Best and Worst of 2006
This year, with the help of All Consuming, I kept track of every book I read, 45 in all. And since this year is drawing to a rapid close I thought it would be appropriate to draw up a list of the best and worst reading material I devoured in 2006. Mind you, the list will consist of books I read this year, not necessarily books that were published this year.
Most people draw up top ten lists, but I’ve chosen to do a couple of top five lists, mainly because there were only about five truly stunning books I read this year, and likewise, only five books that, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, were not to be tossed aside lightly, but thrown with great force. I give you my top five best and worst books of 2006.
The Best:
1) Household Saints by Francine Prose – This achingly beautiful novel follows three generations of an Italian-American family as they deal with issues of religious faith, assimilation, and the strength of family ties. It also explores the nature of myth making and story telling. A truly stunning read.
2) Blue Angel by Francine Prose – This year I fell head over heels for Francine Prose, hence why she holds the top two spots. This novel focuses on the relationship between a bored university professor and his favorite student. Prose is fond of ambiguous endings, and this one made me want to turn right back to the beginning and start it all over again. Masterfully written and executed.
3) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers – This book isn’t considered a classic for nothing. Set in the rural south, this tale of a deaf mute and the confidence he inspires in those around him provides a layered look at the nature of friendship, justice, and free will.
4) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – Like Prose and McCullers, Ishiguro is a master of the craft. He strikes that rare balance between revealing just enough to satiate the reader and holding back enough to keep them reading as this compelling novel about three boarding school friends unfolds.
5) The Hungry Gene by Ellen Ruppel Shell - The only nonfiction book to make the Best of List, The Hungry Gene takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the weight loss industry and the search for obesity related genes.
The Worst:
1) The Bitch Posse by Martha O’Connor – This heavy handed coming-of-age tale consists of little more then a handful of flat characters and a “plot” whose arch and resolution a discerning reader can tease out of the first page. Don’t waste your time with this one. Take it from me, I learned the hard way.
2) To Feel Stuff by Andrea Seigel – This tale of love and ESP has three strikes against it; it too consists of flat characters, the pacing is intolerably slow, and the ending is anti-climactic. I walked away wondering why Seigel felt it necessary to tell me this story. I always know I’ve finished reading an awful book when I close it and think “Now what was I supposed to get out of that?”
3) Josie and Jack by Kelly Braffet – Drugs, money, crime, and sexual deviance, what more could a reader want? How about relief from the constant onslaught of hopelessly narcissistic and naive characters?
4) Life Mask by Emma Donoghue – I actually adore Emma Donoghue, but this historical novel about lesbianism and upper-class morality was just too long and too slow.
5) The Ghost Writer by John Harwood – Harwood gets points for actually being a good writer. He loses points for concocting the most absurd suspense novel I have ever read. It was fine until the end at which point my mind boggled at the sheer ridiculousness of the climax I’d become so invested in reaching.
The Starving Artist’s Survival Guide by Marianne Taylor and Laurie Lindop
The back cover of Taylor and Lindop’s The Starving Artists 
Survival Guide proclaims it “A Blackened Chicken Soup for the Artistic Soul,” and from looking at the table of contents you’d think it was true. With a first chapter simply titled “Rejection,” and subsequent ones on the hazards of group critiques, day jobs, and that classic enhancer of notoriety, death, this book appears to offer the black humor, not to mention affirmation of genius the thwarted artist suspects his suffering is indicative of, you can’t find in the pages of your typical new age self-help fare.
Unfortunately, this book doesn’t deliver the goods. It’s big down fall is simply that it isn’t funny. Taylor and Lindop try so hard to get laughs they end up writing quips that are too heavy handed and over the top to be amusing. Most of their comedic ideas have potential, take for instance the form responses to form rejection letters laid out in chapter one. The idea is great. I don’t know a single person who has received a rejection letter and hasn’t wanted to immediately shoot off a biting response so ingenious the Editor/Curator/Grand Poobah would reconsider the initial rejection just long enough for them to reject any secondary offer. But Taylor and Lindop’s form letters just aren’t amusing. One goes on a snoozer of a rant about the writer’s dead dog that, rather than coming across as biting, sounds whiney. The last thing a rejected artist wants to consider is that they are whiney in all their pain. And it’s not as though the humor is tongue in cheek. They WANT the rants to come off as empowering and clever. So, the fact that they sound contrived simply adds insult to injury.
The text is only actually funny when the authors are relating stories about real artists who were snubbed during their lifetimes. In the aforementioned chapter on “Rejection,” (Forgive me for harping on it. I found it to be the least stomach-able of all the chapters, hence it rests on the low end of my heinousness meter.) features a section called the Humiliation Hall of Fame, in which we learn that “Edgar Allan Poe once filed for bankruptcy but was refused because he couldn’t pay the fee.” Now if that doesn’t make you feel better about the fact that you’re ten years out of college and still surviving on ramen, I don’t know what will.
Yes, the irony of me, a starving artist with no connections or published writing to my credit, writing a crappy review of a book written by two women far more accomplished then I with the purpose of helping individuals like myself isn’t lost on me. Though, given the fact that they have a book deal and I’m blogging, perhaps they won’t feel the need to send me anonymous packages of little porcelain animals in an attempt to drive me cuckoo (p. 42) or print out this review and use it to creat an Angel of Despair (p.8.)
For truly funny insights and helpful suggestions on how to survive as a starving artist check out The Lost Soul Companion and The Not-So Lost Soul Companion by Susan M. Brackney.
College Girls by Lynn Peril
Lynn Peril has put together an eye opening overview of 
advice, advertising and stereotypes aimed at and associated with college girls in the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present.
Don’t look too closely for the “present” in this book. Though the title does promise a look at Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-eds, Then and Now the “now” of it is only touched upon briefly in the final chapter. Most of the book focuses on the image and experience of the college girl who attended school between the late 1830’s and the late 1950’s.
This book is overflowing with facts, something I found slightly intimidating as I started reading. Peril doesn’t offer much in the way of reflection or analysis. Fortunately the facts are so engaging the book rarely reads like a stuffy history text. A lot of that is due to Peril’s writing style which is both sleek, punchy, and fast paced. She never gives the reader the opportunity to become mired down with information. She keeps you moving seamlessly forward from one topic to the next in a manner that allows one to take her swift style for granted.
Some of the assumptions examined in this volume are a scream. Take for instance my personal favorite, the assertion put forth by Dr. Edward H. Clarke in his 1873 book Sex in Education, or, A Fair Chance for the Girls that college girls needed to take a few days off from studying every four weeks while on their periods. His reasoning was that studying diverted physical focus away from the reproductive organs and prevented them from fully developing. These girls “graduated from school or college excellent scholars, but with undeveloped ovaries. Later they married and were sterile.” It really makes you wonder what map of logic this guy and a host of other “experts” were following.
It’s the stories of how such absurd ideas rose to acceptance and fell to hogwash that makes this book so stimulating. In taking one small aspect of the female experience Peril succeeds in showing the reader how far women have truly come in American society and how far we have yet to go.
Mission to America by Walter Kirn
I am a huge Walter Kirn fan. His first novel, She Needed Me, still holds a place in my top ten list of all time favorite books. His follow up, Thumbsucker, is a hilarious and complex story of a young man’s oral fixation and the roots of the behavior within his dysfunctional family life. I wasn’t too keen on his third novel Up in the Air, mainly because I don’t find the culture of flying half as interesting as Kirn does, but that was okay because his great writing made up for it. Naturally, I was happy as a kitten with a ball of catnip-coated yarn when his fourth novel, Mission to America, finally came out.
It’s the story of Mason LaVerle, a life long member of the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles, a small religious sect that has produced generations of followers in a small town in rural Montana. Mason and fellow apostle Elder Stark are sent on a mission to convert new members, particularly women, in order to prevent the slow death of their faith. The two go on a road trip that eventually lands them in the ski town of Snowshoe Springs, Colorado where Elder Stark is instructed to try and land the support of a dying millionaire, while Mason finds himself falling in love with a secretive young woman with a passion for fashion. Along the way the two apostles discover the pains and pleasures of caffeine, greasy food, and sex with underage girls.
Mission to America is something of a mixed bag. The first chapter is speedy. Kirn sets up the plot with ease. It bares mentioning that Kirn is a writer who has mastered the art of the hook. He knows how to pique a reader’s interest with each sentence and it is this talent which moves the first chapter along so smoothly.
But between the second and sixth chapters there’s a lull. Kirn documents Mason and Stark’s journey to Colorado where the primary action of the story will take place. During their travels both men begin to indulge in fast food and stimulants. Stark picks up a drug habit. There’s an interlude with a group of teenage Wiccans in Wyoming. There are two reasons these 63 pages slow down the narrative; 1) The changes the men go through in this brief period are told rather than shown to the reader. Chapter two picks up after the duo have already been on the road for a week and Mason tells the reader how many of their religious beliefs have been thrown out the window during that time. This makes the transformation jarring and, when compared with the piousness displayed in chapter 1, a bit unbelievable. 2) The incidents we do witness during this time are unnecessary to the development of the characters and trajectory of the story. What little character development occurs during these scenes could have easily been incorporated into later ones. It left me wondering why, when Kirn thought it better to skip over their first week on the road, he thought the boring tryst with the Wiccans was worth including?
Once in Colorado the boys meet a range of self-involved and eccentric characters whose lives and beliefs test their own religious convictions. What got under my skin at this stage was the realization that Mason, the narrator, wasn’t a very interesting character. Compared to Weaver Walquist, the evangelical protagonist of She Needed Me, or even orally fixated Justin Cobb of Thumbsucker, Mason is a blank slate. He has virtually no personality. I don’t know if that was a deliberate choice Kirn made to highlight the whitewashing effect of fundamentalist religious belief, but it just doesn’t make for very interesting reading. I think I would have probably given up on the novel at this point had the more colorful characters not shown up.
As the story progresses Mason comes to find out that the mission he thought he was sent on is not the mission he was actually sent on. Kirn takes a magnifying glass to the cogs of religion and how they move in a culture of consumerism. He is clearly making a statement with this book, one that can be viewed through many lenses. While reading I kept coming up with ideas for research paper I could have written if I’d read this back in college; an examination of Mason’s misogynistic beliefs and attitudes and what Kirn is saying about the damaging aspects of woman centered religion; A discussion on whether or not there is a distinction between religion and big business these days. There are enough ideas in this novel to spark a landslide of academic papers. Unfortunately, academically rich texts don’t always make for wonderful recreational reads.
While the second half of the book did hold my interest, that alone wasn’t enough to grip my imagination and really make me enjoy this book, and it pains me to say that since I adore Walter Kirn so much. Unfortunately, this book left a lot to be desired and I regret to say that I can’t precisely put my finger on what was missing. I think it just lacked heart. It is difficult to engage a reader in such a heady and esoteric topic as religion without offering him or her some sympathetic characters to invest in. This novel offered nothing to become invested in. Kirn has tackled the idea of religious disillusionment, dependency, and vehemence far more eloquently in his previous novels. Look to them for the spark that Mission to America lacks.
