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Plus an unpublished novel by an acquaintance, to whom I owe feedback on said novel and feel terrible for not having provided to date.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