Last Shelf Life of 2012. Gonna be brief.

154. Sunset Park, by Paul Auster
(Henry Holt and Co., 2010)

I’d never read Auster before, but I’ve heard good things. Perhaps this wasn’t the best introduction. I found Sunset Park to be very disjointed and there were too many pointless references to baseball. I couldn’t get into it.

155. The City and the Pillar, by Gore Vidal
(Abacus Books, 1948, 1997)

A classic of gay literature, it tracks Jim’s dawning awareness and acceptance of his sexuality, exploring the different scenes available to gay men in the 40′s and 50′s. Continue reading »

I’ve never really set targets for my reading before, beyond a general expectation that I’d read at least a hundred books a year, but last year a friend pushed me to challenge myself to commit to 150. According to Goodreads I surpassed it, but according to my own count I read 135. I read twenty-seven graphic novels that I hadn’t added to the count. For the past three years, I’ve listed the graphic novels I’ve read, but not included them in the total number of books I read.

This was, admittedly, due to a foolish prejudice I’d acquired that graphic novels somehow didn’t count as “proper books”. Most of them can be read in about an hour, often they’re picture (rather than text) heavy, and though I read comics prodigiously in high school (Marvel universe FTW), I couldn’t quite convince myself to put them at the same level as the classic lit I was also reading.

I know, I know. It was snobbish and stupid. There are tons of wonderful and highly literate examples in the medium. Marjane Satrapi’s Persopolis, and Blankets by Craig Thompson, Skim, by Mariko Tamaki and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series is rife with literary allusions, both overt and more subdued. It’s not all men wearing underwear over their spandex leotards and large breasted women bursting from their flimsy costumes. Graphic novels count. Books like Kate Beaton’s excellent collection of comics Hark! A Vagrant count.

So, for the first time I’m including comics and graphic novels in my official tally of books read. I feel like I’ve grown as a person. Continue reading »

The last segment for 2011. For the full list, see 2011 Books Read.

126. The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Centres around Madeleine Hanna, an English major in an on-again-off-again relationship with Leonard Morten (who may or may not be David Foster Wallace), much to the chagrin of Mitchell Grammaticus, who’s in love with fair Madeleine.

It received mixed reviews, but I had fun with it. I like lit crit, deconstructionist thought, and spiritual ambiguity. Continue reading »