50 Books In 2014 Year-End Recap

Today is December 29, and I am approximately one-third of the way through my thirty-first book of the year, and I probably won't finish by Wednesday. I have read a grand total of 30 books for the year 2014. Of course, my goal was 50, and I would be disappointed, but someone tweeted me this yesterday:

When I started this reading challenge, I knew that 50 books in one year was a lofty goal. Fifty was always kind of an arbitrary number. I knew it wouldn't bother me very much if I didn't finish, as long as I stuck with it throughout the entire year—and that I did. Even though some months passed in which I finished only one or two books, I never went anywhere without a paperback in my purse or a digital copy of something on iBooks. I seriously read a lot of great books this year, and it has been my most fruitful New Year's resolution to date by far.

My biggest realization is that to truly enjoy a book, you've got to take your time, and you've got to read it more than once. I didn't do either one of these things this year, in the interest of completing my goal. Even though 2014 is ending, the challenge isn't (especially since my friend/blogger maven Tyece so graciously included me in her list of 50 Blogs To Take Into 2015—check it out!). 50 Books In 2014 will remain a space where I document and review all the fantastic literature I consume, and hopefully inspire others to read some of the same titles (or any titles, really). Here are some graphs.

Weren't those cute? Special shout outs to: Paolo Coelho for writing the best book I read all year (The Alchemist); Kevin Kunitake for lending me several of these books and being a great literary conversationalist; Amazon for making it possible for me to order books for as low as $0.01 plus S&H; Tyece Wilkins for reading and supporting the blog via Twenties Unscripted; my online pal Courtney for appreciating the blog and being a fellow bookworm; and to everyone who supports my reading habit in one way or another. See you next year!

Book 30: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Title: Tropic of Cancer
Author: Henry Miller
Length: 318 pages
Year Written: 1934
Why I chose this book: A tattered, almost obliterated copy of this book was lent to me by my friend Kevin. I took it, but bought a copy on iBooks for ease of reading.

This was not a bad book, but it was a bad choice. As you can see, it has been a MONTH since I last finished a book, and it's December. This means that I have less than a month to read 20 more books. Fortunately for me, this is one of those challenges that you can still feel good about regardless of the outcome (kind of like running a marathon for charity or something like that). Plus, some people won't read 30 books in 30 years. Hmm. Anyway, I say this book was a bad choice because it certainly would be more enjoyable sans a hovering timeline. It is a book that provides profoundly meaningful tidbits, about life and the human condition, but not necessarily a quick and easily digested storyline.

Tropic of Cancer is one of those books I've always known of (perhaps initially through an episode of Seinfeld) but had no clue about its content. The only thing I knew, just prior to starting, was that it was initially banned, which is not a concept my modern mind can necessarily grasp. It turns out that Tropic of Cancer is a surly, kind of depressing, half-fiction account of author Henry Miller's nomadic life in Paris as a struggling writer. The novel is chock-full of dirt, both sexually and hygienically. Life for Henry Miller between 1930 and 1934 was apparently laden with lice, starvation, and whores. I later learned that he based many of his characters on people he knew in real life, including beastly poetic writer Anais Nin (who I read earlier this year, and now realize was probably writing about cheating on her husband with Miller). They apparently had quite the passionate affair that many speculate to have crystallized in his character "Tania":

"I am fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris' chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces..."

More than the actual novel itself, I am fascinated with the circumstances that led to the novel's creation. I am blown away by the inspiration that two awesomely nasty writers shone onto one another in the nude and then onto paper. I'm also fascinated with the feeling of being a fly on the wall of some unintentional bigot's dilapidated Parisian quarters in the 1930s. The novel can be quite graphic, but honestly contains nothing more offensive than life itself. It has been heralded as the literary work that paved the way for our current freedom of expression in fiction. For that, especially, I am grateful.

Rating: 8.3/10

Book 29: The Giver by Lois Lowry

Title: The Giver
Author: Lois Lowry
Length: 225 pages
Year Written: 1993
Why I chose this book: Like the last book, this one was recommended to me by my friend Kevin (which means it will be a great, meaningful book that I absolutely love).

Long after Brave New World, but years before The Hunger Games trilogy, Lois Lowry wrote this brilliant, powerful, yet simple story about many of the same dystopian visions that seem to recur throughout popular literature. The Giver is a kid's book, but relevant to all ages. For those unfamiliar with Aldous Huxley's masterpiece Brave New World, it is about a society where babies are bred for particular careers, and everyone is too doped up on a drug called "soma" to ever consider the bigger picture, or even the existence of one. People are generally more familiar with The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, in which kids aged 12 through 18 are entered into an annual drawing where boy and one girl are selected from each of the 12 districts to fight in an arena (though more like a complete ecosystem) until one survivor remains. The Giver is not as complex as Brave, nor as violent as Hunger, but much more moving than either.

The main character, Jonas, is a young boy who lives in a community where everything is rigid and controlled. Births are regulated to 50 per year, and each "newchild" is closely monitored so that on their twelfth birthday (which occurs as a mass ceremony every December) they can receive a job assignment from the community's elders, for which they immediately start their training. Though many kids already know what they will be assigned, because of their expressed interests and hobbies, Jonas has no idea what he will get. So, of course, he gets assigned a mystical, prestigious, but super mysterious and scary job: Receiver of Memory. Essentially, his job is to hold all the memories of the world so that everyone else doesn't have to. This turns out to be, like, the biggest gift/curse combo you could ever imagine.

Jonas goes through about a year of very painful self-discovery and newfound awareness, which all culminates in a simple, slightly unfinished ending. Lowry's reserved, elegant style of writing definitely add to the pleasure of reading this story. Moreover, it gives us highly relevant but perhaps uncomfortable food for thought.

Rating: 9.7/10

Book 28: The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield

Title: The Celestine Prophecy
Author: James Redfield
Length: 246 pages
Year Written: 1993
Why I chose this book: This was lent to me under high recommendation from my young Henry Miller-Murakami, better known as my friend Kevin.

In all caps, the back cover of this book boasts: "A BOOK THAT COMES ALONG ONCE IN A LIFETIME TO CHANGE LIVES FOREVER." This might seem a bit corny or pretentious (corntentious), but after finishing this very spiritual novel, I can't say it is inaccurate. This book is similar in content and attitude to others I have read (Siddhartha, The Alchemist), but delivered in a way that is more modern, much more specific, and perhaps more relevant.

The narrator of The Celestine Prophecy never goes into much detail about himself, his life, or even his appearance. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure he ever gives his name, either (though if I missed that completely, I'll feel pretty foolish). The first chapter throws the reader into a dinner with a longtime, rarely-seen woman/friend, where the narrator is informed about a secret, widely-debated Manuscript circulating in Peru. This Manuscript deals with our understanding of ourselves, our purpose on Earth, and what we must do to achieve enlightenment and move towards our destinies. It all sounds cheesy, but I swear, it's not.

The rest of the book follows the narrator as he discovers the different Insights of the Manuscript one by one as he voyages the jungles of Peru, now made dangerous by government officials and police seeking to prohibit dissemination of the document. The Insights are the heart of The Celestine Prophecy, because they actually make sense, and answer a lot of the questions that we have, and ones that we forgot we should have. The Insights discuss things from the proper way to interact with children, to the importance of speaking with every person you make eye contact with. And, of course, the book's content heralds highly the meaning of coincidences. This is the first thing we've got to start paying attention to, if we ever hope to (Andre 3000 voice) vibrate higherrrrrr, and evolve into really kick-ass super-sentient beings.

This book was very interesting, though a bit lacking in the creative style of the language. Every character seems to speak the same way, and deliver information on-time and in full as the plot progresses. I have a sneaking suspicion that before writing this story, James Redfield wrote (or stumbled upon some version of) the Manuscript in question. Nevertheless, it's worth reading, though it may take a while. Redfield packs each sentence with need-to-knows. It's no lazy read.

Rating: 8.8/10

Book 27: Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham

Title: Not That Kind of Girl
Author: Lena Dunham
Length: 262 pages
Year Written: 2014
Why I chose this book: I am a huge fan of Dunham's HBO television series GIRLS. I've always been curious to read the memoirs Hannah is working on in the show, and I imagine that this book is essentially it.

Not That Kind of Girl is only the second non-fiction book I have read this year. However, after reading Lena Dunham blather about her self-centered, vaguely unstable, privileged, prosciutto-eating childhood, and her colorful adult life (that runs virtually parallel to that of the character she plays on GIRLS), you wonder just how reliable of a narrator she really is. At one point in the book, Dunham actually says "I am an unreliable narrator," before proceeding to explain how she retells details about other people's lives as if they were her own—before she even realizes she is lying.

Remember when Hannah's literary agent read her work and asked, "Where's the pudgy face slick with semen and sadness?" It's here, in NTKOG. There's a lot more, though. Behind the pudgy face is what is and always has been a brilliant mind (something Dunham both knows about herself and proves simultaneously). It's clear that Dunham has no qualms about looking or sounding like a jackass, and frequently redeems herself with her special brand of intelligence and wit.

One particularly high point in NTKOG. 

This book reads less like a how-to manual and more like a how-never-to. Never let someone continuously fuck you and fuck with you. Never forget that we are all destined to die. Never underestimate the audacity and spite of a pre-pubescent daughter of crunchy granola types in Brooklyn. Dunham is a piece of work. And she's transformed her life into a pretty entertaining and cleverly written piece of work.

She is morbid, the physical embodiment of the acronym TMI, and her self-deprecating style is as much charming as it is pathetic. I think the moral of the Dunham story is that she doesn't give a fuck. But she really, really does. She wants to make it, to be heard, to have her experiences documented and digested by the new generation. She reminds me that everyone is crazy and unstable. But if you can write about it intelligently and make others laugh while doing so, you've hit the sweet spot. We can't take ourselves so seriously, and it's good to know that Lena is true to her attention-seeking brat of an inner child.

Rating: 8.5/10

Book 26: The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

Title: The Sirens of Titan
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Length: 319 pages
Year Written: 1959
Why I chose this book: I really liked Cat's Cradle and dig Kurt Vonnegut as a human (RIP).

I hate to admit that this is a science fiction novel, but it really is. Most of the plot revolves around space and time travel, and a Martian invasion on Earth. But it really doesn't read as Star Trek as that all sounds. [Quick side note: this is the first book I've read on my phone using iBooks. Thought I'd hate it, but I didn't. I've always been a traditional paper-page-turning reader gal, but reading on my phone was surprisingly convenient and even enjoyable. Yay technology!]

Anyway, The Sirens of Titan is really a very deep book presented in a witty, almost goofy way. It is about a vapid playboy named Malachi Constant who becomes a brainless soldier on Mars named Unk, and eventually returns to Earth as a prophesied wandering space traveler. The plot is wildly imaginative and would seem like a coleslaw of non-sequiturs if not for the fact that everything eventually ties together seamlessly and beautifully.

Vonnegut really has a knack for making you examine not just yourself but mankind altogether. The central themes of this book are, in my opinion, free will and purpose. What if our bigger picture is just a speck in a bigger picture? What is the biggest picture? Reading this book made me smile. It reminded me just how much we really don't know shit about life. Vonnegut, like every good writer, writes about the same things in many different ways throughout his works. He has a brilliant, almost sacrilegious sense of humor, and what seems to be quite the lovely take on life and death. It makes me feel so at peace about his being dead (RIP again).

"Luck, good or bad, is not the hand of God. Luck is the way the wind swirls and the dust settles eons after God has passed by."

Rating: 9.8/10

Book 25: Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Title: Fight Club

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Length: 218 pages

Year Written: 1996

Why I chose this book: I love Palahniuk but always overlook this book, because in all its acclaim, the story still never appealed to me.

When I first started reading Fight Club, I knew the story, more or less. I thought I'd never seen the movie, either, but had caught enough cable re-run snippets of it that I couldn't be surprised by anything in the plot. Turns out that the more I read, the more I realized I could see Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter acting out each scene. I guess I saw more of the movie than I remembered. It kind of ruined the reading experience for me just a bit. 

The basic story is that an insomniac starts a fight club and mischief gang, with the help of his evil friend Tyler Durden who is actually his schizo alter-ego. The book may have been better if I'd read it blindly, not knowing that Brad Pitt is really Edward Norton. 

I've read several books by Chuck Palahniuk, but this was his first. I appreciate the fact that he is incessantly, reliably disgusting, and never shies away from the most grotesque descriptions possible. It wasn't my favorite Palahniuk book, but I already knew it wouldn't be. It seems that he has only mastered his craft of yucky fiction brilliance in the 18 years since his debut novel. It's not a bad book, and I'm sure in some rights it's a classic, but I didn't care for it all that much. 

Rating: 7/10