Paul Auster’s “Invisible” is a compelling, delicious, nasty read. The reader needs to adjust expectations and be reconciled to not really caring about or identifying with any of the characters, as none of them can be trusted to have an accurate picture of the central story and circumstances, and at least two of the characters are likely guilty of monstrous acts. Auster treats his characters more like moral chesspieces than people, and the book is more a puzzle for the reader to solve than a milieu in which the reader can imagine him or herself.  In fact, a reference late in the book to “a laboratory of human possibilities” probably captures it best.

Here’s what I read in 2009, with links to reviews where I have them. (Actually, I’ve commented at least a wee bit on most of what I read this year.)

1. Letting Go of the Words
   by Janice (Ginny) Redish

2. The Scream
   by Rohinton Mistry

3. Great Expectations
   by Charles Dickens

4. Catching the Big Fish
   Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity
   by David Lynch

5. Soucouyant
   by David Chariandy

6. The Importance of Music to Girls
   by Lavinia Greenlaw

7. Old City Hall
   by Robert Rotenberg

8. The Other End of the Leash
   by Patricia B. McConnell

9. Sideways
   by Rex Pickett

10. 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa
    by Stephanie Nolen

11. Northanger Abbey
    by Jane Austen

12. Master of Reality
    by John Darnielle

13. Crabwise to the Hounds
    by Jeramy Dodds

14. Margaret Lives in the Basement
    by Michelle Berry

15. Revolver
    by Kevin Connolly

16. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

17. Rising, Falling, Hovering
    by CD Wright

18. The Book of Negroes
    by Lawrence Hill

19. The Family Man
    by Elinor Lipman

20. Primitive Mentor
    by Dean Young

21. In the Land of Long Fingernails
    A Gravedigger’s Memoir
    by Charles Wilkins

22. The Sentinel
    by AF Moritz

23. What the Body Remembers
    by Shauna Singh Baldwin

24. The Dog That Pitched a No-Hitter
    by Matt Christopher

25. go-go dancing for Elvis
    by Leslie Greentree

26. The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh
    by AA Milne

27. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
    by Jonathan Safran Foer

28. Middlemarch
    by George Eliot

29. Brooklyn
    by Colm Toibin

30. The Dangerous Book for Dogs
    by Rex & Sparky

31. The Winter Vault
    by Anne Michaels

32. Stripmalling
    by Jon Paul Fiorentino

33. The Cure for Death by Lightning
    by Gail Anderson Dargatz

34. Then We Came to the End
    by Joshua Ferris

35. Blackouts
    by Craig Boyko

36. Homesick
    by Guy Vanderhaeghe

37. The Cellist of Sarajevo
    by Steven Galloway

38. Solomon Gursky Was Here
    by Mordecai Richler

39. The Incident Report
    by Martha Baillie

40. A Bend in the River
    by VS Naipaul

41. This Shape We’re In
    by Jonathan Lethem

42. The Grandmothers
    by Doris Lessing

43. Frozen in Time
    Unlocking the Secrets of the Franklin Expedition
    by Owen Beattie and John Geiger

44. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
    by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

45. A Gate at the Stairs
    by Lorrie Moore

46. Paper Radio
    by Damian Rogers

47. Negotiating With the Dead
    A Writer on Writing
    by Margaret Atwood

48. The Disappeared
    by Kim Echlin

49. February
    by Lisa Moore

50. You Don’t Love Me Yet
    by Jonathan Lethem

51. The Journals of Susanna Moodie
    by Margaret Atwood and Charles Pachter

52. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out
    by Rosemary Sullivan

How interesting that author Bruce Wagner makes a fleeting cameo appearance in a party scene in Jonathan Lethem’s “You Don’t Love Me Yet”. Lethem’s slim novel about romantically adrift twenty-something Lucinda Hoekke, bass player in a fledgling alternative band, bears some resemblance to Wagner’s largely Los Angeles-based collection of novels and TV and movie screenplays. The title “You Don’t Love Me Yet” even echoes Wagner’s “I’m Losing You”, “I’ll Let You Go” and “Still Holding”, even though Lethem’s title doesn’t double as a typical telephone stock phrase/excuse. Actually, you would think he might have tried something like that, since Lucinda also answers telephones for a faux complaint line in an art installation.

Like Wagner’s stories, Lethem’s story is set in Los Angeles. His characters stumble (usually under the influence of one toxin or another) through the same decadent, emotionally parched terrain on the fringes of stardom, seeking and usually not finding professional, artistic or personal validation or fulfillment. While Wagner’s stories have Dickensian complexity, Lethem at least musters some Dickensian names – influential radio host Fancher Autumnbreast is a favourite – but isn’t able to match Wagner’s absorbing depth and insight, with one exception. Lethem’s characters are unsympathetic to a person, and their connections with each other don’t ring true, particularly Lucinda’s inexplicable and messy hookup with an enigmatic crafter of slogans that she meets when he starts calling the complaint line. The one exception is that Lethem captures vibrantly the alchemy of how individual musicians collaborate and cohere to make beautiful music.

“Through democracy, which demands we meet strangers as equals, we perhaps become less strangers to ourselves.”

This book is a fascinating exploration of artistic and aesthetic taste, and a kind, intelligent and moving defence of sentiment and sentimentality, using Celine Dion as the perhaps unlikely touchstone. Oh, and it’s cool and even laugh-out-loud funny.

This is a very cool endorsement:

As 2009 comes to an end, many publications and pundits are offering their assessments of the best whatevers of the decade just past. Inspired by the best books of the decade list from Salon magazine, I’ve listed those from their list with which I agree, and I’ve added my own. These are the books that left the greatest impressions on me as a reader, through the authors’ craft, imagination and that magical je ne sais quoi that makes for a memorable reading experience.

The best books of the decade
A tribute to the fact and fiction we wouldn’t stop talking about in the 2000s
By Laura Miller

From the Salon list, here are the ones I’ve read that I agree are “best of” the last decade:

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
• The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
• Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathem Lethem

Additionally, here are other books I’ve read since 2000 that I think are “best of’s”, including links to previous reviews on this blog. (I’ll aim to add reviews for the others in, well, the next decade.)

• Darkmans, Nicola Barker

• Wild Dogs, Helen Humphreys

• Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones

• The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri

• Small Island, Andrea Levy

• Family Matters, Rohinton Mistry

• Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

• A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore

• Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro



• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

• We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver

• White Teeth, Zadie Smith

• A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews

• The Master, Colm Toibin

• Let’s Talk About Love – A Journey to the End of Taste, Carl Wilson

 

This is an engrossing and sensitive depiction of the complexities of human lives lived during the German occupation of France during the Second World War. It’s made all the more poignant by the fate of the author, who was arrested and died at Auschwitz in 1942. Her notes accompanying the manuscript reveal that she had envisioned an even more sweeping and ambitious work, but that she sensed that her time was running out. The novel’s appendices, detailing her notes and the correspondence of her last days and that of her family and colleagues as they tried to find and rescue her, are as riveting as the novel.

The mother of all trashy, addictive, guilty pleasure reads!