Frivolity: Fave Reads '96

...From the "Who asked you?" department comes...

Larry's Top 10 Fave Reads for 1996

Emma. Jane Austen.

This was a year in which a lot of Jane Austen movies came out. This encouraged me to give Jane Austen a second chance. I had decided a long time ago that I didn't like Austen because I hadn't liked reading Wuthering Heights. Once I saw the Pride and Prejudice mini-series and was informed that Austen (ahem) hadn't actually written Heights, I read a few of her novels. Emma ruled--the heroine was emotionally shallow and manipulative; how could I help but identify with her?

Leviathan. Paul Auster.

I spend half my life trying to figure out what's going on with insufficient information to figure out anything. This book is about this kind of armchair detective work. There are parts of the plot which the narrator never manages to untangle--the reader is left hazy on these as well. I discovered that I liked being left hazy. Plus, the story had a mad bomber in it, so you know it's high-quality.

The Cowboy Wally Show. Kyle Baker.

This is the funniest comic book I read all year. It had farce, witty dialog, Hamlet, angst, fake advertisements, a Foreign Legion movie,... What more do you need?

Regeneration. Pat Barker.

There's this anti-war poet who's in this mental hospital so that the army can declare him crazy and dismiss his anti-war statements as demented ravings; and there's this doctor who's trying to help the poet and other people; and there's the hospital, and memories of trench warfare. There are so many horrible things in this book, I'm not exactly sure how I managed to enjoy reading it so much.

Budding Prospects. T. Coraghessan Boyle.

T. Coraghessan Boyle is, I am sure, John Madden's favorite author. At some point in any Boyle story, the lead character will lie muddy and exhausted in the dirt, and will decide to perservere. In this book, the protagonist, down on his luck, is swept into a pot-farming scheme in Northern California. The mud follows soon afterwards.

Joy Ride. Carol Lay.

All characters in Carol Lay's comics go around grinning like maniacs, baring their teeth in ricti of unease. They lead lives of surreal desperation, surrounded by irritants. She is one of the few writers I know of that can use magical realism without seeming dumb.

Looking For A Ship. John McPhee

Any book written about the merchant marine is intrinsically cool. John McPhee is a great writer. What more do you need to know? Would it help if I mentioned the modern-day pirates?

Terror on Flight 789. Bill Shunn

It's a hypertext autobio of a Mormon missionary making some regrettable choices. It's a real page turner. I couldn't stop reading this. Oh, wow. I hope I never become a Mormon; I'd end up in all kinds of uncomfortable situations. Man.

Toxic Sludge Is Good For You. Rampton, Stauber.

There's this newsletter called PR Watch that keeps track of who's paying which PR companies to do what. And PR companies do plenty nowadays--run "grass roots" political campaigns, quash unfavorable news stories, discredit witnesses,... The editors of PR Watch wrote a bunch of essays about what's going down; they then placed those essays into this book. It would all be very depressing if it weren't so funny.

Storeys From the Old Hotel. Gene Wolfe

Half of the stuff that Gene Wolfe writes leaves me cold. The remaining half is mighty fine, though. This book had a lot of mighty fine stuff in it. A lot of high-quality short stories about a lot of strange goings on.

Honorable Mentions:

• Parkinson's Law (and other studies in administration) C. Northcote Parkinson--
  I tried reading a couple of Dilbert prose books this year. They were not good. I was saddened. Scott Adams' Dilbert provides me so much amusement; it was sad to find that he couldn't keep up that level of humor in a prose essay. Then I read this old book about hierarchies, and was favorably impressed. "Parkinson" took more time to think about why hierarchies became so unwieldly.

• Generations: the history of America's future Strauss and Howe--
  This book looks at the experiences of generations of Americans. From this, it tries to figure out what's going to happen over the next 70 years. I was informed and amused by the generational approach to history. Unfortunately, whenever I encountered a passage which pointed out the "cyclical nature" of these generations and how this allowed us to predict the future, I shook my head in disagreement so hard that I kept losing my place.

• Smilla's Sense of Snow Peter Høeg--
  I spent too much time learning about the legends and waterfowl of Western Greenland not to love this book. Then again, lots of other people liked it, too. So maybe the Greenland references aren't what make it cool.

• Confessions of Madame Psyche, Chapter One Dorothy Bryant, Word for Word--
  This wasn't exactly a '96 fave read. I mean Confessions of Madame Psyche is a kick-ass book. But I read it too long ago for it to be a fave read of '96. However, I did get to see the "Word for Word" troupe read Chapter one of this book. "Word for Word" is a troupe of actors who read the entire text of a book, acting it out. Like, if a book said, "Ahab tossed the harpoon," then the actor playing Ahab would say, "Ahab tossed the harpoon," and toss a harpoon. That doesn't sound that interesting, but it is. Really. So this was a fave something of '96, I just don't know what.

• Calde of the Long Sun, Oranges, Pride and Prejudice, The Eye in the Door, East is East--
  I did a lot of author binging this year. E.g., I read all the Austen and Boyle I could get my hands on. To make it easier to pick my top 10 reads for '96, I decided that only one book by each writer could make it in. So I had to leave all of these books out.

• Among the Thugs Bill Buford--
  I really like this book. On the other hand, I've just now finished it, so maybe I'm still too excited to be a proper judge of this book. I have a feeling it should be in the top 10, but don't know if I'll still feel the same way in another couple of weeks. It's about mob violence and the author's experiences among football (soccer) supporters in England.

• The Log of the Coriolanus Norman Matson--
  Travelogs rule. Sailing travelogs rule twice over. The Log record's Matson's journey on one of the last long sail-powered commercial freight voyages ever. Read about sailing with a crew who speaks little English, about the respect accorded bean-eating scholars, about dogs (stupid and smart), and fun shipboard hijinx.

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