I’ve always liked books that tell the same story from multiple perspectives because you can see how people react to the same situation in different ways or how they interpret a situation differently given their varied preoccupations and levels of knowledge. It shows how little solid information we have about anything and how our most prized opinions may be based on very incomplete knowledge. Smith tells her story from four different perspectives, each one appearing three different times: Eve, her second husband Michael, and two children from her first marriage, 17-year-old Magnus and 12-year-old Astrid. They are on vacation in a rental house in Norfolk, and in walks Amber, a 30-something woman who wheedles her way into their lives. Each one thinks someone else in the family knows Amber, so no one seriously questions her presence. The story is about the havoc she wreaks as she develops different relationships with each family member and makes them confront who they are as individuals and as a family. There are short sections that are presumably from Amber’s perspective as well, although they don’t tell us much about who Amber is. She remains a mystery.

What works best is Smith’s use of language to capture the distinctive thought pattern of each character. The opening lines of Astrid’s story, for example, are interrupted by the words “Astrid Smart. Astrid Berenski. Astrid Smart. Astrid Berenski” in parentheses, as Astrid, in the midst of her thoughts on the dawn, also thinks about her own name and identity. She was born Astrid Berenski, but when her mother remarried, her name changed, and she is constantly thinking about what this change means. Eve’s first section is told in questions and answers, which is appropriate as she is a researcher and writer whose books are part biography, part fiction and who undergoes interviews herself. This format nicely captures her uncertainty and self-doubt. There is even a very odd section where’s Michael’s story transforms into a series of poems. Normally I would find this sort of thing irritating, but here it works: Michael is the sort who might start composing poems (bad ones) in his mind as a way of thinking about his life, and so it’s natural for the narrative to follow his mind there.

I found the characters almost equally compelling — which strikes me as hard to pull off when a writer is moving back and forth among four of them — and enjoyed being pulled into the emotional world of the Smart family. I read this book partly because I’ve heard very good things about Smith’s latest novel There But For The, and I wanted to read the Smith book on my shelves before moving on to the new one. I’m glad I did, and now I’m even more eagerly awaiting Smith’s latest.

The Lethem was fabulous as well. Motherless Brooklyn is the second Lethem novel I’ve read, after The Fortress of Solitude, and I think it’s my favorite (perhaps because the subject matter of the other one didn’t appeal as much). It’s a detective novel, and a book I read for my mystery book group, which met last night. In a lot of ways, it’s a straightforward mystery, with murders and detectives and clues, etc. But the main character, Lionel, has Tourette’s, which means he’s not able to control his words and actions as a traditional detective might. I thought Lethem did a great job portraying what life with Tourette’s might be like (not that I know for sure, of course, but his depiction was convincing), and I was fascinated by how imaginative and fluent Lionel was with language. The problem, of course, was that he couldn’t control the outpouring of words, and this frequently got him into trouble. He’s an appealing character — a thoroughly unconventional detective who does the best he can in some difficult circumstances.

I also finished Terry Castle’s collection of essays The Professor and Other Writings, which was a little disappointing. Some of the early essays in the book were good, especially the one on Susan Sontag and another one her obsession with World War I. Other essays I didn’t quite get the point of, and the title essay is much too long, book-length, really, with not enough pay-off. The success of an essay collection comes down to voice, I think, and I was never quite won over by Castle’s.

And now I’m reading Ali Smith’s The Accidental, which has been very good so far. It tells a story from multiple points of view and follows the characters’ minds closely in a stream-of-consciousness style that captures their different experiences well. I can sometimes be put off by writing that seems labored or self-consciously poetic, and I postponed reading this book for a long time because I was afraid I would find that kind of writing here, but that hasn’t been the case at all.

Before I go, a quick note on cycling: since January 1st, I’ve done 11 rides with 410 miles total in over 26 hours on the bike. That’s perhaps one reason I haven’t posted here much!

• Reading the Little House books and books about the series, including Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life and Anita Clair Fellman’s Little House, Long Shadow. It was great rereading Wilder’s books, of course, but also fascinating to read other’s responses to and interpretations of them. I don’t usually read multiple books about the same subject all at once, and it was fun.
• My Dorothy Wordsworth reading, including her letters, her Grasmere and Alfoxden journals, and Francis Wilson’s biography of her, The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth — another example of reading into a subject more deeply than usual. The Wilson biography is fabulous.
• Two books by Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The Year of Magical Thinking, this last one connected in my mind with Joyce Carol Oates’s book A Widow’s Story. Didion is amazing, and reading the Oates book was a powerful experience.
• Two books by Scarlett Thomas, PopCo and Our Tragic Universe. Both of these books I felt ambivalently about as I read them, but they made me think so much I couldn’t help but admire them, and just recently I bought The End of Mr. Y. I love how strange her novels are, how they break the “rules” of good fiction, or at least the ones I have in my mind, but are great and fascinating anyway.

Some great nonfiction:

• Geoff Dyer’s Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, an absolutely fabulous essay collection, one that got me interested in whatever subject Dyer took up, no matter how far from my usual interests.
• Sarah Bakewell’s biography of Montaigne, How to Live, a model of a great biography.
• Deb Olin Unferth’s Revolution, a memoir with a wonderfully understated, funny, fabulous voice.
• Lauren Slater’s Lying, a book that got me to think about truth (and lying) in memoir like no other book I’ve read, plus one that’s simply a wonderfully entertaining read.
• Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, a book that has inspired my dedication to aimless reading purely for pleasure in 2012.
• William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. I have become a huge fan of William James’s calm, thoughtful, incisive, tolerant persona.
• Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, an incredibly entertaining and thought-provoking meditation on what it means to read and not read.
• Honorable mentions: Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives, Andre Dubus III’s Townie, Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book.

It wasn’t the greatest year for fiction, but here are the novels I liked best, other than ones mentioned above:

• Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. The quiet power of this book has stuck with me.
• Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus. She’s a challenging, strange novelist, qualities I think I like very much.
• Arthur Phillips’s The Tragedy of Arthur. I loved the playfulness of this book, and Phillips’s gentle mockery of memoirs. Plus he wrote a fake Shakespeare play, which takes guts.
• Teju Cole’s Open City. The story of a guy walking around New York City, thinking about stuff. But more complicated than that, of course.
• Lars Iyer’s Spurious. This book is funny, witty, strange, a little like a Beckett play. All good things.
• Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. A wonderfully strange, Gothic novel that uses first person point of view to great effect.
• Honorable mentions: Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, with a protagonist I came to love; Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending for its mix of excellent plotting and philosophical musings; David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion, for its, well, strangeness is the word of the day, it seems, and this book was one of the strangest of them all.

Best mysteries:

• Laurie King’s A Monstrous Regiment of Women
• Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time
• Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s The Laughing Policeman

Biggest disappointments:

• Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination. Lots of people loved this book, but it didn’t work for me at all.
• Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale. I was all set to love this book, especially since I like The Painted Veil so much, but I’m beginning to think Maugham isn’t a favorite of mine after all.
• Maria Edgeworth’s Helen. This book has some good points, but I really loved Edgeworth’s Belinda and wanted to feel the same about this one but didn’t.

I think I’ve mentioned at least 1/3 of all the books I’ve read this year, so this is hardly a best-of list. But I would be at a complete loss to come up with a list of the 10 best or whatever, so a larger survey felt like a better thing to do. All in all, it was a great year for nonfiction and an okay year for fiction. Perhaps I’ll dedicate myself to finding as many novels to fall in love with in 2012 as possible.

But, whatever. My only resolution for 2012 is not to care about numbers so much (although I will still keep track) and to read whatever I please. So although it’s been fun reading fast (for me) this year, and not going to try to keep it up.

So, a breakdown:

• Books read: 100
• Fiction: 67
• Nonfiction: 33 (I thought this percentage would be higher than last year, but it’s only higher by a little; last year I read about 30% nonfiction)
• Poetry: 0 (I read part of a book that I didn’t finish)
• Essays: 9
• Biography/autobiography/letters: 16
• Theory/criticism: 6
• Short stories: 3
• Mysteries: 11
• Books in translation: 11

Gender breakdown:

• Men: 28
• Women: 68
• Both:4

I’m usually very close to even between men and women, and I don’t know what made the difference this year. There were the nine Little House books, of course, but beyond that, it was just a matter of what I felt like reading at any particular moment (and the books chosen for book groups).

Nationalities:

• Americans: 54
• English: 20
• Canadian: 5
• French: 4
• Irish: 4
• Finnish: 2 (two books by Tove Jansson)
• 1 book each by Czech, Egyptian, Nigerian, Scottish, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss, Trinidadian, Virgin Islander, and Welsh writers. Plus one book by authors from various nationalities.

Year of publication:

• 17th century: 1
• 18th: 1
• 19th: 2 (yikes! these numbers are low)
• First half of 20th century: 22
• Second half of 20th century: 17
• 2000s: 22
• 2010-2011: 33
• Various time periods: 2

This is way more contemporary writing than usual, 55% from the 21st century. I read a lot of review copies this year, which contributed to this.

Now a word about my riding this year. In a lot of ways, it was an off year for riding: I didn’t race much and I spent a lot of the year trying to get in shape after having fallen out of it. This happened partly for good reasons: my 3 1/2 week trip to Ireland and England was great but meant a lot of missed riding. There were also lost days because of my thyroid problem and because of bad weather, both last winter and this fall (hurricanes, blizzards).

BUT, 2011 is also my second highest mileage year ever, at 5,213 miles. My highest year was 2010 when I rode 6,597 miles, and 2009 is now my third highest when I reached 5,097. So, even though I was often riding slowly, I still rode a lot. I’ve kicked up the mileage in November and December in preparation for winter training and the March racing season, and if keep I my current pace up, I might break my mileage record in 2012. But that’s not a particular goal of mine. We’ll just have to see what happens.

I’d like to write a best-of 2011 list; I’ll be back to do that soon.

Critics have written about the differences between The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates’s own grief memoir A Widow’s Story, which I read earlier this year. But the entire time I was reading Didion, I kept thinking about the similarities between the two. The books have the same structure: they cover about a year’s worth of time after the husband’s death, they tell in great detail the story of the death itself, dwelling on and returning to the details of the death scene, trying to figure out how it could have happened. They tell of kind and not-so-kind friends who try to offer support, and of reading their husband’s writing in search of clues that might tell them something new about their lost one. They also are going through a traumatic experience from a place of great privilege: their husbands will get obituaries in famous newspapers and will be mourned by strangers and neither needs to worry about financial security. This makes a difference in some ways and in others it doesn’t: they are describing an experience many people have gone through or will, but theirs is not exactly a universal story. Still, both books offer much to think about — and to feel. If Oates’s book speaks more on an emotional level — and I was riveted by the raw emotion on the page as well as horrified by it — I admired Didion’s resolve not to accept comfort that violates long-held intellectual beliefs. She knows there is no God to create meaning out of her loss; all there is is change and all she can do is watch change as it happens.

I thought when I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking that reading Blue Nights right away might be more grief memoir than I could handle, but I don’t feel that way now. Reading two grief memoirs by Oates might be more than I can handle, but Didion is not such an emotionally raw writer. But I don’t have Blue Nights on hand, so that reading will wait until I find a copy somewhere.

First, The Marriage Plot. I liked it just fine. But, but … I wanted to like it more than that and so felt a little disappointed. It’s a very absorbing story, and I read the novel quickly. Ultimately, though, I didn’t think it was doing anything terribly interesting. It was good but not great. I guess I don’t think the question the novel asks — what happens to the marriage plot in the modern age when marriage is so embattled? — is all that interesting. Forms of the marriage plot still exist, but it is radically changed and becomes something more like the relationship plot. But this is something tons of novels explore, right? I did like all the novel’s bookishness, Madeleine’s literature and theory courses and her obsession with A Lover’s Discourse. And I liked Mitchell and his religious explorations. I thought the ending was satisfying as well.

Also, Mariana, by Monica Dickens. Again, I liked it just fine, and again, it was good but not great. The story is episodic, recounting scenes from the main character Mary’s life from her girlhood up through her (early or mid?) adult years. She visits the country, she goes to school, she gets “engaged” as a child to a boy who takes the “engagement” much less seriously than she does, she slowly comes to face more grown-up worries. What makes the novel’s structure more interesting is the opening scene, which shows her as an adult during World War II waiting to find out whether her husband was drowned or not. After this, we move back into her girlhood and don’t find out what happened to the husband — or even who the husband is — until the novel’s end. This created enough suspense and interest to keep me going. The novel was charming and fun, but not something I was in a mood to fall in love with.

I’ve been in a mood to read fiction that’s a little more experimental and strange and not likely to be the kind of perfectly competent but not very exciting novel I’ve read recently, so I picked up David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Oblivion, and even though I’m not loving that book either, it is closer to what I’ve wanted. It is strange, certainly.

The book has fantasy elements to it, but they don’t become part of the story until Charlotte gets lost: while wandering around the woods nearly starved to death, she comes across a group of large human-like creatures, frightening-looking but kind animals, who slowly adopt her into their community. The creatures’ lives are endangered by the encroachments of logging; they need space in which to wander and forage for food, but that space is quickly disappearing.

All this works pretty well, although the fantasy element comes too late in the book to feel natural and properly-integrated. The book’s structure is odd in one way — the pacing is wildly uneven — but quite interesting in another: it is a mix of several genres. The main story is told through Charlotte’s diary, but interspersed throughout are fragments of her fiction, stories that are sometimes based on her own life and so rework the material in the diary, and also Charlotte’s essay-like ponderings on what it means to be a woman writer. These materials reinforce each other by exploring themes and ideas from different perspectives, so we can see Charlotte’s life told through her diary and also transformed into fiction.

What bothered me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling although I’m not sure how fair this is, was that Charlotte felt unrealistic, too much of a fantasy figure. For her to be able to write as much as she does without a husband and with five sons seems improbable, even given the nanny. But even more so, her feminism seemed fashioned purposely to please 21st-century audiences rather than to capture a truth about the time period. I know that feminism at the turn of the last century was well-developed and that people were making arguments about women’s writing similar to Charlotte’s, but Charlotte seems just too perfect. She defies stereotypes about women at every turn, in the way she dresses and acts, in her conversation, in the way she treats men, in her writing. I am all for strong female characters who defy gender stereotypes, but I don’t want to be jerked out of the world of the story by the feeling that I’m being presented with an argument rather than a character.

All in all, it’s a pretty odd book, although not entirely in a bad way. The book’s various elements — the wild west, the fantasy, the feminism, the theorizing about gender and writing, the experimenting with structure — don’t quite cohere, but it’s interesting in parts, and it’s fun when the story finally hooks you and you absolutely have to know how Charlotte is going to make it out of the woods.

• The Laughing Policeman, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. I chose this book for my mystery book group and am glad I did, because I liked it very much and most of the members of my book group did as well. This is the fourth in what’s called the Martin Beck series, but Martin Beck is really just one of a group of characters and doesn’t stand out much more than the others. The book is dark, as one expects of Scandinavian crime fiction, and the writing is very good. I’m not sure how the authors divided up the writing, but whatever they did worked well. I liked the interaction among all the officers, and I thought the dark humor that runs throughout the book was great.
• Maria Edgeworth’s Helen. This was a bit of a disappointment. It tells an interesting story and takes up some important themes of the early 19th century, but it’s too long, with too many digressions. The story is partly about the complicated friendship between Helen and Cecilia; Helen is your typical nearly-perfect heroine of early fiction, and Cecilia is charming and gracious but has a fatal flaw: when under pressure, she hides the truth about herself. This puts Helen in danger and threatens her potential marriage. The novel is also about unreasonable expectations (or at least I think they are unreasonable expectations — it’s hard to tell what Edgeworth’s stance is) placed on women to love one man only during the course of their lives. The social critique here is interesting, but the novel needed some serious editing.
• William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. I really loved this book. James surveys a range of religious experiences, focusing on the personal rather than on the institutional aspects of religion. His approach is for the most part nonjudgmental; he wants to describe and understand rather than to judge. The basic idea he is working with is that our religious experiences stem from our individual psychological histories and that the many varieties of religious experience exist because humans have a wide range of religious needs. I valued most his tolerant and open-minded approach, as well as his very pragmatic idea that we should follow the religious practices and beliefs that suit our needs most.
• Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. This book was so much fun! Before this, I had only read “The Lottery” by Jackson, and now I’m ready to read more. I loved Jackson’s use of point of view; she writes in the first person and uses it masterfully to slowly reveal information about the protagonist and her family — information that, as it turns out, is really bizarre. The book isn’t scary exactly, but it’s incredibly creepy, and it perfectly maintains that tone right through to the end. I’m looking forward to reading The Haunting of Hill House very much.

The title is a little misleading, because even though Bayard says he is going to give advice about how to talk about books you haven’t read, he only does that occasionally. Mostly the book is a meditation on what it means to have read something and on how small and uncertain the difference is between having read something and not having read it. If you think about it, is it meaningful to say that you have read a book you don’t remember a thing about beyond its title? Isn’t it possible to know much more about a book that you have recently skimmed than one you read 20 years ago and have completely forgotten? Isn’t it possible that you could say something more insightful about a book you have read a review of and understand from an exterior, distanced point of view, than one you have read and in whose details you have lost yourself?

I’m not in the least interested in pretending to have read books I haven’t, but I realized as I read Bayard that I talk about books I haven’t read all the time: I do it in blog posts where I talk about what I want to read or why I bought particular books that are as yet unread. I recommend books I haven’t read to people I think might possibly like them (while admitting I haven’t read them), and I allude to books I haven’t read while I’m teaching class, in order to make some point about history or context. It’s this kind of book knowledge Bayard is interested in; he talks a lot about cultural literacy, which to him means knowledge of the ways books fit together, their relationships with one another and with their contexts. I can tell you something about a Trollope novel I haven’t read because I know a little about Trollope and a fair amount about the Victorian novel. I understand the context from which his novels come, and, for that matter, I know a lot about novels. If this is the kind of knowledge about books that matters, then actually having read the Trollope novel is kind of a minor detail.

I don’t buy that argument fully — it leaves little room for the actual content of books to surprise you after all — but it does seem true that just by surrounding yourself with bookish people and culture, you can absorb a whole lot of knowledge about books you will never pick up. A bigger problem with Bayard’s argument is that he nowhere acknowledges that reading books might actually be fun. I don’t read solely for the purpose of gaining the kind of cultural literacy he describes (especially now that I’m out of grad school); I read because I want the experience of being absorbed in a book.

But these disagreements aren’t what matter to me. What really matters is the fun of exploring the complexities of reading. Bayard deconstructs the reading/nonreading distinction, but he also undermines the very notion of a book, or rather, he makes up a whole bunch of “books” in addition to the actual book you hold in your hand. Because as soon as you have finished reading a book, you immediately construct your own version of it, a “book” that is only a little bit like what you have read. Every reader brings to books a certain history, capacity, and set of interests that shape how they make sense of them, which means the books they read are a little (or a lot) different than other people’s readings of the exact same books. So when we talk about books, we are really talking about entirely different things: I’m talking about my book and you are talking about yours, no matter whether the words we read are the same or not.

So, given that logic, why not talk about books you haven’t read? One excellent point Bayard makes is that readers should lose the shame they feel about unread books. In fact, any reader’s relationship with books is primarily one of not having read them, since we can only read a very small percentage of all the books out there. Not only that, but our relationship with books we have read is one of loss: once we stop reading, our “inner” book becomes a separate thing from the book itself, and we immediately start the process of forgetting. The small percentage of what we remember, out of the tiny percentage of what we have actually read, leaves us with not a whole lot.

These arguments don’t strike me as all that original; if you’ve studied philosophy or literary theory or just thought deeply about reading they won’t be particularly surprising. But Bayard does a great job of making the ideas fun. The book makes an interesting pairing with Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction; they seem like very different books in many ways, one urging us to read for pleasure and the other not even acknowledging that pleasure in reading exists. But both urge a certain freedom in our reading, whether it’s the freedom to read at whim, or freedom from the shame we feel at not having read things. Reading is a serious endeavor, yes, but we could all stand to lighten up a bit.

The only mildly disappointing part of the evening was that I didn’t get my books signed because the line was too long and would have required that I take a late train home on a Monday night, which didn’t seem like a good idea. But perhaps I’ll see them another time.

On another note entirely, I’ve been glued to my twitter feed all day looking for updates on the Occupy Wall Street protests going on today. Who knows what will happen with the movement in the long run, but for now, I think it’s wonderful that so many people are out there exercising their right to protest. A couple weekends ago when I was in Manhattan to see the NY Public Library exhibit, I also wandered down to Zucotti Park to see what the place looked like. That day, it was thoroughly peaceful and happy. There was a police presence, but the police seemed to be chatting with the tourists, mostly. The protesters were playing music and holding meetings and handing out buttons and flyers. It was great. What’s not so great is the raid that kicked everybody out and the destruction of the OWS library, or  The People’s Library:

There’s something very wrong about police destroying thousands of books, isn’t there?

And now I’ll close with the meme that has been doing the blog rounds lately (seen most recently at Ms. Musings):

1. The book I’m currently reading: The Marriage Plot, which I started on the train ride home from the reading. I just finished up the first section, which takes place at Brown University, and from what I’ve heard of the book, I think we’re off to India next. I’m enjoying it very much. I’m also in the middle of Mariana, which got interrupted by The Marriage Plot. I usually don’t read two novels at once (unless one of them is an audio book), but I didn’t want to wait to start the Eugenides. I’m afraid I’m not giving Mariana its due.

2. The last book I finished: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard. I totally loved this book. I’ll write a post on it if I can manage it, but for now I’ll say it was a thoroughly enjoyable meditation on what reading and non-reading really mean and how the two aren’t nearly as different from each other as we generally imagine. I didn’t buy everything Bayard had to say, but that didn’t matter; I still loved it. There was something exhilarating about the freedom with which he explored the topic.

3. The next book I want to read: Next up will be Wild Life by Molly Gloss for the Slaves of Golconda. But I also need to choose a nonfiction book soon, and I have no idea what that will be. I’ve heard a couple interviews with Joan Didion lately, so maybe I will pick up a collection of her essays. Or perhaps one of my theoretical works on the essay genre, or perhaps a Janet Malcolm or Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, which, if you have read The Marriage Plot, you will understand.

4. The last book I bought: The Marriage Plot, but also the third Julia Spencer-Fleming, Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior, Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, and Ryan Van Meter’s If You Knew Then What I Know Now. Plus a whole raft of other books because I’ve gone a little crazy with the book buying this year.

5. The last book someone gave me: Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book, about C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. Fabulous book.