Holiday book round-up

It heartens me to see books piled on my nightstand just waiting to be read and I always get a little antsy when the pile dwindles, but thanks to the recent round of birthdays and Christmas and discounts at the MLA book exhibit, the pile is comfortably tall. I've already read some of them but as long as there are a few more in waiting, I'm happy:

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin: A terrific collection of short stories all linked by their connection to a particular family in Pakistan. I recall being impressed by the opening story, "Nawabdin Electrician," when it appeared in The New Yorker, and the remaining stories do not disappoint. My favorite image: "The oversized head had settled heavily onto the shoulders, like a sand castle on the beach after the sea has run in over it."

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand: A thought-provoking and thorough account of the problems facing colleges and universities, especially those struggling to sustain a liberal arts emphasis. My favorite image: "if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about thirty years ago, it zoomed straight off a cliff, went into a terrifying fall, grabbed a branch on the way down, and has been clinging to that branch ever since."

Death With Interruptions by Jose Saramago: The Portugese author's novels offer interesting thought experiments, but they are most successful when character development trumps the artificialities imposed by the experiment (as in Blindness and All the Names), and least successful when character development seems like an afterthought (as in Seeing). Death with Interruptions is a hybrid: the first half of the book features no fully developed characters, while the second half focuses on two (death with a small 'd' and an unnamed musician), ending just when you want to get to know them better--and ending with a sentence identical to the opening line. My favorite sentence is typical Saramago prose (and let's give a shout-out to his marvelous translator, Margaret Jull Costa):

That is her man, a musician, nothing more, like the almost one hundred other men and women seated in a semicircle around their personal shaman, the conductor, and all of whom will, one day, in some future week or month or year, receive a violet-colored letter and leave their place empty, until some other violinist, flautist or trumpeter comes to sit in the same chair, perhaps with another shaman waving a baton to conjure forth sounds, life is an orchestra which is always playing, in tune or out, a titanic that is always sinking and always rising to the surface, and it is then that it occurs to death that she would be left with nothing to do if the sunken ship never managed to rise again, singing the evocative song sung by the waters as they cascade from her decks, like the water song, dripping like a murmuring sigh over her undulating body, sung by the goddess Ampritrite at her birth, when she became she who circles the seas, for that is the meaning of the name she was given.

I have to stop and get my breath after that one.

Colors of the Mountain by Da Chen: This eye-opening tale of a village boy coming of age during China's Cultural Revolution is positively Dickensian in the amount of oppression heaped on an impressionable child, but it lacks the Dickensian depth of detail and color. But I'm only halfway through so perhaps it will improve. The writing is workmanlike except in his tender reminiscences of his grandfather: "Grandpa lived the life of a mountain cat. He rose with the moon and dozed off in his small, wooden bed when the sun came out."

Truth in Nonfiction edited by David Lazar: A collection of beautifully written essays exploring the troubled relationship between fact and fiction in creative nonfiction. I'm halfway through and already I've found many ideas worth chewing on. For instance, Vivian Gornick explains that some readers of her memoir were disappointed when they met the author or her mother outside the book. The problem, explains Gornick, is that "In our actual persons, neither Mama nor I could give satisfaction. We ourselves were just a rough draft of the written characters."

And now to the ones I haven't started yet:

Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon: I don't recognize many of the authors' names, which is as good a reason as any to read this.

The World Within: Writers Talk: This collection of interviews gleaned from the pages of Tin House focuses on authors as diverse as Sherman Alexie, Marilynne Robinson, Ken Kesey, and Lydia Davis.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt: A big fat hardback book promising the kind of Byatt complexity we saw in Possession.

Frommer's Washington State: A birthday gift from my daughter and son-in-law, who believe it's high time we took a real vacation. Books can take you places, sometimes literally.