5 Books: The 5 Best Books I’ve Read This Year (So Far)

3rd July, 2009 by Marcelo - 3 Comments

This week will mark 2009’s halfway point.  Already?  It seems like only yesterday that 2009 was just beginning, but time flies when you have a lot of books to read.  So here are the five books that I’ve read so far this year that have really stuck with me. They weren’t published this year, I just happened to stumble on them in 2009.  I’m presenting these in a countdown from 5th best to 1st best.

5. It’s Superman! by Tom De Haven- A rip-roaring Depression-era origin story for the Man of Steel, the book takes the legend of Superman and does something the comics haven’t been able to do in years:  make it real.  Clark Kent is a dust bowl farm boywho yearns for social justice, Lois Lane is a sexy firecracker of a dame with a penchant for getting into trouble, and Lex Luthorisis a New York City alderman with more nefarious plans and a back story that finally explains what makes him tick.

The result is a supremely well-written book that will have you humming the theme from the Superman movie while you admire the 30’s detail that grounds the story and makes it real and believable.  And through it all you never lose sight of the idea that these are real human beings, and that’s a first for the Man of Steel.  My only criticism is that De Haven spends too long building the origin story and not enough time with Superman actually being Superman.  Indeed, the final chapter has a small summary of all the times Supes and Lois have met since his debut, and I wanted to read about those adventures.  But that doesn’t take away much from how great this book is.  They should make a period film out of this story.

4. Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson – Steven Johnson is one of the most fascinating writers working today.  Each book he writes tackles some new corner of knowledge, from emergent systems to neuroscience to a mid-19th century cholera outbreak that changed the world, and Johnson always manages to relate the material to your everyday life.  Everything Bad is Good For You is a story about the here and now, about how the naysayers who think our pop culture-addicted children are getting dumber and dumber is just plain wrong.

Using an arsenal of statistics, test scores, anecdotal evidence, and reasoned analysis, Johnson argues the exact opposite–that the video games, Internet links, TV shows, and popular music that we are exposing our kids to are making them smarter, more agile, more capable of solving certain types of problems than we have ever been.  It’s a story of techno-triumphalism that helps you appreciate this brave new world we’re in right now.  It’s one of those books I constantly refer to when talking to people about tech issues.

3. Token by Alisa Kwitney & Joëlle Jones – In a previous 5 Books post I mentioned the DC Minx line of comics aimed at teenage girls.  DC has since announced the cancellation of the Minx line, but you can still pick up the books that are out there (and DC has one or two more in the pipeline they intend to publish).  One of the best of the Minx books is Token.

Token is a beautiful coming of age story about a girl’s first boyfriend during a too-short summer in Miami Beach. All at once Shira Spektor’s world is thrown upside downby her dad’s impending marriage to her secretary Linda, and it doesn’t help when a young Spanish boy named Rafael wanders into her world.  The writing is honest and real withan ending that is completely earned, and the artwork matches the script with subtlety and grace, perfecting quiet beautiful moments like a casual shrug, a shiver, a sideways glance.  Many times in comic books art is just cool and stylish, but this book features art that gives ideas about character and mood.  This is one of the finer graphic novels I’ve read.

2. Syrup by Maxx Barry – Let me start by pointing out the obvious to anyone who has already read Syrup:  it’s got a lot of problems.  The final third of the book is completely unrealistic and would never go down the way it does.  The writing is hyper-self-aware to the point of parody, and the story is filled with unlikable characters who exist in a sort of quasi wish fulfillment for Barry, himself a survivor of the corporate marketing culture he’s skewering.

But Syrup somehow, against all odds, works.  Not only does it work, it works really well.  The words fly off the page and hit you in the face with their audacity and electricity.  There are so many purely laugh out loud moments, so many wonderful plot twists and punchlines, and despite your better intentions you end up rooting desperately for the main characters to succeed.  I had a shit-eating grin on my face the entire time I was reading Syrup, noting passages I wanted to read aloud to my fiancee because they were so funny and so audacious.  This may not have been the best book I read this year, but I listed it so high because it was unquestionably one of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had.

1. Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland – On a completely different tack, this book is the exact opposite of Syrup–it’s a quietly horrific story of a school shooting and its aftermath in the lives of several key participants.  The book is told from four different points of view, each one taking a long single turn to reveal their part of the story.  There’s Cheryl, the dead girl everyone turned into a martyr who had a secret marriage to her high school boyfriend, speaking to us from beyond the grave.  There’s Jason, her husband, who has tried over the years following the shooting to find some semblance of normalcy in a world where no one could possibly know the truth about what really happened.  There’s also a section written by Heather, Jason’s long-suffering girlfriend, about her attempts to live up to Cheryl’s legacy and to heal the wounds Jason suffered so long ago. And finally there’s Reg, Jason’s domineering and psychotic father, who finds himself at the end of his life alone, apologetic, and surprisingly human.  Through these four stories we get a portrait of a family lost in a world where God has abandoned them and people are incapable of connecting on a meaningful level.

The result is a story of tremendous humanity and poetry, a story about the difference in perspective between so many disparate people.  One image in the book reaches out to me over and over again.  In the first few pages Cheryl talks how God doesn’t see night and day because God is the sun and the sun shines indiscriminately on the Earth.  It’s our perception of that light that creates night and day.  This book is the story of that difference in perception.  Every character in the book has a side to them no one else knows or can truly understand.  And the ending is a tour de force explosion of meaning and poetry that caps off this beautiful, tragic, sublime book.

Honorable mentions go to Rudy Rucker’s fabulous book of fourth dimensional weirdness Spaceland, Michael Chabon’s nostalgic adventure Summerland, and Judith Guest’s classic Ordinary People, which is one of my all-time favorites but I didn’t want to stack the list with books I frequently re-read because I love them so much.

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Five Short Stories You Can Read Right Now

29th May, 2009 by Marcelo - No Comments

Marcelo is posting here on Stacked regularly.  We’re working on getting a sig. attached so that you’ll know when he’s posting without my having to leave you all a little note. -c

With all the talk about novels, we can often forget that some of the best pieces of writing around are short stories.  Haruki Murakami, who appears first on this list, once said, “I find writing novels a challenge, writing short stories a joy.  If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.”  I love the way the best short stories can illuminate profound truths in such poignant and brief ways.  I also love the freedom short stories give to writers, allowing them to explore single ideas without having to commit to the intricate plotting and more involved themes of a novel.  Some authors, like Mansfield and Barthelme, are remembered more for their short stories than their novels, which have faded over time.

The stories in this group are not only five of my favorite shorts, but they’re also available for you to read online right now for free.  The links lead to the full text of each story.

The Second Bakery Attack by Haruki Murakami – This story features most of Murakami’s hallmark themes–the importance of memory in forming the self, characters operating between instinct and reason, and a surreal, slightly spiritual universe where curses can appear unnamed and be banished by specific acts.  What sets this story apart from the others he has written is the way Murakami interweaves those common themes with the main character’s search for newness and vitality as his life approaches a permanent change.  But more than anything it’s a fun and playful read with a great deal of heart, and it’s a great introduction to Murakami’s work at large.

Modern Love by T. C. Boyle – Fun fact:  for a very brief time I was friends with T. C. Boyle’s daughter–we shared a class together at USC and we even had lunch together after class a few times.  This was before I had ever made the connection between her and her father, who was a creative writing prof at USC at the same time.  I saw a short story collection by Boyle in the bookstore at USC and picked it up, and the first story in the collection was this one.  It’s a brilliant tale of love in the age of microorganisms, but more importantly it’s a telling metaphor for the way modern relationships avoid real intimacy and closeness.  By the time the story ends it’s about something completely different than what it was when you started reading it.

The Daughters of the Late Colonel by Katherine Mansfield – I encountered this gem in an English literature class where just about everything else was stuffy and dull (that’s not really true, but it feels true compared to this story).  The plot is simple–two women whose father has just passed away spend their time figuring out what to do with his estate and with themselves.  Written in 1921 at the height of the women’s movement, the story is a scathing and sad look at two women who are unable to define themselves outside of the father who watched over them and upon his passing find their lives empty and without meaning.  It’s a warning to women everywhere that they should never depend on a man for their identity or their survival.

At the End of the Mechanical Age by Donald Barthelme – This is my all-time favorite short story, and Barthelme’s avant-garde syntax and postmodern sensibility work well with the short story format.  He considered himself a collagist and the fragments and single ideas in each story contribute to the overall whole of his work.  This story appeared at the end of a collection called Amateurs, where it capped off a dozen stories of modern alienation and self-awareness with a beautiful and poetic elegy to a dying era in which God’s will is channeled through electric currents and the love between two people and their knowledge of their destinies lying elsewhere create a story ultimately about hope, about moving on when one phase of your life ends and another begins.

After the Siege by Cory Doctorow – This story comes from a collection called Overclocked, which features several great stories about everything from MMORPG’s and gold farming to the real world implications of an Asimovian universe where robot technology was locked down and owned by only one company.  In “After the Siege,” Doctorow combines his ideas about how  intellectual property laws ruin third world countries who need cheap ways to produce medicine with a very personal retelling of his grandmother’s survival in Stalingrad during WWII.  The result is a coming-of-age story with more humanity than most science fiction, real implications about the world we’re in today, and how tales like these might not be far off.

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Five Books to Put in a Young Reader’s Hands

1st May, 2009 by Marcelo - 3 Comments

Marcelo is back with another list of five books, and it was a delight to read.  Hope you all enjoy it as much as I did!
.c

I was an avid reader as a kid.  And as a daycare worker and camp counselor, I’ve seen firsthand how the right book at the right time can change a kid’s life.  I’ve seen books transform teenagers overnight, turning them into passionate advocates and thinkers because a book moved them.  When I first started reading Stacked, the first book that came to my mind that Christina had to read was such a book, Cory Doctorow’s awesome Little Brother.  I could conceive of someone reading LB and deciding to become an info-activist or a hacker–a Big Life Decision spurred by a book they loved.  Books like that are rare, and I thought in honor of Little Brother I’d present five more books worth putting into a kid’s hands.  These range from books for younger kids to books for teenagers, but they’re all wonderful and valuable.

Danny The Champion of the Worldby Roald Dahl – Most people who recommend Dahl recommend Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Matilda or one of my all-time favorites, The Witches.  This book has flown under the radar for decades, probably because it’s the only children’s book Dahl wrote that doesn’t contain any magical elements.  It’s a simple slice-of-life story about a boy and his father living in a caravan in the English countryside and the adventure they go through when the boy discovers his father’s deep dark secret.

What’s wonderful about this book is the attention to detail Dahl gives the community around the boy and his father, the autobiographical elements taken straight from his own childhood.  Dahl clearly has a great deal of fondness for his characters and the story.  Even though there’s nothing overtly magical or supernatural in the story, Dahl still fills it with the magic of everyday life.  There’s a quiet stillness in it, an elegance that doesn’t really exist in Dahl’s other works for kids.  It’s truly a gem and worth any kid’s valuable time.

A Wrinkle in Timeby Madeleine L’Engle – This is not an obscure book.  It is beloved and appreciated by so many people.  But I put it on this list because I remember so clearly how my 4th grade brain was completely stretched by this curious novel about hyperdimensional travel, and how even after having it explained to me over and over again, I couldn’t quite bend my mind around the concept of the Tesseract.  The beauty of this book is that even if you never quite get there, you get somewhere.

At first you think it’s going to be a fun book about three bumbling witches and the adventures they take the kids on.  But before you know it, the kids are thinking about hyperdimensional reality and flying across the universe to face off against an ominous evil.  In a literary world filled with cheap surface-level fantasy franchises like Harry Potter, it’s nice to see a book that challenges and expands consciousness rather than cocooning it in an easily accessible world.  Books like HP are safe.  This one isn’t.  In fact, it’s usually the first book a young reader ever encounters that truly tests them.  And that test has so much value.  I love seeing the look on a young reader’s face when they read this book, as their brains come to grips with what they’re being asked to understand.  They’re never quite the same afterwards.

Frek and the Elixirby Rudy Rucker – Frek is a young boy on an Earth far removed from our own –a biotech company called NuBioCom has released a virus that prevents reproduction, so now only NuBioCom-approved genetically modified species roam the earth–generic dogs that are all the same, anyfruit trees and grobread plants that feed the world, even house-trees with wifi circuits genetically built into their walls.  Life is pleasant and unremarkable, and every day looks and feels exactly like the last one.  That all changes when a small alien appears in a cartoon Frek is watching, bearing a message from his long-lost father.  Before he can even stop to rest, Frek is on the run from the authorities, taking flight in a miraculous spaceship powered by strange alien technology, and visiting planes of existence he never could have imagined.

This is a fun science fiction yarn that combines thrilling action and adventure with thought-provoking science.  Kids will love the story of a young boy who may be Earth’s only hope to restore the genome, but they will also feel their minds bend over backwards to conceptualize dozens of typical wacky Ruckerisms, from a journey into the hyperspatial Planck brane to the natural habitat of an alien race that lives inside stars.  They’ll also learn about concepts like biotech and monoculture and compare the world Frek lives in with the world we live in today–and it’s not that far off.  This is the perfect book to give to the slightly nerdy science fiction fan who’s looking for something different but completely challenging.  It would also make a great Pixar movie.

The Plain Janes/Janes in Loveby Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg – I’m not a comic book fan at all, but I love the line of short black and white graphic novels put out by a small division at DC Comics called Minx.  Aimed at a teenage girl audience, the books are short, small, cheap, and most importantly, very smart.  The Plain Janesis a great book to start checking out this line.  Jane’s parents move her out of the big city to the suburbs after a minor terrorist attack freaks them out.  In a new school with new questions about herself and her world, Jane finds a tribe of friends from all different corners and together they attempt to change their community through public “art attacks” in their tight-ass neighborhood.  Labeled as terrorists and vandals, the Janes continue to strive to change the world by changing the community around them.

This book and its sequel, Janes in Love, are the perfect books to hand to a teenage girl who is still finding herself.  They celebrate nonconformity and self-confidence and are empowering and sweet.  The characters are well-developed and real, and the books don’t pander to what most publishers of books think the teenage girl crowd wants–stories of rich brats and designer jeans and who’s going out with whom.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this book inspires some kid to go do the same thing in their town.  The entire Minx line is filled with other great books that feature the same qualities, all drawn by different artists in different styles, featuring unique and quirky characters and plots.  If you like these two books, you have a whole group of similar books to check out afterwards.

Cuntby Inga Muscio – Give this book to your free-thinking daughter during their senior year in high school.  It’s a controversial feminist manifesto that challenges female readers to own their feminity and reclaim words like “cunt” for themselves.  Muscio combines this call to arms with her own autobiographical journey of discovery, sharing extremely personal details about her own life (including a self-induced miscarriage).  She also offers her readers alternative ways to own their femininity without having to depend on male-created institutions for their health.

This is the perfect book to give to the young woman in high school who’s looking for a way to empower herself and her gender.  It will challenge sacred beliefs, reaffirm long-held truths, and ultimately introduce whomever you give it to to a whole new world of thinking.  Most importantly, it’s the kind of book that creates women who aren’t afraid of being self-aware and articulate and beautiful in a way that they define and they own.  In today’s high school space where teenage girls are hypersexualized, treated like marketing pawns, and expected to conform to a world that men have defined for them, this book breaks through all that to find and celebrate real women everywhere.

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Five Books – Obscure or Underappreciated Books

17th April, 2009 by Marcelo - 2 Comments

This is a short intro as Marcelo wrote up a great description of what is now to be a regular column, “Five Books.”  Marcelo and I have some mutual friends, one being previous guest poster, Matt Stratton.  Through Matt’s website, Marcelo ended up here at Stacked and the book recommendations he’s made have led to some fantastic discussions.  He’ll be back regularly contributing to “Five Books” from time to time and maybe with some other literary insights as well.   .c

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Hello, Stacked readers!  I’m delighted to be able to post some of my favorite recommendations for you.  The “Five Books” feature is something Christina and I dreamed up while trying to brainstorm ideas for a guest post.  The idea is to come up with a list of five books in a particular theme, do a quick rundown of each book, and then switch up the themes every time.  Hopefully this will become a regular spot where you can get quick book picks in various categories–some silly, some socially conscious, all interesting.  Maybe Christina will pick up a few of them for her 2009 list.

For my first list I chose books that are among my all-time favorites, but are also a bit obscure or under-appreciated.  I really love it when I read a book no one else really knows.  Then I can recommend that book to someone else and spread the love.  These are books that I’ve adored over the years that have somehow flown under the radar of most readers.

Mathematicians in Love by Rudy Rucker – In writing this description of the book, I’ve started and stopped so many times.  The truth is that this novel defies categorization.  It is both startlingly weird and wacky, yet completely autobiographical.  It is at first glance a science fiction novel, but contains so little of what we would consider SF that it reads more like a straight up fiction book featuring fantastical elements.  The story deals with a young math PhD candidate working on a universal theory using natural mathematical forms (rippling pools of water, swirling gases, etc.) to predict everyday events.  He falls in love with a hip surfer chick named Alma and so does his roommate who’s also working on the project.  Before too long, they’re using the mathematics skills they’ve discovered to compete for her affections, even going so far as altering reality itself to make Alma love one over the other.  Then it gets weird.

What I like about this book is that the tone is completely wacky and whimsical.  There is none of the dark, dystopic cyberpunk voice so common in today’s science fiction.  It’s bright and funny and truly comic, a voice that is completely and utterly alone in science fiction (Rucker’s other works also have that same sense of whimsy).  The completely insane story is supported by real character development and charming autobiography (many of the characters are based on actual math candidates Rucker supervised as a professor himself).  This is a book that exemplifies all that is great about science fiction–mind blowing ideas and plot twists you could never predict but make perfect sense when it’s all over.  Most of Rucker’s works have similarly crazy ideas, but none of them are quite as sublime as this one.  If you’re a science fiction fan, you’ll enjoy the change of tone.  If you’re a newcomer to science fiction this book will really challenge your concept of what SF can do and where it can go.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami – Murakami’s easily accessible style and slightly surreal plots have a strong and passionate following amongst literary hipsters, some of whom pay hundreds of dollars on eBay for English editions of his novels not published in the US.  It’s not for nothing–Murakami is a must-read author with a long list of spectacular books and short story collections.  His work is thoughtful, beautifully translated from the original Japanese, and completely accessible to American audiences.  After Darkis his latest novel, the story of a teenage girl and her wanderings through Tokyo over the course of one late evening.  And while Murakami is by no means obscure, many people overlook this particular book.  Most Murakami fans tend to recommend his more realist books like Norwegian Wood to newcomers before moving them onto his masterpiece The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

I chose After Darkfor this list for many reasons:  1) It’s considered one of Murakami’s lesser works by his fan base, which I think is a terrible judgment.  The book is vastly underrated.  2) It’s completely different than most of his books, featuring a female protagonist and almost no plot, but with wonderful characters and a dynamite setting.  3) It is a perfect distillation of one of Murakami’s great gifts, the ability to articulate the concept of collective memory and spiritual malaise brought upon by the atrocities of others, and 4) It’s accessible to fans and first-time readers alike.  Many of his novels like Dance Dance Dance are fan favorites but require a good introduction to his writing to really appreciate.  After Dark is immediately accessible and worthy on its own.

Snow Whiteby Donald Barthelme – Before the literary journal McSweeney’s, before Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, before those wonderful writers began reshaping the face of American fiction with their ironic postmodern experimental pieces, there was Donald Barthelme.  McSweeney’s openly credits Barthelme as the godfather of their style, recently devoting an entire issue of their journal to pay tribute to him.  Considering the high regard other writers have for him and the literary debt they owe, it seems criminal that Barthelme’s name now rarely appears in college and high school classrooms, and that his work, once lauded as the finest of his generation, now occupies maybe a few inches of shelf space in most major bookstores.  It truly is criminal, as Barthelme’s work is singularly unique and altogether magnificent.

While his claim to fame was his short pieces, which have been re-collected in several decent volumes (there’s a great online collection here, including my all-time favorite short story), I chose Barthelme’s first novel, Snow White, because it’s a perfect introduction to his unique experimental writing style. In retelling the classic fairy tale, Barthelme completely deconstructs and upends the entire genre while simultaneously saying something about the “me decade” seventies in which the book originally flourished.  The prose is absolutely electric, dancing across the page in a way that makes you wonder if words can actually be self-aware.  But most importantly this book is just plain laugh-out-loud funny.  It’s also incredibly short, which makes it a perfect summer read for a day or two.  I guarantee that after Snow White you’ll be seeking out much more of this fine, terribly neglected genius.

Iliad translation by Stanley Lombardo – Despite my geeky sci-fi leanings, I am also a MASSIVE classics fan, thanks to a single college course my freshman year taught by a comparative literature professor who knew how to make the text come alive.  He recommended this translation of the Iliadabove all others, even the definitive work by Robert Fagles.  Operating under the assumption that Homer’s works were performed orally, refined and shaped over years of recitation (much like a stand-up comic hones their routine through trial and error on the stage), Lombardo used the same process of refinement through repeated oral performance to create his translation, performing in lecture halls and even on the streets of cities to create his translation.

The result is an Iliad that is powerful in its immediacy and rage, a poem that feels like a story being told to you by a visceral and engaging performer rather than a stodgy dusty translation by an Englishman with a monocle.  It’s fast and furious, with action, romance and anger jumping from the lines and grabbing you by the throat.  Sometimes the text feels a little too modern, but it is by no means “street”–the translation is quite accurate and doesn’t rely on any hip language to make itself more appealing to today’s audience.  It’s a faithful translation that grabs your attention and forces you to rethink Homer and the nature of epic poetry while you’re enjoying a thrilling story.  If you’re a classics fan, this is a must-read.  If you dislike the classics, this is an eye-opening book that will unleash the power lurking in the page.  You’ll never look at epic poetry the same way.

Step Right Up! I’m Going To Scare The Pants Off America, by William Castle – Known mostly for his 1950’s B-movie gimmicks (for The Tingler he installed buzzers in the seats to shock the audience), William Castle was one of the most famous film producers of all time, and his autobiography is one of the great unknown books about the film industry.  Castle covers his early career in the New York theater scene (his story about the first play he ever put on is so crazy you wonder if it’s actually true) through the golden age of B-movies in the 1950’s up to his later career, where he famously stunned Hollywood by producing the masterpiece Rosemary’s Baby.

The great thing about this book is the way Castle tells his story –he fills it with an enthusiastic love of show business and thrilling audiences. Castle comes across as an audacious, fun, good-natured man who only wanted to give people a good time at the theater. It’s a great read that paints a picture of movie making that’s completely different from the franchise-based corporate tentpole business model we have today.  It’s especially satisfying considering how many books about movies are absolute crap.  If you love movies you should definitely seek this title out.  Note: There is no link because this book is out of print. Copies of it are somewhat rare, but it pops up at a library or used bookstore from time to time.

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