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DECEMBER 2006
42. Magic For Beginners, by Kelly Link
41. Justice League America: World War Three, by Grant Morrison & co.
Grant Morrison closes his run on JLA with a bang, taking us from Atlantis to Heaven to cosmic space in a dogged determination to out-do every previous comic-book end-of-the-world storyline. The result is hyper-kinetic and deliriously crammed: a psychedelic mandala made out of superheroes. There's no room for (much) character development here, but amid the fireworks there are still moments where the story manages to feel surprisingly moving and personal. A blast.
40. Kalpa Imperial, by Angelica Gorodischer
Fabulist allegories investigating the relationship between power, humanity, and storytelling, using Empire as the central metaphor. Often fascinating, although the book has a tendency to skew towards abstraction: this has the feature of making the stories feel more universal (a plus) but also saps them of concrete details that would make them more memorable.
39. Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace
Strong collection from Wallace, with the opening and closing stories ("Mister Squishy" and "The Suffering Channel") being the high-water marks. These two stories are perhaps the strongest pieces of fiction I have ever read about life in corporate America, revealing yet another vast field of human experience that Wallace has seemingly obtained mastery over. Impressive.
NOVEMBER 2006
38. The Garden of the Departed Cats, by Bilge Karasu
Strange narrative about a traveller who grows embroiled into a conspiracy / human chess game, interspersed periodically with fables, metafictions and allegories. Sounds promising: the combo of "fantastic tales plus framing narrative" recalls Calvino, and the tales themselves are akin to Kafka's parables. But in the end, the book misfires more often than it connects, rendering these comparisons tragically superficial.
37. Time Maps, by Eviatar Zerubavel
Brief, readable book about the ideology of historical narratives and timekeeping systems (i.e., the calendar). I'm no stranger to the ideological dimension of the quotidian, so the revelations on hand here didn't feel especially startling, but having so many examples so accessibly presented kept the book enjoyable.
36. Y: The Last Man Vol. 1: Unmanned by Brian K. Vaughn & co.
Q: In a near-future where only one man survives, will there still be stereotypical man-hating feminists? A: Oh my yes. Promising premise (first pitched by Mary Shelly in 1826) degrades quickly into garden-variety gynophobia.
OCTOBER 2006
35. Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
Short stories. The title story is a killer, one of the best I've read in recent years.
34. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Autistic boy attempts to solve neighborhood crime. A promising premise, one which the book dutifully carries out, and then memorably transcends. Recommended.
33. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared by Mike Rose
When a book defines itself as "moving" in its own subtitle, approach with caution... and, indeed, this memoir-ish book is not without its soft-focus moments. It does manage, however, to amply convey that peculiar love that a teacher feels for even (especially?) his or her worst students. But its episodic nature and unwillingness to follow through on its argument(s) grows wearying by the end.
32. Venusia by Mark von Schlegell
Delirious piece of writing growing out of that verdant patch where the tributaries of science fiction, psychedelia, and abstract critical theory all drain into one another. Equal parts William Burroughs and Edgar Rice Burroughs, this book features sentient plants, unstable psychic landscapes, drug-induced reptile hallucinations, and pulp-grade sex: what's not to like?
31. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
:: Long review
SEPTEMBER 2006
30. Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee
Take a topic which is inherently fascinating (the inner workings of America's transportation industry), and then hand it over to "writer's writer" John McPhee, with his unerring eye for illuminating detail, and his unerring ear for unusual turns of phrase, and the result is absolute delight. Steering a barge, braking a locomotive, getting a package through UPS: McPhee handles them all with great elan, rendering them accessible to the mind of the reader without sacrificing an iota of their boggling complexity. Highly recommended.
29. Seven Soldiers of Victory, Vol. 3 by Grant Morrison & co.
28. The Totality for Kids by Joshua Clover
Arch little poems and hypercondensed travelogues ambiguously regarding the waning of Europe, modernism, and theory and the concomitant rise of America, pop, and capital. Occasionally exuberant, but only in a way that suggests deep and abiding sorrow.
27. Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
It's kind of amazing that a story cycle containing so many different hot-button global elements (art thieves! disembodied souls! apocalyptic cults! artificial intelligences!) can end up feeling so oddly understated. The end result is something like one of Warren Ellis' Global Frequency trades, only four times the length and lacking most of the kinetic energy. Interesting enough to be worth finishing, but I would have preferred the faster, denser book that the subject matter suggests.
AUGUST 2006
26. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory by Franco Moretti
I'm interested in diagrams and info visualization at least as much as I'm interested in literary history, so when Moretti argues that the former can be used as a tool to learn more about the latter, I don't find it particularly controversial. But the examples he uses to prove the utility of his method are startling in their clarity and force. Recommended.
25. Seven Soliders of Victory, Vol. 2 by Grant Morrison & co.
24. Seven Soliders of Victory: Vol. 1 by Grant Morrison & co.
JULY 2006
23. Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
Polymath whiz David Foster Wallace on John McCain, pornography, grammar, 9/11, sports memoirs, conservative talk radio, and, yes, lobster. And yet from the welter of topics a coherent theme emerges: how to communicate in a world so thick with irony and spin that genuine, sincere communication is automatically considered suspect. An important book, highly recommended.
22. This Is Not A Novel by David Markson
Novelist attempts to write an anti-novel, seeing what survives when you reduce narrative to a cascade of facts (literary anecdotes and gossip, mostly). The experiment yields its most interesting results over the first 40 pages or so, so the remaining 150 serve primarily as feeble inquiries into the effects of perserverance and duration, effects explored more intriguingly elsewhere.
21. The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon
Short stories by Bosnian-turned-Chicagoan Aleksandar Hemon. Hemon, like Nabokov, is an ESL writer who puts most native speakers and writers of English to shame: the language-acquistion process seems to generate linguistic strangeness (or at least a total liberation from cliche). Hit or miss overall, but certain sentences here are as good as they come.
JUNE 2006
20. Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu
This book lucidly debunks the notion that the Internet inherently possesses territorial independence or extra-legality, mostly by clearly laying out various ways that governments can (and do) enact enforceable restrictions upon Internet content and behavior. Recommended.
19. Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness by Chris Kraus
A curious book, collecting essays which straddle the line between art review and memoir of alienation (book club question: is Kraus' BDSM practice a cure or a symptom?). The institutional critique is sharp, the observations on LA are witty / bleak, and the overall grimness is leavened by Kraus' obvious yearning for meaningful human interconnection (and art that can express it). Bracing, enticing.
18. Demonology by Rick Moody
A frustratingly uneven collection, containing one story which I'd consider to be a modern classic ('Demonology') and one story so torturously overwritten as to be unreadable ('Pan's Fair Throng'). Sometimes I found myself suppressing the feeling that these stories exist primarily as an excuse to showboat, that they're really more about Moody as a stylist than they are about the people they are ostensibly about. In this way the book ends up reminding me of the Coen Brothers movies: inventive, flashy, often entertaining, but with little sense of human urgency.
17. Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, by Steven Johnson
Breezy book making what essentially amounts to a three-point argument: that video games engage mental skills such as problem-solving and pattern recognition, that a lot of contemporary TV indulges in fairly complex narrative strategies, and that online discourse rewards writing skills and in-depth thinking. I'm pretty sympathetic to these arguments, so the book's conclusions felt a bit foregone to me, although certain examples felt freshly cogent (the diagrams of character networks in a show like 24, for instance).
16. On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
This slim volume attempts to develop a theory which will position bullshit in the framework of moral philosophy, and along the way answers questions like: how does bullshit differ from the lie? A blast to read, although I disagree with almost every major conclusion Frankfurt makes (with the anti-postmodernism argument that closes the book being particularly unwelcome).
MAY 2006
15. Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
MacArthur fellow Mike Davis hunkers down and attempts to produce a readable synthesis of the enormous body of current literature on global urban poverty in this book, which ends up averaging about four footnotes per page. The general adherence to hard fact makes it difficult for Davis' usual theoretical insight to shine through, but the urgency of the subject matter more than compensates. Required reading.
14. Europeana, by Patrik Ourednik
Twentieth-century events, reordered and recontextualized into something that more closely resembles experimental fiction than a history book. With such a broad focus, it's unsurprising that the book chooses to work most commonly with collective masses such as 'scientists' or 'philosophers,' although a few individuals shimmer into focus on occasion. Ourednik is Eastern European, so it's perhaps unsurprising that fascism and communism factor in as the big baddies here, capitalism and neoliberalism getting more of a free pass than I'd be inclined to give. Intriguing nevertheless.
13. Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Davis
Slim, readable critique of the prison-industrial complex. Points out ample racism and sexism, although, oddly, the titular question of "obsolescence" is mostly left unaddressed. Useful as an introduction to the prison abolition movement, although newcomers to the topic may want more convincing that punishment and/or reformation would function better in a post-prison world.
APRIL 2006
12. Rational Geomancy : The Kids of the Book-Machine, by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol
:: Notes: one | two
11. The Visible Word : Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923, by Johanna Drucker
This dense book by the brilliant Johanna Drucker focuses primarily on four practicioners of experimental typography: Tristan Tzara, Ilia Zdanevich, Filippo Marinetti, and Guillaume Apollinaire (with Mallarme visible in the background). It's not merely a general overview of these four poet-typographers, however: it's a sustained book-length argument about the nature of signification and textual materiality. This increases the intellectual value of the book but also makes it less welcoming to a non-academic audience, despite the one-chapter recap of the history of semiotic theory that's crammed in there. Essential for visual poets who want to better understand the historical and conceptual underpinnings of what they're doing, less useful for graphic designers or casual browsers.
10. Great Expectations, by Kathy Acker
In this novel Acker aims her critique at the gnarly intersection of capitalism, violence, sexual dysfunction, and male dominance. In order to live out this critique, Acker jettisons most of the (male-dominated) traditions of narrative as she writes, systematically disrupting the stability of characters and setting, and rejecting the claim to authorial originality (as you might guess from the title). Some might say that this rejection is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I'm more inclined to say it's form following function. Exemplary.
9. Povel by Geraldine Kim
:: Long review
MARCH 2006
8. Black Dog Songs by Lisa Jarnot
The fake [?] political poems and fake [?] pastoral poems that constitute this book seem to qualify as what Richard Kostelanetz would call "text-sound" pieces: works "where the sounds made by comprehensible words create their own coherence apart from denotative meanings." Most of these poems ultimately seem to "cohere" more as lovely clattering vocable contraptions than as sense-making devices, but this could be a ruse... Delightful.
7. This Connection of Everyone With Lungs by Juliana Spahr
:: Long review
6. Matthew Ritchie: Proposition Player, assembled by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Matthew Ritchie creates colossal semi-abstract paintings and installations, generated (somehow) by a complicated set of undergirding narratives, which are populated by characters which personify religions, archetypes, and scientific theories. Pretty heady stuff, and the essays in this book make valiant attempts to cast some light on Ritchie's project, with varying degrees of success. Maybe not clarifying (ultimately), but always compelling. :: further notes
FEBRUARY 2006
5. The First World by Bob Perelman
3. Often Capital by Jennifer Moxley
Two long poems, derived obliquely from reworkings of Rosa Luxemburg's letters to her lover. Shimmering and diffuse, this book reads like a Marxist critique of relationship dynamics, atomized into a fine vapor, almost a tint.
2. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover
Fascinating novel about a man who invents a dice-based baseball simulator and manages it through dozens of fictional seasons. Conceptually very rich, and I don't think Coover always gets his due as a stylist: sentence for sentence, this is one of the most accomplished novels I've read in the last few years.
JANUARY 2006
1. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines by Manuel DeLanda
:: Long review
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