Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau

We're not even a full month into the new year, and I've already allowed myself to get behind in writing about the books I've read. Last weekend, I finished Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau. This takes care of one of the non-country countries on my books from every country list: Martinique, which is an overseas department of France. Unlike some books I've read in this ongoing project, this felt like a very good book to count as representative of the country (if any book can be so). It covers Martinican history from the latter part of the slave era up until the late 20th century. Although it's about a different place, it felt to me like Texaco picked up where Explosion in a Cathedral left off. Particularly in the early part of the book, the uncertain status of slaves as the island waited for word of abolition from mainland France, reminded me of the regular theme of waiting for news to cross the ocean in Explosion in a Cathedral.

I struggled a bit with Texaco. I would occasionally find myself reading for pages only to realize I had drifted off and didn't know what had happened. The book got easier to read toward the second half when the voice switched from the narrator's father, Esternome, to the narrator herself, Marie-Sophie (as told to an amanuensis). It's hard to say what my favorite thing about Texaco was. Esternome and Marie-Sophie were both extremely compelling. The book is about losing everything you have and having to start again, over and over and over. One of the lovely ideas in the book is how maintaining a connection to the past, remembering the old ways of doing things, makes that starting over possible. Much of the hope in the book comes from knowing it's been done before. It's a kind of unusual idea of progress.

The Infatuations, Javier Marías

This book was gorgeous. The writing, the themes that kept repeating: just beautiful. I'm not positive, but I think the thing I liked most in this book was a description of the aftermath of a death, all the little things that are left in a state of non-completion when death interrupts someone's life. Marías -- or the narrator -- refers to "the novel with the page turned down, which will remain unread, but also the medicines that have suddenly become utterly superfluous and that will soon have to be thrown away..." and many more things. The character in the novel has lost her husband, but I read that passage and immediately thought of the bottle of pills I got for my old cat's stomach illness two days before she died -- nearly a year ago. The almost full bottle is still sitting on top of my fridge. My cat aside, this book dealt in lovely detail with the space we take up in the world and what happens to the the people and objects we affect when death removes us.

The Storyteller, Mario Vargas Llosa

I was reading a friend's year in books post and he wrote, "if it is worth reading, it's worth jotting down at least 100 words about it" about his decision to start writing at least something short about every book he read last year. I think this is a really good point and, further, I feel like it's a good idea to help process a book upon finishing it. I find my mind swims a little just after I finish a book and I sort of stare off into space and then I start thinking about what I should read next. It's probably not a bad idea for me to spend a little more time with whatever it is I have just read. I decided, however, that I don't want to write reviews, per se, so I'm going to write instead about whatever it is I liked most in the book.

I have just finished reading The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa. (I can now check off Peru in my books of the world list.) A friend of mind loaned me (a different copy of) this book nearly 20 years ago, but I never read it at the time. When Vargas Llosa won the Nobel, I kept thinking I really should read him; I really should already have read him. I'm glad I finally got around to it. (I still want to read Conversation in a Cathedral.) Anyway, the thing I liked most in The Storyteller is the idea of walking as a way of life. The book is about a writer's fascination with the Machiguenga indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon. The mythologies as presented in the book provide cosmological explanations of why the Machiguenga must always be moving, but what appealed to me was the idea of continuous movement as the preferred and natural state. Any time the people are lulled into complacency and start to settle down, bad things begin to happen. This is a reminder that they shouldn't stop walking. It's a subtle distinction, but something about the idea of continuing to walk to preserve peace or balance or what-have-you, versus being forced to move on because of conditions where you have settled, was really moving for me, even though the effect was the same.

So, this has been the first edition of "What I Liked Most About the Book." I hope there will be many more this year!

2015 in Books

Goodreads has made compiling this list so easy. I could just link to my year in books and be done with it. But I won't. I read 40 books this year:

• The Silence of the Sea by Vercors
• Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
• Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar
• Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño
• Broken Harbor by Tana French
• Quicksand by Nella Larsen
• The Shooting Party by Isabel Colgate
• Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• The Healing of America by T.R. Reid
• Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
• Life with Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
• Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry
• The Garden Next Door by José Donoso
• Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson
• Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Luis Zafón
• The Whispering Mountain by Joan Aiken
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• Requiem for a Glass Heart by David Lindsey
• The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
• Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
• 4:50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie
• Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Four Hands by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
• Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli
• Kinshu: Autumn Brocade by Teru Miyamoto
• Almost Never by Daniel Sada
• Leon Trotsky by Irving Howe
• No Happy Ending by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
• Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
• Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh
• One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
• Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke
• Nemesis by Jo Nesbø
• The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
• A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
• Mifanwy: A Welsh Singer by Allen Raine

Some stats:

• 15 books are by women 
• 26 books are by men (The Locked Room gets double counted)
• 14 books are in translation
• 3 books are nonfiction
• I read authors from 17 countries
• I read 9 books by American authors

I have a book club to thank for all my nonfiction reading this year. My reading choices over the last 4 months of the year were influenced by my decision to attempt to read a book from every country in the world, which I wrote about last month, though I was already reading pretty internationally in the first part of the year. Aside from the international books, there are two big, new trends in my reading this year:

1. I read a lot of short stories. Prior to 2015, I avoided short stories and claimed not to like them. At the start of 2015, I decided to read mostly short stories. I was trying to write more and I thought it would help if I wasn't always in the midst of reading some big book. I think it kind of worked, though I slacked off on writing a couple months into the year. I brought a book of short stories with me on vacation in April and decided they were the perfect form for reading while traveling (though I didn't take short story books on any of my subsequent trips). I tend not to read much when I'm traveling and several times I've found myself lugging around some large novel that I'm in the middle of, barely picking it up during the trip, and coming home after the trip having to reacquaint myself with the book. Short stories are the perfect thing for picking up occasionally when one has down time over the course of a trip.
2. I read a lot of detective novels. Eight of them to be exact. I never read detective novels before a few years ago and this is definitely the most I've read in a year. I probably read more this year than I had in all previous years combined. A few years ago I started watching detective shows on TV and I discovered that they had everything I wanted in a television program. There was drama, suspense, sometimes romance, and everything wrapped up satisfactorily in 90 minutes at the most. (I don't like the shows that don't solve the crime at the end of the episode.) Anyway, I decided I should maybe give detective novels a shot too and I liked them too. Most of the novels I've read are a bit darker than the detective TV programs I enjoy, but I have a lot more tolerance for dark books than I do for dark television.

Anyway, on to my favorite books of the year! There is a tie and a close third as well:

Tied for favorite books of the year are Explosion in a Cathedral and The Garden Next Door. I picked up The Garden Next Door at the end of May from a thrift store. I didn't know anything about it and wasn't familiar with the author, but I bought it on a whim. I started it a couple days later and it just so happened that the date that it was in the book was also that day's date, June 2. As I read the book there were all sorts of little coincidences like that and it felt totally magical as I was reading it. So I loved the book, but it almost feels like some of that was up to chance. I read the book at the right time and it was perfect. Explosion in a Cathedral was a book I'd long been aware of, but also knew nothing about really. I picked it up in July for $1.50 at a used book barn in upstate New York. If you're not familiar with it, Explosion in a Cathedral is a novel about the period leading up to and during the French Revolution and the Terror set mostly in the French Caribbean, largely about Victor Hugues, who was the governor of Guadeloupe (among other things). It was both beautifully written and a fascinating history of how the French Revolution, and the Terror, manifested in the colonies and the idealism followed by hypocrisy of the revolutionaries when it came to slavery. It was just a fascinating book and it kind of blew my mind. The close third is Wolf Hall. It was beautifully told and gave me such tender feelings toward Thomas Cromwell.

Other honorable mentions: 

• The Shooting Party, which was lovely and is apparently one of the inspirations for Downton Abbey. 
• Case Histories, which was probably my favorite detective novel of the year. 
• Kinshu: Autumn Brocade, a lovely Japanese epistolary novel. 
• Kiss of the Spider Woman, which is just incredibly told and unlike anything I've ever read, really.
• Mifanwy, which I squeezed in at the very end of the year to fill two requirements: a new country (Wales) and pre-1900 (1896!) -- aside from some uncomfortable colorism, it was a perfect 19th century romance and really evocative of Wales! And is available free from Google Books.

One more fun fact: I read two books ~on my phone~ this year, which is a first for me. 

Ok... on to 2016! I've already finished 2 books this year.