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INTRO
"'The best-laid plans of mice and men...' and Henry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis... in the Twilight Zone."
-- Rod Serling (closing narration), "Time Enough at Last," The Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode 8 (starring Burgess Meredith), originally aired November 20, 1959 on CBS
For readers the world over, it would seem--at first glance--that the year 2020 might have been from the perfect cloth. After all, when everything [Aside: And by "everything," I do kind of mean "everything"] came to a crashing halt, leaving all of us quarantined at home, alone with our loved ones and with ourselves, we all of us suddenly found ourselves with time on our hands to more or less do whatever we wanted. For movie buffs, this meant time to catch up on some quality movie-watching. For television addicts, this meant ample time to stream and binge on everything offered up by the algorithm. For car enthusiasts, this presented itself as time spent alone in the garage, the hood to your old classic propped open, droplights illuminating the old engine where you lose yourself. For music-aficionados, this meant flipping through old record albums, dusting them off, and spinning them again. For sports nuts, this meant more time than you knew what to do with to follow all your favorite games, and your favorite teams, and your favorite athletes. For online gamers, this meant unlimited time lost in the chosen game-world. And, again, for readers it meant time at last to settle back in your favorite chair--a stack of books piled on the floor beside you--and the opportunity to literally make time disappear within the pages of a book
Suddenly, in 2020, readers found themselves with something they had perhaps always quietly wished for: a chance to read, to dive into a book (or books) without having to worry about scorn or judgment from others, and without having to hear the age-old question: "Don't you have anything better to do?"
Because, quite frankly--for maybe the first and only time in our lives--readers could answer a question like that with: "No. I have nothing else to do. Now, leave me alone."
The quandary arises, of course, when you have more time than ever to do something that you love to do, how do you discriminate? How do you choose wisely? When a reader suddenly has on their hands more time than ever before to catch up on their reading, what do you choose to read?
[Aside: I know... First-world problems.]
Below is just a sampling of some of the books and writers I chose to spend time with over the past 12 months. There were other great books and writers that I had read before and that I chose to revisit and to reread in 2020 (titles like The Old Man and the Sea, The Hobbit, Catch-22, The Country of the Pointed Firs, The Plague Dogs, The Hotel New Hampshire--all of them wonderful books that definitely would have made my year-end list of Best Reads), but I decided to leave them off this list. Below are only new books (or "new" to me, anyway) that I cracked open and read during this past year. Ten books that challenged me, entertained me, made me happy, made me angry, made me laugh, made me scared, and made me glad to be alive, even in difficult times such as these--books that made me glad to have time enough at last to spend some of my time (and some of my pandemic-induced solitude) in their company.
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10.) I Am C-3PO: The Inside Story -- by Anthony Daniels (2019)
What a notably strange career Anthony Daniels has had over the past 40 (+) years as an actor and an entertainer. A returning cast member in what is undoubtedly one of film history's most lucrative and popular movie-series of all time, Daniels has been able to maintain an almost unheard-of level of anonymity. Outside of legions of diehard/convention-level Star Wars fans, an actor of Anthony Daniels' CV can walk down the street basically unknown and unmolested by hordes of autograph-seekers and selfie-hounds. To most of us, he is a veritable mystery man--which is also, unsurprisingly, his personal axe to grind in this brief memoir/autobiography. As the physical- and voice-actor of the character C-3PO in all nine of the "canon" Star Wars films (not to mention various stints voicing the character in numerous offshoots and animated Star Wars series), Daniels loves this robot that he has brought to life over his lifetime as an actor. But he also undeniably feels cheated, somewhat, out of the "normal" career that seems to have eluded him. He has spent his life as an actor behind the golden body-suit armor of one of the most well-known and beloved characters in all of filmdom. And yet...therein lies the story of his life, I suppose.
Daniels is not a writer, nor does he pretend to be. If there is a weakness in his book it is in his somewhat amateurish writing style. (At times it reads, honestly, like an over-zealous older teenager expounding on his thoughts and feelings. But...then again he's not a professional writer. And that's okay.) Would the book have been better if he had been aided by a co-writer, to help "dress up the style" a bit? Perhaps. But then part of the clunkiness of Daniels' writing is in perfect keeping with the Star Wars films themselves (clunky dialogue and all). And it accentuates the fact that it is his story--literally the inside story--of what it's been like for him, sacrificing his ego and his career for the love of a character he has spent his life creating. As a life-long Star Wars fan reading Daniel's memoir, I discovered a thing or two about the Star Wars films that I did not know. His book is entertaining. It's fun. And it put me inside that suit, if only for a while, to look through the eyes of someone else--an actor, a robot, an icon.
9.) A Journal of the Plague Year -- by Daniel Defoe (1722)
I don't think it's a mistake that my "Best Of" reading list for 2020 consists of several titles having something to do with disaster--either natural or man-made.
[Aside: It was, obviously, that kind of year.]
Would I have picked up Defoe's book under more "normal" circumstances? I don't know. I almost doubt it. But our contemporary life being what it was in the year past (and still is in 2021--let's just accept it right now), I thought this book--written nearly 300 years ago and set, fictionally, in the bubonic plague-ravaged streets of London--would be an interesting comment on our modern COVID-19 life that we all seem to be living. And I was right. Defoe's 18th century fictional-nonfiction is amazing.
From the parallels--gleaned from history--to our own times in the haggard 21st century, Defoe charts a remarkably prescient glimpse of our world in 2020, staring down a microbial enemy. The echoes are startling, and when reading it I had to keep reminding myself that this is a work of fiction. Defoe, one of our first "novelists" in the English language, was (who knew it at the time?) one of our first genre-bending post-modernists, with this historic account told in a creative-nonfiction stylistic approach. As it is, it's an amazing "novel"/historical document that sings to the tune of our times.
8.) Dune -- by Frank Herbert (1965)
Okay. Full disclosure: It seems I have always been aware of Frank Herbert's Dune and yet (for some reason) have always resisted it.
When I was younger, I was a sci-fi fan, snatching up whatever titles I could, devouring every piece of science-fiction (modern and classic) that I could get my hands on. This inevitably extended into the sub-genre of fantasy fiction, as well, and so early reading of novels like Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood's End, as well as Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, eventually melded with the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth sagas of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, as well as Richard Adams' anthropomorphic allegorical masterpieces, Watership Down and The Plague Dogs.
Along with all of this, then--always orbiting somewhere out on the periphery--was Frank Herbert's daunting Dune. I remember the stiff Permabound copy of the book on the shelves in my high school library, and I remember riffling through it occasionally, probably even checking it out from the librarian from time to time, and opening the cover, and turning to the first page, and taking a glance at the book's several Appendices toward the back of the book, as well as its Maps and its Glossary. And I am more than certain that Arthur C. Clarke's famously cryptic critical blurb on the cover (or in the inside cover)--"...I know nothing comparable to it other than The Lord of the Rings"--teased my curiosity all the more.
I have always enjoyed certain speculative fiction--I can be a sucker for fantastic fiction that deals with all the minutiae of carefully drawn-out world-building. Richard Adams had that skill. Tolkien more than had that skill. And I always knew (albeit indirectly and only through osmosis, in a way) that Frank Herbert's massive, mythological sci-fi masterpiece, Dune, doubled-down on the whole world-building thing and existed almost as a thing unto itself.
And yet strangely (for me at least) it remained unread. I just could not get into it, for some reason.
Fast-forward to 1984, my freshman year of college, and coincidentally the year of the release of David Lynch's legendary failed attempt at filming Herbert's almost unfilmable novel.
[Aside: Let's face it, that movie is a disastrous mess, from start to finish. (Could there really be a serious dissenting discussion on that point?) Lynch is an artist of unparalleled talent and vision, in my opinion. But the book (not to mention the studio) got the best of him in this case, I believe.]
Anyway.... I do remember buying the pocket paperback movie tie-in version of the novel when I was in college--complete with the movie-poster artwork on the book's cover--orange colored sand dunes, and Kyle Mclaughlin striding heroically across the foreground, some sort of weapon-device draped over his arm and across his shoulders, looking every bit the messianic protagonist. [Aside: Cue the movie's theme music from Toto.] And I remember (because I was still intrigued and I was, already at that time, a fan of David Lynch) that I cracked open the book and tried to break into it. And I made it through the first chapter or so before quickly giving up.
I found the novel's mysteries impossible to crack, I guess. I didn't get it. It was beyond me, I suppose. And what's more, I didn't care.
But now fast-forward several decades. I'm older now (obviously). I've read considerably more (obviously). And yet another attempt to film this seemingly unfilmable book is "in the can," as they say (this time from visionary Canadian filmmaker, Denis Villeneuve--so we'll see), and merely awaiting a post-COVID green light, allowing it to open at theaters on the big screen...finally. So this year I thought would be an interesting time to once again try to tackle this cumbersome novel--hopefully making it past Chapter One this time--and finally check this book off my list of Heretofore Unread Big Books.
It's dense. It's complex. But the novel was not as daunting or impenetrable as I remember from my previous attempt 40 years ago. The book is definitely dated, I think--most definitely a product of 1965, when it was published. The drug-induced reveries of "the Spice," the ridiculously stilted dialogue, the clumsily awkward patriarchal sexism, the (supposedly) anti-Semitic take on Cold War-era views of the Middle East and U.S. relations.
It's all a mess of a mix, really. (And I'm not convinced that if the novel were to be published today it would find even half of its cult-like reverential audience--even underground. Who knows?) Herbert's classic novel is a product of its time, to be sure, but it is also undeniably the product of a massive imagination constructing and controlling a unique and singular vision.
Don't ask me what it's all about. I'm not entirely sure what all this vision finally amounts to or what it all means. But I'm glad I finally read it.
7.) The Thing With Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human -- by Noah Stryker (2014)
One upside to the whole "quarantine thing" over this past year, I suppose, is that (like many people, I'm assuming) it has caused me (or "allowed me," if you'd rather) to slow down and to take a closer look at the immediate world around me. This year's pandemic and quarantine has allowed me to take inventory, to take stock of all the things I have and of all the things I'm missing.
My back yard--as it reveals itself to me now--is a remarkably interesting place. My back yard is its own little ecosystem--its own little world--of rabbits, and squirrels, and raccoons, and snakes, and possums, and chipmunks, and deer, and coyote, and birds.
I have lived around birds all my life, obviously. For 50+ years now I have listened in the back of my mind to their voices singing to one another, calling, laughing, searching, ringing through the air, and I have watched our little winged neighbors flit so casually and effortlessly in and out of the corners of my eyes, up and down, floating from tree to tree, from limb to limb, from branch to branch, from tree to ground, and back again. And I have barely noticed them.
The more I began to watch them over this past summer, the more I wanted to make time to watch them. To observe them. To note and to infer what in the world could possibly be going on with them in their airy, leafy world above my back yard.
So I got my hands on Stryker's book, wanting to maybe gain a little more educated insight into what I was watching and listening to, and I couldn't put the book down. It has changed the way I watch and listen to the ecosystem, the little world above me and all around me, the daily avian drama in my trees in the back yard.
6.) Whale Day: And Other Poems -- by Billy Collins (2020)
From the beginning of the quarantine, the former U.S. poet laureate, Billy Collins, took to taping and recording short little daily poetry readings and discussions from the comfortable book-strewn confines of his home and study in Florida. These continuing "sessions," then, are posted to his social media sites--a daily visit and conversation that Collins has taken to calling "The Poetry Broadcast."
Subsequently, he also published his 13th collection of new poetry this past year. Like all of Collins' work, his persona's voice in this book sidles up next to you like an old friend, and you simply find yourself once again picking up the relationship since the last time you'd met.
He's just so good at what he does best. I don't mean this simile to sound like a detriment or a criticism, because it isn't meant that way at all: Collins' poetry reads like a comfortably worn-out pair of shoes, or jeans, or sweatshirt--the kind that you're so used to you have forgotten just how good they feel, just how much you like them, until you slip them on again, and settle in to them, and find yourself saying, "Oh yeah.... This is it. This is what I like...."
It's inevitable, I think. His poetry is often--and rightfully so--described as playful, and humorous, and grounded in the everydayness of everyday life. And while those descriptions are apt, it can be too easy to simply leave his poetry there and to dismiss it and to miss what else is also there: How, for example, he so effortlessly (it seems) picks at the threads of subtle and seismic nuances in the everydayness of our everyday lives, uncovering places that we thought we had either hidden or hidden from, and all the time echoing the depths of some great and profound silence and sadness.
Collins is a contemporary master. He is a national treasure. I will read anything he writes.
5.) Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are -- by John Kaag (2018)
With such book titles on his Amazon page as Idealism, Pragmatism, and Feminism: The Philosophy of Ella Lyman Cabot (2011), Drone Warfare (War and Conflict in the Modern World) (co-authored with Sarah Kreps, 2014), Thinking Through the Imagination: Aesthetics in Human Cognition (2014), American Philosophy: A Love Story (2014), Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (2018), and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (2020), you could be fairly quick, I'm sure, in assuming that John Kaag would be the life of any party.
This book was fascinating, frustrating (at times), captivating, maddening, and finally fully illuminating.
Yes, as the title suggests, it is a book about walking. It is a book about walking through mountains, to be more specific. It is a book about hiking through the Swiss Alps, to be most specific, and about the pursuit of the19th-century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, to follow--quite literally--in his footsteps, and to better understand what it means to be a human being.
Kaag, a respected professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, is haunted by Nietzsche's writings and teachings, and returns to the master's beloved area in the Swiss Alps, Sils Maria, with his wife and young daughter, to pursue his own demons, to chase them down, to hopefully finally understand Nietzsche, himself, and the meaning of his own life.
This is the kind of book that you read a little bit, put down, think about, process, read some more, put down, think about, process...and repeat. It's thoughtful, engaging, and undeniably challenging in the gauntlet that it throws down before you. Nietzsche, after all, was not an easy philosopher to either fully understand or to fully accept. The story of his life (which Kaag pursues on his own parallel track) is a story of genius, and madness, manic highs and lows, joy, sadness, and ultimately despair. Kaag--on the journey with his wife and daughter--discovers something that always eluded Nietzsche, perhaps.
And the result--at least in part--is this book. I found it moving, maddening, and beautiful.
4.) Nemesis -- by Philip Roth (2010)
If there is another late-20th century American author of Philip Roth's stature who turned out such a surprisingly strong run of books in what came to be the "late period," I would like to know who the author is. By 1997, Roth's output (already prodigious and worthy of cementing him in place as one of America's great contemporary writers) was further solidified with the publication of American Pastoral, which would go on to win him the Pulitzer Prize the following year in '98. That book would be followed by 2000's much applauded, The Human Stain, and later, in 2004, by his alternative-history masterpiece, The Plot Against America.
All told, that is an incredible run of fine novels for any "older" writer to achieve. At a time when a writer (of such a lauded reputation) could normally relax and set the pen aside and step away from an honorable career of great books, Roth seemed intent on doing the opposite. He found a second wind at the tail end of his career and produced what many critics consider not only some of his own personal greatest work yet but also, perhaps, some of the greatest work by any contemporary American writer at the time.
In the years immediately following The Plot Against America, Roth then released a trio of short, gasping little novellas, as if finally, at long last, maybe the air was gone. But then in 2010--as if in one last, closing burst--came this novel, Nemesis, which though while just falling short of being a "great" Roth novel, perhaps, at least finds the strength to be filled with its author's typically formidable writing and some of the usual Rothian narrative trademarks.
Set in a sweltering summer of 1944 in Roth's own hometown of Newark, NJ, the novel (one of his last), signs off on his career with a story that looks back to an imagined outbreak of polio that sweeps through the city's Jewish Weequahic section, devastating countless lives--the victims, their families and loved ones, as well as the novel's doomed protagonist, Bucky Cantor, fated through the course of his life to suffer ignominy, loss, and loneliness.
While maybe the book won't be mentioned in the same breath as many of the other novels that make up Roth's pantheon, I still found Nemesis to be powerful, relevant, and moving. (I would imagine practically every writer alive would be honored to write such a "lesser" novel.)
3.) The Topeka School: A Novel -- by Ben Lerner (2019)
I must admit, I was surprisingly unfamiliar with Ben Lerner's name before coming to this novel. As a young poet and novelist, Lerner does not have a long catalogue behind him. The Topeka School is only his third novel--his first, the acclaimed Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) was closely followed by 10:04 (2014). All of his novels (to date) are experiments of postmodern self-referential reflectivism, resulting in a clever play of fictional autobiography (or autobiographical fiction--take your pick).
This story's protagonist--Adam Gordon--is coincidentally the narrator in Leaving the Atocha Station, while 10:04's narrator is interestingly named Ben.
[Aside: That's the limit of my knowledge of his first two novels, at this point, having only read this book, so far. But knowing even that small degree of Lerner and of the arc of his novels paints an exciting portrait of a young writer--hailing from my home state of Kansas--who is not afraid to push some boundaries and some buttons with his literary experimentalism and his deft poet's eye and ear for language.]
So, what's going on here? What are we to believe is real and what made up? Lerner is hardly the first writer to trip down this experimental metafictional Proustian lane, but this is a pretty fascinating contemporary addition to the genre. With scenes of mesmerizing wordplay and character-building, the book moves along quickly. It is compact, with passages of aching beauty and awkward humor and mounting dread and implosive sadness and explosive violence.
A depiction of late-20th century/early-21st century America--with its boiling angers, and hatreds, and manipulated rhetoric, and blunt-force trauma divisiveness--it feels as if Lerner somehow has his finger on the pulse of a nation, not to mention a voyeuristic telescope trained on all of us.
I plan on getting caught up on Ben Lerner, the writer.
2.) Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster -- by Adam Higginbotham (2019)
I remember the days when I could say something as casual as, "I don't know that I've ever actually been legitimately frightened by a book before."
I can't say that anymore.
1.) Gravity's Rainbow -- by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
I've written about this reading experience elsewhere [emptyshipoutward-bound.blogspot.com/2020/07/] and so won't belabor the point revisiting things I've already said and resaid ad nauseum about this one-of-a-kind novel.
Except by saying this: Pynchon's novel is an exhaustive and exhausting work--maybe the work--of 20th century American post-Cold War encyclopedic Menippean satire. It is funny. It is tragic. It is exciting (in places). It is boring as hell (in places). It is singular, and massive, and it is a crazy fucking masterpiece, in a world that unrelentingly needs exactly that.
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OUTRO
"Witness Mr. Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He'll have a world all to himself--without anyone."
-- Rod Serling (opening narration), "Time Enough at Last," The Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode 8 (starring Burgess Meredith), originally aired November 20, 1959 on CBS
