NYT Notable Books

I've got books in stacks around the apartment right now--also on shelves, under the bed (last time I moved, I found two books on organizing just there), in boxes in the front closet, which used to be my meditation space. An old boyfriend said years ago, "you know, with alcoholics, you find bottles all over the place: with you, it's books."

Okay, true, but who cares? I've had many conversations recently about The Amazon Kindle, and while I admit to being intrigued, and I'd save so much space, and what about trees . . . but no, not yet. I love the weight of a good book in my hands.

Anyway, in those stacks and stacks of books, there are 11 of the fiction/poetry books listed in the NYT 2008 Notable Books list (personally, I find that word, 'notable' a little suspicious--doesn't exactly translate as "good", I don't think). I've read one: My Revolutions, which is remarkable in a lot of ways, not the least of which is the author is in his early '30's, maybe, and the book's narrator is a minor radical from 1960's London. Thirty years later he's living under another identity, deluding himself that he's still important, and his memories of that time are quite evocative--apparently the activities of his group are based on an actual British operation from the time (not one I'd heard of before)--but there is one sequence where they get a bunch of discarded food from groceries and distribute it to the poor that is just amazing. Much of what they do is ill-conceived, as well as downright stupid, and there are the usual controlling people running the show, but it definitely felt like a worthwhile read.

There are some books from the list I'm excited about reading, but they've drifted down the piles: American Wife, which is Curtis Sittenfeld's imagining of a Laura Bush-like First Lady's life. I wasn't crazy about Sittenfeld's first book, Prep, which I wanted to love, and her second is part of the Great Unread, but every time I hear or read one of her reviews, she so exudes intelligence I'm always intrigued by what she herself is going to write next. The Road Home by Rose Tremain--I read a couple of hers a couple of years ago, and she's one of those authors for me that I know I will always acquire the minute I hear of another one--and truth is, I have absolutely no idea what this one is about yet!

There is one book on the list, Beautiful Children, by Charles Bock, that I've sworn to never read. It's about a child's disappearance and I think it deals in child porn, and well, no, I don't think I can. Not prudish, just no longer interested in some stuff. I wonder at my bias, because what if it's a great book? Some years back I trolled a bookstore with a friend, another writer, and when we compared notes, we found, in my case, that if the flap copy described a "comic novel", I immediately closed the book and put it back on the shelf. Susan's trigger was "love story"--both of which disqualified so many potentially wonderful experiences!

I also own a small but odd assortment from the NYT non-fiction list, and it makes me laugh at myself: The Dark Side, by Jane Mayer, about Bush and the uses of torture by his administration, Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein, about, as far as I'm concerned, my lifetime's original trip to the dark side, Pictures At A Revolution, by Mark Harris, because I'm still hopelessly dazzled by many forms of entertainment, and lastly, How Fiction Works, by James Wood (no, not the actor--that would be James Woods) because I continue to be convinced that the answer lies in some other book, not my own, ha.

yeah, so, that's where we begin.