Right, so, I'm a huge fan of The A.V. Club as both a source where I can find out about pop-culture releases I might otherwise never be aware of, and a place where I can cyberspatially hang out (read: lurk) with like-minded people talking about things I've already consumed and enjoyed (or disdained). I credit The A.V. Club both with the fact that I actually went to go see The Aristocrats in the theater during its limited release, and that I read The Name of the Wind and evangelically pressed it into the hands of other people.
Anyway, The A.V. Club recently released their Best Books of the 00's list and I suppose it goes to show how long I've been haunting their book reviews because it was not really a surprising run-down. Here's how my personal intersections with the list break down, for no good reason other than it's my blog and I like to keep score:
Books I've Read:
The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay (2000), Michael Chabon
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao (2007), Junot Díaz
The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time (2003), Mark Haddon
Fargo Rock City (2001), Chuck Klosterman
Freakonomics (2005), Steven D. Levitt and Steven J. Dubner
Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince (2005), J.K. Rowling
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), Susanna Clarke
The Road (2006), Cormac McCarthy
The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), Audrey Niffenegger
The Tipping Point (2000), Malcolm Gladwell
The World Without Us (2007), Alan Weisman
So, 11 out of 30, which makes me feel reasonably pop-literate. I do think it's funny/interesting to note that I read eight out of those 11 sometime in the past two and a half years while commuting, which is a lot of recent catching-up. I also don't have any major disagreements with putting the above books on a Best Of list, since none of them are books which I stubbornly read to the end but ultimately hated. The Road came the closest, though I thought it had a lot of merit, but I would never recommend it to another human being because it is so excruciatingly gutting, so take that for what it's worth. Kavalier & Clay, Oscar Wao, Fargo Rock City and Time-Traveler's Wife are all freaking outstanding.
Looking over the 19 books I haven't read, I can sort them into the ones I keep hearing about and have added to my wishlist and fully intend to ingest at some unspecified point in the future, and the ones ... not-so-much.
Books I Haven't Read Yet But Keep Meaning to Get Around To:
Carter Beats The Devil (2001), Glen David Gold
The Corrections (2002), Jonathan Franzen
Devil In The White City (2003), Erik Larson
Fortress Of Solitude (2003), Jonathan Lethem
Gilead (2004), Marilynne Robinson
Middlesex (2002), Jeffrey Eugenides
Never Let Me Go (2005), Kazuo Ishiguro
Nickel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America (2001), Barbara Ehrenreich
Nixonland (2008), Rick Perlstein
Pictures At A Revolution: Five Movies And The Birth Of The New Hollywood (2008), Mark Harris
The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle (2008), David Wroblewski
The Terror (2007), Dan Simmons
The Wisdom Of Crowds (2004), James Surowiecki
I've read other stuff by Larson, Ishiguro and Simmons and would probably gravitate towards them first. It is kind of remarkable that I've never read Fortress of Solitude, for the comic book connections if nothing else.
Books I Will In All Likelihood Never Read:
Atonement (2001), Ian McEwan
Bel Canto (2001), Ann Patchett
The Blind Assassin (2000), Margaret Atwood
Empire Falls (2001), Richard Russo
Them: A Memoir Of Parents (2005), Francine Du Plessix Gray
White Teeth (2000), Zadie Smith
But never say never. None of these seem to be my cup of tea and I wouldn't seek them out by name, but if I were in the long dry stretch between gift-giving occasions and casting about for something to fill the commuting hours and someone tossed a free copy of any of the above my way, I'd probably give it a go. Except Russo - I read The Whore's Child and I find him difficult to relate to in a way that's hard to pin down.
While we're at it, The A.V. Club also put together a list of the Top 25 Comics of the 00's, which is a dicier proposition because graphic novels are becoming much more common but comics can mean GNs but also the monthly 22-page pamphlets that barely constitute chapters in larger stories in some cases and are self-contained gems in others, plus online webcomic strips that form larger narratives, so The A.V. Club considered collections of serialized graphical narrative in addition to intentionally designed GNs. And while I personally adore comics of all kinds I am unapologetically a fan first and foremost of the superhero monthlies, whereas The A.V. Club (probably rightly) casts a wider net including more indie and literary small-press stuff. The point being my batting average is much lower against the Comics of the 00's list, since I've only read four out of 25:
All-Star Superman, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
Promethea, Alan Moore & J.H. Williams III
Y: The Last Man, Brian K. Vaughan
(And odder still, there were a couple more super-hero monthly titles included on the A.V. Club list but one was Daredevil, which I've got nothing against but I simply can't be into everything out there, and another was New Frontier, a retro-retelling of DC's Big Guns origins which I started reading and gave up on because I thought it was boring and not worth the effort. I am apparently the only geek in America who thought this as New Frontier is pretty much universally-beloved to the point where they made a well-received animated movie out of it.)
So I can't say much about Blankets or Fun Home, or as much as maybe I should about The Goon or Tales Designed To Thrizzle, but as far as the ones that I've read, again, I enthusiastically concur with their inclusion. Promethea in particular is stunning from the art to the story to the dialogue to the giant elaborate intricate puzzlebox it ultimately reveals itself to be. They are currently re-releasing Promethea in massive deluxe hardcover editions that run a hundred bucks per volume, and I will probably end up buying those at some point because it just seems to deserve such a setting. In the meantime, if you're looking for a lower-end gift idea, the graphic novel on the list which I'd most like to check out is The Golem's Mighty Swing, which is about baseball AND mystical Jewish automatons - COME ON.
No comments:
Post a Comment