I’m happy with the recommendations, although I suspect the recommendation Ron’s guest made — James Salter’s All That Is — wasn’t based on my list but was just a book he happens to like a lot. But still, I’ve been meaning to read Salter for a while now and haven’t gotten to it yet. I may start with A Sport and a Pastime, though, which is what I have on hand. Ron’s recommendation is more appropriate to my list — Iain Sinclair’s Ghost Milk: Recent Adventures Among the Future Ruins of London on the Eve of the Olympics. Sinclair is someone I’ve been aware of for a while but haven’t read yet. Ron’s description sounds perfect: the book is a mix of memoir, history, walking tour, and discussions of the city. It’s exactly what I’m looking for — unclassifiable, voice-driven nonfiction.

I can’t post these days without a baby picture or two, so here they are, first, a picture that makes clear what Cormac thought of his vaccinations yesterday:

And then a happier picture, with Muttboy in the background:

The first session was on “Criticism and the Essay,” and it dealt with boundaries among genres, for example, the book review versus the review essay, i.e., moving beyond the book itself to the broader context in which a book sits, or criticism, which implies an expert pronouncing judgment on a subject, versus the essay, which leaves room for not knowing, for lacking expertise. They talked about the challenge of writing what one wants to write while at the same time meeting the needs of a particular publication and a particular audience. They also talked about moving from writing polemically, i.e. letting a particular political point of view dominate one’s writing, toward writing essayistically, i.e. letting the subject rather than the point of view lead the piece.

The second session was on “The Personal and Impersonal Essay,” and the speakers in this part each gave a talk that was partly autobiographical, partly about how they negotiate the personal in their essay writing. Colm Toibin talked about how uncomfortable he is writing personally, but that he finds a way to write about himself indirectly, through the subjects that he chooses, which often end up (often unexpectedly) relating in some fashion to his personal experiences. Patricia Hampl spoke about what it is like to write autobiographically when, as she put it, nothing has ever happened to her. That turned out not to be true, of course. David Shields did a lot of what he does best: recommending great books and arguing for their greatness.

Perhaps the best part of the day came at the end when I got Shields and Lopate to sign books for me. There wasn’t a formal book signing, but all the speakers were milling around at the front of the lecture hall and looked approachable, so I got over my reluctance to talk to intimidating and famous (to me) strangers, and got their signatures. I did it without, I think, saying anything stupid.

So yay to Columbia for organizing an awesome event, and yay to Twitter for making it easier to publicize awesome events. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it to this one, but the next event (discovered on Twitter) that I’ve got my eye on is at Housing Works bookstore: “A Discussion of Women and Criticism” with Laura Miller and others.

I’ll go to this event if I can manage to tear myself away from this charming little guy:

Cormac is almost two months now and is doing well. He’s even letting me get some sleep now and then. Good boy!

He’s also left me with a surprising amount of time to read, or perhaps I have that time because I haven’t yet gone back to work. That happens next week. So far this year I’ve read 30 books, which is a lot for me. A good number of them I read before Cormac was born, but I’ve been reading steadily ever since. I read while he eats, or while Hobgoblin is watching him, or while he hangs out in the swing, and now and then I read while he naps, although he doesn’t nap much, or at least not regularly. I don’t think my reading has changed much since Cormac was born. Perhaps I’ve read a few more mysteries and lighter, easier reads than usual, but not a significantly larger number. The main reason for this, I think, is that while I’m tired a lot of the time, I’m not as exhausted as I thought I would be, and I’m getting more sleep most nights than I thought I would. Hobgoblin is to thank for this: he does a lot of the work and lets me sleep in many mornings. I haven’t slept straight through the night since the night before Cormac was born, but that doesn’t matter so much when the total number of hours I sleep is high enough.

I can’t write, even briefly, about every book I’ve read, so I won’t try. But here are some highlights:

• Sven Birkerts’s The Art of Time in Memoir. This is a great study of structure in memoir, how the events of a life are organized into a meaningful, coherent narrative. It struck me as a good introduction to the genre, with in-depth discussions of many examples, but also a good book to read for anyone who is considering writing a memoir.
• Justin Torres’s We the Animals. This short novel/novella describes scenes and stories from the life of a family, told from the perspective of one of three young boys. It’s beautifully written and the voice/perspective is done extremely well. I loved it.
• Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette. This is a hugely entertaining comic novel. The story is told largely through emails, letters, and other types of documents, which adds to the fun. It’s about an eccentric family in Seattle. The main characters are very well-drawn and the social satire is amusing.
• Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast. I read this memoir after reading and loving his later book Dog Years. Heaven’s Coast tells the story of the death of Doty’s lover from AIDS. It’s a very moving, beautiful book. I think Dog Years is better, though; it’s shorter, sharper, and more focused. But still, I find Doty’s voice and authorial presence in both books warm and wise.
• Meghan Daum’s My Misspent Youth. This is an essay collection from the 1990s; many of the essays are about money, class, New York City, and finding one’s identity and place in the literary world. The title essay is great in its blunt discussion of money, giving numbers in a way that most people avoid. Daum’s writing is light and humorous and at the same time perceptive.
• Nick Hornby’s Housekeeping Versus the Dirt. These essays are addictive. I don’t share Hornby’s taste in reading material very often, and I sometimes disagree with his ideas about what’s valuable in literature, but he’s such a fun writer about books that I read him with great enjoyment anyway.
• Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. I got this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and here’s the review I wrote for them: “I very much enjoyed this book; it’s a good story with interesting characters, and a light style that’s entertaining and readable. It’s sort of a parody of self-help books, and that conceit works well. The author follows the life of his main character pretending that it’s an illustration of how to become rich. But this is really a way to tell what is a traditional story of a man’s life. The self-help element is used partly to consider what a “self” really is and also as a way to say something about the state of Asia today. I can’t say it goes very deeply into these topics, but it handles them with a enjoyably light touch.”

There are more books I’ve read, more good ones too, but for now it’s time to return to reading.

Cormac is doing great and even letting me sleep on occasion. I’m managing to read a few books, although getting to my laptop to blog is a challenge. Maybe someday soon!

Little Cormac Robert was born on Wednesday, January 23rd, at 7:47 pm. He was 6 pounds, 12 ounces, 19.5 inches. He’s doing great, as am I. Isn’t he a little darling?

So here are some very brief thoughts about what I’ve been reading. I’d love to write longer reviews … except that’s a lie, because I’m feeling lazy and wouldn’t really love it. Brief thoughts are all I have ambition and energy for.

• Barbara Comyns’s Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. I put this on my list of my best books of 2012, but I wanted to mention it again here, as I read it right at the year’s end. What a fabulous book! Comyns has a wonderful style and creates a marvelously strange atmosphere. It reminded me of Shirley Jackson, although Comyns is less gothic. I’m looking forward to reading her other books and now have The Vet’s Daughter on its way here.
• Megan Abbott’s Dare Me. I listened to this one on audio and liked it. It’s about a group of high school girls on a cheer leading squad and a new coach who comes in and transforms their lives. The book is forthright about the combination of vulnerability and cruelty, especially the cruelty, of young women at this age, which I admired, but I loved the depiction of female athleticism and what it means to the characters to train hard and transform their bodies for competition.
• Lauren Groff’s Arcadia. This was a very absorbing read and very well-written. It’s about a commune in upstate New York and tells the story of Bit who spends his childhood there. It’s more accurate to say that the book is about Bit himself, because it follows him after he grows up and  leaves Arcadia, but, unsurprisingly, Arcadia haunts his entire life. The novel is well-written, Bit is an appealing character, and the ideas the novel explores about utopian societies are interesting.
• Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John. I approached this book as a novel, so I was surprised to see Sven Birkerts mention it as a memoir in his book on the subject. Perhaps the book combines elements of both genres. At any rate, it’s a very good book. It’s a coming-of-age story and focuses on Annie’s relationship with her mother, first with their closeness and then their growing estrangement. The outlines of the story are not unique, but it’s particularly well-told and moving.
• Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. I liked this retelling of Achilles’s story very much. It’s from the point of view of Patroclus and focuses on their relationship. The novel makes the familiar story of the Iliad feel fresh and new.
• Nicholson Baker’s The Way the World Works. This is a collection of essays, some of which were fabulous, and some of which left me thinking, huh? I should care about this why? These particular essays could have benefited from a little context, more explanation of why they were written and how they fit into the magazine or book collection they were originally written for. Baker is fascinated by the everyday stuff we are surrounded by, and I admire that quality in him, but sometimes he doesn’t convince us that his preoccupations might be our preoccupations as well. But then some of the essays are great, particularly the ones that are longer and more in-depth, where we get a sense of why his subject matters.
• Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. I was inspired to check out a couple memoirs about motherhood from the library recently, and this is the first one I read. I also found Anne Enright’s Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood, which Hobgoblin picked up and read immediately. He laughed his way through Enright’s book, while I read Cusk’s account of motherhood with growing anxiety. I admired the honesty of Cusk’s book, but her experience was very difficult. I can only hope mine won’t at all be like hers, although if it is, I’ll look back at her book and find comfort.
• Lastly, Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios. We are discussing this book at my mystery book group meeting this weekend. I enjoyed the novel very much, although I found its structure odd: it’s a thriller, I guess, but surprisingly long chunks of it are made up of people sitting around talking. There isn’t a whole lot of action, or at least not as much as you might expect. But the story itself is a good one, and the novel is very writerly as well: the main character is a crime novelist who decides he wants to investigate a crime himself, and so there is a lot of discussion of novelistic vs. real-life crimes, criminals, and crime narratives. That’s a lot of fun.

Finally, my week 38 picture:

• A bunch of reading by and about Virginia Woolf, including Hermione Lee’s awesome biography of Woolf, Woolf’s diaries Volume 2, and Mrs. Dalloway. It’s been great to think about Woolf from multiple angles including different types of writing. Perhaps I’ll continue this Woolf obsession by reading To the Lighthouse this coming year.
• Two books by Zadie Smith, both of which were awesome: NW and her essay collection Changing My Mind. I got to see her do a reading as well. I liked Smith before this year based on my reading of White Teeth, but now I’m a real fan.
• Two books by Barbara Comyns, of which I really loved Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. Our Spoons Came From Woolworths was also good, but not as good as the other. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on more Comyns books soon.

Probably two of my favorite books of the year:

• Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. This book is beautiful, it has an innovative structure, it’s smart, and it’s also personal, emotional, and compelling. Fabulous.
• Mark Doty’s Dog Years. Unmissable for anyone who loves dogs, and a really, really good read even if you don’t, because the book is about much more than that.

Some favorite novels not already mentioned:

• David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green for its distinctive voice and beautiful writing.
• Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl for unabashedly exploring an unsympathetic character (except she’s not entirely unsympathetic).
• Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl for being thoroughly absorbing and entertaining, an unputdownable book (Tana French’s In the Woods was very good for the same reasons),
• Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai for its inventiveness and energy.
• Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver for its mysteriousness, beautiful writing, and perfectly-captured atmosphere.
• Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station for its ideas about art and its perfect handling of a meandering style and form.

Some favorite nonfiction not already mentioned:

• Katherine Boo’s Beyond the Beautiful Forevers — an important story beautifully and movingly told.
• Tim Parks, Teach Us to Sit Still — the subject matter is important to me (mind/body connections, illness, meditation) and Parks combines ideas with personal story in a way that works very well.
• John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead — a great collection of essays, as is Tom Bissell’s Magic Hours, although I think Sullivan’s is more consistently good.

Best mysteries: Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Clare Fergusson series (I read the third book this year), and Tana French’s In the Woods.

Some honorable mentions: Christine Schutt’s Prosperous Friends, D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Ali Smith’s The Accidental, Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter, and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn.

All in all, a good year in reading. Happy new year everyone!

• Books read: 84
• Audiobooks: 6
• eBooks: 3
• From library: 23
• Fiction: 54 (64%)
• Nonfiction: 30 (36%, up a little bit from last year)
• Poetry: 0 (harumph)
• Essay collections: 8
• Biography/autobiography/letters/journals: 14
• Theory/criticism: 3
• Short story collections: 1
• Mysteries: 11
• Books in translation: 6

Gender breakdown:

• Men: 30 (36%, a little more equal than last year where men were only 28%, but still off the perfect gender balance I used to [accidentally] keep, which is fine)
• Women: 51 (61%)
• Both:3

Nationalities:

• Americans: 46 (55%)
• British: 24 (28%)
• Canadian: 2
• Japanese: 2
• One each by Bosnian, Czech, Egyptian, Finnish, Irish, and Swedish writers. Plus one book by an author of uncertain nationality (Olaudah Equiano — was he born in Africa or South Carolina?) and three books by multiple authors from various nationalities. There was not as much diversity here as usual, alas.

Year of publication:

• 18th century: 3
• 19th: 0 (wow — down from the already low number of 2 from last year! I need to read some 19th-century fiction soon)
• First half of 20th century: 8
• Second half of 20th century: 20
• 2000-2009: 18
• 2010-2012: 35

I’m reading a lot more contemporary fiction lately, which I don’t like in theory, although I’m enjoying it in practice.

As for cycling, my total mileage is way down this year, for obvious reasons. I rode 3,677 miles, down from 5,213 the previous year. But I rode over 3,000 of those miles in the first half of the year, mostly before I knew I was pregnant. If I’d kept up that pace, I would have been close to my old yearly mileage record of 6,597. That’s a number I won’t see again for a while. I did some races last year, maybe 6 or so, but that’s all over for a while. Next year, I’ll be grateful for every mile I get to ride, and I won’t even think about racing.

And now to think about which books from this year I liked best …

And now I … wait. After submitting final grades last week, I now have no obligations at work until I return 6-8 weeks after the baby is born (at which point I won’t have many obligations — it will be nothing but putting in an appearance in the writing center a couple times a week during the remainder of the spring semester to keep the paychecks coming). So all I have to do is stay healthy, take care of a few things like buying a car seat and arranging the nursery, and sit on the couch and read in between muttering complaints about my sore back. I’m extremely lucky to have so much time to rest before the baby is born (extremely!), but at the same time, I’m wondering what the next few weeks will bring. I generally don’t deal well with having a lot of time on my hands. I get anxious and cranky and find myself doing nothing at all. But this time I’m going to keep telling myself to enjoy it while it lasts, because it won’t last long, and maybe I’ll convince myself. We’ll see.

As for what I’ve read recently, I’ve been ploughing through Francis Burney’s long (900+ page) novel Camilla and should finish it in a day or two. It’s been a fun read. Yes, it could be shorter — there are episodes that could easily be cut — but it’s obviously not the kind of book you pick up when you want a quick read; it’s the kind of book you pick up when you want to be absorbed in a long story, and it’s perfect for that. Camilla is that very typical 18th/19th novel character — the young woman venturing out into the world for the first time without the protection of a mother, finding that all is not what it seems and that people can be treacherous and deceitful. Even those who appear to be kindhearted and friendly can pose dangers — in fact, these are the most dangerous of all because they seem so trustworthy. But they are all too often frivolous, or friends with the wrong people, or profligate with their money, or vain, and they lead poor, susceptible Camilla down dangerous paths. The book is all about the dangers of having the wrong friends, and also, although Burney wouldn’t frame it this way, about how horrible it is that women of Camilla’s background can’t easily earn money. As the novel goes on, it gets more and more obsessed with money and the problem of not having any, and Camilla can do nothing about it except look for new people to borrow from and hope her relatives can come to her rescue. If only she could just work a small part-time job for a while, she would be fine, but, of course, she doesn’t live in that world. And I don’t live in Camilla’s world, a fact for which I’m very, very grateful. The restrictions she lives under are absurd, but no one in her world sees it that way.

I also finished Virginia Woolf’s diary, volume 2, which I’ve been reading off and on for several months now. I’ll admit I skimmed over some of the passages where she talks about her social life, except those where T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster appear, in favor of passages where she discusses her writing and reading and her mental state. Those passages are fascinating, particularly toward the end of this volume where she is working on Mrs. Dalloway. She struggles with it at times, but she also seems to know that this is going to be one of her masterpieces. She is writing in a way that pleases her and she doesn’t much care, at least in her best moments, about what people think. She’s found her style and her subject, and it’s fun to know from the perspective of the future that her confidence is justified.

A few quick notes on other books I’ve read in the last month or so: first, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which was as great as everyone seems to be saying it is. It’s an absorbing story, and at the same time it leads you to thoughts, questions, and conclusions about global economic structures without being at all didactic. She has a great way of keeping her focus on the story, but getting the reader to realize the implications of the story without spelling them out. Surely that’s not easy to do.

I also read Christopher Beha’s What Happened to Sophie Wilder, which I liked very much — it has a satisfying structure and is the sort of book that makes you turn back to the first page after finishing it to see what you missed the first time around. It turns out to be worthwhile to take that extra look because then you understand the book as a whole so much better. It’s a book about art, specifically about being a writer, and it’s also about faith. This is where I balked a little bit, for the very personal and non-literary reason that I didn’t understand the religious conversion the main character undergoes. Hers is a kind of faith I have a hard time wrapping my mind around. I’m still undecided as to whether Sophie makes sense as a character. But in a way this is okay because the narrative purposely keeps a distance from her and she is meant to be mysterious (as the novel’s title indicates). I liked the way the novel circles around her, trying and never quite succeeding to understand what happened.

And, finally, I finished Christina Schutt’s novel Prosperous Friends, which was a dark and difficult read that I liked very much. The characters are complicated and frequently unlikeable and the prosperous friends are not always friends you actually want to have. It’s a book about relationships and marriages gone wrong and only occasionally going right. I think I’m in the mood for unlikeable characters these days, so all this was fine, but I particularly liked the writing, which was rich and poetic — not always a good thing as far as I’m concerned, but it worked well here. The writing makes you work a bit, as Schutt does not always fill in all the pieces of the narrative, but it captures the mood of the novel perfectly.

I’ll close with my latest picture, which shows me looking a little bit harried — which is only to be expected, I guess! I hope to be back soon with my year-end round-up.

• First, there was Kenzaburo Oe’s novel A Personal Matter, which is a strange choice of book to read during pregnancy, since it’s about a man who discovers that his son was born mentally handicapped. He spends the rest of the novel reacting badly to this news. But I wasn’t bothered by the subject matter, and I liked the novel a lot. There’s an unsparing directness to it, a sense of strangeness and a willingness to dig deep into the main character’s disturbing, although in moments unexpectedly sympathetic, mind that I admired.
• Then I read Tim Parks’s illness memoir Teach Us to Sit Still, which I also liked very much. He tells the story of mysterious pelvic pain that he suffered from for many years before feeling desperate enough to seek solutions in unexpected places. He turns to various forms of meditation and finds that this helps him recover and transforms him in deeper ways as well. The book is a really interesting exploration of the limits of western medicine and the surprising (to him and to many other people I’m sure) connections between the mind and the body.
• I listened to The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker on audio, and I’m not sure why, but I didn’t respond to this with as much enthusiasm as I thought I would. Parts of the story were great, the depiction of how people responded to the totally mysterious slowing down of the earth’s rotation in particular. I liked how simply and naturally Walker describes what this was like. The integration of the sci-fi elements with a coming-of-age story was well-done as well. But the coming of age story itself seemed a little cliché. I didn’t really like the teenage romance element.
• Then there was Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, which I thought was fabulous. I suppose this is a fairly cliché coming-of-age story as well, but the writing was very, very good, which made up for it. Mitchell has a marvelous way with a sentence. It’s a novel-in-stories, each chapter forming its own vignette in the life of the main character, a thirteen year-old boy who struggles with bullies and a stammer. Mitchell captures this character and the setting in which he lives very well.
• For my mystery book group, I read Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, a book I chose after having heard good things about Hughes. It turned out to be a good choice, as the group liked her, and the discussion was lively. It’s told in the first person from the perspective of the murderer, and the mood is unsettling and claustrophobic. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out the extent to which the narrator is unreliable and what exactly the other characters figured out and when. I like that sort of puzzle.
• From the library, I got a copy of Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins, a book I thought was very well done, a good, entertaining piece of literary fiction that made me feel a little dissatisfied with the state of literary fiction generally. I can’t pinpoint anything wrong with the book, but I guess I’m in the mood for books that are more innovative or do something more exciting on the sentence level. It’s a book about a family in Chicago and their struggles with a wife/mother who is seriously ill because of her weight. The descriptions of the family dynamics are good and if you’re in the mood for a family drama, you might very well like it more than I did.
• Then Kate Zambreno’s book Heroines, which I liked with some reservations. It’s partly literary criticism, history, and biography, and partly memoir. I enjoyed the combination of these things. Zambreno focuses on the “wives of modernism,” writers such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien Eliot, and others who were kept from writing or whose writing was dismissed and ignored because of their gender. Zambreno analyzes the language used to belittle these writers and the ideas about women and creativity that still influence us today. All this I liked. I just wished the book had a clearer organizational structure, as it felt repetitious and too long.
• Finally, I just finished Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir about her mother’s death, The Long Goodbye. This is a book that grew on me as I read; at first it seemed to be a fairly unremarkable story about illness that I wished had more reflection rather than straightforward narrative. The reflective elements of the book became more important as it went on, however, and the second half or so has a lot of interesting insights into grief and mourning.

I thought I’d give you the list of books I bought during a spur-of-the-moment book buying spree in Manhattan last weekend; I decided that I wanted to get out and walk around the city a bit while I still easily can. I visited 192 Books for the first time, a very small but great bookstore, and also old favorites Three Lives and McNally-Jackson. Here’s what I got:

• Jean Strouse’s Alice James A Biography
• Andre Aciman’s Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere
• Jo Ann Beard’s Boys of My Youth
• Barbara Comyn’s Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
• Maggie Nelson’s  Jane: A Murder
• William Gass’s On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry
• Roland Barthes A Mourning Diary

And now for a pregnancy update: I’m a little under eight weeks away from my due date. All is going well, although I’m eagerly awaiting the end of the semester, which will get here in about two weeks, so I can stop having to lumber around campus feeling ridiculously large. My teaching is going fine, but it’s getting increasingly uncomfortable to stand in front of a class. I’m both looking forward to some time in which to linger on the couch and do nothing, and worried that I will be too uncomfortable to enjoy it and/or bored out of my mind. We shall see. Here I am at 32 weeks: