100 book challenge: part one: fiction

Here are the first 25 picks, all from the Fiction shelves.

• The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker
  [One of my favorite authors, and this is my favorite novel by him.]
  

• Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
  [This book has enough provocative, imaginative ideas in it to last one a lifetime simply by itself.]
  

• The Age of Wire and String, by Ben Marcus
  [Still one of the most common books for me to read a random passage out of to someone.]
  

• Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
  [Like Labyrinths, this is a book that opens up onto a nearly infinite "possibility space."]
  

• If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, by Italo Calvino [The other really essential Calvino novel.]
  

• Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille
  [A 1928 pornographic novel so mindbending it borders on the Surrealist.]
  

• Crash, by J.G. Ballard
  [If we're bringing along experimental pornography, we should definitely include this.]
  

• Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs
  [And this.]
  

• I'm going to cheat here, and count Burroughs' "Cut-Up Trilogy" (Nova Express, Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded) as one volume
  

• Another cheat: William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive).
  

• I actually don't need to cheat on this one, because I have the single volume that collects The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, by Douglas Adams, but it's really the first only the first volume that matters deeply to me. I can, however, see myself enjoying re-reading the others at some point.
  

• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
  [I've still never made it all the way through all three of these, but it's good to bring an unfinished book along with some of the faves, and good to have a book you could feasibly read out loud for a year.]
  

• The Annotated Alice, by Lewis Carroll [annotations by Martin Gardner]
  [Another good out-loud book, plus it's essential to have at least one book on hand that could entertain children. Having Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass together in one volume make this an absolutely indispensible choice.]
  

• Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
  [I'm not entirely sure that I'll ever re-read this, but there are some great bits in it that often pop up in my mind, and I'd like to be able to refer to those bits at some point.]
  

• The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon [I'll include Gravity's Rainbow later, if there's room]
  

• Underworld, by Don DeLillo
  [Maybe my favorite "realistic" novel of the last 100 years.]
  

• White Noise, by Don DeLillo
  [Fights with Underworld for the title.]
  

• Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis
  [My favorite Amis novel, and the most successful and beautiful extended meditation on the flow of time that I've ever read.]
  

• Blindness, by Jose Saramogo
  [Like Time's Arrow, this is a book that's effectively a fantasy, but nevertheless profoundly captures both the horror and the beauty of real-life humanity.]
  

• Europeana, by Patrik Ourednik
  [An experimental novel that's also a concise history of the 20th century.]
  

• Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
  [Or maybe Pale Fire? Whew, tough choice.]
  

• Valis, by Philip K. Dick
  [Far and away the best of his novels.]
  

• My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner
  [An indescribable mish-mash of cyberpunk, experimental poetry, and humor writing.]
  

• Schrodinger's Cat, by Robert Anton Wilson
  [More coherent and more intellectually provocative than the cluttered Illuminatus Trilogy.]
  

• Magic For Beginners, by Kelly Link
  [A weird but often delightful collection of fantastical short stories.]

Next up: poetry.

100 book challenge

So in the Red Eye a couple of days ago was an article on something called the "100 Thing Challenge"—which caught my eye at first because I thought it was a spin on my long-running 100 Favorite Things exercise.

It is and it isn't. It's an article on one person's attempt to simplify his life by reducing his personal belongings to 100 things. This appealed to me, probably foremostly because I'm preparing a cross-country move in a few weeks, and so the idea of reducing my belongings has been much on my mind lately.

But 100 items only? Sheesh, I thought to myself, I don't think I could reduce even just my books to 100, much less everything else. (It actually turns out, if you look at the original post from the guy who came up with the challenge, that he's allowing himself books as an exception, so that's heartening.)

But it did get me to thinking: if I tried to reduce down to 100 books, what are the ones I would choose? I have a lot of books that I cart around from apartment to apartment to apartment, more for their decorative value than anything else. Many (most?) of them I don't think I'll ever re-read (and if I was struck by the sudden impulse to re-read them, I could probably go get them out of a library). But there are some that I do refer to regularly, or plan to re-read, or just can't bring myself to part with. But is that category larger than 100?

I think I'll make a list of the 100 "must-saves," and see how I feel about the "leftovers." A complete list or list in progress will likely appear here soon.

See also: the LibraryThing Swap this Book feature; BookCrossing; and my own lament, last year, about what to do with all the CDs clogging up my living quarters (a problem I'm still in the process of solving).

(some writing about) writing about film

So recently I saw Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (Film Club XXVII), and afterwards, I went and got a book of her writing out of the library (Essential Deren: Collected Writing on Film). It's pretty interesting, and it sheds some light on exactly what it is that she's attempting to do in her films.

I tend to read with a package of book darts nearby, and eventually (because I'm a huge geek) I take the passages of a text that I marked with the darts and transcribe them into the computer so that I can easily access, search, or share them later.

It occurred to me that people reading this blog might be interested in the notes on the Deren book, so I whipped them up into a webpage, viewable here. I'm still reading the book, so the notes aren't quite complete, but there's more than enough there for interested parties to sink their teeth into. (The page will dynamically update with new notes once I return to reading the book, which might not be for a few weeks: I'm travelling.)

Just in case Deren isn't your thing, here are a few other exports of notes on film books I've read in the recent past:

Virginia Wright Wexman's A History of Film

Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film

Stan Brakhage's Brakhage Scrapbook: Collected Writings 1964-1980

Martha Nochimson's The Passion of David Lynch

Eric Lichtenfeld's Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movies as Politics

Hopefully you can find something in there to enjoy. Oh, btw, these exports aren't hand-coded; they're all made possible by Dabble DB, a great (but not free) service used to generate online databases: that's the same service I use to maintain the 20 Most Recent Films and Favorite Films pages.

year in reading: 2007

I know we're a little bit far on into 2008 for a year-end recap from 2007, but I try to crunch the numbers on the reading log every year, and I don't want to skip 2007 just because I was so busy for the first few weeks of the New Year.

So. Total number of books I read last year: 58! That's up a comfortable 16 from last year, and only two shy of my high-water mark (60 books in 2004).

Novels / novellas: 16 (up seven from last year). Highlights: Honestly? Probably fantasy stuff like the Harry Potter series, which I read all in a row, and Philip Pullman's Amber Spyglass. Of the science fiction I read this year, Charles Stross' Accelerando was the standout, beating out SF-esque books with greater literary aspirations like Cormac McCarthy's The Road or William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. Both of those were fine books, but Accelerando was ultimately more impressive.

Books on film / film criticism: 11 (+11). Highlight: Martha Nochimson's offbeat feminist read on Lynch, The Passion of David Lynch

Graphic novels / comics anthologies / books of cartoons: 7 (+2). Highlights: Roz Chast's Theories of Everything, and Matthew Diffee's great anthology of rejected New Yorker cartoons

Collections of poetry: 5 (-1). Highlights: K. Silem Mohammad's flarf masterpiece, Deer Head Nation; derek beaulieu's fun book of visual poetry, fractal economies

Essays / memoirs: 5 (+2) Highlight: the first three volumes of the Grand Piano collective autobiography project, written by an all-star team of Language poets. I claim them as a highlight, although by the time I got to the third volume they were depressing me deeply: hearing people reflect back upon about the formation of their intellectual / creative community really fostered an indelible awareness of certain absences in my own life

Books of literary criticism: 3 (same as last year). Highlights: the N+1 pamphlet on the "practical avant-garde;" Samuel Delany's Starboard Wine

Books on video games or game studies: 4 (+4; counting Henry Jenkins' Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, which is only marginally about video games). Highlight: I was deeply engaged by all four of these books, but the one of them that was most important for my own thinking on games and narrative was Jesper Juul's lucid and insightful Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, the best book I read all year

Assorted nonfiction and polemics: 7 Highlight: Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand!: Women and Men in Conversation

Authors I read in 2007 who have written at least one book I read prior to 2007: 8 (Philip K. Dick, Paul Pope, Rick Veitch, Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip Pullman, Edward Tufte, William Gibson, Samuel Delany. Aside from Edward Tufte and maybe Rick Veitch, every one of them writes primarily in the field of science fiction or fantasy. Interesting.)

Trends: big leaps in reading about film and video games, two categories not even really on the radar in years past. Novels and poetry remained an important part of my reading, although I didn't read a single short story collection this year. Hmm.

What did you read last year that you enjoyed?

some recent capsule reviews

With classes being over (they ended, for me, on Thursday), I've been able to take some time to catch up on this year's reading log. That said, here are some new capsule reviews for stuff I read this fall...

Alma, or The Dead Women by Alice Notley
This book is many things simultaneously: a collection of experimental poems utilizing different female personae; a cry of abject despair regarding US foreign policy; a set of incantations, curses, and other witchery; a call for the creation of a new species, defecting from the old. The fact that none of these things are particularly popular make it all the more impressive that this book ever made it to press. Enjoyable in small doses, sobering at its full length (at 344 pages it dwarfs most other volumes of contemporary poetry on my shelf).

Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie by Eric Lichtenfeld
A good overview of the action film as a genre, although I wish the book's theoretical basis was a bit more rigorous. It is best at positioning the films historically (it includes even minor details about their promotion and reception) and is weaker when it does ideological or formal analysis. The promise of an argument about "violence and spectacle" is only nominally fulfilled. Scavengings here.

You Just Don't Understand!: Women and Men In Conversation by Deborah Tannen
A careful analysis of the way gender differences manifest in conversation that scrupulously avoids taking a side in the "nature / nurture" debate. The book has no shortage of hard sociological data at its root, but most of the chapters are "humanized" with the inclusion of a lot of (sometimes repetitive) anecdotal data. This makes it slow reading at times, but the insights here remain sound: making this the rare example of a book that will genuinely help almost any adult who might take it to heart. Scavengings here.

Beautiful Evidence, by Edward Tufte
A masterpiece of beautiful design, but content-wise this book feels a bit like a "Tufte's Greatest Hits" collection. The Powerpoint-hatin' and the appreciation of Minard's "Napoleon marches on Moscow" graphic, for instance, will seem familiar to readers of Tufte's other books. (That's not to say that there isn't a pleasant sort of comfort to encountering them again here.) Of the chapters that felt really fresh, the one on "sparklines" is key: it's the one that best showcases Tufte's endless willingness to fruitfully rethink the ways that we visualize data. Scavengings here.

Movies As Politics, by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Book-length volume of Rosenbaum's film criticism, collected from around the 1994-1996 era. I admire Rosenbaum as a critic, but I'm not entirely sure these short pieces, taken together, quite add up to a book. Arguments recur, yes, but in a way that betrays their piecemeal origins rather than working cumulatively. Scavengings here.

Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons 1978-2006, by Roz Chast
Roz Chast's cartooning work in recent years has been so content to mine the vein of child/parent relationships that it's easy to forget the pleasures of her early work, which is much more interested in the intersection between the odd and the quotidian. This is a great collection, although the first third (for my money) is vastly better than the final third.

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures The Life of The Mind, by Gerald Graff
A book-length argument for some relatively commonsense principles: students learn better when they understand a context for what they're learning; instructors have a duty to try to bridge the gap between academic language and the vernacular; student papers are better when they have a sense that they're arguing *against* someone rather than into a vacuum. Valid points, certainly: but as someone mostly convinced of these points on my way in, I found the rhetorical exertion on display here to be essentially skimmable. Scavengings here.

As usual, the full list of everything I've read this year lives here, and LibraryThing powers a RSS feed of my reviews here.

accelerando, by charles stross

Back in August, I wrote that Charles Stross' Accelerando might be the best science fiction novel of the last ten years. After a few months to think about it, I stand by that, and I wanted to try to follow up on the claim a bit here.

First off, it touches on just about every hot geek topic from the last decade or two: bandwidth politics, data havens, distributed computing, AI pets, entertainment law, viral marketing, the reputation economy, fringe-science ideas from people like Moravec and Tipler... the list goes on. One of Strosser's great talents is that he can not only cram all these ideas into a single book, but also find the ways in which they can be rewardingly combined, the ways they might shoot sparks if struck together: as a result, the future of Accelerando seems like an actual future, the generated result of ideas that have been lived with for a while, and fruitfully combined, recombined, mashed-up, road-tested, exploited, etcetera. It's a future that's imagined richly enough to be pretty disorienting for the reader—the more familiar you are with those zeitgeisty topics listed above the easier a time you'll have.

It'll also help if you've got a passing familiarity with the basic tropes of SF—stuff like interplanetary colonization, "first contact," "the singularity," virtual worlds, consciousness-as-digital-simulacra, etc. Cause most of that stuff's here, too. Still erring on the side of maximalist density, Stross chooses to shoehorn not one but all of these different tropes into his book, again with an eye for the ways they might cross-pollinate interestingly. In other words, this is a book intended to disorient people who find normal SF novels to be not provocative or defamiliarizing enough (no small feat, considering that SF is a genre that has a certain degree of disorientation and frustration built into it as a fundamental requirement). It's also a generational epic and a comic romp—it's brisk and flat-out entertaining. Highly recommended.

some recent capsule reviews

I've updated this year's reading log with some new reviews, posted below for your reading convenience:

Easy Travel to Other Planets, by Ted Mooney
There's a lot to like about the way this novel chronicles the interpersonal drama among a group of intellectuals and artists. The conversations are stylish, fragmentary, and mediated; the prose is compressed, with a cinematic sense of editing; a quasifuturistic theme (interspecies communication) provides ample opportunity for strange riffs; an atmosphere of geopolitical tension permeates obscurely at all times, threatening, at any moment, to condense into apocalypse—at its best, it recalls the energy and thrust of early DeLillo. At its worst, it reads like high-end erotica posing as lit: Mooney's attention to the sexuality of his [female] protagonist lurches towards the prurient at times (in the first thirty pages of the novel, she participates in three sex scenes, including one with a dolphin).

Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art by Jennifer New
Book dedicated to showcasing intricate art journals, mostly hand-drawn. The journals themselves are so self-evidently fascinating that it's hard to say why presenting them in this fashion doesn't quite work. The choice to reduce intricate journal-pages down to postcard size, rendering them mostly unreadable, certainly doesn't help; I think there's also a problem with the sheer number of journals represented here, which helps to give a sense of scope and variety but eliminates the ability to really immerse yourself in any particular journal. The framing essays profiling each journal-maker are worth a read, but ultimately they're not nearly as interesting as the journals themselves: it's just one more degree of remove between the reader and the subjectivity that's alive in the journal-pages. There's so much "frame" here that the art itself is choked out.

Only Words, by Catharine MacKinnon
MacKinnon is an anti-pornography feminist, which can cause people on both ends of the political spectrum to reject her ideas without taking the time to engage with them first. This is a shame, because MacKinnon's argument here is one of the most interesting anti-pornography arguments I've read, avoiding the easy use of anecdotal pathos, in favor of a legal argument, suggesting that pornography's status as "protected expression" is a classification error, and that it belongs more properly in the category of speech acts that are treated legally as actions rather than ideas (hate speech; sexual harrassment). Elegant and deft.

The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
Final volume in the His Dark Materials trilogy, a children's fantasy trilogy built around the (Gnostic) notion of a War Against God. The fact that such a thing ever achieved a moderate success on the shelves of American booksellers strikes me as so profoundly improbable that Pullman earns points just for pulling it off; that goes double when you also consider that this book also features two heroically pair-bonded male angels and features a young girl's sexual awakening as a major plot point. But to focus on the anti-Narnian qualities on display here is to overlook the sheer strength of Pullman's prose and storytelling craft. In this volume, these strengths are most evident in Pullman's sequences of genuine terror (the passage into the Land of the Dead) and heart-rending tragedy (the parting of lovers). Heavy stuff, but Pullman is right to not flinch from confronting children with emotionally weighty material: it dignifies them as fully human.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Post-apocalyptic minimalism from master prosesmith Cormac McCarthy. This book could fruitfully be partnered with Jose Saramago's Blindness: both stare unflinchingly into extremes of human ugliness in an attempt to unsentimentally illuminate the fragility and sheer miracle nature of human love. In Blindness the love is between a man and a woman; here it is between a father and son, a framework that allows the book also to also rewardingly explore some of the thornier questions of parental ethics—when is it appropriate to lie to a child, for instance? What forms of protection are valid and appropriate? The book disappointingly pulls a few punches in its final pages, but prior to that it was one of the most rewarding novels I've read this year. Recommended.

Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
If I were to pick a book that this one most reminded me of, it would be Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: you could practically entitle this Understanding Video Games and be none the worse for wear. Like McCloud, Juul comes to his chosen branch of the media tree with a fresh eye, determined to coherently examine its component elements in order to build a new conception of the way they work their effects. For Juul, the key elements are narrative and rule-based play, and the unique experience of video games grows out of cooperation (as well as tensions and slippages) between these forces. Fascinating reading, clear and lucid, an essential work for anyone interested in the academic study of video games or cross-platform narrative. Highly recommended.

(Those of you who are interested in that last one might want to take note that all my "scavengings" from the book (85 in total) can be found here.)