Books read 2006

I read 49 books, 3 short of a book a week, which in my books, is close enough. This year, I got to read some contemporary poetry. I also revisited some old friends. I also spent an ungodly amount of time wiping Proust and Pynchon off my classics reading-list.

*the canonical essayist* Montaigne "Essais I". This is the original book of essays, the book in which the term "essay" is coined. Unlike most people's experience of the average essays, these essays are as fun as they are profound, as Montaigne takes any topic and pursues it to its bitter, and witty end. Unfortunately my French is weak and I couldn't appreciate the full flavour of Montaigne's incandescent prose. One to re-read.

Günter Grass "My Century". Itty bitty stories about Germans.

Orhan Pamuk "My Name is Red". I managed to get this in before all the Nobel Prize winning brouhaha. I was surprisingly not so entertained. Is it the translation? I found that Pamuk tried to do much in this novel, without really hitting pay-dirt with any of it - historical fiction, thriller, shifting perspective, meditations about the nature of art. Still, a bunch of Swedes in a secret committee can't be that wrong. In many ways, "My Name is Red", reminded me of Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose", where a bunch of Medieval monks hunt for missing illuminated book. In "My Name is Red", a bunch of medieval Muslim clerics hunt for a missing illuminated book. .

John Perkins "Confessions of an Economic Hitman". I have sympathy with the theme of the book, World Bank super-spy lives a life of excitement, then gets guilty conscience, loses family, quits and becomes sage-like enviromental entrepeneur. I expected Perkins to get down-and-dirty with the expose, instead we get this barely believeable James Bond rip-off with the most simplistic explanation of global economics. The prose is perfunctory to say the least.

Henry James "Turn of the Screw". Billed as the scariest story ever written, I was mildy disturbed.

*the biography of the original philosopher-king* Margeurite Yourcenar "Memoires d'Hadrien". This decade-long labour-of-love re-imagines the life of Hadrien, one of the most fascinating of Emperors. Schooled under greek philosophy, he took on the administration of the Roman empire as a spiritual journey. This impressive biography plumbs the depth of a singular mind.

*poetry for alchoholics anonymous* Kim Addonizio "What is This Thing Called Love". Addonizio is a poet's poet, a san francisco woman that writes about love entangled in booze and cigarettes, the way it should be written. No metaphysical flights of fancy, but carving luminosity out of the bottom of an empty beer-glass.

Robert Hughes "The Fatal Shore". This is a fabulous book but suffocating in the sheer bulk of the story-telling. In the end I found that there was just too much, as Hughes takes a masochistic delight in detailing the brutality of life in the early years of the white Australian colony. It would not be too far from the truth to say that I learnt more about the history of Australia between these pages than 13 years of public Australian education.

*The living master of the short story form* Kelly Link "Magic For Beginners". Kelly Link is notoriously difficult to categorize. Is it sci-fi? Fantasy? Literature? Magical-realism? Post-modern? Meta-narrative? She is a true American original (I do not use this word lightly). Her take of the short story form is innovative in the way Calvino's writing is, but she always has an unshakeable grasp of the emotional core of her stories.

Michael Frayn "Copenhagen". If I were ever to direct a play, I think it would be this one. Apart from the fact that it's a three hander, the play tackles science in the way it should be done, not as a pop-sci proselytizer, but as drama, feeling its way through betrayal, love and the meaning of truth.

Albert Camus "La peste"

Margeurite Duras "La plui d'été"

*Allegra Goodman "Intuition"

Charles Mann "1491"

Kim Addonizio "Tell Me"

*Li-Yong Lee "The City in Which I Love You"

E. D. Hirsch Jr. "The Knowledge Deficit"

Jonathan Lethem "The Dissappointment Artist"

*F. Scott Fitzgerald "The Great Gatsby"

*Martha Stout "The Sociopath Next Door"

Bruno Latour "Nous n'avons pas été moderne"

Susan Sontag "On Photograph"

Dom Delilio "White Noise"

Jeffrey Paine "Reenchantment"

Saul Bellows "Ravelstein"

Li-Young Lee "Book of My Nights"

David Duncan "Masterminds of DNA"

*Patricia McMillan "Ruin of Robert Oppenheimer"

Shan Sa "La Jouese de Go"

*J. Armstrong & Markos Zuniga "Crashing the Gate"

Daniel Gilert "Stumbling on Happiness"

John Beebe "Integrity in Depth"

Thomas Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow"

Gustav Flaubert "Trois Comtes"

*Marcel Proust "À la recherce du temp perdu"

Octavia Butler "Parable of the Talents"

Victor Mchleny "Watson & DNA"

Nelly Arcan "Putain"

Sylvia Plath "The Bell Jar"

*Michael Bérubé "What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts"

*Adam Gopnik "Through the Children's Gate"

*Ken Wilber "Integral Spirituality"

Mikaly Csikszentmihaly "Flow: Psychology of Optimal Experience"

Marcel Proust "À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur"

Iegor Gran "Ipso Facto"

Lee Smolin "The Trouble with Physics"

*Michael Bérubé "Rhetorical Occasions"

*Philip K. Dick "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"

*Shan Sa "Impératrice"