2009 Book List

I'm getting a head start on 2009 by setting up this page to list the books I read. Usually, I keep the list in a pretty book that I have had going for about 10 years now. I'll still use that book, but I am going to keep track of my progress here too. Mostly because I am signing up for the 100+ Reading Challenge this year. And just why am I doing that? I avoid reading challenges because they make me nervous. And I already have 100 different reading lists going over on Lists of Bests. And I really do not want to read 100 books just to say I read 100 books. But, the 100+ challenge isn't really like other challenges. I mean, I usually read more than 100 books each year anyway (125 or so this year), so officially adopting this as a "challenge" should not make me fussy. And some of my favorite book bloggers are participating. And maybe I'll discover some other good book blogs. And . . . and . . . and . . . And maybe it is just an excuse to make another list. So this is the spot where I will list the books I read in 2009.

Book Notes: A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Dust struck me as a mix between Brideshead Revisited and Scoop. It starts off as an English country house drama, and ends up as an adventure story in the jungle. Huh? But it was entertaining through and through—Evelyn Waugh at his snarky best.

Review: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

Martin Dressler left me cold.

Steven Millhauser generated a lot of hullabaloo with this book – and won the Pulitzer Prize – because it is something bigger than itself. No mere historical novel – it is “allegory,” “fable,” “myth.” But good allegories, fables, and myths also have conflict and drama. This book does not.

The story marches from the hero's childhood, through his early career years and successes as a young entrepreneur, to his “final downfall” as it says on the dust jacket. But this march follows a perfectly straight path. Martin is restless at his job; he moves to a better job. Martin is bored with his new job; he opens his new business. Martin is unsatisfied with his business, he expands it. He moves on to bigger and bigger enterprises until he moves on to one that is too big. Yes, hubris is his eventual downfall, but nothing trips him up on the way. He never faces any substantive opposition and never has a set back, until the very end.

What is missing is conflict (a key element of any drama) and character development. The characters, pretty flat to begin with, are all the same at the end of the book as they are at the beginning. Several reviews compared the novel favorably to Greek tragedies, but the characters in those classic tales had complex relationships, nothing but conflict, and learned lessons along the way.

Here, many characters drift in and then fade away without any further mention of them. Martin's parents, for example, never make an appearance in his adult life. His mother-in-law, who is a major character through the middle part of the book, disappears after he marries her daughter, who literally sleeps through their marriage. Not only do the characters not grow as individuals, every relationship Martin has with another character is static.

I did not think there was much to recommend the book, other than some marginally interesting descriptions of New York City at the turn of the Twentieth Century and the ever more elaborate attractions of Martin's hotels. It just didn’t do anything for me.

OTHER REVIEWS

If you would like your review of this books listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

Patience Please!

Please bear with the pedestrian posts. I'm figuring out how to clean up some of the permanent links over on the right side. There are probably nifty, proper ways to do this, but I'm an autodidactic blogger, so have to do it the way I can figure out for myself. So these posts of yearly book lists, ratings explanations, and lists of reviews all have something to do with fixing my right side links. Bear with me.