The Man in the Empty Boat, Mark Salzman. Really not as good as the talk it was based on; also has the weird abbreviated quality peculiar to "Kindle singles," which sound like they'd be great for novella-length fiction or longer nonfiction features (I am not using that fucking fake word "longreads" and you can't make me), but somehow wind up oddly....hollow.
The Last Novel, David Markson. I read this out of sequence -- it's the last of the four "index card books" -- but I couldn't help gobbling, and in the end I'm almost glad I did so, despite its being so disappointing....I would've hated to have read it as the very last one in the series. A very bitter aftertaste. People joked about Markson writing "The Posthumous Novel," but this really felt like that title. It's prickly, sad, and self-pitying, obsessively concerned with posterity, critical judgements, and the impossible subjectivity of same. (Bookslut managed to miss the point impressively.) The reader is gone -- it's all critics, all about criticism, not reading, not writing; it's not play, anymore. Suicide is constantly hinted at, but Markson also jabs at "the casual reader" (or, more likely, the skimming for-pay book critic) so the emotional impact is diluted. If Wittgenstein's Mistress was about creating, the world well lost for works of art -- literally -- this one is about what happens when the world fights back and does its best to seemingly destroy the artist. Markson/the author keeps talking about how high the building is and it seems like a long, long suicide note, but then he also keeps undercutting it elsewhere: Schrödinger's Author? (Open the book/box, is he dead/not dead?) It's a sad end.
Two more Kindle Singles: 43* by Jeff Greenfield, which was like a missing or extra chapter of his book on the same topic. Greenfield's a funny and slick nonfiction writer, but his fiction is sort of thuddingly traditional, and when he tries to write fancy, the result is wince-worthy. The original setup (Gore doesn't lose Florida partly because Elian Gonzales' mother didn't die in the crossing) was interesting, but then it went OFF THE RAILS, which is just about what happened in the bigger (actual book-sized) book of his alternate histories, which I got after reading this, which I suppose I was supposed to do. So basically this is sort of like a fictional ad for his not-a-novel.
And then Final Vision by Joe McGinnis, which was mainly about Jeffrey MacDonalds' appeals and included some snotty remarks about A Wilderness of Error, which I read last year. (Shameful true-crime addict here.) Basically a ripoff - large chunks of Fatal Vision are cut and pasted without any revision at all, and while he does answer Errol "Thin Blue Line" Morris, it's not done very well at all.
Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins. Every year there's a book everyone loves but me, and this one is probably going to be 2013's. (Others: the first Harry Potter book, The Time Traveller's Wife, Jonathan Strange, you get the picture.) This is the kind of book that knocks you out if you've never read any MFA-produced, self-consciously "gritty," this-is-my-territory-let-me-stake-it-out first short story collections. I have GOT to stop getting books based on glowing NYTBR reviews. The author gets a bit of notoriety because her father was Paul Watkins, and I'll wait here while everyone under thirty has to go Google that name. She wrote a much better memoir about him in Granta. She does describe the Southwest, especially the charred isolation of the high desert, very well, but her plots are cardboard and her characters are worse. Probably we'll see either a novel or memoir (or the oh-so-modern combination of those genres) from her about her childhood in the next few years.
The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein. I actually remember reading Primary Colours when it first came out anonymously (yes, I am THAT OLD), and the big flap about figuring out who the author was, &c &c. I didn't realize Klein was this....conservative. Sort of interesting in a historical sense, in terms of how Clinton's personality and two terms badly affected Gore, and how he fits into the phenomenon of New Conservative Democrats, but not that good, really. If anything's interesting in the book it's the topic, not the prose style, or the narrative choices, or the longer perspective afforded by writing books after the fact rather than newspapers. This is typical of nearly all 21st-century nonfiction I've read lately.
Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, Jeff Greenfield. Despite the goofy and hellishly long title, a valuable inside look at the 2000 US election, which I just couldn't read anything about for a good long while (I still can't read even news articles about the one in 2004). Greenfield's a real smartass and this book basically is all the thoughts he couldn't say on the air or even out loud off-camera at the time. He gets a bit defensive now and then but it's hard to blame him. It was particularly sweet to read this right after Karl Rove made a huge deal out of the networks "not prematurely calling Florida for Obama like they did in 2000" in 2012.
Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Jeff Greenfield. (Yes, I tend to focus on one author or topic at a stretch, sue me.) I've read a lot of genre "Speck Fic" (as Ursula Le Guin terms it) alternate histories, and the ones gathered in this book -- JFK's assassinated before he becomes president, RFK isn't, and so on -- just aren't that good. The tone is a very weird mix of detailed reporting, wild speculation, pulpy fictional plotting and at least one terrible shaggy dog punchline involving President Gary Hart, Governor Clinton and Secretary of State Rodham (don't ask). I might check out Greenfield's entirely fictional account of a contested Presidency, The People's Choice, but if it's written in the same style as his rather stuffy fiction, I'll take a pass. (Primary Colours, way back when, had the same problem: everyone knew they were reading real details about real people, so the fictional "waking dream" never took over, but the story was shaped as if it were fiction, complete with artistic license here and there, so it also felt very inauthentic. The whole question of pop nonfiction -- ghosted celebrity "books," rushed ebook or paperback true crime tie-ins, memoirs written two or three decades after unverifiable events, histories more poorly sourced than freshman term papers -- is a vexed one.)
Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines. I really wanted to like this, because it was supposedly urban fantasy done "right" without a passive heroine trapped in a limp love triangle, because the author writes great posts about feminism, rape, patriarchy and the like on his blog, and he's behind the entirely delightful Striking a Pose series where he tries to copy those terrible urban fantasy covers. Unfortunately the description everyone's quoting, a "cross between Dresden and Thursday Next," is accurate, and I....don't like either of those series. I actually had a similar reaction to reading the Next books: I thought there would be a lot more literary in-jokes, and instead it was sort of focused on geeky cleverness. There was a fairly lengthy discussion of the book's flaws (including especially its female lead) here.
(Yeah, I also hate Jasper Fforde, along with J.K. Rowling, Audrey Niffenegger, Susanna Clarke, and so on. Neil Gaiman gets a bye, but not really. In my spare time I
Finally, I did just finish The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, which took about two and a half days of sustained reading -- I wanted to really understand it (I read fast, but I'm also one of those people who reads all the endnotes....the acknowledgements....the list of sources....the index. You can tell a lot about a book from its index). I'm not sure what to say about it -- it was gripping, even riveting, altho the places where he tried to write fancy (what is it with reporters suddenly wanting to turn out embroidered prose in books? Does it just become a pent-up urge after so many years of Just the Facts and strict wordcount limits?) were pretty bad. I was really surprised at how much I didn't know (which I am not going to reveal here because it would be very embarrassing) (this included: what Osama's father did to earn all that money, who Sayyid Qutb was, the Grand Mosque Seizure, the Luxor Massacre, you get the picture). I wonder, inevitably, what the author's thoughts were on bin Laden's finally being killed, by a Democrat administration no less. The book seems to stop a little abruptly, because he goes into the causes of 9/11 so thoroughly and then very briefly (but harrowingly) describes the Twin Towers dying, but I could understand it. We've all seen those final moments endlessly on film, the hijackings have been filmed over and over again too in very sketchy "docudramas," and this is about what we didn't know, what we didn't see -- and what the people in the book didn't see, either. Like all good books this one made me want to read more books: Through Our Enemies' Eyes, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, The Man Who Warned America....This book does lean very heavily on the testimony of those authors -- Michael Scheuer, Ali Soufan, memories of John O'Neill -- but that's not a bad thing.
That's it so far -- I want to read some more serious stuff before the end of the month (this was what I was saying for nearly all of 2012. sigh). I also reread some -- the Sherlock Holmes canon, The Taste of Sorrow, Wintering, Tweak -- but I try not to do that because well, the stacks just go piling on up and up in here, and rereading is really not the best use of my time unless it's for research, or I need comfort when I'm sick.