My Year in Reading

I wasn't entirely sure what image to use at the top of his blog post to represent a year of reading and blogging. Then I found this beautiful flip book calendar, featuring a tree transformed by the seasons.

Most other book bloggers or book-related websites do some kind of feature on their best reads of the year in December or January, which is the traditional period to neatly tuck away what’s been achieved in order to move on to the year ahead. I love reading this type of list myself, but I find their number is growing exponentially and it’s easy to lose yourself in a deluge of interesting titles. I toyed with the idea of doing it myself over the holidays, but instead I decided to release a list of my years reading now, in the Spring, because it’s during the Spring, last year, that I began Book’s End with a post about book titles. That’s right, Book’s End is one year old.

And what a year it’s been! To be fair, I spent most of it reading for school—although there were pleasant discoveries in that domain as well. For example, I’ve been spending a lot of my time pouring over the short stories of three Irish writers for my undergraduate thesis: Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, and Sean O’Faolain. I’m lucky to have chosen writers of such undeniable talent because I can honestly say that not once did I NOT feel like picking up one of their collections to read or reread a certain story. These writers are three masters of the short story form, and their works reveal many truths about human nature. I also very much enjoyed Bowen’s The House in Paris, which I studied in a class on the Uncanny last year. It’s a wonderful between-the-wars novel about displacement and inheritance. 

Thanks cdrummbks on Flickr for the image.

Other school-related discoveries include Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (a stunning, extremely well-wrought reinterpretation of a historical figure), Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (a Canadian masterpiece I had never heard of before), Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (you’ll hear more about these last two modernist novels very soon), Jean-Paul Sartre Les Mots (I thought this book would be dreadful but it turned out to be a bibliomemoir, a genre I’m very fond of), and Toni Morrison’s pitch-perfect Jazz, about Harlem in the 1920s. 

My reading this year was also enriched by my membership to Mr. B’s Year of Reading Delights, which means I got a new handpicked book in the mail every month until February. Because of my otherwise busy reading schedule, I didn’t get a chance to read all of them yet, but among those I did take the time to open, I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, a hilarious, rambunctious Australian novel about a 19th century Tanzanian prisoner on a mission to paint and catalogue specimens of fish from the surrounding waters. This strange novel, which develops level after level of forgery, is also an exhilarating exploration of language.  I look forward to checking out the rest of the novels my bibliotherapist at Mr. B’s sent me, such as Robin Jenkins’ The Cone Gatherers and Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers.

In the last twelve months also went from living in Bristol, England (where I’d gone to study abroad for two semesters) to moving back home to Montreal, Canada. I made the dreaded voyage at the end of June, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch provided the transition between my life there and my life here. As I’ve said elsewhere, I planned to finish the novel in Bristol but ended up using it over there as a kind of manual to explore the British countryside, and finished it in Quebec as a way of easing myself into my old, normal life… It was my first time reading Eliot, and as these things go I read it mostly for the interweaving of plot and the descriptions of quaint English country life. It demands rereading in the future. 

As for other books I picked up myself (or that were recommended by G.) during the year, the ones I enjoyed the most tended to be a little bit ludicrous (escapism, anybody?). There was Jocelyne Saucier’s award winning Il pleuvait des oiseaux (It rained birds, as yet untranslated), which I got as a gift at Christmas, about old people falling in love in the woods of Northern Ontario. There was Bulgakov’s thrilling The Master and Margarita, which I read in the train over a trip in Italy that contained way too many hours of transportation. There was Umberto Eco’s brilliant The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, about an amnesiac who remembers only everything he’s ever read. These are very different novels, but they are united by their originality and distinctive voices. Here are books that come blazing into your life with their own aesthetics, their own logic. You must accept them on their own terms: that’s what makes for a remarkable reading experience. 

One regret I have about my reading year is that I didn’t get a chance to check out any new publications. Reading books that have been out for a while is a safer choice, but it’s also fun to be able to take part in what everyone’s talking about, like Julian Barnes’ Booker-winning The Sense of and Ending, or Murakami’s 1Q84 or (more recently), Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision. There are some books I’m really excited about that will be coming out in the next months, such as Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (the sequel to Wolf Hall) and a new novel by Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth; hopefully I’ll be more inclined to pick up some reading material from the “hot off the press” pile at my local bookstore. 

School’s almost out, now, and there’s a daunting, exciting (and growing) pile of books on my bedside shelf (I realize I just said I was also looking forward to buying new books that will come out this year—it’s the paradox of my existence). Hopefully I’ll be able to spend the upcoming months with my nose between their pages. 

Escapades in the Picaresque

Gabriel García Márquez is perhaps the grandfather of fabulist fiction, but the tradition goes far beyond his works of magical realism...

I find that lately I’ve been developing a soft spot for books that move away from the more traditional forms of storytelling — perfect plot arch, realistic descriptions, few narrative digressions, consistent characters, and so forth — and into literary universes that are altogether more fanciful. My readings have brought me to discover three such novels in the last couple of months, and I thought I’d share the pleasure with which I read them. All three of the books are quite famous, but they emerge from unique different traditions; still, they are all similar in their approach to certain artistic truths by their exhilarating stories and exuberant prose-styles.

The first of these books is The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. It is, simply, a masterpiece. Written in 1938, two years before the author’s death, it was only published in 1967, Bulgakov’s works having long suffered at the hands of the Soviet censors. The novel, which meanders through the lives of a cast of vivid characters, follows the arrival of the devil in person (accompanied by a few of his hilarious henchmen) in a hot spring in Moscow, and his meddling in the affairs of Margarita, a beautiful, brilliant woman, and her lover, nicknamed the Master, who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate (the reader is also privy to three chapters from this novel, interspersed throughout the book). It’s a thrilling, sparkling ride, with an intrusive narrator leading the reader on with obvious relish. Thanks to Bulgakov’s powerful, elastic writing, the story is at once funny, fantastical, sexy, moving, and violent. A myriad of adjectives for the myriad of moods and sensations the novel provides with such perfection. 

The Vintage cover for The Master and Margarita, just as wild and wonderful as the novel itself.

The second book I read in the same vein was Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. I came to this novel with a certain amount of reticence, since I found everything I’d read by Woolf to be utterly depressing. Not so Orlando. It was a writer’s holiday for Woolf, who worked on the novel as a kind of joke for her charistmatic, bisexual friend (and sometime lover) Vita Sackville-West; it’s also a real treat for the reader, who gets the chance to experience a writer at the top of her game, writing on a rampage, free from the bonds of tradition. Orlando is the story of the eponymous character, who begins life as a man in the 16th century and then sails through the centuries until first quarter of the 20th century, changing sex along the way. Woolf often focuses on beautifully rendered moments of fancy, like “The Great Frost”, during which “birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground” and the Tames becomes a pleasure ground for the city of London, or the cloud that comes to rests upon the British Isles on the first day of the 19th century, altering “the constitution of England”:

The muffin was invented and the crumpet. Coffee supplanted the after-dinner port, and, as coffee led to a drawing-room in which to drink it, and a drawing room to glass cases, and glass cases to artificial flowers, and artificial flowers, and artificial flowers to mantelpieces, and mantelpieces to pianofortes, and pianofortes to drawing-room ballads, and drawing-room ballads (skipping a stage or two) to innumerable little dogs, mats, and china ornaments, the home — which had become extremely important — was completely altered.

 The tone is light, the writing carefree; Woolf is free as bird and can do whatever she likes, while creating an insightful satire of history and raising questions about the role of women in society. Orlando alone proves Michael Cunningham’s recent claim that Virginia Woolf was fun at parties, something many find difficult to believe. 

The original Hogarth Press dust jacket for Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

Last, and certainly not least, in this small list of fabulist fiction of mine is a very strange novel called Gould’s Book of Fish: A novel in twelve fish, by Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan. I have never read anything quite like it before. In the first section of the novel, we meet a male narrator, in modern-day Tasmania, who discovers in an old junk shop an original copy of The Book of Fish, a 19th century document filled with watercolour paintings of fish (which really does exist, by the way). What’s special about this book is that it’s also covered in writing; in a way it acts as the testament of Gould, the artist who painted all the fish, who was a convict in Van Dieman’s land. The narrator reads through Gould’s story, fascinated, but learns that Gould depicts only fictions in his Book of Fish, relating to people and events that never existed. In The Book of Fish, he recreates his own version of the penal colony in Van Dieman’s land, with a fake commander ousting the real one and establishing a Republic of New Venice, building a railway that goes nowhere and a great Mah-Jong Hall. When the book mysteriously disappears, however, the narrator decides to rewrite Gould’s story by memory, which makes up the eleven other sections. So the story we read is a recreated fake, even within the universe of the novel, and things get only worse from there. Like an intricate, tricky hall of mirrors, versions of fakery and artistic inventions are made to stare at each other in the face, multiplying the fictions into infinitely divisible versions. All of them are valid, but none of them are real. Truth is inconsequential in Gould’s Book of Fish; instead, the novel revels in the joyful possibilities of the counterfeit. There are echoes of Borges at times, for instance when Gould, reading the fictitious archives of the penal colony that another character has written, comes upon the very words he is now writing in a kind of mind-boggling narrative circularity. What keeps everything together is Flanagan’s mastery of language. His prose is exuberant and majestic — he uses countless metaphors related to the sea in order to maintain a coherence in imagery — and he is especially successful in crafting an original, provocative voice for his Gould, which gives the novel its energy and thrust. 

These are three excellent novels, which create exciting universes and really original reading experiences. In the wake of Téa Obreht’s Orange Prize victory this week for her imaginative novel The Tiger’s Wife, we should perhaps expect more of these fabulist pieces of fiction to emerge as a counter-movement to the realism that has been dominant for the last decades. Authors exploring new magical realism or the picaresque certainly have a strong tradition to rest upon and emerge from, and their books are bound to be interesting and altogether different, as these seem to be inherent tropes of the genre. 

The Travelling Library

The ultimate travelling library: "Archive II", designed by David Garcia, which allows you to walk away with half a ton of books!

The most important part of preparing any trip — be it a weekend at the cottage or a longer stay abroad — is most certainly packing your bags. However, I’ve found that one specific aspect of packing often takes up a lot more of my thoughts and time than it should: deciding what books I’m going to bring along with me. I always take along at least two books, no matter how long the trip, to make sure I have a backup if I finish or get tired of the first one. If travelling involves flying, I find that complicates the decision-making; I always want to bring something really long I’ve been meaning to get to for a while because I tell myself that a flight will give me several solid hours with no interruptions and nothing better to do, although of course I should bring something lighter and really engaging because airplanes are so uncomfortable. I always end up bringing loads of books with me on planes and read only very little — I tend to switch to the little screen rather quickly.

Of course, reading is enjoyable at home, but there’s a very vivid satisfaction in sitting in a park or a café abroad and doing something so usual, so normal. It’s a good way to escape the eery feeling of displacement that travelling gives me, and slip into that very moment, enter the texture of life in the place where I am a stranger. I have very fond memories of visiting a lot of truly fascinating places in Ireland when I went backpacking there for a month in 2008, but I also remember — with equal fondness — reading DeNiro’s Game on a bench in the gardens of Saint-Patrick’s Cathedral, or José Saramago’s The Cave in a hostel common room on a rainy day.

Reading Dostoyevsky with a nice, cold beer in Sofia, Bulgaria.

I’ve found it’s really important not to bring something too engrossing to read on a trip, however, or else all I want to do is read and skip all the sightseeing and experiences the place has to offer. On another backpacking trip two years ago, in Turkey and the Balkans, I brought One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Brothers Karamazov, Voyage jusqu’au bout de la nuit, and other stuff I’d wanted to read for a long time. These proved perfect: good to escape elsewhere in long, hot bus rides, but not exactly thrillers. My girlfriend and I learned this truth the hard way when she brought The Shadow of the Wind on the same trip; she mostly wanted to stay by the hotel pool for the (very short) time it took her to read it. I ended up bringing way too many books on that particular trip myself, some of which I didn’t even get around to reading (Le Rouge et le noir, if you really want to know, which still stares at me accusingly from my shelf, as yet unread). All those books did serve a purpose when my backpack was searched in the night train on the border between Bulgaria and Serbia. “Books! Books! BOOKS!” cried the customs officer as she shuffled through my backpack, pulling out volume after volume. She sighed rather desperately and gave up her search. If ever you need to pass anything illegal through Eastern-European borders, now you know how.

My "to read" pile.

I know what you’re thinking: an e-reader would solve that problem, and I could carry an entire library with me in the volume of a single, paperback novella. But the thing is, the love I have for ink and paper books still outweighs the advantages of those clever little machines. I like how I can annotate my books, I like turning the bottom corner of pages I want to read to G., and I like being able to measure how much I have left to read by the space between my thumb and index. I also have a tendency to buy books abroad, where they become mementos of the places I visit. Downloading them abroad just wouldn’t be the same. For example, I cherish my Everyman edition of Ulysses all the more because I bought it in Dublin, from the James Joyce Center. Similarly, I needed to get something — anything — from Shakespeare & Company, in Paris, the first time I went there a few months ago (I finally settled on a book about bookstores, The Yellow-Lighted Bookstore, by Lewis Buzbee, which I felt was appropriate). I didn’t see many decent books in English in the Balkans, although I did find a nice edition of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms in English, with an introduction in Bulgarian, in a street market in Sofia. My foreign book buying activities have gotten a little problematic in the last year, since I’ve been studying abroad in England and, although I brought a decent number of books along with me, I’ve also been buying lots of books here, because I like to surround myself with books — it gives me comfort and makes wherever I live feel like home. The problem is, come June, I need to bring all these books with me back to Montreal.

The nature of residence rooms means bookshelves also holds crockery and wine glasses. It adds to the charm, I suppose.

The core of my library-away-from-home is made up of the books I brought with me (The Measure of Paris, by Stephen Scobie, Possession by A. S. Byatt, and others), then there are books I needed to buy for school (Henry James and Shakespeare figure prominently here), and finally all the books I bought here: The Granta Book of Irish Short Stories, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Al Alvarez’s Risky Business, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita bought at Mr B’s Book Emporium, in Bath), Diana Athill’s Instead of a Letter (bought in the London Review bookstore), and (too) many others. Some of these I’ve read, some I haven’t. In my defense, I’ve promised to stop buying books while I’m here — if only because of the logistical problem of bringing them back home with me — at least until I’ve read all of those I have.

Meanwhile, I have another problem; it’s Easter vacation and I’m leaving for a short trip to Italy this week… which books, I wonder, will get the chance to visit Florence with me?