Aleema Sapopa Libro

Today’s Post: I have read 150 books.

With a crowd of milestones looming ahead, I can’t resist taking a moment to celebrate this most personal one: the completion of my 150th book. I finished Ian McEwan’s Atonement after 19 and one half months of Peace Corps Service, for a rough mean of 2 books a week since I swore in as a volunteer in mid-December of 2009.

The last 50 books in my literary journey have been my companions through hot and cold, boredom and titillation, and journeys through three countries. I turned to them when I felt socially over-stimulated and intellectually under-stimulated. I forsook them to watch every episode in the first six seasons of The Office and to read numerous Time and Harper’s magazines (not to mention a few issues of People). I read them in bed by cell phone flashlight and sitting on a terrace in the middle of a maize field in Peru’s Cotahuasi Canyon, but more often than not, sitting at my table in Prettyview with my feet propped up and a bowl of soup or oatmeal at hand.

Though I continued to discover new authors (Virginia Woolf, John Banville, Jon Krakauer, Pearl Buck, Barbara Tuchman, Mario Vargas Llosa, Elizabeth Strout, Chinua Achebe, Jeffrey Eugenides, Chang-Rae Lee, and Ian McEwan), I also went on binges, reading a collection of Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness), several books by Margaret Atwood (the best was The Year of the Flood, her sequel to Oryx and Crake), everything I could get my hands on by David Mitchell, and yet another mediocre fantasy trilogy from Terry Brooks. I found two more books by my beloved Haruki Murakami and read more by Ann Patchett, whom I had discovered earlier in service.

A number of my selections in this most recent batch were easy, throw-away reads. I can’t say that How to Raise a Jewish Dog did very much for me on either a spiritual or a literary level and towards the end, reading more Terry Brooks just felt degrading. On the other hand, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Atwood’s Surfacing, and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient all struck me as quality fiction that failed to leave much of an impact on my memory.

As usual, I encountered several bombs. The only book that I re-read in this recent set of 50 was John Gimlette’s At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig. I despised this history/travelogue of Paraguay when I read it before beginning Peace Corps service and I only found it more loathsome after living in Paraguay for a year and a half. Unfortunately, Gimlette’s haughty, Eurocentric, poorly edited, and often factually questionable account stands out as one of the non-fiction works written in the English language that exclusively deal with Paraguay. Paraguay deserves a better English-language chroncicle than the Inflatable Pig, and, though I do not consider myself a prime candidate for the job, I can’t help but feel moved to write it when I consider Gimlette’s work. I have less to say about Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, an unlovely mess that, given the critical acclaim it garnered on publication, must have aged rather poorly. The book clearly began as a turgid, complex literary experiment that unfortunately yielded a (feminist, socialist, psychoanalytical, literary) theory-laden, self-conscious parable with wooden characters struggling mightily to fulfill their creator’s ambitions. The resulting story felt imprisoned by its own structure and was thus slow and unpleasant to read. Guilty of very similar sins was Aldous Huxley in his creation of Island, a utopian sequel to the excellent Brave New World. Again, theory and allegory barely animate two-dimensional characters and the ideology has aged very poorly. Dialogue was almost embarrassingly poor and some of the spirituality-related bromides were less comprehensible than my most dysfunctional Guaraní-language conversation.

Another more positive “event” in my recent reading was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I had become disenchanted by Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in July 2006, but was ready to give Dostoevsky a chance, especially after receiving several recommendations of The Brothers. Though the epic tale of transgression, judgment, punishment, and redemption took me awhile to read my way through, I can’t recommend it enough to other readers.

I’ll save further commentary on The Brothers for its entry below and for my customary list of the 5-Star books of the last 50 I read, those masterpieces that stood out in terms of artistic achievement, readerly delight, or both:

The Untouchable (John Banville)
The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Anne Fadiman)
Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)
The Good Earth (Pearl Buck)
American Gods (Neil Gaiman)
Beautiful Evidence (Edward Tufte)
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami)
Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)

A full 20% of the books I read in this recent group merited a rating of 5. These included, as usual, some critical and commercial blockbusters as well as some lesser-known works that I recommend most highly.

Though my efforts were often facilitated more by chance than design, I did manage to develop some continuing thematic discourses among the 150 books I’ve read as well as christen some new ones. Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat was my third (and least favorite) account of the Trujillo dictatorship. The Good Earth and Things Fall Apart complemented past reads in their description of life in rural, agricultural societies. Likewise, Rae-Lee’s Native Speaker, Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Spirit Catches You, The English Patient, and Middlesex captured feelings of cultural difference, dislocation, and blending familiar to me as a Peace Corps volunteer. Inflatable Pig, for better or for worse, is written about Paraguay and a character in Freedom briefly visits. Middlesex and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando both dealt with gender and sexual fluidity and indeterminacy; for fun, I read them back-to-back. Brooks’s trilogy, American Gods, The Year of the Flood, and Justin Cronin’s The Passage were all forays into beloved science fiction and fantasy realm.

In terms of black-and-white parameters, my taste in books has not changed much over time. Though I have progressively re-read fewer books and sought out fewer Anglophone authors, the following statistics have not changed terribly over the last 19 months:

Of the 150 books I have read to date,
8% were re-read,
Over two-thirds were written by male authors,
58% were written by Americans and 90% were written in English,
39% were written after the year 2000 and 97% were written after 1900,
7 out of 10 were novels and 2 out of 10 were non-fiction,
Almost one of every three was, in some way, postmodern,
Half came recommended,
63% were the first book I had read by the book’s author,
39% were page-turners, and

Every single book that I have read since beginning Peace Corps service was enjoyed, tolerated, or, occasionally, despised, in the form of a paper-and-ink book: a true book, and never a K----e or one of its brethren.

****

Books 101-150
Books are listed as “Title (Author) comments”
*Indicates a book I re-read.
Unless otherwise noted, all books are listed in the order I read them.

101. The Untouchable (John Banville) This fictional account in the voice of one of the “Cambridge spies” – the former schoolmates who infiltrated British intelligence prior to and during the Second World War to spy for the Soviet Union – presents all the best of historical fiction. The characters are compelling and the setting conveys a historical period without being heavy-handed. The book’s protagonist is psychologically fascinating and, though flawed, sympathetic.
102. The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood) This sequel to Oryx and Crake, set in the same post-apocalyptic future, manages to be provocative and fascinating, if sometimes awkward in its occasional moral pedantry and Atwood’s made-up “hymns.” I hope a final book in the series follows.
103. The Glass Castle (Jeannette Wells) This successful journalist’s memoir of her childhood and adolescence spent surviving the shockingly negligent behavior of two narcissistic, selfish parents is engaging, if not terribly deep.
104. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje) The fragmented, impressionistic story of several lives coming together in an Italian villa at the end of the Second World War read like poetry slotted into a novel. I found it a little disappointing given its reputation.
105. Midnight Cowboy (James Leo Herlihy) Behind its sensual veneer, this bildungsroman portrays the paradox of its protagonist’s spiritual growth through his failure to become a “cowboy” hustler.
106. After the Quake (Haruki Murkami) Elegant, moving short stories dealing with a variety of psychological topics and featuring Murakami’s typical magical realism.
107. Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates) Excellent portrayal of a relationship falling apart as a 1950s couple attempts to escape their unsatisfying suburban existence. To me, the outstanding elements are Yates’s natural and realistic portrayals of conversations and internal trains of thought.
108. Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer) A post-mortem of the life of Alex McCandless, whose decision to seek the path of asceticism and immersion in nature led to his death in the Alaskan wilderness. Krakauer is sympathetic to his subject, but I ultimately felt disenchanted with McCandless’s treatment of those who cared about him and his (to me) irresponsible ideals.
109. The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison) Morrison’s characteristic willingness to unapologetically and naturalistically portray her characters thinking and acting in ways that many authors hide or sensationalize enables her to portray this novel’s characters in a humanitarian, but honest way.
110. Island (Aldous Huxley) Some critics have classified this fictional portrayal of Huxley’s ideal society as the utopian counterpart to Brave New World. I found it incredibly disappointing. Every character spoke as though he or she were a pious, cranky Huxley on his soapbox. Plotting was incidental to the author’s pedantic aims. And worst, Huxley’s pet ideas in the realms of spirituality, health, political philosophy, and social planning have aged poorly. Written far later than Brave New World, Island seems unself-conscious and heavy-handed by comparison.
111. Surfacing (Margaret Atwood) Atwood’s story of a young woman reclaiming agency in her own life while investigating her father’s disappearance was, like other books of hers I have read, meticulously crafted and both intellectually and emotionally stimulating.
112. The Easter Parade (Richard Yates) A panorama of a New York woman’s life from the thirties to the early seventies. Though this novel, like Revolutionary Road, portrays the existential torments of suppressed middle class (sub)urbanites, I enjoyed reading The Easter Parade more; the plot was both less suspenseful and more organic. There were also a number of interesting parallels between its protagonist and Margaret Atwood’s from Surfacing.
113. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (Richard Yates) An excellent collection of short stories in which occasional moments of optimistic poignancy leaven Yates’s more typical portrayals of suffering and disillusionment.
114. Simple Murders and Good Bones (Margaret Atwood) Atwood’s short vignettes in this collection cover a lot of ground. Though sometimes trenchant or fanciful, they ultimately seemed too light. There was little to demand my attention in a sustained way.
115. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing) A mediocre novel of ideas with a few excellent passages and a number of almost unreadable ones. Lessing’s turgid, endless meditations on communism, psychoanalysis, and the relationships between men and women swamp the book’s plot and any attempts at characterization.
116. The Patron Saint of Liars (Ann Patchett) An unchallenging but emotionally gratifying story about biological and adopted family. Fun to read and well-written.
117. Numbers in the Dark and other Stories (Italo Calvino) A number of Calvino’s stories and other short works selected from his life works. I enjoyed the early “fables” more than the later, more conceptual short stories.
118. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky) An epic tale of an aristocratic Russian family in the mid-nineteenth century that blew me away by dint of its psychological and spiritual profundity. Though sometimes exhausting, The Brothers is a masterpiece.
119. The Narcissism Epidemic (Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell) A timely if somewhat shallow and overly “pop” account of the social context of American narcissism. I thought the text and supporting graphics could have been better edited and more cohesive.
120. Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell) A fascinating novel written in the form of a fugue with six voices: the diary of a nineteenth century American notary traveling in the South Pacific, the letters of a sensuous and dissolute British composer living in Belgium between the two world wars, a crime thriller set in 1970s northern California, the early twentieth-century autobiography of a justifiably misanthropic British publisher, the recorded confessions of an enslaved Korean clone in the late twenty-first century, and the oral history of a post-apocalyptic Hawaiian goat-herder of the distant future. Each voice is fascinating when taken apart and together, they form an intricate, engaging puzzle.
121. McTeague (Frank Norris) I would recommend this novel set in late nineteenth century San Francisco both for its vivid, engaging setting and for the story’s historical value as a prescient piece of realist fiction that, to me, anticipated Steinbeck by several decades.
122. How to Raise a Jewish Dog (Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman) A silly “instructional” book about how to use guilt and praise to raise your dog as though it were a Jewish child.
123. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Anne Fadiman) An intimate cultural anthropology that addresses the relationship between allopathic medicine and non-Western culture as it crystallized around an epileptic Hmong girl, her family and community, and her medical providers in 1980s California. Unusually moving and easy-to-read for non-fiction.
124. At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig* (John Gimlette) Though it is notable as the main instance of recent, English-language travel writing on Paraguay, Inflatable Pig disappoints deeply. Paraguay deserves better than to be represented to the outside world by the author’s confusing prose, Eurocentric obsession with expatriates, and his hodgepodge recombination of straight history and memoir. I first read this book before arriving in Paraguay and can now attest that many of Gimlette’s observations are as shallow and erroneous as they seemed before I had set foot in the country.
125. Running with the Demon (Terry Brooks) Another mediocre but titillating fantasy novel by Terry Brooks.
126. The Ghost Map (Steven Johnson) Though superficially a social history of cholera epidemics in nineteenth century London, Johnson’s page-turner unfolds into a meditation on urban sustainability , paradigm shifts in medical thought, and the nature of genius.
127. Freedom (Jonathan Franzen) One family’s peregrinations through the American nineteenth and twentieth century ground Franzen’s discourse on freedom, both positive and negative, and its consequences. The result is a profound psychological study and novel of ideas that even includes a brief trip to Paraguay!
128. A Knight of the Word (Terry Brooks) Sequel to Running with the Demon…also mediocre.
129. Angel Fire East (Terry Brooks) Third chapter in my second Terry Brooks trilogy of service. Angel Fire East actually overcame the two first books in the trilogy, approaching, at least, an artful style.
130. The Good Earth (Pearl Buck) A moving chronicle of a family’s fortunes in the years leading up to the industrialization and political transformation of China. The beautiful portrayals of the life of the rural poor were edifying and also struck a chord with my experiences in Paraguay.
131. The March of Folly (Barbara W. Tuchman) Tuchman identifies folly as obvious, recognized, and preventable action in contradiction to self-interest and details the folly inherent in the fall of Troy, the Papacy’s failure to preempt the Reformation, Britain’s loss of America, and the Vietnam War. A well-documented and well-reasoned take on political decision-making.
132. American Gods (Neil Gaiman) Superb fantasy writing that addresses the role of mythology in contemporary culture. One of the surprising triumphs of the book was the degree to which Gaiman overcomes shallow characterization, a frequent bane of the genre. Even minor and fantastic characters seem to act with natural motives and limitations.
133. Babbit (Sinclair Lewis) Disturbingly, Lewis’s satire of post-World War I conservativism and conformity remains relevant in today’s era of mass culture and material prosperity. Sometimes a little slow, but I became more involved as the eponymous protagonist began to implode.
134. The Feast of the Goat (Mario Vargas Llosa) A historically faithful retelling of the end of the Trujillo era. To me, Vargas Llosa’s documentary style provided a complete but sterile account less compelling than In the Time of the Butterflies or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
135. Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout) A technically interesting novel-in-stories that reveals the inner lives of the eponymous protagonist and her family and neighbors in a small town in Maine. The tone is muted, yet moving.
136. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell) An enchanting, character-driven historical novel set in a Dutch trading outpost off the coast of Nagasaki at the turn of the nineteenth century. Worthy both as a novel and a window into the medicine, economics, maritime culture, and politics of the time as practiced by both the Dutch and Japanese.
137. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe) This brief, moving account of the rise and fall of a Nigerian tribal leader depicts pre-colonization customs as well as the social and personal dislocation attendant on subjugation by the British.
138. Life of Pi (Yann Martel) A novel of ideas that doubles as a story of spiritual and physical survival.
139. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (John Berendt) The author’s charming and informative ethnography of contemporary Savannah, Georgia turns into an account of true crime after one of his contacts commits murder.
140. Beautiful Evidence (Edward Tufte) Tufte draws on texts from two millennia and dozens of technical and artistic fields to present the principles of effective visual representation. Reading this book changed the way I think about data, illustration, and visual communication.
141. number9dream (David Mitchell) I didn’t enjoy this novel of a young Japanese man’s quest for self-discovery in modern Tokyo as much as I liked Cloud Atlas or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Still, taken by itself, the story is well-written and the protagonist, sympathetic.
142. The Passage (Justin Cronin) I couldn’t put down this genre-busting, epic tale of survival, love, and mortality set in the western United States following a vampire apocalypse.
143. Hero (Perry Moore) Moore rewrites the young adult superhero novel with a gay teenager as his protagonist. Fun and light to read, this story is also important as a counternarrative to the homophobia typical of mainstream comic book discourse.
144. The Geography of Bliss (Eric Weiner) The author explores the possibility that human happiness may be determined by geographic and cultural setting. A combination of travelogue and pop psychology.
145. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami) A fascinating bifurcated tale. As the protagonist’s conscious mind narrates a dark crime mystery set in the dystopic near-future, his unconscious mind intercalates a tranquil story of a mirrored utopia set in a bucolic town at the “end of the world.” Murakami not only pulls off the required plotting, but also fills the tale with conceptually challenging ideas, three-dimensional characters, poetically beautiful prose, and compelling conflict. There’s even an understated political message for the finding.
146. Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides) Part Greek epic, Shandyean memoir, bildungsroman, American legend, and genealogy (both Nietzschen and biological), this stunning novel traces the family history and personal metamorphosis of Cal(liope), a male hermaphrodite raised as a girl in the suburban middle class. A perfect culmination of relevant and engaging themes, historical and scientific veracity, enjoyable and credible characters, and a plot with plenty of dizzying precipices.
147. Orlando (Virginia Woolf) Another sexually ambivalent epic, this one chronicling the unusually long and bisexual existence of Orlando, an English noble(wo)man whose youth, adolescence, and early adulthood stretch from the Elizabethan Era to modernity. Sometimes rather slow to read, the text is laced with incisive social commentary and humor that keep the reader engaged. The tale is also impressively progressive given its historical provenance.
148. The New Kings of Nonfiction (Ira Glass, ed.) An engaging collection – my favorite essay by far is David Foster Wallace’s meditation on right-wing talk radio. But why this title given that two of the contributors are women?
149. Native Speaker (Chang-Rae Lee) A gripping and humane drama that unflinchingly forces its characters and reader to consider the meaning of ethnic identity and nationality, especially through the lenses of language and physical presence. Beyond its political engagement, the story of a Korean-American private detective is also a humane and realistic story of the ambivalent relationships that abound in families.
150. Atonement (Ian McEwan) A story of transgression, punishment, and, yes, atonement, with World War II’s buildup, execution, and aftermath serving as the setting for each. Searing and tragic, but the tale’s eventual unfolding feels somewhat gimmicky.