2008 in Books

The end of the year is upon us and it's time to look back over my past year's reading. Beautiful, isn't it? (Note: if you're reading in an RSS reader, click through for the full effect.)

I sorted them by date read, starting in January and ending just yesterday. Standout novels for me this year were The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger, The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper, Neverwhere and The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, and Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance by Lloyd Jones. Plus, I discovered Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum, which made for many hours of delicious fun reading.

Many of the books below have reviews if you click their covers.

2008 Book Montage

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Good News After Bad

Three late school starts and two snow days cutting into my productive morning writing time, two rejections in quick succession, some family worries (justifiably) occupying my mental space and well, it’s been a rough week for the writing.

So, that made it all the sweeter to get the news that ”Gone” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. I couldn’t ask for a nicer Christmas present.

1000 Actions
350. 30 minutes editing.
351. 30 minutes editing.
352. Finished a book in my genre.
353. Submitted.
354. Submitted again (fastest rejection ever… nice, though).
355. Finished a book in my genre.

Craft, Art, and Magic

I’ve been reading Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, by Daniel Wallace the past couple of days. I'm about halfway through and the book is an amazing lesson in how a novel can be structured to reveal layer upon layer of story in a completely non-linear way. I'm quickly falling in love. Last night, I happened on this passage, where Mr. Sebastian describes the work of a magician to his young apprentice:

Craft becomes art, and once it’s art then it’s no longer simply yours: you have to share it, you’re compelled to share it. You have to find an audience who think they understand what’s happening, that the effects in the performance are accomplished through some sleight of hand or legerdemain, misdirection, deception, or possible collusion with a member of the audience, secret mechanisms, mirrors.You will seek to present an effect so clever and skillful that the audience won’t believe their eyes, and can’t think of the explanation, but feel in their hearts there is one. But there won’t be; even you won’t be able to explain it. The sense of universal bafflement is part of the entertainment. It’s a lie made true. Think of it: you will be master of one of the only situations in life in which people willingly allow themselves to be lied to—pay for themselves to be lied to. And only then, after they think they know the rules, only then will they realize that this was the biggest lie of all, and that what they have witnessed is beyond anything their meager minds could imagine, Magic, he said, again and again and again. Magic!

He may as well have been talking about writing, don’t you think? Writers, good ones, use all the rules of craft, all the tricks of the trade, store up countless words the world will never see and, at some point, they transcend the craft they’ve been so carefully honing and produce art. And when it happens, they surprise even themselves.

Magic. Again and again. Magic!

1000 Actions
342. Submitted.
343. Wrote morning pages.
344. 30 minutes editing.
345. Entered Nathan Bransford’s contest.
346. Wrote morning pages.
347. 30 minutes editing.
348. Wrote morning pages.
349. Wrote morning pages.

Second Draft

I opened up a new draft file for the next version of Things Between (my NaNo novel) this afternoon. That beautiful blank slate made my novel feel full of promise once again. All of the ill will and the frustration and the disappointments of the past 50,000 words were erased in that single click of the mouse.

In his essay, “Fear of Finishing,” Mark Childress writes that, in the mind of a writer, a novel is never better than when it’s unwritten. “After that,” he says, “it only gets worse. Every page you write is in some ways a tiny death… of the illusion with which you began. Every clumsy, unstructured, redundant sentence that you apply to paper is one less deathless, tripping, dancing, rhythmical, internally rhyming piece of brilliance.” I suppose it sounds incredibly depressing to a non-writer, but it’s true. My chances of being awarded a Nobel prize dropped immeasurably the moment I committed my first sentence to paper. Of course, they also increased immeasurably. As, it turns out, they don’t give out awards or glowing reviews or NYT bestseller designation to unwritten novels. It seems unfair, given how amazing those novels are, but alas, such is the way of the world.

I’ve always known that first drafts were, in the immortal words of The Bill Gaither Trio, “a great big bundle of potentiality,” but I’ve always feared and dreaded second drafts. They feel less like polishing a rough gem than beating a dead horse. This time is different, though. That new file seemed every bit as promising as the one I opened on November 1. It won’t stay this way forever, but maybe I’ll come out the other side and feel like my novel is just a bit closer to its deathless, tripping, dancing self.

1000 Actions
336. Wrote morning pages.
337. Submitted two stories.
338. Wrote morning pages.
339. Submitted to a contest.
340. Wrote morning pages.
341. Spent 30 minutes editing Things Between.

Pulitzer Read 2009

The first thing I did after closing the novel draft I wrote in November (metaphorically—the file is actually still open on my desktop because I can’t stand to let it out of my sight) was to finish reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. It was a fantastic book.

One thing I’ve noticed about being in my thirties is that my generation is coming into its own. More and more of the novels I’m reading, the ones that are going to stand the test of time, are coming from our voices. This is Generation X all grown up and it turns out we’re not the vapid, directionless youth Time magazine had us pegged for. At least, not anymore.

Reading Oscar Wao, I decided on a plan to direct my reading for the next year. I would like to read every book that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in my lifetime. I want to see what American literature has done in the past thirty-five years, how it has grown and developed. What’s more, I want to have that foundation for my writing.

So, here’s my reading list for 2009 (leaving off those books on the Pulitzer list I’ve already read). These won’t be the only books I read next year, but they might be the most important ones:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
March by Geraldine Brooks
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
Independence Day by Richard Ford
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
Ironweed by William Kennedy
Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

If anyone would like to read all or some of these with me, I'd love the company. I'll update my reading list on Goodreads as I go along.

Nano Log, Day 30

Day 30 - Wrote 2144 words for a total of 50,293. I wrote an ending. I don’t know if it’s the ending, but it’s at least an ending. Amazingly, both of my narrators ended their tales with the same line. “And that was enough.”



1000 Actions
333. Wrote 2144 words (Nanowrimo day 30).
334. Finished reading a novel in my genre.
335. Wrote morning pages.