More books I've read in 2009

This was such an interesting reading year for for me -- lots of books that I'd looked forward to that disappointed, but just as many great ones that came from out of nowhere -- that I think I'll do a year-end wrap-up. Unlike every magazine and media website however, I will actually wait until the year is over to do so. Who knows, maybe the best book I'll read this year is the one I read on New Year's Eve. (And yes, I will be at home reading on New Year's Eve with any luck.)

Anyway, I may remember 2009 as the year I discovered Jonathan Tropper. I first read The Book of Joe and really liked it, then I read How to Talk to a Widower and loved it. And I just recently completed Everything Changes and . . . uh . . . I didn't like it that much.

Part of it's probably my fault. You read that much of an author's work in a short period of time, his stylistic and thematic quirks become obvious. In Tropper's case, his protagonists are always guys in their early thirties who do not have their shit together, partly because of their inability to let go of the past, and they are all headed -- though they don't always know it -- for a giant emotional showdown slash public humiliation.

Although all three of the protagonists were similar, their differences were the critical factors in determining whether or not I liked them and ultimately their book. The guy in Widower had just lost his wife who he loved very much, so I cut him a lot of slack. Joe was jerky and self-absorbed but he took a lot of his anger and wrote a novel. (The Widower guy was a writer too, come to think of it.) In Everything Changes, Zach King seems to have everything going for him -- a rent-free NYC apartment, a beautiful, rich fiancee who is nuts about him, a good job -- and all he does is wallow in self-pity and try to sabotage all these blessings. True, he did have a rotten dad who abandoned him and his brothers, and his best friend died in a car wreck a couple years ago. But come on! All in all, things are going pretty good for you, Zach. And isn't it obvious to you that as much as you hate your father you're following in his footsteps, hurting everyone who makes the mistake of caring about you?

I'm going to forgive Tropper this misstep. I'm still looking forward to his newest one This is Where I Leave You, but I am going to wait a while before I read it and cleanse the palate some first.

More Books I've read in 2009

While I was wallowing in the overwrought romanticism of Four Letters of Love I told my wife Kim that I was probably going to have to watch an action-adventure movie to cleanse my palette. But of course things weren't actually that dire. All it took was a book of the "lad lit" (or more vulgarly "dick lit") which deals with emotions from a male perspective and of which Nick Hornby is probably the most well-known practitioner. I chose "The Book of Joe" cuz I read something somewhere about its author Jonathan Tropper, and the story about a writer returning for the first time to the old hometown he savaged in his first novel sounded interesting. And that turned out to be an excellent choice. I found this book compelling for several reasons. It's laugh out funny; the protagonist has no sense of self-preservation and cannot resist smarting off even when he knows it's going to result in an ass-cutting -- or maybe even death. But there was some depth there too, as it slowly dawns on Joe Goffman that, although he may have legitimate beefs with his family and classmates, they might be right in their opinion that he is an asshole. After all, he wasn't a great brother, friend or son either. Here he is after the funural of a friend. Dugan is the high school basketball coach in a town where high school basketball is the only thing that matters:

"I thought the book was a load of horseshit," Dugan continues without missing a beat. "The malicious work of one miserable son of a bitch looking for someone to blame."
I nod again. . . "You'll understand if I don't ask you for a blurb on my next book jacket."
"You're an asshole, Goffman."
"Well, it's always a pleasure to hear from one of my readers," I say. . .
"I'm an asshole too," Dugan says. . . "Nothing wrong with being an asshole as long as you do it responsibly."
"So I'm doing it wrong?"

Now that I think about it, that may be the theme of the novel: Joe learns how to be a responsible asshole.
P.S. One of the characters in this book makes the case that Bruce Springsteen's "Backstreets" is some sort of gay anthem, and I'd never thought of it that way, but looking over the lyrics it sure could be:

One soft infested summer me and terry became friends
Trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in
Catching rides to the outskirts tying faith between our teeth
Sleeping in that old abandoned beach house getting wasted in the heat
And hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets
With a love so hard and filled with defeat
Running for our lives at night on them backstreets

Slow dancing in the dark on the beach at stocktons wing
Where desperate lovers park we sat with the last of the duke street kings
Huddled in our cars waiting for the bells that ring
In the deep heart of the night to set us loose from everything
To go running on the backstreets, running on the backstreets
We swore wed live forever on the backstreets we take it together

Endless juke joints and valentino drag where dancers scraped the tears
Up off the street dressed down in rags running into the darkness
Some hurt bad some really dying at night sometimes it seemed
You could hear the whole damn city crying blame it on the lies that killed us
Blame it on the truth that ran us down you can blame it all on me terry
It don't matter to me now when the breakdown hit at midnight
There was nothing left to say but I hated him and I hated you when you went
Away

Laying here in the dark you're like an angel on my chest
Just another tramp of hearts crying tears of faithlessness
Remember all the movies, terry, wed go see
Trying to learn how to walk like heroes we thought we had to be
And after all this time to find were just like all the rest
Stranded in the park and forced to confess
To hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets
We swore forever friends on the backstreets until the end
Hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets

2009 Literary wrap-up

No big pseudo-suspenseful countdown here. I'll just tell you right off the bat the best book I read in 2009 was "The Great Gatsby" by Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. But I may have to disqualify it -- because I've already read it several times, and technically I didn't read it this year; I had the audio-book read to me.
Other than that, 2009 held a lot of literary disappointments for me. Several books that I had been anxiously anticipating let me down, among them, "B is For Beer" and "Villa Incognita" by Tom Robbins, "Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch" by Dai Silje, "My Tango With Barbara Strozzi" by Russell Hoban and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home"by Joss Whedon. (That last one probably my fault, as I didn't do my homework.) It should also be noted that even though Tom Robbins struck out twice, I also read his "Skinny Legs and All" and if we disqualify Gatsby, that was probably the best book I read in 2009.
One author who didn't let me down was Nick Hornby. I loved "Slam" and "Juliet Naked."
I read three biographies this year. Craig Ferguson's was the best, Micky Dolenz's was the worst.
I discovered a couple of new authors that shot up to my list of favorites -- Jonathan Tropper and Paul Quarrington. Two graphic novel series that I was following -- "Astonishing X-Men" and "She-Hulk" -- either came to an end or got new creative teams that I have no interest in following, leaving the only series I currently follow "Fables" and its spin-off "Jack of Fables."
I also did an experiment in rereading, going back to "Old Glory and the Real-Time Freaks" for the first time in decades, and it was brought home to me once again that I have completely lost communication with my sixteen-year-old self, as I do not see the appeal of this book at all, even though I used to love it.