A year in the Cloud

Twelve months after I welcomed my Kindle into my life, I've just downloaded my 50th book. Time to take stock. 

(Or maybe it's time to buy stock in the company--even if some of those downloads were free or cheap, it still looks like I've spent around $400 on e-books this year. Please remind me of that figure next time I complain about being broke.)


I read twenty-four books written by women, twenty-five by men, and one anthology embracing multitudes. Most of the authors are American, with a few exceptions (Clarice Lispector, Malcolm Lowry, Victor Hugo, Tan Twan Eng, Herman Koch, and the globetrotting adventuress Isabella Bird, among others). Three Canadians appear on the list: Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Ruth Ozeki.

Authors who appear on my list more than once include Atwood, Bird, Eng, and Lispector along with David Foster Wallace, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Richard Russo, Barbara Kingsolver, and Carl Hiaasen. (I'm embarrassed to admit how many of Hiaasen's books I read this year, but he's tied for first place!)

Some of these were guilt reads: authors I ought to have read before but never got around to them, like Kingsolver, whose novels I found underwhelming and manipulative, and Malcolm Lowry, whose Under the Volcano knocked my socks off stylistically even though I dislike the characters. Other books were associated with my teaching or research: I needed to read Lucy Alibar's play Juicy and Delicious to prepare for the paper I gave at MMLA, and the two Margaret Atwood novels helped me answer students' questions about what happens after Oryx and Crake.

I look over the list and I see titles that spark no specific memories. Rebecca Lee's Bobcat and Other Stories? May have been interesting but I don't remember. Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic? I have some vague memories of a long road trip, a wedding, and Russo's usual dry wit, but plot and characters are moldering in some dark, dusty corner of my mind's attic.

Which books were most memorable? I've recommended Herman Koch's The Dinner to just about everyone I know this year. I read it through quickly the first time and then had to start over at the beginning again because I couldn't quite believe what Koch had accomplished and I wanted to track how he did it. An astounding novel, certainly the best I've read all year--and that's saying a lot when Faulkner is on the reading list!

Similarly impressive is A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, a boundary-crossing novel assembled from fragments of overlooked history. The various narrative voices are engaging and believable, even if some of the plot twists are not.

Several novels gripped me for a time but don't claim any permanent devotion. Kate Atkinson's Life after Life and Emma Donoghue's Room are compelling tales told with originality and ingenuity, but I don't foresee reading them again. Odds against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich feels like a movie treatment rather than a fully developed fictional world, but it's entertaining and even profound in places. And Peter Carey's His Illegal Self ends just when it's getting interesting--I want to read the rest of the story! But I was utterly incapable of finishing The Maytrees by Annie Dillard, despite several attempts. I just can't care about her characters.

Several novels provided way too many characters to keep track of--and yet I couldn't put them down. Both David Foster Wallace novels fall in that category (Infinite Jest and The Pale King), along with The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, a sort of puzzle book that made me want to go back and read it again right away despite its brick-like length.

The advantage of reading on the Kindle, of course, is that a book the size of a brick weighs no more than a brief novella, but both can stake out similar plots of mental real estate. I read The Dinner in an afternoon--a novel that covers the course of a single meal shared by four people--but in my mind it feels just as weighty as Catton's sprawling, Dickensian The Luminaries.

One disadvantage of reading on the Kindle, of course, is that I've developed no mental image of these books as books. What do their covers look like? No clue. Does that matter? I don't know yet--but I do know that I have a terrible time remembering the authors and titles of books I read on the Kindle, perhaps because I don't see the books lying on the nightstand or stacked on the bookshelves. They live in the Cloud, a nebulous place where authors dead and alive rub shoulders--Faulkner and Atwood, Ozeki and Hiaasen--while their words and titles mingle and dance and dissolve like vapors. It's a nice place to visit, but I'm not sure I'd want to live there.