This month I read a lot of nonfiction that I’m not going to detail below. The first category is books about business and sales (Get Clients Now!, Ready Fire Aim etc.) to figure out how to turn part-time freelance work into full-time business. So far, so good, but nerve-racking. The second category is a series of books about the history of Christianity following up on Paul Johnson’s history (see below). Finally, I joined Twitter. I think it’s something I need to be knowledgeable about for Sealy Communications (marketing people love Twitter). I remain wary of it, but I have found it’s a good source for obtaining news, much like a compressed version of my RSS feed.

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

My wife and I watched Downton Abbey recently, which I enjoyed. It’s a bit soap opera-ish, but the time and place and the series’s presentation is wonderful. As a follow-up, and also on the heals of Franzen’s much-discussed New Yorker essay about Wharton, I reread The Age of Innocence. It’s subtle, ironic, and entertaining, well worth a read if you like period pieces. It did not inspire me to go on a Wharton binge the way I did with Henry James last summer.

Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity

One of my freelance clients puts out college lectures, so I’m writing catalog copy for a course on world religions. I realized I had a very limited understanding of the history of Christianity, so I’ve been reading up. I started with Johnson’s history, which is good but dense. I’m less interested in the Middle Ages and Renaissance forward, which I think I do have a handle on. But the early years, particularly the first century, are fascinating. In the first century, Judaism was fractured and there were political squabbles between various sects — Temple Jews, Palestinian Jews, Essenic monks, Gnostics, etc. The era was one of discontent, and there was a heavy messianic wave spreading through the region. In other words, not dissimilar from today’s soothsayers, 2012 apocalypse watchers, tea partiers, etc. It’s interesting to read about how the preachings of an illiterate Jew evolved into the theology of an organized mass religion.

Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

This is a big, fun novel about baseball and growing up we do in college. I enjoyed reading it, but I’d say it’s one for the wide middle reader — Michael Chabon rather than Jonathan Franzen (who has been drifting toward the wide middle with each book). Harbach’s novel is sprawling, and the characters feel real and fully-developed, but I don’t think it has Franzen’s sense of larger stakes. Whereas the War on Terror and the Bush administrations appropriation of the word “freedom” underlies Franzen’s latest novel, the closest Harbach gets to cultural commentary is two players arguing in the locker room: “Israel!” “Palestine!” “Israel!” “Palestine!” Maybe that’s commentary in itself, but the book starts by promising something bigger. In short, good book (especially for a baseball fan or an English major) but maybe not the Great American Novel the reviewers would have you believe. (Whether the Great American Novel is still possible, that’s another discussion for another time.)

Piers Brendan, Ike

I’ve been watching the American Experience portrayals of U.S. presidents. So far, none on Eisenhower, so I picked up a biography. This one is good, I guess, though Ike’s story is not as interesting as some of our presidents’. What struck me most was how unprepared the U.S. was for World War I. We think of ourselves as this advanced military power, but in the 1910s, military exercises still focused on the cavalry system of the Civil War. This book portrays Eisenhower training troops with sticks, which is amazing given America’s role in 20th century military engagements.

This month was a big one because I quit my job in December to freelance full time. On the one hand, freelancing is giving me a lot more free time to read and write, but I’m also having to take a lot of time to educate myself on how to be a salesman for my business. January’s reading was a bit light in quantity, mainly because of Tolstoy (see below).

William Trevor, Felicia’s Journey

Trevor seems to be most highly regarded for his short stories, but I’m fond of his novels, perhaps because I prefer novels to short stories in general. This one is about a young woman who, pregnant, leaves her home in Ireland to chase after the father in England. She’s naive about the world, so bad luck befalls her. This isn’t Trevor’s best novel, but it’s a good study in sympathy/empathy, because Trevor never condescends toward his character.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

I reread this novel for the first time since high school. I went through a Hesse phase at 18, where I read nearly every one of his novels. I liked him for his rebelliousness, his respect for the artist, and his reverence for the pastoral (my favorite at the time was Narcissus and Goldman). Rereading Steppenwolf, I’m struck by how prophetic Hesse was. This book came out in the mid-’20s, but he’s already predicting “the next war,” already commenting that in Germany the center will not hold. This prophecy underlies the story of Harry, an aging scholar who has this life-altering moment when he meets a free-spirited young woman who draws him into a world of jazz, dancing, and intoxication — a comment on the repressed world of the bourgeoisie.

Jesse Graves, Tennessee Landscape With Blighted Pine

This first book of poems does not read like a first book of poems. Graves is an Appalachian poet, and these poems explore the landscape of east Tennessee (among other places) and the way history impresses itself on the present. I don’t read enough poetry to talk about it critically, but this is a fine book — the poems are narrative enough to be accessible to the non-poet, but lyric enough that they don’t read like stories with line-breaks.

Tolstoy, War and Peace

I’m about 1/3 of the way through this one, and I’m expecting to drag it around all year. I’ve got the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which is the one to have for the Russians. The story is readable and not uninteresting, but there’s just so much of it. Briefly, the story is about several aristocratic families in Russia during the Napoleonic wars. We’re introduced to most of the main players in various salons (you have to power through the first 100 pages), and then we follow them as the wars progress. We get sweeping battle scenes and juxtaposed with personal moments of growth (the most striking, to me, is Pierre’s induction into the freemasons), and the analogy that comes to mind is a TV series with a wide cast, such as Downton Abby. What’s holding me back with this one is that it reads like a history book, like Foote’s trilogy about the Civil War. There are a lot of details about various battles and Napoleon negotiating with so-and-so. Just as I imagine one would have to be in the right mood to read 1500 pages about the American Civil War (or any war), one has to be in the right mood to read 1200 pages about Russia’s war with the French, which I am not right now.

Max Watman, Chasing the White Dog

This was short and interesting, though a bit scattered. I enjoyed his account of trying to make moonshine, of bumbling into a store to buy the ingredients. I wish the book took a more historical-narrative structure, because it was kind of scattered, each short section loosely related to the next.

William Styron, Sophie’s Choice

I have mixed feelings about Styron. He can be long-winded, but I enjoyed this novel, overall. Part of it is I have a fascination with World War II and the Holocaust, and part of it is that the novel reads like fictional autobiography of the young Styron, up in New York in the late ’40s, banging away at the gates of American literature. My big qualm with the book is the juxtaposition of the horny young man and the horrific Holocaust narrative—I think the former did a disservice to the latter. Also, Styron’s prose can be unwieldy. You get the feeling, from reading him, that he was hugely ambitious and considered the novel as a form not merely a novel but The Novel—he and Mailer and Roth and the rest of those guys, the last of the big guns who could be novelists-as-public-figures—and with that self-identification comes a grandiose tone that could never be written today.

Alexandra Styron, Reading My Father

I skimmed this. I didn’t care for her perspective, and would have preferred a more straightforward biography of Styron (not a big fan of the memoir form in general). I was interested to see how Styron worked. In one passage, the daughter visits the university to sort through Styron’s papers, and she finds boxes full of an unfinished manuscript, and the first drafts were a real mess, pages and pages of rambling prose shot out as if from a cannon that the author gradually tamed with each subsequent draft.

Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Very entertaining, and quite well written. These novels and stories read like something written today, so I can see how Holmes has endured.

Best American Stories 2011

I didn’t get very far in this one. Geraldine Brooks rants in the introduction about how narcissistic American fiction is, saying things like, “There is a war on.” Despite her prescriptive introduction, what I read of her choices were the same tired pieces that I think gives American fiction a bad rap.

Keith Lee Morris, Call it What You Want

I enjoy Morris’s work. This collection’s movement is from realistic stories—what he does best, I think, Ford-esque stories set in Idaho—to dream-sequence tales. The second story, “Camel Light,” was about a man in a room who finds a cigarette, and through 20 pages of rumination his entire world comes to an end. That was one of the finest pieces I’ve read all year, certainly in a short story. Were I still teaching, I’d put that on my syllabus because it shows that you don’t need “plot” to create a short story. “Camel Light” is about a guy sitting in a room; he doesn’t meet anyone, and the only actual event is he notices a cigarette under his dishwasher. I still don’t know how Morris pulled that off.

Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists

This book started well, but turned south. Each chapter is a self-contained story about an employee with an Italian newspaper—the aging stringer in Paris, the aspiring stringer in Cairo, the obituary writer, the editor-in-chief. Interspersed are italicized sections that tell this history of the paper. Unfortunately, I was not engaged by the italicized history, and by midway through, each of the stories began to feel like tricks—they had clever or one-line trick endings that undercut the story. Finally, the book is marketed as a novel, but the through-line wasn’t strong enough for this reader to consider it a true novel, but rather a collection of linked stories. In general I’m not interested in the question of “linked stories” vs. “novel-in-stories” vs. “novel,” that spectrum that links short fiction to the novel. But in this case the connections were just too loose. Maybe it’s just that I didn’t care for some of the stories, so I’m harping on the packaging.

My reading slowed down in November. Emily’s car broke, which took several evenings to take care of. Then we had company for Thanksgiving. Finally, I read a book’s worth of lecture notes about the Persian Empire for the Great Courses assignment, so I didn’t read as much this month. Most of my energy at this point went toward mopping up loose ends for Sealy Communications.

Don DeLillo, Americana

I love DeLillo’s prose, and it’s interesting to see how in this first novel all of his themes are already there—crowds, mass media, paranoia, character numbness, satire, art and exhibition. Part One is a terrific read, an analysis of life in corporate Manhattan in the ’60s, with all the booze and womanizing and Machiavellian office drama one could ask for. Part Two takes an interesting turn, where you see wild leaps into the character’s past. I quit in Part Three, the road trip, because I started to get burned out.

The thing about DeLillo is that his sentences sizzle, but his novels can drag on. Part of his project is to explore numb characters and the circumstances for their numbness. David Bell, here, is numb from corporate life, from his meaningless personal life (a broken marriage, a string of affairs), and from rocky things in his past. The road trip seems an effort to wake up from the nightmare, as the book flap notes, but he’s not really developed as a flesh-and-blood character in the conventional realist sense. There’s still some remove between the narrator and the reader—and between the narrator and himself. We find out he’s narrating from an island where he’s alone. You can riff off the “no man is an island” idea, and say Bell’s character is what results from the “I’m an island” perspective, fostered by commercialism, which might be true, but it’s hard to read about.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

This novel is unusual because of its first-person plural point of view. The narrators are a collective group of men who were teenage boys when five teenage sisters committed suicide over the course of a year. It’s interesting how the narrative develops, as a kind of investigation, complete with a series of numbered exhibits. It’s a tight, readable book, but I did have two disappointments. First, Eugenides does a good job of developing everything about the first two girls, Cecilia and Lux, but the other three remain rather vague. Secondly, he does quick sketches of the boys, but they too remain rather vague on the whole. I was hoping for a bit more delineation of the characters, a la Joshua Ferris in Then We Came to the End.

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four

Following the Chabon (see below) and inspired by the series “Sherlock” on PBS, I pulled out some Sherlock Holmes, which I’ve never read. These two are the first two novels in the Holmes series, and both are short (about 100-150 pages each) and surprisingly well-written. They were quick reads, and satisfying, and I’m looking forward to reading more.

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

This was probably the most surprising book I read all month. A colleague loaned it to me after reading it in two sittings and heaping lavish praise upon it. I used to like Chabon a lot more than I do now. I like him on a sentence-level, but at the risk of sounding elitist, his books don’t always have the kind of gravitas I’m looking for. This novel, however, is his masterpiece. It’s too bad all the awards went to Kavalier and Clay because in my book The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is the one to read.

The story takes as its premise that instead of creating Israel after WWII, the United Nations set up a temporary, 60-year settlement in Sitka, Alaska. Now, in 2007, the settlement is about to end—a process of Reversion. In that milieu, Chabon opens the novel with a murder investigation—a dead Russian chess player in a fleabag motel, just what the burned out detective needs. Unfortunately, the detective’s ex-wife gets transferred over to be his new boss and tells him to bury the case, which of course he can’t do. Trouble ensues for him and his partner.

What’s so interesting here is that the novel follows Chabon’s literary instincts—to re-introduce genre and plot to literary fiction—and creates a wonderful hybrid. We get a detective story, a political thriller, and something of a fantasy. Chabon builds a world wholly and convincingly, with wonderful echoes of our current state of affairs. Moreover, the plot comes together seamlessly so that no elements are wasted. Definitely a must-read.

In addition to the fiction, I read quite a few business books this month in preparation for launching Sealy Communications full time, relatively dull books about accounting and business structure and prospecting and marketing et cetera.

George Singleton, Drowning in Gruel

Good God, George Singleton is funny. I’d somehow missed this collection of stories. After a while, Singleton’s stories start to blur together, but this collection contains some gems. I have to say, though, that the collection is a bit darker in places than a lot of his stuff—for instance, the first story is about a guy who goes on a media tour when his stray dog has 24 puppies. The puppies all die and the dude’s marriage falls apart and and in the end he buys a shotgun for an implied suicide. It’s told in third person, unusual for Singleton, and while it’s funny and satirical, I think it also could have been toned down.

Daniel Woodrell, Under the Bright Lights

This book’s title comes from a great quote by Joe Frazier about how if you cheat in your training in the “dark of morning” you’ll be found out under the bright lights. This novel is the first in Woodrell’s trilogy about detective Rene Shade and his misfit brother. Cajun noir, I’d call this (though I found out at AWP that the critical term is “country noir”), and it’s fun — not on the level with Winter’s Bone – but still a great study in that literary/storytelling sweet spot.

Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander

I picked this up on the recommendation of one of my old professors. It’s interesting for its world-building—nautical life in the 18^th century—but overall the book didn’t hook me. It seemed to focus more on world-building than a narrative through-line. The main character was promoted to captain, and he organizes a crew, including a mysterious surgeon. Compare that to the menace at the beginning of Moby-Dick.

Charles Baxter, “Westland” and “Gryphon”

After a trip to Michigan, I pulled some Baxter off the shelf to see how he characterizes the landscape, which is distinctive. Westland is an area in suburban Detroit, and this story demonstrates what Baxter has termed “Captain Happen,” meaning a character comes in and upsets the equilibrium. Here, a teenage girl shows up at the zoo with a gun, and a man drives her home. “Gryphon” is about a strange substitute teacher—another “Captain Happen.”

Charles Dodd White, Sinners of Sanction County

White edited an anthology a while back, where he said he wanted to get down to the mud and the blood and the beer of Appalachia. He explores that terrain in this, his first collection of stories. What struck me most, and what I found the most memorable, was his language, which absolutely shimmered. The stories are short, but cut to the bone. Reminded me of Ron Rash’s book Casualties. Like Rash, I think we’ll see a lot of good things from White.

Patricia Henley, Other Heartbreaks

My review of Henley’s new collection of stories was published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Alan Heathcock, Volt

These stories are pretty intense, and Heathcock takes great care with his language. The first story, “The Staying Freight,” is particularly engaging. A farmer, in the wake of driving a tractor over his son, drives his truck in front of a train, and the train operator harasses him. The farmer then walks off and becomes a kind of circus freak in a far-off county. There are some recurring characters, such as the sheriff who turns her blind eye to a dead bad man. It’s an unflinching worldview overall, which I enjoyed.

When I put the blog on hiatus, I began writing short synopses of the books I read each month. I went on a mystery kick in September, and read quite a few fast-paced pulps in two days apiece. Not blogged about is Tyler Cowen’s The Age of the Infovore, which I enjoyed for its reading of Sherlock Holmes as mildly autistic. But since I’m an avid reader of Cowen’s blog, a lot of the ideas were not that new to me.

Barry Hannah, Long Last Happy and Ray

Hannah is a balls-to-the-wall comic wild man, highly recommended. Long Last Happy is a posthumous selected stories, and a good place to start. It might take you a few stories to see what he’s doing, but once it clicks, it’s a great ride. Ray is a short novel about the escapades of a small-town recovering drunk. One of the best comic novels I’ve ever read.

Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams

This is interesting for its structure, because chapters bounce back and forth between a husband and wife, Mitch and Jean, around World War II, then bounce around with their kids as time passes. Phillips writes witha  flat, objective voice along the lines of Anne Beattie, so it didn’t pull me through the way more language-driven books do.

George Pelecanos, The Cut

This began my mystery binge. I heard an interview with Pelecanos on NPR about his research method, how he wants to be so accurate that he’ll stake out a house if he’s going to have it broken into in a novel. The novel is fast-paced and suspenseful, and Pelecanos handles the story (private investigator in DC) well. It’s worth a read if you want to study pacing.

Laura Lippman, Charm City

Set in Baltimore and about a newspaper reporter-turned-private investigator, the set-up will be familiar to those who enjoyed season 5 of The Wire. I found the plot a bit transparent. This is plot (a), this is plot (b), and this is the subplot, and here’s how they come together. But it’s a quick, breezy read.

Dennis Lehane, Moonlight Mile

Of all the mysteries I read this month, Lehane, I think, rises most successfully out of the genre. This novel is a sequel to Gone Baby Gone, and though I found some of the dialogue distracting (too many witty quips at dangerous moments), the novel as a whole is pretty solid.

Richmond Noir, Ed. Tom De Haven et al.

This anthology is part of the Akashic Books noir series and is about Richmond, Va. What I like about this series is that each story is located in a different part of town, showing you a cross-section of the city. Three stories that stood out were Mina Beverly’s “Gaia” (about a prostitute in a part of town that never gets media coverage and that I didn’t know existed), Tom de haven’s “Playing With DaBlonde” (about the sex fetishes of an out-of-work ad man, and I’d classify it as one of the most “Richmond today” of the stories here), and Howard Owen’s “The Thirteenth Floor” (a solid mystery by a solid writer).

James Lee Burke, Cimarron Rose

This novel is his first in the Billy Bob Holland series, about a Texas attorney/investigator. I like Burke’s prose, and he nails the landscape, but the story was a bit choppy and uneven.

Ross MacDonald, The Underground Man

MacDonald is the heir to Chandler and Hammett, and his setting is upper-class southern California. The prose is fantastically hardboiled and Lew Archer is a good protagonist, but the story was quite baggy — a kidnapped child, a dope fiend on the run, a dead man, a missing father, a mysterious servant, a menacing real estate developer, etc. It’s like the opposite of Pelecanos’s spare, stripped down storyline, full of twists and reveals that got a bit tedious. Still, definitely put MacDonald on your list if you like hardboiled crime novels.

Evan S. Connell, Mr. Bridge

Mr. Bridge is a lovely companion to Mrs. Bridge (see below). Following the same years and many of the same events, Mr. Bridge gives us a new window on the Bridges’ lives, from a different perspective. I felt like I knew all of these characters already, but it was interesting to get the husband’s perspective. Early on, Mr. Bridge ruminates about his life at home with his wife and his life at work with his secretary:

“My life is cut in half. The halves remain side by side in perfect equilibrium like halves of a melon. I suppose the same is true of most men. Or are they somehow unlike me? Are they able to share themselves?”

In this novel we see some of Mr. Bridge’s other half. Whereas Mrs. Bridge’s perspective is one of confusion, and in the earlier novel Mr. Bridge is a shadow figure, here you get the other side of the man’s life. Still, we’re not let into his psyche as much as we are Mrs. Bridge’s. In one memorable scene here, a man tries to rob him, saying, “Stick ‘em up,” and Mr. Bridge walks on casually, saying, “Don’t be ridiculous.” Why? On the one hand, it’s clear to us what motivates Mr. Bridge and what he’s thinking; on the other hand, he’s an odd mixture, both astute about business and the ways of the world, and incredibly simpleminded and obtuse. Connell is aware of Mr. Bridge’s flaws, and because the novel, published in 1969, is set in the 1930s, we get that historical lens filtered with a layer of irony. For instance, Connell allows Mr. Bridge to think that while Hitler must be stopped, not all of his ideas are bad. What can you do with a man like that? Understand him, sympathize to a certain extent, but keep your distance.