Favorite Books of 2010

My top 5 books published (in any format) in 2010 are on the Powell's Books website, with my short review of Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless:

"Much like the man himself, Werner Herzog's journal from the filming of Fitzcarraldo is hallucinatory and horrific, lovely and poetic all at once. This is a book about madness and obsession, about depth and illusion, about a place where nothing is as it seems. Filled with darkness and light, it's the story of a vision so contradictory and shifting it becomes life itself. I've stayed in Iquitos on the Amazon, and this is by far the most honest, accurate description of the place I've ever read. In fact, I've never read so honest a description of any place."

The review doubles as a shelf-talker and is designed to draw sales, though the book deserves a lot more attention. It is moody and atmospheric, remarkable for how it says what it says as much as what it says. Herzog's perspectives and focus constantly shift and there is a sense that whatever fragmented narrative there could have been has been positively and willfully exploded into anecdote and allegory. But somehow it works, and even if Conquest of the Useless isn't easy reading and is often maddeningly self-centered, it's maddeningly entertaining.

2010 somehow seemed to miss out on really good new books, in terms of my own reading interests (an admittedly small sample size). And one annoying trend continued: new works by my favorite authors just didn't quite live up to their potential. Still, I read a ton of books this year, discovered quite a few new authors I like, and I enjoyed the new books by David Abram, Paul Auster, Craig Childs, and Per Petterson. There are still thousands of books out there, and many, many authors still to discover. Whether you’re cracking open a book or hitting the trail, the journey never ends.

The Frozen Thames

In each of these forty remarkable vignettes, the River Thames freezes over, and the lives of all Londoners - the rich and the poor, the royal and the peasant, the merchant and the working man - come together in a cross-section of history suspended like bubbles in a block of ice.

These historically accurate snapshots of deep winter center on the lives of those who lived through the actual times the river froze. The characters are complex and their feelings palpable. The frozen river and hard winters double as characters aching with depth and pathos. The stories are fraught with tension, suspended in medias res, leaving the reader on ice while the river flows on underneath. Some elicit powerful emotions, while others thrive cloaked in cold intellectualism. They submerge into one another, creating patterns and lattices connecting time periods, people, and places. Consequently, The Frozen Thames feels authentic and postmodern at once, no easy feat in such a short form.

Humphreys’ spirited inventiveness, poignant details, and focus on the range of human experience enliven and expand her fictions into truths. The Frozen Thames is a fine book, always smart, engaging, and entertaining.

This review was first published by The Sacramento Book Review, August 2009

Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend

In his folklorist history of Bigfoot, Joshua Blu Buhs tracks Bigfoot from the mists of native mythology to the backwoods of America and beyond. He explains how the wild-man, a figure common in oral tradition and storytelling, evolved into a North American monster against which white working-class males in the 1950s could test themselves, while shifting cultural norms and changing values threatened traditional male roles and ideas of masculinity.

A small part of that constituency forms the heart of this book. Sasquatch hunters and researchers are earnest and driven, yet divided by paranoia, suspicion, and ideological differences. In their quest for fame and acceptance, they fell victim to their own vanity, to hoax and fraud, and to tall tales and charlatans so dishonest that the hunters themselves became laughing stock. Bigfoot changed with the times, eventually becoming a staple of fiction and advertising, an environmentally friendly commercial symbol, fully co-opted by the culture at large and no longer wild and primitive.

Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend is an oversized footprint of Americana, and a fun read - Bigfoot may not be stomping through the American wilderness, but his legend still lives in the forests of our imagination.

This review was first published by The Sacramento Book Review, August 2009

Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of the Mona Lisa

In Paris, in 1911, the greatest crime in art history went unnoticed for more than 24 hours – and then the world mourned the loss of Mona Lisa.

Vanished Smile follows the Mona Lisa from the brush of her inception in Renaissance Florence to the halls of Versailles and finally to the Louvre, where she hung among equals before vanishing in the heat of August and a new century. Her theft ignited public imagination and made headlines as two radical artists – Apollinaire and Picasso – were implicated in the heist. Two years later, in circumstances as mysterious as her disappearance, she returned an icon, her wry smile no longer the sole territory of obsessed artists, megalomaniac art collectors, and besotted admirers, but a social phenomenon and symbol of France.

Scotti paints the Mona Lisa as alluring and aloof in Vanished Smile as she is in real life: a woman around whom the world turns, mirroring the passions and sentiments of her age. She is timeless, and for a time, in an innocent Europe before the First World War, entire nations held their breath for her. Vanished Smile is an entertaining portrait of a masterpiece, and the birth of the modern age.

This review was first published by The Sacramento Book Review, July 2009

Armenian Golgotha, by Grigoris Balakian

Beginning in 1915, the Turkish government persecuted, tortured, exiled, and murdered over one million Armenians. Grigoris Balakian, an Armenian priest educated in Germany, survived the genocide and recorded his experiences in Armenian Golgotha.

Balakian’s eyewitness account balances memory with history and explains how and why Turkish officials engineered the genocide. Towns were razed, and property was stolen. Turkish villagers murdered and plundered their Armenian neighbors. Bandits attacked and butchered caravans of exiles. Refugees exiled to desert wastelands died of hunger and thirst. Women were raped or kidnapped and forced into Turkish harems. Religious conversion saved some, but the rivers and roads and fields were littered with the bones of thousands. For four years, Balakian parlayed his religious status into opportunities to record the genocide from both Armenian and Turkish sources, determined to survive, to testify, and to remember the bloodshed and the horror.

The result is an unsparing, unflinching masterpiece of survivor literature, full of searing brutality, yet distanced with intelligence, context, and measured purpose. Clearly written and superbly translated, Armenian Golgotha is an indictment of all that is the worst in humanity, a warning to future generations, and a paean to the resiliency of the human spirit.

This review was first published in the July, 2009 issue of The Sacramento Book Review.

Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time, by Richard Conniff

Who knew that baboon social behavior resembles Jane Austen novels? Or that the ants in kid’s ant farms are among the most venomous of all arthropods? From big cats to horseshoe crabs and snapping turtles to termites, Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time is an adventurous and uncommon tour of the animal kingdom.

Richard Conniff writes with vibrancy and verve. His prose crackles with the leaves on an African savannah and shimmers with the sun on a Louisiana bayou. He’s self-deprecating and inquisitive, with a knack for drawing insight from unusual facts about animals and the people who study them: a scientist French-kissed by a hummingbird, a leopard tracker who writes field notes on his legs, and a researcher stung so many times by the insects he studies that he developed a scale to research the pain itself. Conniff’s experiences make for lively reading-leaping into a river full of piranha may get the title, but interviewing ranchers protecting livestock by shooting endangered cheetahs is equally as dangerous and just as provoking. Though animals form the heart of Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time, Conniff demonstrates that the practice of science is just as fascinating as the animals themselves.

This review originally appeared in the June, 2009 issue of The Sacramento Book Review.

Enchanted Hunters, by Maria Tatar

On first glance, Enchanted Hunters appears to be a blunt instrument of adult rationality operating on the magic and mystery of Oz. This academic history of children’s literature is a cultural and literary study where Dr. Seuss mixes with Hegel and J. M. Barrie with Walter Benjamin. But like children’s books themselves, Enchanted Hunters succeeds by appealing to curiosity and imagination, and by asking questions.

What do children experience while reading? How do stories work in shaping and developing children’s emotional and intellectual development? Tatar goes to the source to investigate, using examples from “Alice in Wonderland” to Harry Potter to elucidate the power of reading in childhood. Enchanted Hunters reveals that children’s literature is as complex, affecting and important, if not more so, than other genres of literature.

Tatar’s research is meticulous and her analysis insightful, and if her conclusions lead to more questions, it’s only fitting for a book that reignites our sense of wonder and the excitement of reading. Storytelling burns bright in Enchanted Hunters, a book for grown-ups that carries the torch lit by the beauty, horror, adventure, and possibility found in the books we read as children, and that we read to our children today.

This review originally appeared in the June, 2009 issue of The Sacramento Book Review.

Aladdin's Lamp, by John Freely

In "Aladdin’s Lamp," John Freely tells how Greek science was translated into Arabic, preserved in the schools and texts of the Islamic world, and eventually translated into Latin, helping to spark the European Renaissance. This fascinating culturally important subject deserves both wider recognition and deeper understanding, but unfortunately, "Aladdin’s Lamp" suffers from the sheer scope of its subject and the meticulousness of its author.

"Aladdin’s Lamp" reads like a catalog, presenting the reader with a bewildering amount of information. A randomly chosen and representative page contains six dates; nine names of people, including one in Arabic, one in Greek, and the rest in various romance languages; more than ten subjects of study; and various listings of books (some in Latin) alongside quotes from the Bible and a papal mandate. In such a work, facts float without context to anchor them, and sink from memory.

It isn’t that "Aladdin’s Lamp" fails to make its case. It simply makes its case in too scholarly a fashion. Nevertheless, for the reader who wishes to connect the dots or keep handy a meticulous reference, "Aladdin’s Lamp" will satisfy.

This review originally appeared in the April, 2009 issue of The Sacramento Book Review.

The Ten-Cent Plague, by David Hajdu

In this illuminating history of comic books, David Hajdu examines the cultural forces that led to a mid-century witch-hunt and the near death of an American art-form. Vilified as a source of juvenile delinquency by police and the press, burned in pyres by the church and youth groups, and attacked in congressional hearings and though state and local legislation, comic books and their creators finally fell victim to their publisher’s own attempts to self-regulate content. Not until years later were comics to regain their former range of subject matter, stature, influence, and expression.

Though Hajdu stops short of judging the censors or drawing conclusions about societal effects of the comic-book scare, "The Ten-Cent Plague’s" sympathetic treatment of comic book writers, artists, and editors places the issues of censorship and persecution squarely in the cultural milieu of the 1950s. Hajdu humanizes the faces behind the comics, bringing life to a nearly forgotten chapter of American history that might aptly be titled “Tales from the Crypt.” In doing so, Hajdu allows readers to draw their own conclusions and leaves them hungry for more - and that's not a bad thing.

This review originally appeared in the April, 2009 issue of The Sacramento Book Review.

2666, by Roberto Bolano

"For an 800-page, translated novel in five sections, 2666 is an unbelievable pleasure to read. Tightly written, filled with insight and wonder, and with liquid prose as beautiful and terrifying as a dream, 2666 kept me occupied for many a sleepless night. Bolaño fictionalizes the real-life disappearances of hundreds of young women in a Mexican border town, populating his novel with a range of finely nuanced, deeply imagined characters, and capturing the totality of human experience in all its hideousness and beauty, intricacies and truth. In style, range of thought, and execution, 2666 is utterly visionary, and completely unforgettable."

I was given 100 words for that review, which didn't allow me to add that 2666 is one of those rare novels, like War and Peace, like Zorba the Greek, that works because it is so huge, so sprawling, so ambitious, and so risky that it captures the reader's imagination and enthralls with singularity of vision. If artists didn't attempt novels like this - and it has its flaws - all of literature would suffer, and readers would be left with poor imitations, or else nothing at all. Bolano has received more than his fair share of praise - he's currently literature's darling - but he deserves to be read precisely because his work is as messy as life, and when you read 2666, the two become interchangeable. Simply brilliant.

Hamilton Mountain

Last Monday I woke up with a little craft-beer headache and decided the only way to beat the blues was to climb a mountain. I grabbed my pack, a stack of Dead discs, and drove out to Hamilton Mountain in the Gorge.

Hamilton Mountain is in Washington, just west of Bonneville Dam. The four-mile trail leading to the summit is stocked with waterfalls, wildflower meadows, and towering cliffs with killer views of the Gorge. Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, and Mt. St. Helens all make appearances, nearly overwhelming nearby Table Mountain and Beacon Rock. Read More

Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson

The best novel of 2007.

How we translate our past actions and experiences is at least as important as those actions and experiences themselves. Out Stealing Horses, itself superbly translated from the Norwegian, follows the arc of Trond Sander's life as he reflects during a quiet retirement on the violent summer that marked his coming of age. Forced to confront a long-avoided past, he finally deliberates on the adolescent loss, aching beauty, and harrowing grief that underpinned his adulthood. With finely drawn characters, a stark natural setting, and haunting minimalist prose, this quiet, powerful, and spare novel of acceptance is a meditative tale for all.

Well, that's what I initially wrote for my bookstore's website. On a deadline, with a word limit. Orwell would be ashamed. Here's a shelf-talker I wrote for the paperback release, something a little more personal and closer to the truth of my experience:

"I’ve recommended this book more than any other in the last year. It’s achingly personal and wonderfully encompassing, and almost effortlessly shadows and shares my thoughts. Petterson quietly drew me into Trond’s childhood, an innocence that was too quickly shattered and thrust into adulthood, and the unconfronted pain that took a lifetime to understand and accept. This story feels like a quiet talk with trusted friend, someone who knows all your secrets and weaknesses and who is always ready with a steady hand, even when you don’t know you need it. The final line, coming at the end of a such a powerful, uplifting and beautiful tale, reads like poetry and feels like the silence at the end of symphony, in that moment between the last fading sound and the first clap of realization that a masterpiece has just been performed."

Now I don't sound like a washed-up book critic with a thesaurus and a style sheet of recommended "review words."

Rainier

First Published in PoetSpeak Vol VII, #1 Spring 2003


You splash your feet
in the clear water creek
where the Coho come
to spawn.

The rocks many-colored,
the water cold—after a time
warm grass restores
the feeling in your toes

and we pick blackberries,
gorge ourselves,
our hands and faces
purple smeared.

Then, nestled between
cedar roots, we kiss
for the first time–

our lips and tongues trade stains
until we hardly know each other
from each other.

Banning, CA

First Published in PoetSpeak Vol VII, #1 Spring 2003


Thin as winter fruit,
he stood in the orchard
and extended his hand,
begging in an unknown tongue.

I was nine years old.

Fourteen years later
I want to offer him

a taste of orange
juice flowing down
a dusty throat.

I was nine years old.