the eye

10. The Eye, Vladimir Nabokov (1/29) My thoughts got long, so I posted them here. But one) I loved the ideas this book was conveying; the use of an unreliable narrator; that it didn’t flat-out tell you what was going on and really made you think. And two) I really, really loved the left-field climax where Smurov steals the letter to read what Bogdanovich thinks of him, and the letter’s contents are basically the eloquent Russian literature equivalent of:

Books 2012

9. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut (1/24)

Now, I liked this WAY more than the other Vonneguts I’d read (Cat’s Cradle and Sirens of Titan.) I was really, really interested in the subject matter, and the technique of jumping through time was, for once in the history of arbitrary time travel in novels, not confusing at all. At times the descriptions were a little too vulgar/gory for me to stomach, though. (Particularly the part about the horses.) I really want to read up on Dresden now; I’d known nothing about it, and here it played a heavy part in two books I’ve read this month! — And I’m still not clear on if Billy’s experiences with Tralfamadore really happened, or if he went crazy and subconsciously took a bunch of things from Trout’s books and weaved himself a narrative to help make sense of everything. Either way, I really liked this book. (It’s funny, for some reason before I read this, I thought it was about firefighters? IDK my copy is red. I’m really enjoying reading these classic books and seeing how utterly wrong my misinformed presumptions end up.)

books read in 2012

8. The Fault In Our Stars, John Green (1/21)

On one hand, I liked it. A lot. On the other hand, it annoyed me. A lot. It’s the same problem I’ve had with John Green’s other works (I read Looking For Alaska, couldn’t finish Paper Towns) — in that, he has good stories, very good stories with palpable human emotions ripe for the mining, but something about his writing gets in the way of the story. The capital letters for shouting, the addition of “or whatever” to the end of sentences to emulate the speech patterns of teenagers, the way everyone spoke with such vocabulary and unending cleverness; the cheesy moment where everyone clapped at the Anne Frank house; occasionally a scene would be really good, and then it would dissolve into almost schmaltzy analogy that felt overextended. Augustus Waters carried around cigarettes to be metaphorical for crying out loud! The characters were so painfully hipsters that I spent half the time rolling my eyes at how damn smart they thought they were. Now, honestly, this is a problem I’ve found with my enjoyment of a LOT of YA books. I love the stories, not the writing. Lots of Green’s faults are indicative of the expectations (or limitations) of his genre, and that sucks, but there you go.

On the flip side, I read the book in a day, couldn’t put it down for the last hundred pages, and when I wasn’t rolling my eyes, I was wiping tears from them. So I liked the book a lot, I just didn’t love it, because at times I wanted to wring the author’s neck and say stop flaunting how clever you are and get back to telling your story. Which, actually, is funny, because at the end of the book, Hazel thinks that she liked Augustus best when he wasn’t trying to be intimidatingly intellectual or Romantic with a capital r, but rather when all that fell away and he was just him. A fitting metaphor for a book with an unapologetic fetish for metaphors.

Books read in 2012

7. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer (1/20)

A powerful read. The first hundred pages went by in a matter of hours, the next hundred became, admittedly, a little exhausting, but the final hundred I buzzed through with tears streaming down my face. At times it just cusped emotional manipulation, and I can see why some people complain that it’s glorifying 9/11, but I don’t know if it means to be. At its heart, it’s a story about a boy who lost his dad, and so, at its heart, it’s an incredibly touching, heart-breaking experience. I loved how it played with the format too, incorporating pictures and blank pages and various visual elements that brought you that much closer to the story. The title’s incredibly apt too, because at times the whole book pulsed with such raw emotion I would have to take a few steps back, because it got to be overwhelming. Hell of a read. (Though can I, on a purely ridiculous note, express my uncomfortable news with the number of times the grandparents wrote about sex in their letters to their children? YEAH, THAT WAS WEIRD.)

books read in 2012

1. Notes From Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky. (1/09)

2. Bilbo’s Last Song, J.R.R. Tolkien (1/12)

3. God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Kurt Vonnegut (1/12)

4. The Crucible, Arthur Miller (1/12)

5. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1/17)

6. On Booze, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1/19)

7. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer (1/20)

8. The Fault In Our Stars, John Green (1/21)

9. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut (1/24)

10. The Eye, Vladimir Nabokov (1/29)

11. Animal Farm, George Orwell (1/31)

12. 1984, George Orwell (2/7)

13. How Right You Are, Jeeves (2/25)

14. The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (3/8)

15. The Pluto Files, Neil deGrasse Tyson (3/14)

16. The Princess Bride (4/05)

17. Wonderstruck (4/06)

18. Feverhead (4/07)

19. Sisterhood Everlasting (4/12)