Books I Loved That I Never Reviewed

Compared to a lot of other book bloggers, I haven't been reviewing books for very long. I started this blog a year after I graduated from college, so that leaves many books that have gone unmentioned here. Below are some of my favorites that I read pre-blogging:

1. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868): This is for sure my all-time favorite detective novel (not that I have read very many) that was so much fun to read. A very well-written page-turner full of colorful characters that you shouldn't pass up.

2. White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985): Still my favorite DeLillo, if you are going to read one book about the 20th century, I think this one should be it.

3. Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1993): This one is pretty dark but if you can make your way through, it's worth it. At it's core, it examines race relations in post-apartheid South Africa.

4. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (2004): Confession: I have read this book three times and I love it even more with each read. It is a romance novel with a dose a sci-fi, but still smart and and I love it. It will always be a book that I won't hesitate to pick up and reread when I need a good love story in my life.

5. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of A Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah (2007): This is a truly heart-breaking read that examines a subject I feel is important for those removed from it to learn about: child soldiers in Sierra Leone.

6. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (1860): This is my all-time favorite bildungsroman (yes I like it more than Jane Eyre) and if you are interested in Eliot I think this is a great place to state.

7. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker (2007): I think this is the most interesting of Pinker's books I have read. He combines his vast knowledge of language and human behavior to examine what the words we use say about ourselves.

8. Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount Jr (2009): This is a hysterical and intelligent look into specific words in our ever-changing vocabulary. It reads like an amusing dictionary. If you are a nerd about words, this is for you.

9. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884): A children's classic that I read as an adult, this novel is about the nature of freedom and the meaning of human connections.

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and The Bookish
photo via Pretty Books

Falling Man by Don DeLillo

He stood and felt something so lonely he could touch it with his hands.

Don DeLillo is one of my favorite postmodern writers. He portrays modern-day America in a way that makes me question our priorities and culture. He plays with themes of consumerism, mass media, interconnectedness and the human ability to create meaningful relationships. Falling Man explores post-9/11 New York. The title refers to the image of a man who fell from the twin towers (an image that is also used in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close). In DeLillo's novel we see a performance artist who mimics this pose as he dangles from a harness around areas throughout Manhattan. Of course the image of the falling man gives those who see it a feeling of unspeakable dread:

There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body's last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was an awful openness of it, something we'd not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all.

As this image repeatedly inserts itself into the lives of New Yorkers, the novel follows two narratives; one of a family who is trying to rebuild their lives after the attack and one of a 9/11 terrorist who prepares for the attacks. The post-traumatic recovery of this family is almost as heartbreaking as a glimpse into the life of a terrorist. The family struggles to make sense of their new world just as they struggle to understand one another.

But then she might be wrong about what was ordinary. Maybe nothing was. Maybe there was a deep fold in the grain of things, the way things pass through the mind, the way time swings in the mind, which is the only place it meaningfully exists.

DeLillo's poignant novel implies that we will continuously have to recover from the attacks as they will haunt us forever. Just as the falling man's image will continue to resurface, so will the memory of the atacks. However, rather than focus on the attacks themselves, DeLillo explores how they changed America and the daily lives of Americans. He draws significant comparisons to the "before" world that we knew to the "after". Just as 9/11 itself was chaotic, so were the lives of many American's after that day and for years to come. People struggled to understand the event and then struggled to understand themselves.

I don't know this American anymore. I don't recognize it. There's an empty space where America used to be.

DeLillo builds many layers into this story which makes it seem disjointed and fragmented. I think this structure serves to reinforce the emotions and understanding of the attacks and it's aftermath: haunting, confusing and utterly heartbreaking.

Publisher: Scribner, 2007

My First Bret Easton Ellis

Reading now: Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis

"Hey baby, we're all in this together," I grunt, my hands dusted with chalk. "Yeah, I wanna give all this up and feed the homeless. I wanna give this all up and teach orangutans sign language. I'm gonna bike around the countryside with my sketchbook. I'm gonna - what? Help improve race relations in this country? Run for fucking president? Read my lips: spare me."

This is my first Ellis novel and so far, it is unlike anything I have ever read - save White Noise by Don DeLillo but much more intense. I'm about half-way through the novel and the story is finally starting to pick up. It seems Ellis used the first 200 pages or so to establish the hollow and celebrity-obsessed world of the 90's, where the protagonist, a male model, communicates using song lyrics and considers himself very important because "the better you look, the more you see". Like Delillo's White Noise, Glamorama is conveying a sense of post-modern trepidation and is considered a staple in post-modern literature (something I wasn't aware of until I started reading the book).

Ellis is the author of American Psyco and while I didn't read the book I remember the movie. If Glamorama is anything like that, it should get quite interesting.