2007 Reading List

In 2007, I resolved to read a book a week. I'm afraid I came up a little short with 49 books (probably because it took longer than expected to read and appreciate Little, Big), but here's the list for the year.

1. Little, Big - John Crowley

2. The Devil Wears Prada - Lauren Weisburger

3. Trans-sister Radio - Chris Bojahlian

4. A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson

5. Girl Interrupted- Susanna Kaysen

6. Being Dead - Jim Crace

7. Coma - Alex Garland

8. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (2nd read)

9. A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway

10. Nobody Gets the Girl - James Maxey

11. Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis

12. Now You See Her - Whitney Otto

13. Oaxaca Journal - Oliver Sacks

14. A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby

15. Bel Canto - Ann Patchett

16. The Long Hard Road out of Hell - Marilyn Manson

17. Darkness Visible - William Styron

18. An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison

19. The Frog King - Adam Davies

20. Surprised by Joy - C.S. Lewis

21. Everybody Was So Young - Amanda Vaill

22. Bitterwood - James Maxey

23. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

24. In Springdale Town - Robert Freeman Wexler

25. The Road Less Traveled - M. Scott Peck, MD

26. Magic for Beginners - Kelly Link

27. Dime-Store Alchemy - Charles Simic

28. Move Under Ground - Nick Mamatas

29. Stranger Things Happen - Kelly Link

30. The Road - Cormac McCarthy

31. Utopia Parkway:The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell - Deborah Solomon, ed.

32. On the Beach - Nevil Shute

33. Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files - Mary Ann Caws, ed.

34. Circus of the Grand Design - Robert Freeman Wexler

35. The Tesseract - Alex Garland

36. The Caveman's Valentine - George Dawes Green

37. Animal Farm - George Orwell

38. The Witches of Eastwick - John Updike

39. Goodbye Lemon - Adam Davies

40. Paint it Black - Janet Fitch

41. Carmen Dog - Carol Emshwiller

42. run - Ann Patchett

43. Wizardry and Wild Romance - Michael Moorcock

44. Who Moved My Cheese - Spenser Johnson

45. Animals in Translation - Tempest Grandin and Catherine Johnson

46. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

47. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

48. The Opposite of Fate - Amy Tan

49. Are You Somebody - Nuala O'Faolain

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

I have a love/hate relationship with reading lists.

Hate: Inevitably there are books on every reading list that I don't want to read. It seems that every top 100 list has Anthony Powell's 12-novel series A Dance to the Music of Time or James Joyce somewhere on it, and I've never managed to get past Chapter Four of Ulysses, even an annotated version. I mean to read that book before I die, oh yes, and once I'm finally ready, I'll probably love it. But it's a challenge to bump into it on a reading list. If Ulysses is on the list, the obsessive-compulsive monster that lives in the back of my mind will not allow me to skip it. In the middle of the night, it'll wake me from a sound sleep, flinging itself around on the jungle-gym of my basal ganglia until I'm a ball of abject guilt. It's on the list. You've got to read it, or you'll FAIL!

Fail at what? Who's keeping count? I don't know; ask the monster. It's the one with OCD, not me.

Love: A really good list has books on it that I'd never hear about otherwise. I just finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and though I was familiar with the title--New York Times notable book, finalist for the Man Booker Prize, etc etc--I hadn't planned on reading it until I saw it in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. 1001 Books isn't the only list I've got my eye on--oh, goodness no. I've also got The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors, Whissen's Classic Cult Fiction, Calcutt & Shephard's Cult Fiction, and The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction (yes, an obsession, ignore it for now). I can safely say there isn't a list among these that I'll read in its entirety, and in a way, that upsets me. The lists remind me that no matter how many books a year I manage to read, I'll never catch up. But the up side is is that I'll never run out of good books to read.

The day I ran out of good books to read would be a bleak, bleak day.

The Fountain

My house is bursting at the seams with media (eg, CDs, DVDs, books, magazines, video games, etc.) and I've resolved to borrow things from the library whenever possible rather than add to the stacks. But when I saw "The Fountain" was available on DVD (I know it's been out for a while and I'm behind the curve) I gave myself permission to buy the disc. The only name on the slipcase I needed to see was Darren Aronofsky's. After all, "Requiem for a Dream" and "Pi" are among the movies I'd rescue during a four alarm fire.

Whenever I love a movie as much as I loved "Requiem," (Ellen Burstyn's performance is worth repeated viewings) I experience a high level of anxiety about the quality of subsequent films. Perhaps it would be better to judge each film on its own merits, but I can't help viewing Aronofsky films (as well as those by Lynch and other favorite directors) in terms of directorial oeuvre. So, I'm glad to report that "The Fountain" exceeded my expectations. It was as beautiful as "Requiem," as thought-provoking as "Pi." The film was brilliant both in visual effects and cinematography, and the acting was affecting. Ellen Burstyn made the most of her small role, Rachel Weisz was remarkable, and Hugh Jackman's performance was wrenching. That said, the film's real deliverable, in my opinion, was the occasionally opaque, gorgeously fractal story.

Following the three-part, non-linear story is a challenge to those who prefer a mainstream approach, with voice-overs explaining the tough parts and A happening before B, which happens before C. Personally, I'm happiest with fractal patterns, the slow doling out of disparate details that can be assembled, with a little patience and imagination, into a breathtaking stained-glass window. I found the structure and the pacing of "The Fountain" as gorgeous and rewarding as a cinematic epic poem. The story as I see it (you might see it differently): Izzi and Tommy are deeply in love. Izzi's dying, and Tommy, her neurosurgeon husband, is trying to develop a drug that will save her life. Izzi's writing a novel about Tomas, a Conquistador whose mission in life is to discover the Tree of Life for Queen Isabella of Spain. Tommy is so consumed by the quest for life that he can't understand what Izzi is trying to tell him about death through her novel-in-progress, "The Fountain." She begs him to finish the story for her when she dies, but unable to bear the thought of her death, Tommy can only throw himself deeper and deeper into denial. Izzi must not die. She should live forever. They should live together forever. Throughout the story, even as she tells him that "death is the path to awe," he whispers to her, constantly, "We're almost there." We've almost beaten death.

Here's a story point that's not explicit. It's so non-explicit, that maybe I'm making it up. Izzi dies before Tommy can treat her with the life-saving bark of a miraculous tree. After swearing that he'll never stop trying to beat death, he plants a seed pod at her grave site. This action leads into the third story line, which has Tommy as an isolated voyager, drifting through space into a golden nebula that Izzi called Xibalba, the Mayan underworld. As Tommy drifts, he struggles with memories of Izzi, who in his dreams pleads with him to finish the story of Tomas and Isabella so he can understand that death is "the path to awe." Perhaps the way Tommy finishes Izzi's novel (with a very "Siddhartha" revelation under the Tree of Life) is only a desperate fantasy, but I prefer to think that Tommy planted the seed of the real Tree of Life on Izzi's grave. I prefer to think that Tommy drank its sap (the aqua vitae) and searched for a thousand years for a way to bring Izzi's essense to Xibalba, where they could live together forever. But Izzi died before Tommy could give her the life-saving drug, and Izzi-as-the-Tree-of-Life dies before they reach Xibalba, but at the last moment, Tommy finally understands what Izzi was trying to tell him about death. He literally sees the light, achieves spiritual enlightenment, and sacrifices himself for the re-birth of the Tree and the well-being of the universe. Epic.

This is the stained-glass window I built with Aronofsky's puzzle pieces. But the beauty of a film like this one is in all the permutations of interpretation.