Best Reads of 2014

The year 2014 is at an end. I'd like to take a look back at books I've read and share reactions and insights. I'd like to, but I can't, because I have the worst memory of any English teacher alive. 

If a student asks me if I've read a book, I can say yes or no, but usually I check with Stephanie to know for sure; and then when the student asks me if it's a good book, I usually give my overall impression, but that's as far as I can go, almost always: I don't remember characters, plots, styles, settings, images, endings, climaxes, any of it. If I'm handed the book because a student thinks to jog my memory, once I flip through pages and see names and places, none of it is familiar. I've had moments reading when I suddenly remember, within 50 pages of the end, that I'd read the book before. And yet, I have a resistance -- one I did not have in my teens and twenties -- to re-reading. There are simply too many good books out there. This obstinate stance raises the question why we read, or rather, why I read. To educate, to amuse, to feel, to guide, absorb? When I forget everything I pick up, the most principled of these purposes are lost to me, and the ones I'm left with don't mind a little eternal return.

I remember a moment in the middle of reading The Betrayers, a book by the author of a collection of short stories I adored (Natasha), David Bezmozgis. Something was nagging at me. This book was so similar in mood to another novel I'd read only recently, two or three weeks before, but I couldn't remember it. So I turned to Stephanie for the book I'd read recently taking place partly in the USSR, partly in Italy. The Free World, she told me, also by David Bezmozgis.

For a while, I kept a journal, so I'd know what I read and could even retrieve my responses. I liked doing it and I liked having it and then I stopped. Why are there so many routines in life that bring us pleasure but are nevertheless abandoned? Just a lack of consciousness, a little life getting in the way, and just, again, a little ridiculousness to the way we lumber and crash through the days of our year. 

So I can't reflect on a year of reading. I can reflect on exactly one week. Here they are, then, the best reads of the fourth week of December, 2014.

A couple weeks ago, I borrowed a recommended book from our friend, Alison--A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra. It takes place in Chechnya in the nineties and the few years beyond. I remember some echoes of the Chechen wars while I was in college, and I'd never looked too deeply or even studied a map; but this book took me over. While the language was a little too pretty at times, the characters and shifting points of view worked well; and I felt I glimpsed something of the war and geography. I was especially taken with the written treatment of an informant who everyone in a village knew was an informant, and who repeatedly led to deaths and harm of beloved characters, yet was not beyond the realm of sympathy himself. 

I liked the book; but what I especially liked was a list of the author's recommended reading at the very end. Half of the titles I had read before, and almost each of these was a novel that had affected me:  

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett. I've read five of Patchett's books, I think, and this was one of the very good ones. I remember reading it or discussing it in Vancouver with my friend and great reader, Rachel, and I remember this strong, mean woman in the Brazilian Amazon and her medicines.

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. I liked this book (it had twins in it, right?), but I know others liked it more than I.

The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson. I read this, then had Stephanie read it, and I definitely recommended it to others. As I was reading this piece of fiction about North Korea, I was realizing how little I knew, how few images I'd seen; and everything that seemed outrageous in plot, from the little research I did, held up in dissident testimony. 

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, by Ben Fountain. I don't remember how I ended up with that book, but I loved it, bought it for others. These short stories are endlessly readable and moving.

Because I agreed so strongly with Marra for these titles on the list, or for three of them anyway, I ordered several others from the library and read them this week.

We Need New Names, by NoViolet Bulawayo, used a young narrator whose exuberance and innocence translated into humor and irony, which got me through some harrowing scenes in Zimbabwe. And who needs new names? Was it Darling, Chipo, Godknows, or Bastard? Was it Bornfee Moses, MotherLove or Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro? The book is very current. And while Bulawayo is definitely shedding light on tensions and lingering history in Zimbabwe, when Darling moves to the United States, we also get an outsider's perspective on this crazy country, its guns, its fragmentation of family, and the way poverty works here so differently than the way poverty works there. Through it all, the young narrator is likable and funny and wry.

I have a couple other books waiting for me from Marra's list, too: The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li, The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa, and soon enough, I Served the King of England, by Bohumil Hrabal.

But I also decided to find another Ben Fountain book, having liked his collection of short stories so well. Over Christmas on Whidbey, I read Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, and I was delirious with it. Billy Lynn is a soldier whose platoon's heroic three minutes are captured by an embedded reporter. They are all famous and lauded, and they are trotted around America for a two week victory tour, though they must return to duty and war in Iraq as soon as it's done. The entire book takes place during a Dallas Cowboys game the day before their return, and their exposure to Texas fans in the stands and high rollers in the VIP club from the point of view of a 19 year old narrator who is both a little stupid, horny and young but also remarkably astute is a terrific ride, satirical and absorbing. I am stilled awed by the horror and tension Fountain brings to a scene of Billy Lynn and the others simply standing still on the stage during Beyoncé's halftime performance. 

This morning I finished Garth Stein's A Sudden Light. I was looking forward to a ghost story taking place in the Highlands, a nearby neighborhood near Shoreline Community College. I enjoy the local geography, and I did learn some local history I'd never heard, such as about Billy Gohl, a serial killer from the late 1800's who murdered at least a couple dozen people near Aberdeen. I liked the plot of this book, and the imagery, but the dialogue and characterization destroyed me. Next time I read a narrative about a highly precocious child, that author is going to have to win back my trust, because otherwise I'm going to think what I think about Garth Stein here -- that he's just to poor an observer to inhabit an actual kid. The book started off with some good ghost creepiness, but the ghost of the house ends up just hanging out and talking just like every other character, leading our narrator to the perfectly revealing journal entries and letters and providing perfectly revealing dreams when more information is needed. Everything in the book is spelled out, and characters speak in stilted, aggravating cleverness. But the book did make me want to get past the guard at the Highlands (I failed the one day I tried) and see the palatial estates and their protected views of Puget Sound.

Stein also described a 300 foot tree. It was central to his imagery and his plot. I would love to see that. For now, I leave off with this picture, taken from the Boeing Creek Park nearby.