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The highlight of my reading year came in August-September, when two of my favourite authors released much anticipated new books. And now I'm back in Wagga Wagga, post-wedding and Sydney stint, I'm looking forward to doing even more reading.
Here's my list of favourite books in no particular order:
1. Eeeee Eee Eeee, Tao Lin
I must've read four to five Tao Lin books this year after reading Taipei last year. Tao Lin is an American novelist and sometimes poet and I love his super contemporary and minimal writing style. In most of his books the main character is a frustrated writer and New York hipster, who wanders around eating or stealing organic food, taking drugs and spending too much time online. The character is usually a depressive loner who forms temporary relationships with equally unusual characters, who end up taking somewhat aimless road trips with him.
Even though this kind of character sounds totally unappealing, I find Tao Lin's books addictive and an astute representation of modern life. Eeeee Eee Eeee is one of the most surreal of the ones I've read, with bears, hamsters and American celebrities being written into chapters amongst the every day human characters. My favourite chapter is just four and a half pages long, and details the year that dolphins were depressed, and how this came to manifest itself in their behaviour in playgrounds. It's both hilarious and strangely relatable in parts.
2. Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? A memoir, Roz Chast
I'd been looking for this graphic novel for the longest time - it's only recently been available in Australia, and I gleefully found my copy in an amazing bookshop in New York, which contained so many art books that I had to leave Tony there for hours so he could properly explore.
Roz Chast is a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker and this book is the story of her ageing parents decline, from their last years of living independently in New York to their move into assisted living and ultimately palliative care. It chronicles her childhood as an only child, and her guilt as her parents age and need more of her assistance. It's a book about dying, and the complicated relationships we have with our parents.
3. Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Haruki Murakami
This book was released on my birthday this year, which was very exciting! His previous epic 1Q84 was so perfect to me (I thought it was the most fully realised Murakami book I'd read, and interestingly you can read the short story that it grew from here) that I knew his latest offering would most likely be good but not 1Q84 great.
This had all the hallmarks of a Murakami book - a lonely man who lives by a well-defined routine, a childhood mystery and rupture point that provides the conflict of the book, a mysterious woman as a love interest and motivator and a series of surreal occurrences through dreams, stories and overseas travel. I loved this book for its familiarity and the reliable way Murakami describes everyday life but didn't find this book as weird or as satisfying as others in the past.
4. This House of Grief: the story of a murder trial, Helen Garner
This has been such a horrible year for family violence, which made this a little more difficult to read than I had originally thought. The most similar book of hers I had read was Joe Cinque's Consolation: a true story of death, grief and the law, which was partly fascinating due to the totally bizarre nature of the crime. This in contrast was grim because it makes you think about the tiny percentage of parents who do harm or kill their children but I was so amazed by how at the end of the book, I came to see just how it could've happened. I also stopped caring about whether the father did it or not and thought it was incredible that you could come to think about the father and his life up until this point.
This book reminded me of a Conversations episode I'd listened to last year about familicide and after I finished the book, I also listened to Helen Garner's interview with Richard Fidler where you hear just how broken she sounds when recounting this story and the making of the book. I think she copped a lot of flack for following a story like this but in this interview you hear how she took it on, and was incredibly troubled by what she witnessed and describes. And as an aside, I thought it was very clever to have the voice of her young niece or goddaughter throughout the book, as they sit in court together for much of the trial.
5. Far From The Tree: parents, children and the search for identity, Andrew Solomon
This is totally cheating because I only picked up this book on Christmas Eve and am only a chapter in. Still, it's worth recommending because I can tell that it's going to be a fascinating and rewarding book. Earlier this year I listened to Andrew Solomon on Big Ideas and was really impressed by what he had to say about difference and disability and how we understand, tolerate and accept it in society - or worse, the ways in which we fail to.
His book came highly recommended by Natasha Mitchell, and also Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales through their podcast. To look at, it's a huge book that looks like a parenting book, and not something I'd usually pick up. I also find that I'm much better at reading novels in my downtime, because anything else can strangely feel like work. The book is divided into 12 chapters, beginning with father and son but the ten chapters in between focus on a single way children can be different from their parents, whether it's a disability like deafness or by being extraordinary, such as the chapter on prodigies. While I've only read the first chapter, the book is said to be the result of 10 years of work and around 300 interviews with parents whose children are quite unlike them in some ways and how they come to cope. His interview on Conversations is also meant to be excellent and a good summary of the book.
