My Retinas Burn With Failure

What I Read In 2009:

1) JPod - Douglas Coupland
2) Running With Scissors - Augusten Burroughs
3) I'm With the Band - Pamela Des Barres
4) Da Capo Best Music Writing 2008 - Various
5) Helpless - Barbara Gowdy
6) House of Meetings - Martin Amis
7) Three Day Road - Joseph Boyden
8) Flight - Sherman Alexie
9) Twilight - Stephanie Meyer
10) New Moon - Stephanie Meyer
11) Eclipse - Stephanie Meyer
12) Breaking Dawn - Stephanie Meyer
13) The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
14) Heart-Shaped Box - Joe Hill
15) I & I - George Elliot Clarke
16) Colours Insulting to Nature - Cintra Wilson
17) The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
18) From Hell - Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
19) The Road - Cormac McCarthy
20) Half the Sky - Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn
21) Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
22) Our Band Could Be Your Life - Michael Azzerad
23) Wonderland Avenue - Danny Sugerman*
24) John Steinbeck - Cannery Row*
25) Black Water - Joyce Carol Oates*
26) Youth in Revolt - C.D. Payne*
27) First Love, Last Rites - Ian MacEwan*
28) Dance Me Outside - W.P. Kinsella*
29) Whiteman - Tony D'Souza*
30) The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For - Alison Bechdel*
31) Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues - Loren Rhoads (editor)*
32) The Glass Castle - Jeanette Walls*


* blogs pending

Of the 100 books I swore to read by the end of 2009, I read 32.

How do I feel about it?

When I learn about the efforts of people like this woman , I feel sort of crappy about it. But when I look at the cumulative effects of this blog and the book reviews I logged, I feel better. It sparked a lot of great conversations, if nothing else. I figured out a little more about my personal tastes; distressingly, I also had to confront my lack of focus and especially my lack of conviction (and conciseness) when it came to actually blogging about the books I'd read.

I've decided to continue the blog in order to firstly, complete the reviews that are still pending (I think I need a new word limit) and secondly because I read more when I blog about reading than when I don't. New challenges and new features are on the horizon. Recipes. Fan fiction. Trash. Pictures. Videos. The internet.

In the meantime, more reviews, and suggestions for new books are, as always, welcome. Thanks to the devoted few who followed (and continue to follow) along.

Love, Lang

I've Been Drawn Into Your Magnet Tar Pit Trap

Author: Joe Hill
Book Read: Heart-Shaped Box
Pages: 382


My attention was drawn to Joe Hill when I read the first in a series of graphic novels he's working on called Locke and Key (mentioned in this entry.) I liked his style. He's not doing anything mind-bogglingly original with the ghost story genre, but his stories are propulsive and well-paced, with interesting characters. This continues with Heart-Shaped Box. I read this in an evening while coughing up my lungs from a brief cold that felt menacingly tubercular. The book suited my mood.

Judas Coyne is an aging Alice Cooper-esque rock star living in a decaying upstate New York farmhouse with a twenty-three-year-old Goth girl named Georgia (the latest in a series of young Goth girls, we learn.) He's tough and burnt out from thirty years of hard rocking and partying and now lives his remaining years in a creative rut, treating his Gothy live-ins like garbage, remembering his youth as an abused farm child, avoiding email and daydreaming over various gross artifacts he's collected over the years (skulls, snuff films, books of the dead, etc). One day his puppy-dog-like overeager manager Danny shows him a link for an online auction site, where someone has put their dead stepfather's suit up for auction. Judas orders it to add to his collection. It arrives - and guess what shape the box is in? And guess what else has come to stay in his house with the suit? I JUST DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT!

What comes next is many pages of trashy fun. If you like horror, this is probably the cream of the most recent crop, and you won't be able to put it down. Now, I won't say that Heart-Shaped Box isn't a guilty pleasure. Any book that can be read in under six hours while piled under blankets and gulping NeoCitran most definitely falls in that category. There aren't any heart-stopping literary endeavours happening here. There is, however, some ripping good storytelling, characters that you care about (despite not necessarily being able to relate to them) some huge scares and some shocking moments of violence. The ghost's first appearance should be predictable, but Hill lets it creep up on you, and when the moment comes - teased through agonizing, minute description - it's very scary. This shit will suck you in. Even as you sit shaking your head and thinking "I should read Invisible Man" or "Wow, that copy of The Crying of Lot 49 is just on my bookshelf, sitting there," your body-heart will chide your mind and roar, "Quiet, fool! I need to read the next part!"