The year I went everywhere

I don't remember how I got it in my head that I wanted to go to Sicily. I had one friend who'd gone there as a teenager and told me about it and I'd seen the movie adaptation of The Leopard a handful of times and that was about all I knew about the place, but I was sure I would love it. Last fall I figured out a way I could get there cheaply by using miles to get to Milan then flying a discount airline from there to Palermo. I would only have 6 nights there, which was hardly enough time, but it would have to do. I figured out my itinerary, lined up lodging, bought a new travel bag (I highly recommend the Patagonia Transport MLC), packed light and smart (novel, for me) and was all ready to depart 24 hours ahead of time, when I got a text message from the discount airline saying that my flight from Milan to Palermo had been canceled. One international phone call and several minutes on hold later, I learned there was a general strike scheduled in Italy for the day of my arrival in Milan/departure to Palermo and all intra-Italian flights were canceled for 2 days. If I booked myself on the next possible flight to Palermo, I would only have 4 nights there and I was afraid I'd be stranded at the airport 20 miles outside Milan for the duration. So, I called Delta and spent a good half hour on the phone with two different - both very helpful! - customer service representatives trying to book a trip to somewhere - anywhere, though preferably with a similar climate to Sicily, as I had already packed - for the following day. I ended up getting a flight to Madrid for only a small additional charge, from where I took the train to Barcelona and had a lovely substitute vacation.

I planned an international vacation on 24 hours notice and it was not that hard and not that expensive. When I got back home, I was like, "I should do this more often." So then I started thinking about getting TSA PreCheck, which I'd heard some things about. I visited the website and saw that PreCheck is $85, while for just $100 you can also get Global Entry (which speeds you through customs), so I thought, what the hell? and filled out the form right then and paid my $100 and scheduled my appointment with Customs & Border Protection. I am someone who makes enough money that I can spend $100 on a splurge item without thinking too hard about it, but not so much money that I don't feel guilty about it. Immediately after signing up for it, I asked myself why a woman who has gone abroad twice in the last decade (not counting Canada and Tijuana) would need Global Entry. Then I decided: if I have it, I better use it. So I visited 7 countries in 12 months, including a much better-planned trip to Sicily last April. (Hot tip: Meridiana Airlines has weekly direct flights from JFK to Palermo from April through October!)

Beauty Marks

I have a mole about a half inch below the left corner of my mouth. It's always been there. Over the course of my life, mostly I've either liked it or forgotten it's there. I don't think about it much. When I was a kid I thought having a mole was great. Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, and Cindy Crawford had - and accentuated - them, and they were all gorgeous women. As a teenager, a friend gifted me a make-up product for painting on moles that came in a band-aid style tin with pointy applicators. I darkened my natural mole and used it to mask pimples too. It was great stuff. I don't wear full-face make-up much these days, but when I do I sometimes still darken my mole with eyebrow pencil. This is all to say that - when I have thought of it at all, I have always thought of my mole as an attractive feature.

If you've ever used OkCupid, you'll be familiar with the series of cues they have for you to use when telling potential dates about yourself. One of these is, "The first thing people notice about me is..." I've always said my eyes or my glasses. I have no idea if this is true, and it's certainly not a particularly clever response, but they are the things I get the most comments and compliments on so it at least seems plausible. One day several years ago I was perusing profiles on the site and in the midst of some guy's profile (perhaps it was in the "I spend a lot of time thinking about..." section), he states something to the effect of, "Ladies: stop lying. If you have a big mole on your face, that is the first thing people notice about you, so don't say it's something else." It had literally never occurred to me that my mole might be the first thing people noticed about me. Indeed, it may very well not be, but the thought had never crossed my mind. I mean, no one ever comments on or even mentions it to me.

That is until I started dating another guy from OkCupid in 2012. Some time into our relationship - at least a couple weeks, possibly a couple months - he said he was surprised that I made no attempt to hide my mole in my profile pictures on the site. He claimed to have nothing against my mole, it was just the sort of thing he expected women would try to minimize.

So, anyway, this is the story of how two dudes from OkCupid gave me an entirely new perspective on my mole. (Don't worry, everybody, I still like it.)

All my cats: an illustrated guide

Dandy (197? - 198?)

My parents got Dandy in Blacksburg, Virginia before I was born. I always thought of Dandy as a girl, but I learned as an adult he was male. Dandy was a solid black long-haired cat. He liked to sleep in drawers. Every morning, Dandy woke my parents by systematically knocking their knick-knacks off the top of the dresser. He was an indoor/outdoor cat, even once my family became apartment dwellers in Brooklyn. One day when I was 5 or so, Dandy didn’t come back after being let out through the back window. My parents put “Lost Cat” signs up around our neighborhood. Someone called and claimed to have Dandy and asked, “How much is the cat worth to you?” The caller wanted my dad to meet him in an abandoned building and to bring money. My parents were skeptical as to whether the caller even had Dandy and didn’t act on the call. We never saw Dandy again.



Boo (1987 - 2005)

My family got Boo on Halloween 1987, when I was 11, from a family that lived on St. Mark’s Avenue just off Flatbush in Prospect Heights. They had several kittens and we chose the one that was all black, in part because it was Halloween and in part because our previous family cat had been black. Boo seemed like the right name to give to a black cat adopted on Halloween. Unlike Dandy, he was a short-haired kitten. He had 7 toes on one of his front paws and 6 on the other. His paws were oversized and functioned like baseball mitts - he could actually pick things up. His large, clumsy paws aside, Boo was a sleek, muscular cat. He was a lap cat and a drape-across-your-shoulders cat. When you were sitting on the couch or a chair, Boo would climb up on your lap and circle and circle for what seemed like ages before settling down and going to sleep. Once settled, he would stay a long, long time. He also liked to sleep in high places. He slept in baskets we kept on top of our tall bookshelves. He would lounge on the narrow ledge created by a folding closet door and swipe at you when you walked by beneath him. Boo was an indoor/outdoor cat and an enthusiastic birder. He lived to the ripe old age of 18.

Cannoli (1993 - 2009)

We got Cannoli in the fall of 1993. She was a little white kitten with a gray tail. She was the friendliest of a litter of kittens born in the backyard of some family friends who lived on Carlton Avenue in Prospect Heights. When we got Cannoli, I had recently encountered a cat named Taco and had decided food names were the best cat names. I didn’t much like cannolis, but it seemed like a good name for our little white cat. Like Boo, Cannoli was an indoor/outdoor cat, but she wasn’t quite the hunter he was. Cannoli was never content to just sit on your lap; she would climb up your chest to get as close to your face as possible. She did this too Boo also; she liked to sleep half on top of him. Cannoli was friendly with strangers and everybody loved her. The best Cannoli story is the time she scared a probable robber out of our house. We weren’t home, but from what we could figure out from the reports of police and neighbors, someone broke into our house through the front window, heard the patter patter of Cannoli’s steps or the ringing of the bell on her collar, assumed it was a much larger animal (Cannoli never topped 10 lbs.), and ran out through our back door and then the garden door without taking anything. Our neighbors called the police and told them they had seen a man run out of the house chased by the little white cat. Cannoli died at age 16.

Dora (2004 - 2015)

After leaving home, I didn’t have a cat for several years. There were several reasons for this, among them that I mostly lived in places that didn’t allow them. Then, in 2004, I moved with my then husband into a condo that we owned and getting a cat became a possibility. We didn’t plan to get a cat, as far as I can remember. In the summer of 2004, when both Boo and Cannoli were still alive and living with my mother, a little tuxedo kitten showed up in her backyard in Clinton Hill. She took to meowing at my mom’s kitchen window and my mom fed her. She didn’t take her in because Cannoli had taken a strong dislike to the stray. The following spring, she had a litter of 2 kittens. My mom found homes for the kittens and determined to get the mama cat fixed, but before she had the opportunity, she had 4 more kittens. My mom didn’t want to risk another pregnancy and kept close watch of the mama and kittens. In the end, two of the kittens died, but she found homes for the other two and gave the mama cat to my husband and me. We brought her home in September of 2005. After contemplating several names - I remember Olive being a strong contender - we named her Dora for the subject of Freud’s case study of hysteria. The first few days we had her at home, Dora would walk around our apartment meowing and I was sure she was looking for her kittens. Eventually, she settled in and turned into a fat cat who loved to sit in the window or in your lap. Dora liked to play fetch. She like to move socks - and sometimes much larger articles of clothing - from room to room. She preferred her toys to be still in their packages. Dora’s most impressive skill was her ability to open bifold closet doors. She figured out the trick to reaching her paw under the door and pulling it out from the center to make the door open. Eight months after we got her, my marriage fell apart. She lived with my ex for a while, but she moved back in with me in 2007. In the end, Dora went through so much with me - several relationships, several apartments, several other cats. She died of an aggressive stomach cancer in February of 2015 at the young age of 11. She had always had stomach issues.

Uno (2000 - 2007)

About 3 months after we got Dora, a colleague of mine forwarded around an email from a friend who was moving out of state and needed to find a home for her 5-year-old one-eyed flame point Siamese cat. There was a picture attached of a sweet-looking cat next to a hammer. I forwarded it to my husband and he said he knew as soon as he saw the photo that we should adopt the cat. We went over to meet him and brought him home with us on Christmas Eve 2005. Tensions were high between Uno and Dora at first, but things got better within a couple of weeks. But 3 months later, I moved out and left Uno and Dora behind. As the months passed and I moved on with my life and in with my new boyfriend, my ex did the same. In August of 2007, he moved to Ithaca with his girlfriend and her two cats. In their new apartment upstate, they kept his cats separate from her cats because one of hers was very aggressive toward Dora. In November of 2007, Uno had a heart attack and died. My ex wasn’t home when it happened, but his girlfriend witnessed it. They buried him in the woods upstate. He was not quite 7 years old. After Uno’s death, my ex felt it was cruel to keep Dora in a lonely, segregated part of their apartment and asked me to take her back. Of course, I said yes.

Amigo (?? - ??)

After splitting up with my husband, I spent 3 months of 2006 living in a sublet in Park Slope where I also had the responsibility of caring for the lessor’s cat. Amigo was a big black short-haired cat who started his life in the backyard of the building where I was staying and, it seems, gradually moved indoors. Despite his wild early life, Amigo was a big sweetheart and loved to sit in your lap and cuddle. There was a cat door off the kitchen and he came and went as he pleased. Some other neighborhood cats availed themselves of the door as well. He didn’t use a litter box - he still did his business outside - so caring for him should just have involved keeping him fed. He wasn’t in great shape, however. He had a wound on his paw that wouldn’t heal properly and a swollen lip. I took him to the vet for his paw and the vet thought there was something bigger wrong with him, probably cancer. I gave him antibiotics prescribed by the vet, but I couldn’t do much more without his owner around. I don’t know what became of him.

Buster (2005 - )

In November of 2006, I moved into an apartment in Bed-Stuy with a new boyfriend. I missed my cats and he, despite having never owned a cat, had developed an affection for cats. Bed-Stuy was full of feral kittens and there was a particular gray one we had been eyeing. On November 5, we were walking home from an afternoon party and seriously considering trying to grab the gray kitten when this skinny tuxedo cat started meowing at us on the street. She was dirty and clearly homeless, but friendly and interested in us. We picked her up and carried her home and she didn’t really mind until we got indoors. She mewled loudly the whole way up the stairs, but once we let her loose in our apartment, she was fine again. When we came back from picking up the necessary supplies, we couldn’t find her; she had lodged herself behind the pedestal of our bathroom sink, but she came out again for us. We named her Buster for the habit she had of falling over on her side when petted. Like Dora, Buster liked to play fetch, but she never brought the ball back quite far enough. She was sweet and guileless. Like Dora, Buster grew fat. From above, they were hard to tell apart. When I broke up with my boyfriend in 2009, he kept Buster and I took Dora. Buster remains sweet and fat.

Lulu (2006 - )

One evening in October of 2007, when my boyfriend and I were on the verge of moving to a new apartment in Bed-Stuy, we went to buy a roti on Fulton Street off Tomkins Avenue. There was an empty lot next to the roti shop and my boyfriend had attracted the attention of a small calico cat there. The intersection of Fulton and Tomkins seemed like a terrible place for a little cat, so we picked her up and carried her home. She was much more of a fighter than Buster had been. We called the new cat Lulu and she was the prettiest cat. We kept the Lulu and Buster separate until the move. Just before we moved, my ex-husband called to ask if I could take Dora back. We didn’t plan to have 3 cats, but I would never say no to taking Dora. A couple weeks after the move, we took Lulu in to get fixed and learned she was pregnant. Our new apartment was big, so we gave Lulu her own room and put a box with some towels in it in a closet. On the morning of December 21, 2007 we went in to check on her and there were 2 tiny kittens in the box with her: a little orange fuzzball and a mostly-white calico fuzzball. Lulu and her kittens lived in their room - while Dora and Buster had the rest of the apartment - until early March 2008, when we found a home for the kittens. We hoped to reintegrate Lulu with the other cats, but she never gave up her protective motherly aggression. She was so sweet to us, but so mean to the other cats. She loved when I cradled her like a baby, but would viciously attack any cat that came near. After a while we gave up and gave Lulu her own room again, but it was hard on all the cats -- and on us too. We found someone to take Lulu and give her a good life as an only cat. Even all these years later, my (now) ex boyfriend or I will occasionally come on gchat and just say, “Oh, Lulu.” I wonder how she’s doing now.

Nikita Cutechev and Chairman Meow (2007 - )

We knew we weren’t going to keep Lulu’s kittens, but we had to call them something. We called the orange boy Chairman Meow and the calico girl Nikita Cutechev. They were adorable and hilarious and entertaining, but also destructive and stress-inducing. They slept intertwined in any space that would accommodate them. They stumbled when they ran. They batted and pounced at their mother’s tail. They chewed straight through the electrical cord of a radio. They scaled dresses in the closet using their claws as grappling hooks, shredding the garments on the way up. They got litter everywhere, while also refusing to use the litter box, doing their business instead on the carpet next to the box. As there were just the two of them, we insisted on adopting them out together. It took us a while to find someone who wanted two cats, but eventually a friend of a friend adopted them. She kept Nikita’s name (as just Nikita), but rechristened Chairman Meow as Penny. Not long after, she got engaged to someone out of the state who was allergic to cats. At a party, we met a friend of hers who was hoping to take the cats from her when she left, but we never heard what happened to them. I hope he did adopt them; he seemed to really like them.

Little Hans (2010 - )

After I broke up with my boyfriend, I moved with Dora into a place of my own right downstairs from my mom. I wondered sometimes if Dora recognized the backyard she’d lived in 5 years before. We had been there two years when my mom brought in another cat from the yard. He was a long, slim, white and tan cat with bright blue eyes. His coloring was very unusual; I’d never seen a cat that looked like him. According to my mom, he walked right up to her and rubbed up against her leg. He seemed so helpless that she brought him in and put him in the basement. She posted signs around the neighborhood with his picture and took him to the vet to see if he was microchipped, but he was not and no one responded to the signs. So, when we got confirmation that he was FLV negative, he moved in with Dora and me. I looked at the pseudonyms of Freud’s case studies and decided Little Hans would be a good name for my new cat. It suits him, somehow. Little Hans reminds me of Cannoli. Like her, Little Hans is not content to sit on your lap; he must be right in your face. He’s also friendly toward strangers and everyone loves him. He is a kneader in the extreme. When he settles down and stops kneading, and stops trying to put his head between you and your book, and stops reaching for your face with his outstretched paw, he is the sweetest cat. He’s grown to be rather large, though not fat, and I sometimes wonder if I should change his name to Big Hans. In the summer of 2014, Little Hans developed a serious liver condition, lost a bunch of weight, and had to be tube-fed for several weeks. I thought he might not make it, but he recovered and is as hungry and energetic and affectionate now as he ever was.

Princess Marie Bonaparte (2012 - )

Dora died in February 2015 and I immediately started thinking about getting another cat. The argument I made, as if I needed one, was that I didn’t want Little Hans to get used to being an only cat. But really, I was thrilled to be able to get a new cat. (Since living on my own, I’ve imposed a 2-cat maximum.) I found a guy near me who was giving away a tuxedo cat on Craigslist. He had taken her in with her 3 kittens, but it turned out his son was allergic. He’d found homes for the kittens and the mother cat was all he had left. A mama street cat from Bed-Stuy is just my style, so I contacted him, went over to “meet” her, and carried her home that day with her yowling the whole way. She is a tiny cat and is missing the toes on her rear left paw for reasons unknown. She had a name before I even brought her home, courtesy of my friend Jessie, who took it upon herself to look for good potential cat names from among Freud’s circle. I decided I couldn’t call a cat “Princess” or “Marie,” so called her Bonnie or Bon Bon for short. After coming home, Bonnie took to hiding in the cramped space under my dresser, so I would lie down on the floor and talk to her and she would meow back at me. Over the months, she has warmed to me considerably and become much more comfortable in my apartment, but she remains an extremely timid cat. She loves when I pet her, but stays exactly at arm’s length. House-guests have stayed with me for a week or more before even getting a glimpse of her. I feel like every day she gets more comfortable and I regularly find myself feeling proud of the progress she’s made. I’m determined to make her a lap cat yet.

Some precious things I have lost

1. I took my baby hand and foot prints to school with me one day. It must have been for show and tell. After school that day, I went with a baby sitter to a grocery store. Later that day, I realized I had lost the paper with my prints on them. The only place we had gone was the grocery store, but we went back and it was nowhere to be found.

2. I inherited 2 vintage Barbies and a Ken doll from my mom. One of the Barbies was a raven-haired pony-tail, in the first style Barbies ever made. My best friend lived right across the street and I mostly played with my Barbies at her house because she had more Barbies and more Barbie accessories. I left my Barbies there. But sometime in 4th grade, my friend unfriended me and my mom's old raven-haired Barbie was forever lost at her house. I heard from a mutual friend in high school that my former friend was particularly proud of my mom's vintage Barbie doll.

3. My baby ring was a tiny gold band with a very tiny eye-shaped diamond set into it, given to me by my grandma when I was born. It fit tightly on my pinky into my early teens, but eventually I started wearing it on a chain around my neck. One day maybe 20 years ago I couldn't find it. I suspected it fell through the cracks in the floor of my attic bedroom, but I was never sure.

4. When I split up with my husband, he somehow - I've never known quite when - slipped a little note into the book I was reading. All it said was, "I love you. A." I folded it half and put it in my wallet and it lived there for years. Whenever I came across it, it would make me incredibly sad, but I treasured it. In 2011, I was mugged and my purse was stolen. It was months before I realized that note was gone forever.

My next big reading project

Though the final count remains to be determined, 2015 is going to set a new record for the most books I've read in a single year. I set some reading goals for myself at the beginning of the year, which I've just looked back at (and good thing I did! I may just have time to squeeze in a pre-1900 book before the year's up):

• At least one book published before 1900
• At least one work of nonfiction
• At least two books translated from another language, preferably different languages
• At least half of the books I read will be by women or people of color (This doesn't feel very ambitious, but it does feel realistic, sadly.)

I didn't undertake any real milestone books this year and there was no particular theme to my reading (though I did read more mystery/detective novels than I ever have before), but in early September I decided to undertake a new reading project - one which I expect will take me several years: I decided to read a book from every country in the world.

It all started in late August when I booked a trip to Mexico City and decided I wanted to read some Mexican literature in preparation. I was disappointed in myself for only having read one Mexican novel, Like Water for Chocolate, and for the fact that besides Laura Esquivel and Carlos Fuentes, I couldn't really name any Mexican novelists. It's a big country, right next door, that in many ways shares a history and culture with the U.S., and which I had visited 3 times, so how could I know so little about its literature? So I turned to Twitter and to friends and asked for recommendations and a handful were forthcoming. I ended up reading 4 additional Mexican novels (as well as a short biography of Leon Trotsky) prior to my trip. Over Labor Day weekend, I was visiting my friend Daniel in San Francisco and talking with him about this and wondering what is "The Great Mexican Novel" and then I asked, "And, well, what is The Great Cape Verdean Novel?" and he asked, "What is The Great Papua New Guinean Novel?" and then I was off.

There are all kinds of (big!) problems with this undertaking. Such as:

• What is a country?
• How do I decide what author/what book is from what country?
• Why novels (or fiction generally)? 
• If I seek out "The Great X-an Novel," what are the chances I'll end up just reading a bunch more white men?

I tackled the first question first and created a spreadsheet of all the countries in the world, as defined by the U.S. State Department. This list is pretty good and up-to-date and includes the Palestinian Territories and Taiwan, which I wanted to be sure to include in my reading. But as I went about my research, I found the helpful Wikipedia page on Caribbean literature and I got to Martinique, an island in the Caribbean that is an "insular overseas department" of France, which is the birth place of Frantz Fanon, and home to the great Caribbean poet Aimé Cesaire and the novelist Patrick Chamoiseau, whose novel Texaco won the Prix Goncourt in 1992. It felt unjust to leave out a place with such a strong literary history, so I added Martinique to my list, along with the other French overseas departments: French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Mayotte, and Réunion. (Earlier this year - before starting this project - I read Alejo Carpentier's Explosion in a Cathedral, which is largely about the French Revolutionary era in Guadeloupe, and this likely affected my decision as well.) Later, I struggled with and decided in favor of adding the various countries of the United Kingdom. I suppose by my logic I should also add Puerto Rico and Guam. So, my list now stands at 213 countries (or "countries") and is subject to change.

After I had my list of countries, I started filling it in with books I had already read and I quickly realized that who and what books are from where is also not simple. I got as far as Algeria - the 3rd country, alphabetically - and wondered, can I count Camus? I wrote a note to myself, "Consider Assia Djebar or Ahlam Mosteghanemi or Kamel Daoud. Ponder Camus." Then I got to Austria and tried to remember, is Elias Canetti Austrian? Then thought, No! He’s Swiss. But it’s much more complicated than that: Canetti was born in Bulgaria (I thought, Yes! Bulgaria!) and raised there and in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and England. He spent his early adult life in England and his last 20 years in Switzerland. With several Austrians already on my to-read list, I decided maybe I didn't need an Austrian anyway, but for what country can I count Canetti? He wrote in German, largely about Vienna, so it hardly seems fair to claim him for Bulgaria. Or maybe he has no nation. 

Apart from the questions of political and social geography, there is the problem of choosing the novel as the representative form. The bias inherent in selecting to consume written fiction from every country became apparent almost immediately, when Daniel and I had our conversation about Cape Verdean and Papua New Guinean novels. Later in this same conversation, I thought about the Senegalese novelist and filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène, who switched from writing to film-making to reach a wider audience in his home country. The novel is a western form, and the elevation of fiction writing as a privileged form comes from a western bias. Aside from the decision to include some memoir, drama, and book-length poems in my reading, I don't really have a fix for this problem. It's a problem that's at the very root of my project, and I think the best I can do is acknowledge it and be conscious of it as I read. 

Finally, there is the problem of White Men. I started off with the question "What's the great X-an novel?" but starting off with that question is likely to bias my reading list in favor of white men, even in some places where whites are a minority of the population. If, for instance, I accept Camus for Algeria, and J.M. Coetzee for South Africa, and José Luandino Vieira for Angola, that's three white men as representative writers in Africa and that's a problem. Of course, I don't have to read those writers or to call them representative of those countries. The whole idea that a writer or a novel is representative of a country is something I have to grapple with in this project.  

Of course, the problems listed above aren't the only ones I face. There are problems of language, translation, and availability. But I also don't have to solve any of the problems with this project right away. Even if I read only books from countries I haven't read before, it would take me about 5 years to to get through my list of countries at my current rate of reading, and I don't intend to limit my reading to this project. I've been saying this is kind of a rest-of-my-life project and that may well be true. Since coming up with this concept in September, I've only read books from 3 countries I hadn't read before (though I've read books from 14 countries so far this year).

So, here is the place where I ask for your help. Do you have books or authors that you think I should read? You can look at my spreadsheet and see what I have so far. You'll see there are a lot of holes. Blue indicates I have not yet read a book from that country, bold indicates that I already own the book I intend to read. In case you're wondering, for the countries I've already read, I decided to list the first book I'd ever read from that country as the representative book. 

Finally, I want to acknowledge that there's no such thing as a new idea in the world. Not long after deciding to do this, I was not surprised to discover someone had already done it - and recently! Ann Morgan read books from 196 countries (she used the UN member states list, with some adjustment) and wrote a book and blogged about the experience. Her own explanation is here. 

An incomplete list of books I had to stop reading because I was sure terrible things were going to happen to the central characters

In reverse chronological order of my reading them:

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Mortals by Norman Rush
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Native Son by Richard Wright
The Whispering Mountain by Joan Aiken

2013 in Books and Other Entertainments

It's a good thing I'm such an anal record keeper, because I neglected to do a year-end post about everything I read and saw in 2013. but it's not too late! Or so I am telling myself.

Books! (Those that I finished during 2013)

• Longitude by Dava Sobel
• The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
• The Little Pink House by Jeff Benedict
• Reamde by Neal Stephenson
• The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
• If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• The Likeness by Tana French
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
• The Blue World by Jack Vance
• Look At Me by Jennifer Egan
• Raj by Gita Mehta
• Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
• Faithful Place by Tana French
• Libra by Don DeLillo
• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
• River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh
• The Child in Time by Ian McEwan
• Never Mind by Edward St Aubyn

In 2013, I pretty much met my 2015 reading goals (need one more work in translation, but I think War and Peace counts extra, right?), so maybe I need to rethink those now?

According to my ratings on Goodreads, my favorite books were Reamde, The Children's Book, and the two Amitav Ghosh books (these are the first two of the Ibis trilogy, the last book of which comes out this year), and this seems about right. I might add The Diamond Age, because I feel like it has stayed with me looking back now.

I guess I like to do one long slog a year, and in 2013 that was War and Peace. I read it pretty much concurrently with writing my Master's thesis, which worked out oddly well. Each served as a pleasant break from the other.

I made a concerted effort to read a bit of genre fiction in 2013, which I don't usually read. I especially enjoyed The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

My other honorable mention goes to The Last Samurai.

Movies! (Seen in theaters)

• The Moment
• Stories We Tell
• Frances Ha
• Before Midnight
• The Manxman (1929)
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Rosemary's Baby (1968)
• Fruitvale Station
• Blue Jasmine
• Newlyweeds
• Gravity
• 12 Years a Slave
• Carrie (2013)
• Nebraska
• American Hustle

Other!
I saw two operas in 2013: The Nose at the Met and Anna Nicole at BAM. I saw no plays, apparently.

2014 in Books and Other Entertainments

Books! (Those that I finished during 2014)

• Bad News by Edward St Aubyn
• The Game by A.S. Byatt
• Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
• The Enchanted Waltz by Anne Enright
• Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell
• Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain
• Man Walks Into A Room by Nicole Krauss
• The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh
• Met At Arms by Evelyn Waugh
• Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh
• The End of the Battle by Evelyn Waugh
• The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• The Haunting of L by Howard Norman
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
• Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
• The Leopard by Giuseppe de Lampedusa
• In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster

Plus an unpublished novel by an acquaintance, to whom I owe feedback on said novel and feel terrible for not having provided to date.

Notes on what I read:
Right around this time one year ago, I read the first two of the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn. The series had been recommended to me by two people whose judgment I trust. However, I found them unbearable. I still think perhaps I'll go back and read the remaining books - or at least the two that are in the compilation I got for Christmas last year, but then I'm not sure if it's worth it.

According to the ratings I gave on Goodreads, my favorite books of the year were The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Glass Palace, and Man Walks Into a Room. This seems about right to me.

• I think I had always had an aversion to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter at least in part out of a skepticism I have toward brilliant works by extraordinarily young people. I think I expect that either the works will be impressive for someone that age, or that the writing will espouse a sort of knowing worldliness that I think of as not possible for young people. (This is undoubtedly a reflection on myself and how experienced and knowing I believed myself to be when I was younger.) In any case, I didn't find either of these to be true of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I loved it. 
• The Glass Palace was the third novel I've read by Amitav Ghosh and I've loved all three. It spans a century, with overlapping family dramas, and a good dose of British colonial history in Burma an India. I am anxiously awaiting the publication of the 3rd book in Ghosh's Ibis trilogy (due August 2015!) and plan to read some of his other works this year.
• Man Walks Into a Room feels a little smaller, somehow, than the previous two books. (It probably is shorter.) It's the story of an amnesiac, which I guess is a fairly common trope, but the challenges facing an individual, and the relationships of that person, when he loses his memory felt exceptionally well thought through and tender.

Though I gave lower ratings to each of the Evelyn Waugh novels than I did to those listed above, I really enjoyed the Sword of Honour trilogy. I think it stands as a whole better than any of the individual books. After reading several of his novels over the last 10 years in the hope of finding again what I loved so much about Brideshead Revisited, this trilogy was close. However, it also had a good dose of racism of the British colonial era that was occasionally hard to swallow. The other notable mentions I have from 2014 are The Haunting of L and Number 9 Dream.

I also can't go without talking briefly about Infinite Jest. It was a slog - it took me 2 months plus one week to finish. Parts of it were brilliant. I loved what DFW did with language. Some of it was extremely tedious, and I'm not sure to what purpose. I'm glad I did it, and I'm very glad it's behind me now.

This is the first year in a while that I haven't read anything published before the 20th Century. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) was the oldest book I read. I read 8 books published in the 21st Century, which may well be a record for me. I read 8 books by women, only 2 books by people of color, and only 1 book that was written in a language other than English.

Some of my friends are setting goals for a number of books to read  in 2015, but I've decided I'm not going to set that type of a goal for myself this year. However, I am going to set a couple other goals for my reading:

• At least one book published before 1900
• At least one work of nonfiction
• At least two books translated from another language, preferably different languages
• At least half of the books I read will be by women or people of color (This doesn't feel very ambitious, but it does feel realistic, sadly.)

A funny thing I realized about my reading in 2014 - and before - is that I read books largely on recommendations I receive, and most of the recommendations I take come from men. I read 8 books after they were recommended to me by others last year, and only 2 of those recommendations came from women (one of which was my least favorite book I read last year). I'm not sure what this says, exactly, but when I was looking over my shelves yesterday trying to decide what to read, I started to notice the sheer number of books I own that were recommended to me my men. So, women! send me some book suggestions.

Movies! (That I saw in theaters. Maybe missing some?)

• Inside Llewen Davis
• The Wolf of Wall Street
• Secret Defense (1998)
• The Monuments Men
• Alphaville (1965)
• Philomena
• About Last Night
• The Silence (1963)
• Veronica Mars
• Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
• The Lunchbox
• A Most Wanted Man
• Interstellar
• Gone Girl
• The Imitation Game
• Birdman

Other!
I only went to one opera in 2014: Die Zauberflöte at the Met. I saw two plays in 2014: A Doll's House at BAM and A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway. I also saw Isabelle Rossellini do Green Porno live at BAM, which was great.

I have never included TV in my year-end lists before, but I must mention Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. I was sick with a terrible cold over the long Thanksgiving weekend and watched all 26 episodes in four days. A+++ would watch again!