Asking the Wrong Questions

I went through an unplanned blogging hiatus this summer, which meant that a lot of books and movies that I would have liked to write about ended up unreported (though some of them will be showing up in my forthcoming year's best list).  Still, it seemed wrong to end the year without another look at what I've been reading (one of the things I'd like to get back to next year is full-length book reviews, which is something I've let slide, but this will do for now).  Those of you who haven't been following along on twitter (or who have been defeated by its ephemeral format) might also be interested in the conclusion of my read-through of the Sherlock Holmes canon--here are my thoughts on The Return of Sherlock Holmes , His Last Bow , and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes . The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt - Tartt's bestselling, Pulitzer-winning novel kicks off with a terrorist bombing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker loses his beloved ...

If I finish the book I'm reading right now (J.R.R. Tolkien's collection of essays The Monsters and the Critics ) before the end of the month, I will have read as many books in April as I read in the three months preceding it.  That's what reading holidays and volcano-induced delays will do for you.  Of course, this is far too many books to give any of them an in-depth look, so here are some quick thoughts about some of them. Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente - Valente's latest novel, currently on the shortlist for the Hugo award, took a while to win me over.  A portal fantasy in which the fantastic world (the titular city) is reached via sexual contact, with visitors to the city 'infecting' their partners and giving them access to the portion of it that is tattooed on their skin, Palimpsest revolves around four such visitors--a lonely Californian beekeeper, a New York locksmith obsessed with the death of his sister, an Italian antiques dealer infected by h...

A lot of bloggers and reviewers have been posting their decade's best lists, but I'm sticking with the end of year format.  On the whole, I've found most of the best of decade lists I've seen rather samey.  Past a certain resolution, one loses sight of the interesting, idiosyncratic choices that make best-of lists so much fun.  Besides, after blogging for nearly half the decade (a scary thought, that) I hope it doesn't need a best-of post to make it clear that I consider books like Air and Atonement , Cloud Atlas and Perdido Street Station to be among the best I read in the aughts.  More importantly, I think that to linger on these fantastic books would only cast a harsher light on 2009's reading.  I read 60 books in 2009, a slight drop from last year (mainly because the last few weeks have been swallowed up by a major work project, which unfortunately will continue monopolizing my time in the first quarter of 2010) which doesn't quite convey just how muc...

Sarah Waters and I have had our ups and downs, mostly due to the fact that I read her first three novels in reverse order of their publication--from the twisty, superb Fingersmith , through the intense but punishing Affinity , to the borderline unreadable Tipping the Velvet . However unfairly--since, after all, Waters had been improving as a writer--I found myself reluctant to go any further with her, and gave her fourth novel, The Night Watch , a pass. Positive responses to it, as well as the slow healing of the wounds left by Tipping the Velvet , persuaded me to make a stab at her latest effort, The Little Stranger , and I'm glad I did. Fingersmith remains my favorite of Waters's novels, and I have serious problems with Stranger , but there's no denying that it is both absorbing and intense--shockingly so, given the ordinariness of its setting and the matter-of-fact way in which its events are reported. Even more importantly, it demonstrates--as the first three novel...

As I wrote in yesterday's best books roundup, this is not going to be an very long list--it might just be that I'm developing a better bullshit detector, but I didn't read many genuine stinkers this year. Which might seem like something to be grateful for, but I've found that a truly terrible book can be a blessing in disguise--few things are as fun as a no-holds-barred rant against a novel that offends one's sensibilities simply by existing in the universe. Which is what the year's worst reads roundup is all about--it's how I compensate myself for having read these books in the first place. As it was last year, this list is presented in ascending order of horribleness. Misfortune by Wesley Stace I think Wesley Stace must live in a cave. How else to explain the fact that, in his debut novel, Stace chose a premise all but identical to that of Jeffrey Eugenides's sublime, Pulitzer-winning novel Middlesex --male child raised as a girl--and then sat back an...

Look, it's the sixth recent reading roundup, posted on 6/6/06. That's kind of neat, right? No? Well, I thought it was. Affinity and Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters - in retrospect, I think it was a mistake to move backwards through Sarah Waters' bibliography--first her superb third novel, Fingersmith ; then her mediocre second, Affinity , and finally her embarrassingly bad first, Tipping the Velvet . Not only has Waters made great strides in terms of her facility with plot, character, dialogue and voice, but in her earlier novels, Tipping the Velvet in particular, she has yet to strike a balance between the demands of plot and the sensationalism of her premise. To put it simply, Waters doesn't really have anything to say about lesbianism in general, and beyond the fact that she was made her readers aware of their existence, she doesn't seem to have much to say about Victorian lesbians either. This wasn't a problem in Fingersmith , in which the main ch...