New books, old books — a log of every book I’ve read cover-to-cover in 2008

[And a gentle reminder to myself of who has what now]

1. Death Comes for the Archbishop — Willa Cather I somehow missed out on this gem in high school, but I remember my BFF at the time complaining about having to read it. “It’s boring,” he moaned, which probably explains the nearly 15 years it took me to get around to reading it. “This guy is never going to die.” Well, death did come for the archbishop, just like it’s coming for all of us, and now I want to tromp around Santa Fe and Acoma. This was a dazzling, warming book and should be issued to every resident of New Mexico. (Finished 4 January)

2. Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy And now I don’t have to read any more Russian fiction ever. (20 January)

3. Isabel’s Bed — Elinor Lipman One of a thousand books I like to pick up, crack to any point and just read, but this time, during the slog through AK, I picked it up from the beginning and read straight through. Love this book. LOVE IT. (21 January)

4. The Time Traveler’s Wife — Audrey Niffenwhatever I didn’t like this book as much as I could have the first, second and third times I read it. I’m hoping reading number four will make me fall in love with it. So far, not so much. It’s too precious in the literary sense — very senior level creative writing workshop — but maybe I’m just a grump. (Started 27 January) Update: Nope. Still can’t classify it as anything but mediocre.

5. The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove — Christopher Moore Pills. Sex. Blues. Crazy ladies. Sea Monsters. Pathos. One of my favorite comic novels. Moore is a twisted genius. I worship him. (2 February)

6. The World of Jeeves — P.G. Wodehouse Wodehouse is also a twisted genius, what? (6 February)

7. The Marrying Game — Kate Somethingorother It’s a British doorstopper romance featuring a poverty-stricken, madcap family living in a crumbling manor dating back to the Battle of Hastings. It’s the crumbling manor (complete with a Latin family motto that I’ve been too lazy to translate) that pushes the twentysomething daughters into competition to land the wealthiest husband as soon as possible. It’s stupid, it puts the cause back by a good thirty years, and yet I love picking it up on particularly chilly rain-splotched Saturdays. There’s something comforting with the cadence of the language, Whatsit’s descriptions of fashion, booze, food fallen gentility and, well, England (with a minor detour into Scotland). I’m totally embarrassed to post it, but I am trying to be faithful in logging what I’ve read this year. (8 February)

9. The Tale of Genji — Murasaki Shikibu We’ve been watching a lot of movies set in feudal Japan — Seven Samurai, The Blind Swordsman, Yojimbo, Throne of Blood — and it’s only natural that it would trickle into my choice of reading material as well. (Started 9 February — Still in the queue as of 15 February. Finished mid-March)

10. Take the Cannoli — Sarah Vowell I sucked down the Sarah Vowell canon eighteen months ago and felt like I had found the perfect stand-in for my voice, thus freeing up my time for other things like reality television or samurai movies. When I read this collection of essays again while the New Mexico Democrats were throwing out my provisional Obama ballot, I felt like I had found a starting place. Vowell loves America with a fierce passion that I admire and envy. She inspires me to read up on Lincoln for fun, re-memorize the declaration of independence and reexamine what I believe in. Sarah Vowell has made being a nerd cool — in my eyes at least. (13 Feb)

11. Lolita — Nabokov And now I never have to read a postmodern piece of Russian Literature again, either.

12. Sideways — Rex Picket

13. Lamb — Christopher Moore

14. In the Company of Cheerful Ladies — Alexander McCall Smith

15. A Ring of Endless Light — Madeline L’Engle

16. A Wrinkle in Time – Madeline L’Engle

17. A Wind in the Door – Madeline L’Engle

18. A Swiftly Tilting Planet – Madeline L’Engle

19. Many Waters – Madeline L’Engle (I went on a binge)

20. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

21. A Dirty Job – Christopher Moore

22. Contact — Carl Sagan

23. Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen

24. Bite me — Christopher Moore

25. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency – Alexander McCall Smith

26. The Kalahari Typing School for Men – Alexander McCall Smith

27. The Full Cupboard of Life — Alexander McCall Smith

28. Blue Shoes and Happiness – Alexander McCall Smith — So I’m going through a Precious Ramotswe phase. So what?

29. Belong to Me — Marisa de Los Santos — Despite wanting to hate her first book, “Love Walked In,” I was enchanted by it. And there was every reason not to care for it — her main character bounced between the Anthroplogie catalog and Turner Classic movies, there was some manufactured unhappiness, but every single one of her characters was so loved, so cherished, so WASPy-yet-correctly-multicultural that it was almost hard to believe that the book had ever found a home, much less a home that gave her a hard/soft deal. And yet? I liked it enough to buy the sequel in hard cover. I don’t know, I’m a sap.

30. The Good Husband of Zebra Drive — Alexander McCall Smith — Okay, I am not going to buy The Miracle at Speedy Motors until it comes out in paperback and that’s final.

31. The Sunday Philosophy Club — Alexander McCall Smith — So I’ll just start a new series of his.

32. Memoirs of a Geisha — Arthur Golden — I am a sucker for detail porn-laden tales of other times/countries/cultures. Yeah, I know he got it all wrong and he really can’t portray a woman, but yeah, I read it.

33. The Teahouse Fire — Ellis Avery — And I liked “Memoirs” a whole lot more than this tripe. Really, I get it. Japan is the culture that saw the west and was like, “Yo, we’re totally not ready to deal with y’all, so we’ll catch you in say, two hundred years? Meanwhile, try this haiku” and that, even 150 years after the country was open to Westerners, it’s fascinating.  I get that every white girl in an urban environment goes through a sushi-and-green-tea phase. But I don’t get this book. It was one long string of badly rendered haikus in prose form, with every creative writing cliché thrown in for good measure (passive narrator? check. incest elluded? check. evil catholics? check. lesbianism? check molesting of the main character? check. familial abandonment and subsequent rescue?  oh, yeah),  and the detail porn  was on par with an HBO “Real Sex” episode. Epic fail.

34. The Ground Beneath Her Feet — Salman Rushdie — I think that this rock-and-roll novel would have meant more if I had lived through the heyday of 70s stadium anthems, but I still pick this up every other year and read it and love it. The mournful U2 title song is an added bonus.

35. Love Walked In – Marisa de Los Santos — As with the Star Wars films, you always have to go to the source material. Also, I have to give props to de Los Santos for worshiping “The Philadelphia Story.”

36. Garden Spells – Sarah Addison Allen — I’m tempted to write this off as a “Like Water for Chocolate” ripoff, but I’m already itching to pick up her sophomore effort over the weekend. And read “Like Water for Chocolate” again. It was a well-written debut novel that shows Allen has a feel for place and character. And while, yeah, her male characters were flatter than ironed cardboard and her women could have been a little more rounded, the story stuck with me. Also, it made me want to pick up the original.

37. The Sugar Queen – Sarah Addison Allen — Like the sap I am, I picked this up within 48 hours of finishing the first book.

38. Brideshead Revisited — Evelyn Waugh — Evelyn Waugh? Evelyn Waugh was a man. (Really, though. It was one of those books where there was a little too much assumed of the reader, and my post-secondary education in late 20th century New Mexico wasn’t going fill in the gaps about prewar Oxford, or, um, the war. So, yeah. I could have liked this book a bit more than I did.) (Which means that I didn’t care to do the background reading.)

39. Bridge to Terabitha — Katherine Patterson — likes to make me sob like a little, little girl.

40. Tipperary — Frank Delaney — When he’s tired, the Capt’n will sing “It’s a long way to Tipperary,” and I picked it up just for the joke, and then didn’t put it down for 420 pages. I’ve got “Ireland” on my must-get list. (I found the best part was Delaney’s narrative framing. It was delightful.)

41. American Gods – Neil Gaiman — I love this book. I don’t want it to end. It’s wrapped itself up in me.

42. Ireland – Frank Delaney — Maybe you notice that I devour authors in binges.

43. Eleanor of Aquitaine — Allison Weir — followed by

44. The Life of Henry VIII – Allison Weir (because I like reading historical biographies in the early autumn, I’ve discovered. Last year it was the Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I: A life)

45. Anansi Boys — Neil Gaiman

46. Fragile Things – Neil Gaiman

47. Smoke and Mirrors — Neil Gaiman

48. Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman

49. Stardust – Neil Gaiman

50. Coraline — Neil Gaiman (Sooooooooooo, remember how I said I like to read authors in binges?)

51. Lux –Maria Flook — There was a reason I got this at a fire sale for fifty cents.

52. Malachy McCourt’s History of Ireland — Y’know, Delaney did the narrative better, but McCourt’s gone a lot broader and I am using this as a reference for future background reading.

53. The Mists of Avalon — Marion Zimmer Bradley — Druids! Britons! Arthur legends! Feminists! I’m digging it, and I’m only 30 pages in.

54. The Once and Future King — T. H. White – I thought I’d pick this up as the companion to MoA. I am in love with The Sword in the Stone. It’s like the last 30 years’ worth of my education distilled into one novel. Fantastically magical.

55. Radio On, a listener’s diary — Sarah Vowell – I picked this up when I saw Sarah Vowell do a readin from “The Wordy Shipmates.” I’ve got to get through my King Arthur binge before I can plunge headfirst into my Sarah Vowell binge, but this slipped in. It reads as easily as a modern day blog, and it was a reminder of where we were 13 years ago. Loved it.

56. To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee – I read this book every year right around the end of October. It’s one of those magical books that I read when I was in between childhood and adulthood which shaped my outlook. Every time I read it, I find something new, something powerful. I picked it up the night before the election as sort of a good luck talisman and finished it the day after. What a time to read it. What a reminder of how far we’ve come as a society. It, like the campaign, filled me with hope. It’ll be okay.

57. Watership Down – Richard Adams — Otherwise known as the bunny book. Each chapter read like a bedtime story. I’d climb into bed, snuggle down under the quilts and read about Hazel’s bravery and Fiver’s visions and find comfort. Eventually, the English major took over my brain, and I read into the Cold War allegory a little bit, but for the most part, I kept this book as a warm escape from the world.

58. Ethan Frome — Edith Wharton – And then I followed up the warm fuzziness of a book about brave bunnies with the bleak bleakness of the bleak of Ethan Frome. I mean, honestly. I read the last third of the book in a hot bath and it still chilled me. What a gloriously depressing, ironic, cold book.

59. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — Betty Smith – When I was eleven, my school librarian kind of forced me to read this. I’ve discovered that forcing a reluctant reader is the fastest way to build resentment and disinterest. I really didn’t like for this book when I was eleven, though it did hint broadly at sex, and that was at least something. Still. I didn’t care if a tree grew in Brooklyn. And then I grew up and picked up a copy in Target in a moment’s desperation of being between books (it was either Nicholas Sparks dreck or this one, and I was getting the shakes). Good choice. The story is simple and not a lot happens, but it is a glorious, thinly-veiled account of what it was like to grow up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn a century ago, before American Apparel and the Ironically-Haired hipsters moved in. It was fascinating, engrossing and appealed to the reality-television-voyuer-anthro-minor in me.

60. J. R. R. Tolkien — The Hobbit — I have been known to have a love/hate relationship with Tolkien. I was subjected to the animated Hobbit movie as a small child and hated it. As a slightly older child, I tried reading the book, but the immediate sense of foreboding and danger put me right off again. And then I grew up to be a nerd who dated nerds, and there were a couple of Tolkien fanatics who put me right off anything Middle Earth. Hell, I sat through “Fellowship of the Ring” in the theater and mocked it. Openly. But then, I don’t know. Things changed. The Extended Editon DVDs were released and I went from rolling my eyes to being enchanted. I started this campaign of reading everything I could get my hands on — especially books that I didn’t understand or didn’t like as a chid. And finally, this week of Thanksgiving, I read the Hobbit, one of my father’s favorite books, and his mother’s absolute favorite. And I loved it, though I admit that I invented a drinking game for it. It goes like this: every time a woman speaks, take a shot. You’ll be stone sober throughout.

61. Fellowship of the Ring
62. The Two Towers
63. Return of the King (I had to)

64. My Latest Grievance — Elinor Lipman

65. Revolutionary Road — Richard Yates

66. The Sparrow — Mary Doria Russell

67. Homecoming — Christine Golden

68. The Farther Shore — Christine Golden

69. The Road — Cormack McCarthy

Nice.