The bloodlands lie between Berlin and Moscow. You’ve read parts of this history before, but Timothy Snyder’s contribution (a great one) is to change the frame of reference. His subject is the decade and a half of mass death in these lands, considered as the outcome of deliberate policies on the part of both Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. Snyder’s story thus transcends national and ethnographic boundaries and the ideological differences between Hitler and Stalin to discuss how institutional genocide was allowed to take place. In Europe. And no one cared.

It is, as you might imagine, depressing. Parts of it are heartbreaking. Parts of it are nauseating.

It’s amazing.

It’s effectively the sequel to Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 and a companion to both Deathless and The Hare With The Amber Eyes. The other book that keeps nagging at me is Helen Darville-Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed The Paper (no link love for you, lady: you know why) which considered the Holocaust as some sort of legitimate revenge for the Ukrainian famine… of course she was a liar, as it turned out. But that’s my country for you: people lying about genocide for notoriety. (Hi, Keith Windschuttle!)

I’m listening to it in the car, which is a good way of forcing yourself to keep going. The narrator has a very particular diction, with clipped enunciation and a downward inflection. I couldn’t place it for a while, then I realized who it reminded me of: Paul Darrow as Kerr Avon. Which is downright unsettling.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a girl in possession of a retirement-level liquidity event must be in want of a tax shelter.

From The Truth About Grief:

Allan Kellehear, the Australian sociologist, wrote in 2005, “Australian ways of grieving… are not logical outcomes of our local experience but are rather socially constructed ways of understanding inherited from a variety of dominant foreign influences.”

From Among Others:

It wasn’t that we didn’t know history. Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people. We’d been taught about cavemen and Normans and Tudors. We knew about Greeks and Romans. We knew masses of personal stories about World War II. We even knew quite a lot of family history. It just didn’t connect us to the landscape. And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one…

It’s amazing how large the things are that it’s possible to overlook.

Homework supervision, piano practice supervision, roast chicken with kale, yams and spinach salad, dinner all sitting up at the table, bedtime at the official house standard bedtime and no later. And then! After reading Claire a chapter of The Little White Horse, then my daily mandated five hundred words on the novel?

Jesus God, this fiction gig is freakin hard! (And parenting’s no picnic either.)

The smugness when I actually hit the word count, though! The meaningless bullshit sense of achievement! The glow.

Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, on the other hand, are terrible, atrocious people.

After my first year at uni I got a summer gig on an archaeological dig at Port Arthur, the big Colonial gaol site and open air museum on the Tasman Peninsula. It was fantastic, my first adventure away from home, prefiguring Ireland and America. I got to try on different selves and to spend my days in hard physical labour and my evenings flirting and learning to cook. (Zucchini should be peeled and sliced and blanched and served with pepper and too much butter. Whatever you do to them, eels hand-caught out of the well are gross.) And despite its awful history Port Arthur was, and is, gobsmackingly beautiful. Every Benthamite Panopticon should be built out of sandstone and set in parkland, on a cove.

In 1996 there was a huge, terrible massacre there. The person responsible has said that he did it in order to be famous, and so I have not spoken or written his name since I read that, fifteen years ago. (Boy, I sure showed him!) But my desire to expunge his infamy reflected a deeper conviction that the massacre was an aberration, a rain of lead from the sky. It wasn’t about Port Arthur. It wasn’t some terrible reflection on human nature (Port Arthur’s awful history is that.) It wasn’t how life is. I resist all efforts by heartless men with guns to define the human condition.

The Columbine book is super-interesting in this way, because it discusses Eric Harris as a fully-fledged psychopath. (Dylan Klebold’s is a very different case.) Harris was, as far as anyone can tell, clinically aberrant; as if incapable of empathy at the genetic level. He was a rain of lead from the sky. He doesn’t tell us anything about bullying or nerds or people who wear trench coats or social life in American high schools. He is a natural disaster, like a hurricane or a flood. And this is most movingly expressed by Patrick Ireland, who is best remembered for climbing out a window with blood pouring from the bullet wound in his head. What kept him going through the hours it took him to crawl to the window? Not hope, as it turned out. Trust. At his valedictorian address to his class, Ireland said:

“When I fell out the window, I knew somebody would catch me. That’s what I need to tell you: I knew the loving world was there all the time.”

Life is mysterious and amazing.

Not exactly a spoiler to say there’s a scene in the Doctor Who Christmas special (which I watched, not in the approved behind-the-sofa position, but on the edge of my seat hanging on every word, oblivious to the wet Boxing Day unfolding around me) in which Eleven discovers that there are fish flying around in the fog and says something like:

“Who invented boredom? Ridiculous. How is anyone ever bored?”

Reminds me of “So high, so low, so many things to know!” from Sherkaner, in A Deepness in the Sky. This universe! The attention to detail that went into it! Fantastic. Would choose to live again!

Another no-contest. A Place of Greater Safety is crazy-wonderful and amazing, but Wolf Hall was the first. About 200 pages in, I was no longer Rachel sitting in front of a novel. I was Thomas Cromwell walking to the Palace to meet the King.

That, in case you’re wondering, is why I read.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

All ladybooks. And it’s not like I didn’t read dudebooks all year; I did. It’s just that the ladies were all, oh, freer and looser and madder. They were all resurrecting the dead and overthrowing the state and having relations with animals. They were appropriating true stories and speaking with the voices of drunks and historical personages and even First Ladies! They were taking bold risks and those risks were paying off! Dudes are going to have to step up if they want to write like the ladies. You should read any of these but ideally all of them because they are each of them intricately constructed WORLDS UNTO THEMSELVES. So brilliant! Kudos, ladies!

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

A Japanese photographer assigned to Nagasaki after the bombing said this of the scene he surveyed: “I tried climbing up onto a small hill to look. All around the city burned with little elf-fires, and the sky was blue and full of stars.”

Blame

Patsy MacLemoore came to on a concrete shelf in a cell in the basement of the Altadena Sheriff’s department. Her hair had woken her up. It stank.

She had said she would rather die than come back here. She’d said that both times she’d been here before.

A Place of Greater Safety

The child particularly presented an insoluble problem. It seemed inaccessible to the processes of legal reasoning. He smiled at it, and it learned to smile back; not with the amicable toothless grin of most infants, but with what he took to be a flicker of amusement. Then again, he had always understood that the eyes of small babies did not focus properly, but this one – and no doubt it was entirely his imagination – seemed to look him over rather coolly. This made him uneasy. He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him and say, “You prick.”

The Haunting of Hill House

The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends.

The Little Stranger

I wasn’t a spiteful or destructive boy. It was simply that, in admiring the house, I wanted to possess a piece of it…

Niagara Falls All Over Again

Though both men are rotten marchers, they make it to the altar, where a minister opens a Bible in a chiding way; because there’s no good reason to be late to your own wedding, even if the bride is a pony. Which she is, a chubby, sway-backed roan pony whose hindquarters keep shifting – she’s not thrilled about the match either.

Bear

She sucked in her breath and waited; then, when they were close to the dock she saw that what she had thought was true: the house was a classic Fowler’s octagon.

“Wow,” she said.

“Pretty fine, isn’t it?”

“It’s not mentioned in the textbooks. There’s an index of houses like that.”

“Oh, we’re pretty cagey, up here…”

Blackout / All Clear

For a moment after the siren started its up-and-down warble, Polly simply stood there with the stockings box still in her hand, her heart pounding. Then Doreen said, “Oh, no, not a raid! I thought for certain we’d get through today without one.

We did, Polly thought. There must be some mistake.

American Wife

Have I made terrible mistakes?

Room

Eggsnake is more longer than all around Room, we’ve been making him since I was three, he lives in Under Bed all coiled up keeping us safe.

I read some stinkers – Solar was self-pitying crap! I Don’t Care About Your Band actually made me feel sorry for some douchey dudebros! That ain’t right! – but this was no contest.

…the bestselling books in the world are poorly written, erotic fan fiction that a man wrote about himself.

Ugh.

As usual, the number ten is completely arbitrary. Honourable mentions go to Logicomix, Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around, The Indian Clerk, A Final Arc of Sky, The Marketplace of Ideas and Imperial Life in the Emerald City. But the following are all GREAT BOOKS.

Somewhere Towards the End

If you don’t have an old lady friend who is willing to be completely honest with you, that is a great misfortune, but this no-bullshit memoir by Diana Athill should fill some of the void. She is excellent on sex, race, writing and the indignity of growing old. She also wrote this unsparing article on her decision to move to a nursing home. It is all essential reading for aspiring crones.

River Town

I raced through everything else Peter Hessler has written this year as well, and consider him my most reliable informant on China – Country Driving is especially awesome on the manufacturing towns – but River Town is the place to start. Hessler’s two years as a Peace Corps English teacher in Fuling, on the Yangtze, sets the context and introduces some of the characters who will reappear in his other books. Peace Corps sounds like murder, by the way. In a good way. Sort of. My friend Fred and his wife Susan are in Armenia right now. Something to think about for my post-sprog, pre-crone years?

Mountains Beyond Mountains

Do you like yourself? Do you feel good about your place in the world? Mountains Beyond Mountains will fix that! I have an occasional series on my professional Twitterstream (yes, I have a professional Twitterstream, I told you my life was absurd) called Inspirational Badass of the Day. Farmer’s schtick is the preferential option for the poor – ie, that we should treat all human beings as if they are human, not just rich people. REVOLUTIONARY STUFF. Between the earthquake and cholera, Farmer – whose Partners In Health was the first medical organization on the ground in Port au Prince – has amply earned his title of Inspirational Badass of the Year. He’s kind of an asshole, and a wiseass, too: one of his books on institutional poverty and the collusion of Western powers is called The Uses of Haiti. I love him. Go give some money to PIH. God knows they could use it.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

OH HOLY FUCK this book made me sob like a little kid. Gender, race, cancer, grief, Big Science, poverty, families, the reporter’s responsibility to the truth, our responsibility to each other. My America, in all its fucked-up glory, from Wired to The Wire.

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters

My America’s dark mirror. Progressives who suggest that there is nothing to choose between America and North Korea (yes, such people exist) find themselves on my shit list in short order. The USA is unquestionably fucked up, but there is no possible excuse for ignorance of conditions in North Korea. If you think you’re a hero of the resistance because you launched a DDoS attack on Mastercard? You really need to swallow your fucking ego and study some survivor testimony. Just sayin.

Nuclear Rites

What a surprise and pleasure this book was! Exemplary, imaginative anthropology field-work in the early nineties in Livermore. The nuclear test as a rite of passage for nuclear scientists. An anti-nuke activist turns himself INSIDE OUT trying to understand his own dark mirror. In my opinion this is what our great big monkey brains are FOR.

Songs of the Gorilla Nation

The much better neuro-atypical memoir about animal behaviour; also magnificently insightful on sex work, orientation, gender identity and parenthood.

The Language of Blood

The book that had me sitting at my favourite table in Atlas Cafe, waiting for my mechanics to finish an oil change, with tears running unchecked down my face, crying my guts out for a South Korean housewife I never met.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

I really am a death-obsessed little crypto-Goth, no? I can’t believe it took me this long when everyone I know adores Mary Roach. With good reason, as it transpires! Her little asides crack my shit up. Funniest book about human remains since The American Way of Death and The Loved One.

Winter Season

Department of Redundancy Department! See also Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, for the gymnastics and figure skating side of the All Beauty Is A Tool Of The Patriarchy story. Oh, young girls and your aspirations! Like Chum in shark-infested water! Christ.

While I quite liked all three books, I think it’s symptomatic of the pathology of the modern West that the protagonists of Franzen’s Freedom, Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Lipsyte’s The Ask are all sad white men who orbit the uberrich like anxious and stupid moths. And they are all subjected to ritual humiliation, lovingly detailed. And did I mention that they are all transparent authorial stand-ins?

Ah, Bush’s America. Zombie Bush’s America, in fact, in which Cheney has a Cylon heart and the rest of us have a Democratic administration and everything’s getting worse, especially if you were shortsighted enough to be born in Iraq or Afghanistan. (What were you thinking?) People, by which I suppose I mean novelists, are very open about their envy these days. They document the dewy features and lithe musculature of the wealthy. They specify the exact brand of luxury crap they wish they could afford. (William Gibson’s especially ridiculous in this regard, but I’m letting him off because I have finally realized that he’s a comedian. Also he offers a vision of what an alternative life might be like, which none of the others do.) In Zombie Bush’s America there is endless shame in not being rich (for very large values of rich, note well; mere upper-middle-class-ness is the most shameful condition of all, HOW CAN I SHOW MY FACE) and no shame in admitting how abjectly ashamed you are. Quite the reverse. It’s as if Jane Austen approved of Lady Catherine de Burgh.

Of course the most revolting thing about this whole queasy ritual is that if the writer abases himself disgustingly enough, the amused uberrich will anoint him (yes, always a him) and he’ll get to be superrich himself. I’m going to be a prescriptive little bitch here and say that writers should not aspire to the condition of plutocrats; not because I hold writers to higher standards (ha!), but because NO ONE SHOULD.

Winter Season has SO MUCH good stuff about gender as performance, a performance whose terms are set and whose execution is judged by the patriarchy and whose effect is to force women to compete for crumbs. So much! But I shall confine myself to quoting this bit:

About money: I really think we are the most ignorant paid people on earth. I’m sure we are constantly cheated and never complain. We are not trained to think financially. Money is only to pay for the apartment, to buy a fur coat and ballet clothes… When we have a need, we write a check. It’s the only way we know. All our excess money goes on clothes and bodily adornments. We live to adorn ourselves.

Oh and this bit:

My mother worries incessantly that I’m doing the wrong thing. Only those stage-door mothers who themselves dreamed of dancing professionally could forever continue to encourage their teary-eyed, injured, overworked little girls. Recently the mother of a young girl who was auditioning for the school took one look at the bleeding feet and gossiping children and ran out of the building with her daughter in tow. When I have a daughter, I too will keep her clear of competitive ballet schools.

I read Toni Bentley’s Winter Season on the advice of Lazy, Self-Indulgent Book Reviews, a Tumblr blog that basically makes me redundant as a human being (she has an unfinished novel in a drawer, an Appendix QH mare called Bella, and she steals all my jokes about books and also is Canadian which is like being Australian only credible.) ANYWAY. Winter Season was written exactly thirty years ago. John Lennon got shot. The Iranian hostages were released. Bentley was 22 years old and one of seventy women dancing with George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet.

That was a great day, the day my future was decided. I probably had an ice cream. If I didn’t, I should have. I remember saying to myself, praying to myself, “If I can only get in, I’ll be happy, I’ll be satisfied. I’ll never ask for more.” I did not realize what a deeply sad day it actually was — the end of a dream and the beginning of reality.

I did ballet from age about five to twelve. I was dreadful at it. The girls love my stories about being the snowflake who always did the step half a beat behind all the other snowflakes (I was special and unique! and precociously offbeat!) My mother bit her tongue until I confessed that I hated it and she confessed that I was terrible and we all had a big laugh and I got to go and learn to ride horses instead. But the first school I went to was a Serious school. (Janice Green, its draconian head, is mysteriously unGoogleable now.) I was exposed to that world: sweaty tights and ballet shoes, itchy pink leotards, examiners flying out from the Royal Ballet. And the sneaking knowledge that no matter how hard I tried, I was always going to suck at this.

Bentley made it to the top seventy in the world, and no further. Can you imagine?! She watches from the wings as Suzanne Farrell and Darci Kistler dance. She is ravished by their art and knows she will never be as good. She worships Balanchine as a god (he was a god, actually, as much as any human can be: the god of 20th century ballet), and he passively-aggressively fights with the union in order to avoid paying his dancers a living wage. Bentley starves herself. Her feet bleed. She has a cat because dancers can’t talk to human beings. The ballet fans are boring and obsessive and the dancers have nothing in common with anyone else.

The book, in other words, is fantastic. No 22 year old should be allowed to write this well. There oughta be a law! If this insidery-gossipy thing is the kind of thing you’re into, you will also adore Altman’s perfect late film about the Joffrey Ballet, The Company. It obsessed toddler-Claire for months.

(There, that should prevent any NetNannyed corporate types from reading my blog.) Jeremy claims “Shit for Cunts” was the original title of the (slightly disappointing) Banksy documentary, now (slightly disappointingly) titled “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” And indeed, I was attempting to gift shop when I asked a couple of Borders employees where their science section was.

Me “I looked near Social Science and Philosophy and even Religion, but I couldn’t find it.”

Borders dude: “It’s on the top floor, right over in the back corner.”

Me: “I see. You couldn’t find anywhere more out-of-the-way?”

Borders lady, condescendingly: “Ma’am, it’s a big store.”

Me: “Sure, but there are three shelves of astrology right here. I’m just sayin’.”

Borders dude, seriously: “I am very sorry.”

He was nice, but I left anyway, and ordered the books I wanted off the Green Apple site instead.

So Tangled, the movie, is frankly pretty adorable and – better still! – it has respectable worldbuilding! It always drives Claire mad when we stay to watch the credits (“MAMA! I want to LEAVE NOW!”), but people, there was a map! An accurate map, of the fairy kingdom! It was epically cool. Also the heroine getting a (spoiler!) cute short haircut was a key plot point. Also there was a charismatic horse. So I was mostly very happy.

Only mostly, though, because we saw it immediately after I read Emma Donoghue’s Booker-longlisted novel Room, which is based in part on the Fritzl and Dugard kidnappings. Donoghue’s first novel is the exquisite Hood, and I met her a million years ago in Dublin and she was very nice. Like me, she seems to have read every single thing published about Elisabeth Fritzl and Jaycee Dugard. Those kidnappings are at once your worst nightmare and weirdly compelling, because at least the bad man didn’t kill you, right? At least you escaped? But after how much suffering and loss. Here’s a thought to keep you up at night: how many more prisoners are there out there, that we haven’t rescued yet?

The book is beautifully written but I almost couldn’t read it, so fast was I turning the pages to make sure they escaped. It made me claustrophobic. My pulse is racing just thinking about it.

And so to Tangled, where Rapunzel is locked in a tower for eighteen years. My issues with this, where to begin. Note that the bad man has become a Goth woman! And that the kidnapping is not for sex but because of this woman’s vanity! Oh vain women, you are so totally worse than the patriarchy, Disney is kind enough to point out. Note also that Rapunzel’s mother and father never even get to speak, and that the only rescue strategy we see is them flying lanterns every year on her birthday – completely charming, even if appropriated from Thailand and Taiwan, but not exactly thorough.

Rapunzel’s mother and father do not, for example, take the kingdom apart stone by stone with their bare hands.

Dear Goddess in whom I only secretly believe, help me teach my daughters to tear down walls.

The Four Immigrants Manga is an amazing thing, a window into the lives of four Japanese men living in San Francisco at the turn of the century. Rediscovered in the nineties and intelligently translated, it’s really unlike anything else, and joins A Streetcar to Subduction and The Golden Gate on my shelf of marvellously eccentric books about my city.

So does Nuclear Rites, which will be remembered as the book that got me interested in anthropology-about-humans (as opposed to A Primate’s Memoir, Gorillas in the Mist, The Third Chimpanzee, Our Inner Ape, Mother Nature, Songs of the Gorilla Nation and Reason for Hope, which got me interested in anthropology-about-other-apes-and-also-baboons.) Hugh Gusterson was an anti-nuke campaigner straight out of the pages of The Golden Gate when he decided to live among the nuclear scientists in Livermore. Set in the early nineties, his book is a nuanced and complex appreciation of how those scientists came to their various ethical accommodations with the weapons work they undertook. The rites of the title are the scientific coming-of-age represented by a weapons test; a genuinely compelling analogy. I picked up Cultures@Silicon Valley hoping for some comparable insights into the tech industry, but so far it hasn’t dug deep enough under the skin.

I’ve been on a bit of a Big House kick this year (when am I not?) I Capture the Castle and We Have Always Lived in the Castle were middlingly-successful attempts to cash in on the breathless, stay-up-till-3am Gothic awfulness/awesomeness of The Little Stranger. I read the Dodie Smith in my Dalmations-completist phase when I was a kid, and oddly, or not, it is an entirely different book this time around, set in an entirely different place with different characters. The influence of Cold Comfort Farm is tangible. (Mashup idea of great brilliance: Cold Comfort Animal Farm. You’re welcome.) More successful at generating that elusive Gothic frisson were Anthony Blunt, Georgiana and Mad World. The British ton is genuinely creepy.

Jaran had my name written on it and should have worked for me – a romance, with kuhaylan Arabians, set in neo-Mongolia? Are you kidding me? WHERE DO I SIGN – but it was spoiled by its universally beloved, effortlessly polyglot Mary Sue. Actually the hero was kind of a douche as well. Whereas The Georges and the Jewels, despite Too Much Natural Horsemanship, had actual living horses and people in it, and I liked it a lot. Meanwhile My Dog Tulip had way, way too much detail on every kind of canine bodily excretion imaginable, and its notions of responsible animal husbandry are COUGH how shall I say VERY WRONG. And it is an awesome, awesome book.

Not surprisingly from the author of Hood, Inseparable is pretty much the hottest book of literary criticism I have ever read. I met Emma Donoghue in Dublin! She was very gracious. I was a babblin’ fule. I met Anne Enright too, and they have both been shortlisted for the Booker (Anne Enright won it, didn’t she?) and I haven’t. Never mind! With Country Driving Peter Hessler cements his position as the latest raven-haired, Oxbridge-educated sensitive world traveller to join Simon Schama and Rory Stewart among the ranks of my future imaginary husbands. Wait, Rory’s a Tory? Dude, what did I tell you? The British ton is genuinely creepy. I guess that makes him my future imaginary ex-husband. A girl’s got to have some standards.

Item the first: When I fell off Bella I landed on the point of my hip. I was kinda stiff for a few days but mostly okay, and even had a riding lesson in the midst of it; but then I had an evening lesson with Dez and Dez was eeeeville; no-stirrups, trot over a crossbar and canter out from it evil. I could not do it. I can half-ass most things on a horse, but this felt like there was a pointy bit of metal jammed into my hip joint, so I had to opt out. Mehness, and likewise mehitude! I was actively limping all weekend, which suhuhuhucked, because that weekend we went to China Camp with the camping gang, who are all great fun and who love to hike. My hip was so hurty Saturday night that it took me forever to get to sleep, even in our lovely tent under the lovely trees.

Lucky J and I had dug some old Burning Man camping armchairs outta the attic, because I jammed myself into one of those Sunday morning and read books for a couple of hours while the able-bodied – including, humiliatingly, my four-year-old – circumnavigated Turtle Back Hill. This was follow-the-sun sloth, because I had to keep dragging my chair into new sunbeams in the woods at our campsite. Eventually the chair had little tracks behind it, as do rocks on Racetrack Playa. Anyway, enough rest and being lazy and I started to get the circulation back in my toes, and on Tuesday night I had a decentish ride on Omni, the big handsome black off-the-track Thoroughbred I have been riding lately.

Omni is item the second. He’s way dumber than lovely Bella but he’s brave and strong and gentle and wouldn’t harm a fly. He reminds me a little bit of Scottie in that you talk to him through his cadence, lengthening and shortening the rhythm of his stride. But Scottie was a big chicken, and Omni’s not afraid of anything. I am, you’ll be relieved to hear, not getting attached to him at all; when I secretly think of him as Black Beauty I am merely being ironic. The other day, when the message I was passing along the reins to him was “I love you, I love you, I love you,” was an inexplicable error for which the management apologizes; the relevant brain centres have been summarily fired.

Item the third is maps. One reason I adore China Camp is because it is surrounded by wetlands, so that the map of it always reminds me of the awesome map in Arthur Ransome’s Secret Water:

What made it even awesomer this time was reading Secret Water to Claire. We’ve been having a revival of Swallows & Amazons fever ever since Liz moved into a houseboat and Danny bought Daisy. I see that Liz has been doing some cartography of her own.

Item the Fourth: glory but I have been having a brilliant run of books lately. I can especially recommend The Little Stranger and The Haunting of Hill House, two basically perfect Gothic horror stories; The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, which succeeded in making me even more upset about the DPRK, which is quite a feat; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the first book of popular science to reduce me to incoherent sobs three times – it encompasses the whole spectrum of what I think of as My America, from Wired to The Wire; everything by Peter Hessler, whose books are an excellent complement to that awesome Yellow Gorges documentary we saw, Up the Yangtze; The Marketplace of Ideas, which I think lingered in the back of my mind all through this Cambridge jaunt until I had the first glimmering, a couple of weeks ago, of insight into the way the Oxbridge experience was intentionally watered-down and exported throughout the English-speaking world, so that what I was given was not a classical education in that sense but a colonial simulacrum of one, the University of Sydney as a branch of the Scouts or Pony Club – not a new insight at the intellectual level (sidere mens eadem mutato, after all) but actually *felt* this time around, and now having to be processed; and on an entirely different note, a novel that has stayed with me ever since I read it much earlier this year, Michelle Huneven’s remarkable Blame.

Blame got me interested in AA, which turns out to have been heavily influenced by William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, a copy of which is also on my nightstand waiting to be read, which is not altogether surprising as both the Huneven and the James were recommendations from Jessa Crispin, whose taste is sometimes enigmatic but never dull. Oh! I am so very fond of books, and of the San Francisco Public Library, and I am so lucky to have them.

Item the Fifth: I want to tell you about two awesome things that Claire said; forgive me. On the second-last morning in London we took McKenze out for a large and stodgy English breakfast. McKenze was amused at having overheard Julia describe her as “bossy”; we laughed, and asked the children whether McKenze was bossy or nice. Julia stubbornly stuck to “bossy”, but Claire said with what was to me quite surprising judiciousness: “bossy and nice.”

Later she came up with an idea for an art project for this year’s Balsa Man. I said that this year we could stay back from the fire, so she wouldn’t have to be scared about getting burned, and she said something that absolutely floored me:

“I wasn’t scared I would get burned. I was scared for some of the other people, who were being silly.”

She’s only seven. She was six when this happened, and she got in such a right state about it that I had assumed for a year without even thinking about it that she was terrified on her own behalf. I’d no idea she had such complex modelling of and empathy for complete strangers in place already. Some days I think maybe I am doing a few things right. But really I can’t take much credit for her remarkable and complicated self; it is, after all, her self.

I guess I did have a lot to say, and didn’t need the artificial constraint of Five Things Make A Post after all! Let me go back and rewrite the segues! Nah, bugrit. You know I love you, right?

Meaning, I think, comes from doing a full accounting of your limitations and assets, your passions and your weaknesses, your belief system and your fears, and then rubbing up against the things that cause you to panic, like an allergy skin scratch test, and find out what your reactions are. Once you figure out how you can contribute to the greater good, once you’re able even to define that, you take that information and pour yourself into one direction. Regardless of discomfort or regrets or what-ifs. (And then doing that over and over again, until death.) That does not fit on a T-shirt. That to me is more important than bliss, which would really just lead me back into bed, maybe with a bowl of corn flakes, or maybe I would become like an elderly widower, and just Wait for Death. Or become Alice James.

Offshore

Laugh out loud mordant.

Mary Olivier: A Life

I can’t imagine why this perceptive, penetrating novel isn’t considered a modern classic.

Of Human Bondage

This is, of course, and God knows why it took me so long to read it. It’s wonderful. I am looking forward to everything else by Maugham.

The Aquariums of Pyongyang

Included not so much for its writing as for its astonishing and chilling survivor testimony from the North Korean gulag.

The Halfway House

A despairing, beautiful, haunting account of Cuban refugees in Miami.

Lilith’s Brood

Octavia Butler was the single most important find of the year, and this may be her masterpiece.

The File

The ideal book to read on the 20th anniversary of the fall of East Germany.

The American Painter Emma Dial

As vivid and sad as a drowned bird in a swimming pool.

The Story of a Marriage

Set in my San Francisco in the forties, and containing a couple of twists that I did. not. see. coming.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

Gossipy and absorbing; good background for the appointment of Sotomayor, and terrifying in its portrayal of the ultra right wing Roberts court.

Tales from Outer Suburbia

An artifact from the world of my childhood, which never existed.

Ice Bound

The memoir of the doctor who, while wintering over at the South Pole, found a lump in her breast. A love song to the ice.

China Mountain Zhang

I didn’t know science fiction could do that.

Shelter

Or that.

Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living

(sings) “C! S! I! RO!”

Seed to Harvest

Saint Octavia hear my cry.

Kamikaze Girls

Entirely responsible for my newfound love of Lolita culture.

Brother, I’m Dying

Immigration is murder.

The Girls Who Went Away

Essential companion reading and a corrective to Juno.

Fledgling

Not my first Butler but the first to sink its fangs into my throat, to my great delight.

Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe

Doreen Baingana c’est moi, if I had grown up in Uganda and become a wonderful writer.

Tales of Nevèryön

Reformatted my brain and opened a new eye.

The Arrival

As predicted, the best book of the year.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

Smashed my heart into tiny shards.

Books by women: 14/24
Books by writers of colour: 11/24 – I owe this entirely to the fantastic 50books_poc community.
Books from the San Francisco Public Library: 18/24. I LOVE YOU SFPL.