The Pleasure Principle
I read half of A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen (Random House) before I kicked it under my bed, bored and peevish. The essayists tended to say the same glowing things about Jane Austen and her books; the unintended effect was to send me away from the book and straight to my shelf to reread the real deal. Because, really: Life is short, and reading is so often a luxury. If you’ve got the time, why waste it on books that don’t give you pleasure?
So then, in no particular order, the nine books that got me most jazzed this year:
Wells Tower’s debut collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories, for one. The North Carolina native did surprising things with plot (Viking marauders? Really?) and downright shocking things with language, putting words together in a wondrous way (did I imagine the kinship with Saul Bellow?). Language was key, too, in Thomas Mallon’s erudite, hugely enjoyable study Yours Ever: People and Their Letters (Random House), but it was the pictures that rose to the fore in David Mazzucchelli’s graphic rumination Asterios Polyp (Pantheon).
Most critics called the history-bending novel Homer & Langley (Random House) lesser E.L. Doctorow, but most critics, frankly, can go suck it: Doctorow’s final lines read like Greek tragedy to me. For actual Greek tragedy, there was Anne Carson’s lively new translation of An Oresteia (Faber & Faber). Even Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf) spelled katastrophe in a post-9/11 Midwest and rejiggered to Moore’s signature wordplay.
Lev Grossman’s The Magicians: A Novel (Viking Press) fell short of the fun implied in the advance buzz – “it’s like Harry Potter for grownups!” – but, still, it was nicely four-lettered and moody, a welcome spot of darkness to the summer reading list. Certainly you’d expect Lit, Mary Karr’s memoir about addiction and religious conversion, to be pitch-black,and it was; it was also lippy and comic and, naturally, poetic.
And then there was Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? (Ecco). A curiosity in every sense of the word, it surely doesn’t qualify as a novel; novels tend to have plots. And periods. Powell’s cheeky query, on the other hand, consisted of 164 pages of questions – “Do you miss Tab and do you fully comprehend its disappearance? … Are you surprised at the low number of people crazy or the high number of people crazy? Do you know offhand whether a hippopotamus sweats?” – with nary an answer in sight. It’s the world’s weirdest conversation starter (that is, for a conversation with yourself), and every few pages you’ll want to pause to pursue a path some question turned you onto. Is it exhausting? A little frustrating? But also a pleasure?
Would I have mentioned it otherwise?
This article appears in 2009.
