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01-26-10

What I’m Reading Now: Stephen King: The Non-Fiction, by Rocky Wood and Justin Brooks
Current Word Count: Tangerine, 73, 264 words

You want to hear something funny? So, I was going through the list of all the books I read this past decade, January 1, 2000 through December 31, 2009. The mission was to make a big definitive list of the Top 50 Books of the Decade, which as you might have gleaned didn’t happen. Yet.

Of course, there’s been an obvious trend in my reading. I read a lot of Stephen King this past decade. Okay, yeah, you knew that, but what I thought was kind of interesting is how often I read King during this decade. It certainly wasn’t as much as in decades past, but it was a pretty sizable delving. Aside from the young adult novel Singularity, King’s books are the only ones that have benefitted from re-reads, and as I went throughout my lists, I thought it would be fun to figure out which ones I re-read the most. I was a little taken aback at my findings. A brief chart!

King Books I Read Only Once: Dreamcatcher, Desperation, Needful Things, Everything’s Eventual, Firestarter, Cycle of the Werewolf, The Gunslinger, Wolves of the Calla, From a Buick 8, The Shining, Song of Susannah, Silver Bullet, Black House, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Stand, Cell, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, Rage, Faithful, Insomnia, The Long Walk, The Running Man, Thinner, The Regulators, Blaze, The Mist, Dolores Claiborne, Different Seasons, Under the Dome, The Dark Tower

King Books I Read Twice: Lisey’s Story, Duma Key, Misery, Hearts In Atlantis, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, Roadwork, It, The Colorado Kid (back to back!), Pet Sematary

King Books I Didn’t Read At All This Past Decade: Carrie, Night Shift, The Dead Zone, Danse Macabre, The Talisman, The Eyes of the Dragon, Skeleton Crew, The Tommyknockers, Four Past Midnight, Gerald’s Game, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Rose Madder, The Green Mile, Storm of the Century, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

And the Only Book I Read Three Times This Past Decade: Christine.

Seriously? I read Christine more than any other book in the decade? What the French toast!?

* * *

And for those of you who don’t care about Stephen King, here’s some stuff about the books I read last year!

It’s hard to pinpoint my favorite book I read last year. I read eclectically. Buzzing through Ruth Reichl’s entire oeuvre in under three weeks was kind of a huge rush. Tender At the Bone, Comfort Me With Apples, Garlic & Sapphires, and Not Becoming My Mother were all pretty kick-ass, even though Mother was a tad bit pricey for what amounted to a gift book. While Julie & Julia the year before introduced me to food writing, Ruth kind of stabilized my love for the genre. Of her books on food, I liked Comfort Me With Apples the most, because I’d gotten used to her voice by then and I felt cozy with it, even when she was being selfish and strange.

Speaking of food writing, I totally incongruously dug Born Round, by Frank Bruni. A lot of the book details his struggles with weight, and ends up on the decision that thinner is better – at least for him. Which should offend me to my core, except that Bruni’s journey is a personal one, and he doesn’t make any huge pronouncements about fat automatically equaling bad. It’s just his thing. Plus, he’s a terrific writer and a gay dude, and despite his crazy-femme author photo, I really related to him.

Trends I was not in favor of? Follow-up books which totally failed to live up to their predecessors. I was coerced into reading Tom Standage’s A History of the World In Six Glasses and couldn’t put it down. Then he puts out An Edible History of Humanity and it was dull as shit. Ironically, not even the section on the spice trade was spicy. Same happened with Audrey Niffenegger. I literally read The Time-Traveler’s Wife largely in one sitting. I kept thinking I should put it down, go walk, get exercise, perhaps go to the bathroom. No. It was compulsive. Then she releases Her Fearful Symmetry, which has a kick-ass title and nothing else going for it. One of the plot twists is so contrived and out of character that I had trouble even finishing it. It’s maybe not a bad book – there are character pieces I loved, and the structure was fun – but it fell way, way short.

I kind of fear that I’m taking authors I love for granted, so I want to highlight four that deserve special recognition. While I liked and respected Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, I found it hard to love; I far preferred Take the Cannoli, which I read for the first time this year. If it’s maybe not as good as Assassination Vacation, it’s absolutely better than Radio On and on par with The Partly-Cloudy Patriot. Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur might be his best collection of essays, despite a chapter on football (though, helpfully, he says we can skip). Nick Hornby’s last collection of book essays, Shakespeare Wrote For Money, is maybe not his very best one – that distinction probably goes to Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt – but it was delightful to be back in his voice and tone again, and I got some good recommendations, which is kind of the point. And A.J. Jacobs, who has yet to disappoint me, released The Guinea Pig Diaries. If The Year of Living Biblically felt a little heavy after The Know-It-All, this is a return to light reporting about his weird, experimental life. Light, but not fluffy. You get a little substance with your dessert here, and now I want a new book.

Some big surprises this year? Shawn brought home I Hate New Music: A Classic Rock Manifesto, by Dave Thompson, which I scoffed at because I thought it was going to be a lot like John Seller’s atrocious Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life. I snatched it out of Shawn’s hand to read the introduction and didn’t put it down until the next day, finished. It’s cranky but readable and understandable. I don’t agree with all his points, but I don’t think you have to agree with an author to like him. Same with Tattoo Machine, by Jeff Johnson, a short but comprehensive story about the recent history of tattooing from someone who was there. There’s a lot of really cool stuff about tattoo trends, stories of crazy people, drunk people, bad tattooists, good tattooists, portrait ink, all that. It’s amazing.

I was also gratified by Charles Ardai’s crime book Fifty-To-One, which is the fiftieth book published by the Hard Case Crime imprint. The goal of the publisher is to put back in print classic crime novels from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and also release new novels by current authors writing in that style. Fifty-To-One manages to title each chapter after each of the preceding books, and was a terrific crime caper in itself. The Abstinence Teacher was a very good follow-up to Tom Perrotta’s Little Children – more readable suburban ennui, dealt with deftly and accessibly. It’s depressing, but not so much that you don’t want to keep reading. Bev Vincent’s The Illustrated Stephen King Companion was a first-of-its kind for King fanatics, featuring removable documents that reprinted unpublished King stories and early drafts from his novels. At once, it became one of the best books on King ever published.

Finally, Stephen King himself put out a new book this year, Under the Dome, which I liked a lot but had some problems with. Almost everything in the book – from the weirdly balanced characters (bad people doing heroic things, heroes fucking up big time) to the interesting movie-camera point of view (used more sparingly here than in Black House) to the ending that skirts a big battle in a really interesting way – works. What doesn’t work is the same thing that didn’t work in Cujo and almost didn’t work in The Stand: big plot turns relying on coincidence. There’s this file folder that, if found, would probably have changed everything in the book, but it keeps getting lost and almost found and it’s frustrating as hell. Despite this, though, the book has a lot to say about Big Issues without ever making them feel like Big Issues, and the characters are very real. (I actually wrote a huge full-length review!)

Huh. I did it. Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it? For further elucidation: Everything I Read In 2009.

Now, onto reading in 2010!

Kev