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:

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