A Year in Reading

As 2007 draws to a close and a new year (and a new reading list) begins, I'd like to look back at some of the books I read this year, culminating in some small essays about the six books that stood out most for me, the six that I would assume will be among my favorites for years to come. But first, some other housekeeping:

Most Overrated Novel: An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke. I read a book near the end of the year that said one of the reasons why American book reviewing is so unhelpful is that just about everything gets recommended. This novel is Exhibit A. It is to literature what "Juno" is to cinema: A nice effort that tries way too hard.

Most Underrated Novel: Colson Whitehead's Apex Hides the Hurt is a bitingly funny little satire about the nature of advertising and nomenclature. Trust me, it's a lot better than that description.

The Most Pleasant Surprise: I picked up Joseph Wambaugh's Hollywood Station thinking it'd be a dispensable suspense thriller, something to breezily read during my move to South Orange. I was treated instead to a surprisingly memorable story, as well as one of the funniest. I later learned that Wambaugh is one of the great mystery writers of the last 30 years, so maybe I'm the only one who was surprised.

Best Debut Novel: About a month into my position as library assistant at the South Orange library, I stumbled on What You Have Left, by local author Will Allison, and I was glad I did. As Allison himself told us when he came to his own book club discussion (something that has to be just a little bizarre), the novel comprises a series of previously-published short stories that he then threaded together. As such, it's an unassuming book, definitely a first novel, but is a wonderful little read.

Saddest/Most Sobering Book: Tested, Linda Perlstein's year-long examination of a Baltimore inner city school, isn't perfect, but it will leave you frustrated, angered, and/or resigned with how education is legislated in this country.

The Annual Summer Epic: Every year for the last decade or so, I've blocked out two or three weeks during the summer to tackle a huge novel, those imposing doorstops that take up so much space on my bookshelf and often supply me with my only exercise. This year's was Don DeLillo's Underworld. Having read (and admired) DeLillo before, I knew what kind of a commitment I was making, beyond its 827-page length. I suspect it's a novel that will grow in stature upon re-read, but if you want a sampler of what DeLillo's all about, read the prologue, a sequence of about 60 pages centering on the 1951 Shot Heard 'Round the World that truly is an awesome display of writing.

Other Writers You Should Be Reading (a short list):

Laura Lippman -- Baltimore mystery writer. What the Dead Know was my third Lippman novel, and it's by far the best.

Richard Price -- A friend of mine had to read Price's Freedomland for her book club a couple years back. From what she told me, nobody liked it. At all. I was sorry I couldn't have been there to be its lone defender. Price's novels are always riveting, they reek of authenticity, and few authors write dialogue better. Ladies' Man, while much smaller in scope, was still a terrific read.

Rachel Cohn and David Levithan: I've posted about their novel Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist at least twice on this blog, so I won't repeat myself, other than to say you should check it out.

Cormac McCarthy: I know it's been Oprah-fied and it won the Pulitzer, but The Road would have been a must-read even without those lofty endorsements. New readers to McCarthy might be thrown by his spare writing style, but eventually, they'll get sucked in to his desolate and violent morality plays.

Other Notable Stuff I Read:
Harold Pinter's play Betrayal. Upon learning that the infamous backward episode of Seinfeld was a direct homage to Pinter's 1978 play, I spent part of an afternoon reading it. Very well done, if a total theater philistine does say so himself.

Robert Coover's "The Babysitter." If someone asks you what postmodern fiction is, hand him this story and he'll begin to understand. Basically a babysitter comes over to watch two kids while their parents attend a party, her boyfriend wants desperately to come over, and she tries to steal some time to watch TV. Then she accidentally kills the baby. Or the father has sex with the babysitter. Or the boyfriend and his shady friend try to rape the babysitter. All of that happens, among other things. Or none of it happens. Who really knows.

Richard Yates's "Doctor Jack O'Lantern." A quietly devastating short story about a new kid trying to fit in at school, and the naively optimistic teacher who tries to do right by him. This sounds like a cliche, but it's not. More on Richard Yates is forthcoming.

Juno: Indie as the New Mainstream

(** out of 5)

There's a scene toward the end of "Juno" when the title character tells the father of her child, "You're the coolest kid I know, and you don't even have to try." It's the closest this relentlessly vapid film comes to offering a truth, and when I think about what I'll take away from this film, among the most overrated I've ever seen, it won't be anything about the plot. Rather, it'll be the parade of half-written people straining to be cool, burying anything approaching genuine emotion beneath an endless barrage of contrived dialogue.

It's possible you'll watch this movie and think they captured today's high school teenager perfectly; the audience I saw it with certainly did. Many top-flight critics have embraced the blend of comedy with the heartfelt drama. If you embrace that, though, you have to embrace people who say things like, "Fuget, Thailand" instead of "Fuck it," or parents who name their child Liberty Bell, or an abortion receptionist who says they want to know "every score and every sore." This film falls over itself to stay clever with audience-approved indie flourishes, at the expense of what could have been a very perceptive drama.

It's becoming more and more apparent that these "indie" flourishes are every bit as formulaic as a Michael Bay blockbuster, just on a smaller scale. Rather than big-budget explosions, we get what one critic I read called "pre-packaged quirk": the snappy one-liners, the twee soundtrack, the false affectations that are supposed to make the characters "multi-dimensional." Remember the brother in "Little Miss Sunshine" (another movie I didn't like all that much)? His little gimmick was that he never spoke, a character detail arbitrarily included so we would get an inevitable scene near the end where he did speak, which would then be played as something insightful and climactic. But the jig was up long before that: Once the grandfather died and they snuck his corpse onto the van, the movie ceased to be a piercing portrait of a modern American family (what it was billed as) and settled into its role as a pretty funny slapstick comedy.

Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with funny slapstick comedies. But please don't tell me these movies are showing us something about the human condition when everyone in it does their best to stay away from real human interactions. It's all bullshit. Take away the cleverly-arranged jokes and the cute music and you realize how little these movies are actually saying; hell, "Superbad" has more to say about the teenage condition. And it's a shame, since "Juno"'s is a story that merits a wide audience. The movie promotes a message that deserves better than the treatment it receives.

Who can I blame for this? Not the actors, the only reason I didn't give this film one star. Even breakout star Ellen Page does her best to make her character tolerable, if not relatable. Director Jason Reitman already has made one good fim, the deft satire "Thank You For Smoking," so we know he's capable of turning out worthwhile material. I think the onus here is on screenwriter Diablo Cody, whose script appears to be written in aspiration of being quoted on Facebook walls and in conversations in shopping malls nationwide.

Juno is just a hipper version of a sitcom character, spouting off jokes with unerring accuracy and timing. Whether she's using her hamburger phone, talking to us via redundant voice-overs, name-dropping whatever bands are cool for disaffected teens to like these days (Mott the Hoople, evidently), or worst of all, using a healthy amount of black lingo as an attempt at irony, Juno keeps coming off as a joke factory rather than a vulnerable girl using humor as a defense mechanism or as the common language among her friends.

I read a young adult book earlier this year called "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist." Like Juno, the two protagonists are well-versed in sarcasm and pop culture references, but they can't (and don't) keep it up forever. When they're taken out of their comfort zones and forced to face genuine human moments head-on, they revert to the immature young adults they are, and the novel is all the more touching for it. Cody's screenplay doesn't allow Juno that luxury -- from start to finish, she stays "on." And eventually, she exhausted me.

I haven't even mentioned how the film essentially glosses over the complications of teenage pregnancy, or how so many of the secondary characters just fill pre-determined roles as the script requires. (The greatest offender is the ultrasound doctor, a woman whose sole function in this film is to get on a soapbox and generalize about Juno and her family, since I guess somebody has to).

So I pretty much hated this movie. Looking at Metacritic, where "Juno" is sporting a healthy 81 (the lowest score being a 58), it appears I'm in the distinct minority. There's also a prevailing feeling that anyone who resists the contrived charm of these movies must have his head in the clouds. I'm not buying it. There was an observant, witty, and affecting film to be made here, but this wasn't it.

Last week, I saw a film called "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." The script was probably half as long, since the main character is unable to speak, but it has twice as much to say than does "Juno." See that instead.

Have a Couple Hours to Waste Away?

'Tis the season for year-end lists. Seems like every publication under the sun (and the blogosphere) pumps out a few ready-made lists for every occasion. If you're in the market for a one-stop source for all your Best-Of needs, here's a site that has compiled as many of them as it can find -- in every field imaginable (Top 10 PR blunders, Idiots of the Year, Top 10 Search Engine terms).

As for me, I have a couple more books to go to hit 75 (the last week of school nearly brought my reading to a standstill), but I hope to write up some thoughts on what I read this year, including little essays on the books I double-starred.

More Food for Thought

Here's an outstanding and sobering essay by noted literary critic Michael Silverblatt as to why more and more people have come to hate reading.