turning pages

It's been a while since this blog has been updated with any sort of regularity. It could have been considered dead. Yet there are apparently still people out there who patiently wait for new posts and read them promptly. For them as much as for myself, my vague efforts will continue. I've been all over the place, mentally and physically, over the past half year, with excuses for silence that seemed sufficient when I didn't think about them hard enough. But it was just laziness.

As a stark reminder of this laziness, the annual summary of books I read in the previous year is published in October this year, not in February or March as in the past. With this delay it's impossible to say whether what's about to be written has any connection with what I perceived when I read these books. Many of the corresponding memories have been supplanted by more recent ones.

Because I kept a list I know that I read 18 books. I think I bought a fair number more. At least it felt like it when I moved to Switzerland in March. My library constituted a good half of what I shipped, by weight.

• Mr Phillips by John Lanchester – Mr Phillips is dissatisfied with his life and, on a whim, decides to drop out for an afternoon. He ambles through London, pointlessly.
• Landesbühne by Siegfried Lenz – I've read plenty of Lenz novels and I've always liked their peace and quiet pacing. This one might be no different but it seemed a bit inconsequential.
• Stories by Tobias Wolff – This books came thanks to an episode of the New Yorker fiction podcast where Akhil Sharma praised Wolff's frightening intensity. I can't remember a single story, which means, at the very least, that none stood out.
• Viva South America! by Oliver Balch – This travelogue is cleverly set up. Each country visited gets its own chapter, each focused on what Balch identifies as the peculiarity of that country. It's a nice change from the ordinary Riding in Che's Tracks and quite illuminating, though the writing was sometimes a bit too one-sided.
• American Wild by GRANTA – A GRANTA collection is always worth my money. You never know what you get but can count on quality, in whatever guise. These stories and assays show the US as it's rarely seen in the news.
• The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro – In the first chapter, when the main character has a 15-minute conversation with the butler in the lift to the third floor, I almost put the book down for good. I should have done it; it would have preserved weeks of my life. But I struggled on through time that expands, space that contracts and sense that's always absent. It's vaguely Kafkaesque, and I still haven't made up my mind whether it's great or a stinking pile of bull.
• The Island of the Colour-Blind by Oliver Sachs – Sachs, the recently deceased practicing neurologist, travels to the South Pacific to explore medical curiosities, the congenitally color blind people on Pingelap and sufferers from lytico bodig on Guam. The writing is clear, the stories are riveting and the digressions always spot on. Great book!
• Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami – Murakami is a superstar, but this book isn't much. Cortazar achieved the gradual inversion of reality and imagination in The Night Face Up much more breathtakingly.
• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – The story of a Nigerian getting a foot into America, becoming famous of sorts, returning home and getting the boy, against all odds, is dissatisfying for its Disneyesque happy-endiness for everyone involved.
• The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño – The adventures of the visceral realists in Mexico City and a road trip that's possibly a quest for a beautiful girl frame endless snippets of pseudo-biographical ramblings that are, it seems to be the theme of this year's selection, entirely pointless. I skipped the middle part.
• Best American Short Stories 2008 – Too long ago; don't remember.
• The Periodic Table by Primo Levi – Ever since encountering Bear Meat in the New Yorker, I've had Levi high on my list. In this moving memoir, Levi takes chemical elements as anchor points for events, behaviors and characters. It's nothing short of brilliant, the best thing I've ever read about chemistry, and I studied it in college.
• Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare – If I were more of a loner or more selfish, I would like to be like Chatwin, traveling the world on a whim, pompously full of myself, with a hurried curiosity for everything and a knack for writing. There's a nomad inside me as well, but it's not a solitary one.
• On the Eve by Ivan Turgenev – Turgenev was a favorite of Bruce Chatwin's. He was impressed by the finely drawn characters. Maybe Turgenev is a writer's writer. I'm not a writer and I didn't like the book too much, though for being an old tale it had a nice flow.
• Letters from London by Julian Barnes – These collected columns from The New Yorker (a common theme in my literary preferences) give a highly subjective history of the UK from 1990 to 1995. There's even a bit of chess in it.
• Tales of Ordinary Madness by Charles Bukowski – A riot of a book, absolutely hilarious. The tribulations of a failed writer/poet who finds that drugs, sex, booze and betting on horses are all fine stimulants for his literary ambitions.
• Die Brücke im Dschungel by B. Travens – An publishing oddity. A book written sometime in the 1930s and then forgotten, it was published in the 60s and languished on my mom's book shelf until I rescued it. Now it's back.
• Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer – This is my book of the year - and it was the first one I read. Foer goes out to win the US Memory Championships and describes his training (interspersed with scientific and personal digressions) with such confidence that I tried some of the approaches myself. It is indeed possible to remember 20-item lists for weeks or months, but it is not easy.