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In 2009: Many Syllables, Many Sparks

I’m lucky to have two great book clubs in my life that prompt me to read a couple of novels every month.  (Even though I love to read, I get busy and brainfried and often find myself diving for a DVD before a book at the end of a long day.  So I’m grateful for a happy accountability to book club discussions.)  I find equal pleasure in Good Books and airy treasures that remind me why I fell in love with reading in the first place.  It’s so good, this reading.  So in the the spirit of all the (slightly obnoxious but addictive) year-end listmaking, I thought I would make a few notes about what I loved reading this year.

Without a doubt, the best new(ish) book I read this year was Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen.  It’s rather an understatement to say that I was impressed and moved by this novel, which is a meditation on time, identity and love, all wrapped up in meteorology, and written by a woman of about my age.  (And that summary doesn’t really do justice to the novel.  Please just read it.)  I experienced a similar intellectual reaction to I am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett.  These two books practically had me hopping around my apartment with hooray to talk about them.

I added a bunch of novels to my “I Can’t Believe It’s Taken Me So Long To Read This Incredible Thing” list: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon; Watership Down by Richard Adams (okay, so it doesn’t quite qualify as “incredible,” but it did make me think big thoughts about rabbits,  John Hurt, and Bunnies & Burrows all Spring); and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.  I was especially taken with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, not just because it’s one of the best coming-of-age stories I’ve ever read, but also because I live in Williamsburg and it was delightful to re-imagine my familiar blocks in Smith’s turn-of-the-century story.

In the  sci-fi universe, I finally got around to reading Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which made me give a cosmic, jovial punch in the arm to hard science fiction.  I normally steer clear of you, classic hard sci-fi, but this novel was a surprisingly charming and humane representative.  It was a year of re-reading in sci-fi, too.  I took a second look at Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, appreciating all the more how it anticipated so much of our modern social media world, and I spent a few good days re-visiting The Female Man by Joanna Russ.  I read and wrote about The Female Man in my teens, and finishing the book for the first time was the moment when I decided (even though I’d been deciding all along) that I was a feminist (in fact, that I had to be a feminist).  Reading it twenty years later, it’s not quite as revolutionary, but it has become more revelatory for me.  In the new weird universe, Brian Francis Slattery’s Liberation killed me with awesome both times I read it this year.

I spent a fair bit of time with short stories this year, too.  Belle Boggs’ “Homecoming“ was a stand-out among contemporary selections.  Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People” is a rad, economical little story that reminded me 1.) of why I should never stay on in a vacation town after Labor Day, and 2.) why Shirley Jackson does creepyawesome like no other author.  And I think that E. M. Forster’s 1909 story “The Machine Stops“ actually flabbergasted me with its vision about the role of technology in the future (despite its dystopian-as-all-heck outlook, it’s fairly spot-on in a lot of ways about the way we are living our lives right now).

And (of course, of course) there are more!  But I’m really interested in what you’ve read this past year, and what you think I should be reading in the next.

Please comment or drop me a line with some suggestions, dear readers!

Oh, and I’ve included a bonus book club PowerPoint presentation after the jump, too, if you’re interested…

Behold: a bonus year-end analysis I created for one of my book clubs.  Please enjoy or disregard.  Whatever you like.  (And don’t forget to leave suggestions, readers!)