Books read in 2014

Goodreads says I read 38 books this year. That's kind of sad, especially since several of them I didn't actually finish (but Goodreads can't figure that out.) I thought I read more, somehow. Of course, this doesn't count the books I re-read, of which there are always a few each year. In any case, here is the list, followed by a few random thoughts. 

Acceptance, by Jeff VanderMeer
Authority, by by Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer
Revival, by Stephen King
After the People Lights Have Gone Off, by Stephen Graham Jones
Call Me Burroughs: A Life, by Barry Miles
Unseaming, by Mike Allen
The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 6, edited by Ellen Datlow
The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 4, edited by Ellen Datlow
Fearful Symmetries, edited by Ellen Datlow
The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz
Origin: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith
Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo and the Battle that Defined a Generation, by Blake J. Harris
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
Dance Dance Dance, by Haruki Murakami
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King
The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett
Thirst for Love, by Yukio Mishima (did not finish)
Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler
Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher
Lean on Pete, by Wily Vlautin
Afraid, by Jack Kilborn (did not finish)
The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin Kiernan
Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain, by Charles R. Cross
The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, by Greg Sestero
Ask the Dust, by John Fante (did not finish)
The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith
Atonement, by Ian McEwan (did not finish)
Blue of Noon, by Georges Bataille
Hitchcock and Bradbury Fistfight in Heaven (McSweeney's)
Out, by Natsuo Kirino
To Live is to Die: The Life and Death of Metallica's Cliff Burton, by Joel McIver
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, by Laird Barron
Today I Wrote Nothing, by Daniil Kharms
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
The Summer of Black Widows, by Sherman Alexie
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami

Ok, so...Revival was one of the pretty good late-period SK books, Mr. Mercedes one of the meh (though I still enjoyed it enough)...Patricia Highsmith is a frighteningly cold writer. Like deep space ice. No warm blood flows...Caitlin Kiernan deserves so much more recognition than she gets. The Drowning Girl is one of her best...Natsuo Kirino's Out was a recommendation from my sister-in-law, I loved it though the ending stumbled. But the rest was brilliant...Speaking of stumbling endings, the first half of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch was among the best things I read this year, but the second half went from ok to boring and then it just went straight downhill at a frightening pace. If she ever figures out how to finish a story, she'll be one of the very best writers of the era. I'll keep trying. there's so much promise there... 

I'm thankful Ellen Datlow does what she does. There's a sameness creeping into too many of her anthologies and sometimes I think she's just burnt out, but she always pulls in enough good stories to be worth reading...I can't decide which book impressed me more: Mike Carey's Unseaming or Stephen Graham Jones' After the People Lights Have Gone Off. Both are outstanding and an excellent starting point for anyone looking for the best contemporary horror...Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy is the only thing I've read in the last six, seven years that made me say "This. This is exactly what I want to read. I wish I had written this." An absolutely astounding achievement, and the yardstick to which the whole fantastical field will be measured against for years, even as it transcends that very field...

Do they teach classics in school anymore? What defines a classic? Because everyone should read Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, but I suspect it is a largely forgotten book. It's haunted me since I read it, and anyone interested in understanding the torn-apart psyche of the 20th century would do well to read it. Where are the writers with the courage to write such stories now?...War is a demonstration of the failure of human evolution, and that we lost a talented mind like Daniil Kharms says the worst about us a species. He understood the absurdity of his era, even as that absurdity cost him his life. What would he think of this era? You could say the same for Bruno Schultz. To think of what these two writers could have produced...

I've said it many times and I'll never stop saying it: Haruki Murakami is a treasure. He just amazes me. We are all kids in a sandbox next to him...I miss Carl Sagan something fierce, but I am thankful Neil DeGrasse Tyson is out there doing his best. His writing is still not as approachable as Sagan, but he's getting there...I wonder what I would have thought of Neuromancer if I'd read it back when it came out, as I meant to. I'm glad I finally did, but it's hard to suspend the last 30 years of history while reading it. A bit too late...

So, about those books I didn't finish: Atonement sucked, it was as boring as watching paint dry, maybe worse. Paint drying at least has a point. I find it hard to believe this is the same guy who wrote The Cement Garden, which is a fantastic book...I would have been impressed with John Fante's Ask the Dust when I was 15. At 40, not so much...Thirst for Love is actually brilliant, I just couldn't sync with it as I had just finished Darkness at Noon and couldn't shake that book. I'll try it again one day...Afraid is the kind of paint-by-numbers book that just does nothing for me anymore...

Nonfiction: The Disaster Artist was fantastic if you've seen The Room, and if you haven't, you've missed the most brilliant bad movie ever made. I got obsessed with the movie and the book was a wonderful compliment. Seriously, you just have to see it...I did a post on Call Me Burroughs last month, great biography...Console Wars was an entertaining story but the framing of it, mostly from the point of view of Sega of America's president during that time, was a problem. Context was missing, and as such it felt one-sided. Still, there I had  a twinge of nostalgia, even though I wasn't gaming much in that era...I very much liked Charles Cross's Kurt Cobain biography, Heavier than Heaven, but thought that this year's Here We Are Now was reaching and thin. A couple of interesting chapters, but it also proves that it's pretty damn hard to say anything new about Kurt...To Live is to Die, on the other hand, shines a light on the number one rock tragedy (in my eyes, anyway) ever, which would be the death of Cliff Burton in a bus crash in 1986. Not only did Cliff play a major role in shaping Metallica's sound, teaching the rest of the band music theory and exposing them to different influences, he was arguably the best bass player of the era and a musician of immense talent. Orion? That's his, man, and it's maybe the greatest Metallica track ever. To Live is to Die is an entertaining read of a life that was cut too short not from lame rock star excess, but pure bad luck. Heaven owes us, man, heaven fucking owes us. 

On to 2015! Well, after I *finally* finish The Dark Tower series. Halfway through Volume 7!