lorrie moore – Megin Jiménez

In 2014, I read 20 fiction & non-fiction books. Here’s the tail-end of the list, ranked in order of my own most subjective preference. Not necessarily in order of literary greatness, but in terms of my enjoyment of the book, whether it dazzled me with language, or made me think new thoughts, or made me want to make things, or stayed with me long after I read it, or made me feel something, or all of the above. (This also includes an addendum on poetry and the books I abandoned.)

16. Like Life (1990) – Lorrie Moore (Vintage)

Lorrie Moore is usually categorized as a funny writer, and she is. But she is consistently devastating, too. Nobody talks about that. I had read this book in 2007 and it depressed the hell out of me then. This time I couldn’t get through some of the stories, she takes the pain so far. “The Jewish Hunter” is my favorite, maybe because some genuine human connection actually takes place (although it’s not lasting).

17. Laughable Loves (1969, 1974 in English) – Milan Kundera (Harper Perennial)

It’s not worth getting offended over Kundera’s attitudes towards women as his books are almost quaint time capsules of a certain attitude, at this point. In that spirit, I enjoyed these stories, pretending I was a roué Czech doctor for a little while. He’s also deft in depicting the ways a corrupt Communist state infiltrates all parts of life.

18. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008) – Michael Pollan (Penguin Books. Bought at Human Relations bookstore in Bushwick)

I think this could have worked as a long essay, especially if you’ve read the revelatory Omnivore’s Dilemma. I read this early in the year and can’t remember too much about it, actually, but maybe this is because so much of Pollan’s thinking has permeated our language around food choices and politics (“Eat food, mostly plants,” etc.).

19. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007) – Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial. Received as a gift, sold it to a used bookstore)

A non-fiction account of how Kingsolver and her family moved to a farm in Virginia to live the true locavore lifestyle, growing or raising all of their own food, or procuring it from a 100-mile (I think?) radius. It gave me a new appreciation for the knowledge and work small-farm farmers do. The book is at its best when she gets deep into the details of farm life, for example, about the mating lives of turkeys. I was less interested when she wrote as an advocate and called on the reader to take similar actions (for example, get a second freezer in order to eat local throughout the winter), particularly as I am already fairly educated about the environmental and political issues surrounding food production and distribution, and am doing the best I can. At those times it came off as preachy or defensive. Also, I just can’t take on feeling guilty for eating bananas at this point at my life.

20. The Sense of an Ending (2011) – Julian Barnes (Vintage)

I love Julian Barnes (especially Flaubert’s Parrot), but I didn’t like the narrator in this story, who kept insisting on his ordinariness, a conceit that seems played out. I think it was a device here, Barnes emphasized the protagonist’s cluelessness in order to keep twisting the plot, in a clever way. Ultimately, it felt to me like the book was about its own cleverness and didn’t convince me on an emotional level.

BOOKS ABANDONED

I Love Dick – Chris Kraus (1997)

I was really ready to love this book, I was excited when I bought it. I liked everything about it in theory – the loose form, the fact that it deals with issues of sexuality, gender, open relationships, feminism from a personal perspective – but I don’t know what happened. It didn’t hold my interest. Maybe because Kraus is so obsessively internal, letters about letters. I got claustrophobic. I even tried twice with it.

Z a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2014) by Therese Anne Fowler

I couldn’t get past page 3. Not at all how I would imagine Zelda Fitzgerald’s voice. This is like the Hollywood version, or the version made for a docile book club.

Et après… par Guillaume Musso

Picked this up in an attempt to keep up my French. And actually, it made me feel good about my French because I could tell it was badly written! (Schlocky, clichéd.) Also, it takes place in New York! If I’m going to read a book in French I don’t want to be back in NYC

Better late than never, my round-up of 2013 reading. I read 21 books, here are Nos. 15-21 (plus scattered other reading and 4 abandoned books), ranked in order of preference. Not necessarily in order of literary greatness, but in terms of my enjoyment of the book, whether it dazzled me with language, or made me think new thoughts, or made me want to make things, or made me feel something, or all of the above.

****

15. LIT: A Memoir (2009) – Mary Karr

Absorbing account of her trajectory as a writer and recovery from alcoholism. Tough & funny. Maybe too coy about her friendships with literary heavyweights (for example, she had a relationship with David Foster Wallace, but only ever refers to him as David & glosses quickly over the affair), though it must be hard to decide what to include if you’re writing about your whole life. An unflinching account of her spiritual/religious development, a touchy subject if there ever was one.

16. Bluets (2009) – Maggie Nelson

This is labelled a memoir, but is its own made-up genre of numbered sections, which made this compulsively readable and added to the detached, cold quality. I liked how it was philosophical and wandering. A person dissecting her own pain. But maybe, ultimately, the coldness is what kept me from loving it? We get the sex with the beloved, the depression following the loss of the beloved, lots of blue, but never the beloved himself – why he was beloved. I also was averse to the voice’s awareness of the book itself, didn’t seem necessary (i.e., “I had all of these scraps I’ve been working on, I ordered them randomly, here they are”).

17. Self Help (1985) – Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore’s first story collection, not really fair to judge it against her later collections (all of which I read before this) because she just gets better. “What Is Seized” was my favorite in this collection. Didn’t like “A Kid’s Guide to Divorce”, & I couldn’t read the one about the woman with breast cancer, because the first paragraph made my heart stop.

18. Anywhere But Here (1992) – Mona Simpson

Novel. This seemed to me a keen portrait of mother-daughter emotional abuse, though I didn’t see that addressed in any of the reviews I read. It was raw & disturbing in that sense.

19. Diary of a Teenage Girl (2002) – Phoebe Gloeckner

Graphic novel. Intense, intimate, difficult. Especially enjoyed the dark view of San Francisco in the 1970s, when the 60s grooviness gave way to something more frivolous and destructive.

20. Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women – Nora Ephron (1975)

Essay collection. More involved in the specifics of 1970s politics and perspectives than I had hoped, though her view of Gloria Steinem, the women’s movement as it was happening was pretty fascinating.

21. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980) – Milan Kundera

Crankypants Kundera in full force here, particularly the second half, in which he performs a Lars von Trier-esque extended torture of his heroine. I wouldn’t call it magical realism…. Though I did enjoy the scene among the Russian poets. Good quote here.

PIECEMEAL READING

Short stories, but not entire books by Grace Paley and Clarice Lispector

Susan Sontag essays from Against Interpretation

POETRY

Didn’t read much poetry this year, a bit of an exile year. I don’t count these as “books read” as I dipped in and out of volumes of: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rilke, Adrienne Rich, Sandra Simonds’ Warsaw Bikini, and David Lehman’s New and Selected.

ABANDONED READING

The Idiot (1869) – Dostoevsky

I spent two months reading this novel and made it over halfway through. I will return to it!! Need more uninterrupted time.

No Kidding: Women Writers on Bypassing Parenthood (2013)

The writers are mostly comedians, so a lot of the essays started sounding the same. I read maybe half of them.

Black Paths (2013) – David B.

Just couldn’t get into this graphic novel, even though I bought a beautiful full-color hardback edition. Oh well.

Heroines (2012) – Kate Zambreno

In theory, I’m the ideal reader of this book, which is, ostensibly, about the women of modernism, in particular those relegated to the wifey role (Zelda Fitzgerald, Viv Eliot) or struggling with mental illness (Virginia Woolf). But I couldn’t stand the humorless narcissism of the narrator and her conflating of her 21st-century life with those trapped in much more narrow historical circumstances. Muddled arguments and muddled thinking under cover of l’écriture féminine. I actually returned this to the bookstore, which I don’t think I’ve ever done.

Tag: lorrie moore

The 2014 Book List, Part I

The 2013 Book List, Part I