Since I had just begun Deborah Eisenberg’s Your Duck is My Duck when I included it in Part 3, I need to start by saying that the title story was one of my favorites and it contains the most genius description of a puppet show I’ve ever read.
I read about 1/3 fewer books this year than I have in probably the past 10 years. Is it the internet? Planning on more reading in 2019, but here are the last 5 of 2018 (though I haven’t finished The House of the Seven Gables yet, because I left it at my friend’s aunt’s house over the holidays).
The Personality Brokers, by Merve Emre: I was never a huge proponent of Myers-Briggs, but I will say I thought it was more on the boundary of psychology and pseudo-science than it was straight up Jungian astrology. I also find it curious how putting your “Type” in an online dating profile has morphed into a bright red flag (no, I didn’t have ENFJ or INFJ listed on mine, but I didn’t really get it when my roommates would dismiss anyone who listed theres. Now I get it! It’s like listing your favorite book as The Fountainhead!). And now I know the history of the Myers-Briggs (formerly the Briggs-Myers, but…acronym trouble abounded)
Educated, by Tara Westover: Many memoirs written by authors who have great stories can be lacking in the writing itself (in another blog book list, several years ago, exists my reaction to A Child Called It, which I believe was “WTF did I just read??”) This is absolutely not one of them. The writing is excellent. I appreciated the way the author dealt with chronology as well–not utterly strict but episodic while adhering more to the importance of theme than to calendar year.
The Bodies in Person, by Nick McDonell: I found myself getting annoyed by the fiction-borrowed tics that the author employs. I’m not saying that a work of nonfiction needs to be straightforward, or that it can’t be lyrical. But when it’s as journalistic as this is, there are certain flourishes and trailings off and sentences without actual verbs that seem out of place. The premise of this is obviously sobering and I don’t blame the author for not being able to concretely answer large moral questions. I did admire the writing at times, but there was something that felt off about it to me.
Contents May Have Shifted, by Pam Houston: I had started this, somewhat ironically, before getting on an airplane (which the title pertains to), but didn’t take it on the plane with me because I only walked with my Kindle that trip (on which I read Houston’s short story collection Cowboys are my Weakness). I enjoy the general conceit of the book’s structure–bouncing around from flight to flight, trip to trip–and Houston’s voice. At the time I started the book there was a possibility I would be moving to California, specifically where Houston lives half of the year, so maybe I was also looking for landmarks and/or gossip. No gossip, though I did find myself snooping on Facebook afterward to determine the identities of a few characters.
The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne: I was going to read this with a student before she visited Massachusetts, but we didn’t have enough lead time. I had already checked it out from the library, though, and having recently revisited (and appreciated vastly more than I did in high school) The Scarlet Letter with a different student (and, I admit, based on its smallness and lightness making it appropriate for a subway read) decided to read it anyway. Hawthorne is much more playful than I remembered (I did not remember him as remotely playful).
