and deep human drama and all of the other stuff a good, thick, brain-and-heart-driven book should be full of.
Mod
Mod
Mount Analogue by René Daumal
Hands down my favorite read this year. Playful and soulful. Daumal died before he finished it, so it ends in mid-sentence, which is itself a perfect analogy of the accessible yet impossible Mt. Analogue that is at the center of the book itself.
There but for the by Ali Smith
An engaging novel about language, society, the overlooked, and so much more. Almost no plot to speak of, this novel sounds academic, but is actually a riot to read.
Piano Stories by Felisberto Hernández
The story 'Stray Horse' alone makes this one of the best books ever. The inner-life of objects, memory, and the battle between versions of the self slowly sprawls itself across this long meandering story. What a delight.
Gazelle by Rikki Ducornet
What I loved most about this book is that it showed me the real world in a magical way. It's not magical realism, it's just a magical perspective. I felt like a kid again.
Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer
A long poem written over the course of one day, this book hijacked my own thought patterns and made me live under the haze of its strange continuous rhythms of mundanities and insights. Awesome.
Here are some!The Stone Door [Leonora Carrington, 1940s / pub. 1977]
Occult and potent, a strange kind of simultaneous narrative occurring across history in an attempt to break it and move on to a new world. It reads like a combination of a lost alchemical text and a fairy tale, but holds together with a cogency and conviction that makes it far more compelling any other surrealist novel I've yet encountered. One of my favorites ever, really. Incidentally, a shorter version shows up in The Seventh Horse but this full novel is better and more complexly arranged.
Bartholemew Fair [Eric Basso, 1982 / pub.1999]
An underground festival set amid underground pleasure grounds at the height of a deathly heat wave. vivid and obscure, haunting and mysterious.
The Stain [Rikki Ducornet, 1984]
Ducornet's first, and, I think, best. A feverish coming of age in turn of the century pastoral France.
Variations on the Sun [M. Kitchell, 2012]
Cryptic vignettes following several (two? many?) child narrators as they escape across an uncertain and dangerous world. Chasing or escaping the threshold of adulthood.
The Boat in the Evening [Tarjei Vesaas, 1968]
Another set of extremely poetic vignettes, here more those of the natural world and the psyche within it. Stylistically, the height of Vesaas' powers.
Tranquility [Attila Bartis, 2001]
Apocalytic Hungarian family drama -- somehow extremely moving through its ugliness and destructive urges.
Blueprints for the Afterlife [Ryan Boudinot, 2012]
Post-post-modern sci-fi: not literally metafictional at all, really, but inconceivable without its building blocks, which it turns to an elaborate, gripping, and urgent construction that resembles little else.
The Blind Owl [Sadeq Hedayat, 1937]
The proto-nouvelle roman, eerily emerging in 30s Iran.
Babel-17 [Samuel Delany, 1966]
Ridiculously entertaining, Delany scrambling through dense concepts of linguistics and thought-pattern to construct a wildly readable adventure yarn.
Albert Angelo [B.S. Johnson, 1964]
Oddly readbale and human for all its "collapse of the novel form" meta-concerns.
The Devil is Dead [R.A. Lafferty, 1971]
A kind of shaggy dog adventure story on death and rebirth, occuring across half the globe, or perhaps only in a series of alcholic barroom hazes.
Bonus tracks:
The Lathe of Heaven [Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971]
Voyage in the Dark [Jean Rhys, 1934]
Concrete Island [J.G. Ballard, 1974]
The Egghead Republic [Arno Schmidt. 1958]
Blood and Guts in High School [Kathy Acker, 1978]
The Polish Complex [Tadeusz Konwicki, 1977]
Woodcutters [Thomas Bernhard, 1984]
Yesterday [Agota Krystof, 1995]
Two Serious Ladies [Jane Bowles, 1943]
Nightwood [Djuana Barnes, 1936]
The Other Side [Alfred Kubin, 1909]
Lives of the Gods [Alberto Savinio, 1910s - 1940s, pub.1992]
Werther Nieland [Gerard Reve, 1949]
The Magic Toyshop [Angela Carter, 1968]
The Man of Jasmine [Unica Zurn, 1970]
Mes humbles ajouts:The Great Fire of London/The Loop/Mathematics: by Jacques Roubaud
The first three branches of The Great Fire of London project towered over my readings this year and formed something like a connecting thread between my interests over the past few years. Think of Roubaud as a kind of Proust, if Proust had lived to be influenced by Wittgenstein and the Oulipo. These books are massive and dense and can be baffling, erudite, playful, ridiculous, theoretical, terribly sad and tragic, terribly hopeful and enlightening. With these three works Roubaud instantly ascended in my scale of authors I am in awe of. And he's still alive! Keep on with the translations, Dalkey Archive Press!
Raymond Queneau
The other figure that dominated this year's reading is Queneau. It seems ridiculous that before 2012 I had not read a book by him. Now I have something like 7 under my belt. I have pretty much adored everything I've read by him. Witch Grass, Children of Clay, Pierrot Mon Ami, Zazi, Last Days, Exercises in Style are downright classics. What more do you want from an author: obsessive wordplay, meticulous structure, laugh-out-loud humor, neologisms, surreal elements mixed with the mundane, deep philosophical underpinnings with a patina of the absurd, melancholy, nostalgia and hopefulness. There is no one who writes like Queneau, he is too unique to be imitated. When I open one of his books I feel something akin to renewal.
Gilbert Sorrentino
Thank you MJ Nicholls. Sorrentino gets to the heart of what is wrong, fucked up, hypocritical, shallow, venal, and fleeting in the American dream- but he does this in a way that is shot through with humor and deep understanding, intelligence, in hypnotizing prose. He's always conscious of the paradox of art- that it defines what it is to be human while simultaneously allowing no way out of the failings and trappings of that humanity. That artifice does a great deal to soothe and explicate and make real, but cannot in the end change anything about ourselves. That's up to us here in the world of atoms and air. His novels get the most attention, but his collection of essays "Something Said" remained off the shelf and on my coffee table for easy access and consultation throughout the last half of 2012- a deep and masterful collection on some unprobed corners of Americana. He's the real deal.
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit
This came late in the year on a recommendation from Eric, but it is one of those history books that just seems to put forth how we got where we are today. Muybridge's early studies in stop-motion photography led to what became cinema which led to what became computer technology. But in the man and his times what Solnit really explores is the way these technologies- the railroad, the telegraph, and photography- changed the way humans perceive space and time, changed how we interact with the physical and psychic world, changed the fundamentals of how we interact with the natural world and each other. One of those "once you've read it the world doesn't look the same" books. And Muybridge himself is an endlessly fascinating, enigmatic figure. The book is also full of amazing reproductions of his pictures.
Vladimir Nabokov The American Years by Brian Boyd
The second volume of Boyd's massive Nabokov bio is no less great than the first, The Russian Years, and follows N and family from the moment they sail out from France with the Nazis hot on their heels to his travels throughout the American midwest and then triumphantly back to Europe as one of the most respected and popular authors of the 20th cent. Boyd's work is a universe of detail and his analyses of N's works are mind-bogglingly insightful. All writers should read these volumes. The Nabokov that emerges is a man determined to stick to his muse and his calling, throughout all the tremors and obstacles of history, a man who made his success despite what the world was trying to do to him. I doubt another bio on Nabokov will ever be necessary. One of the most fascinating literary lives. One of the great literary biographies.
All the great reviews written by you good people here on Goodreads!
I recognize the event horizon of cheesiness I am approaching here, but I have to do it. You guys are the best. I have found out about so much amazing stuff on this site that I would never have known about on my own, through your genuinely intelligent, interesting, thoughtful reviews. I have been enlightened and enraged and in general just made a more full person by the community here. You guys are better than any university, better than any book club, better than any Facebook or whatever else. As far as a group of people I only know through manipulated electron-based light waves, I couldn't ask for anything more. Keep on! Best online community ever.
Great posts, everyone. You've helpfully reminded me of all the catching up I need to do reading-wise.
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Listomania
Books mentioned in this topic
Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidian Adventures in Mountain Climbing (other topics)There But For The (other topics)
Piano Stories (other topics)
Gazelle (other topics)
Midwinter Day (other topics)
Update: I've added a discussion thread so that we can talk about these lists without cluttering up this thread.