Rice. I did not love this book, but I am willing to admit the possibility that this is a problem with translation or just with the differences in Chinese and English-language storytelling. I found the whole thing to be awkward, overdramatic, unsubtle, emotionally illogical, and in spite of all the creative violence and gore, really boring. Based on this book and some other bits and pieces of Chinese stories and novels I’ve tried to read in the past, I suspect that some ideas can be conveyed with great subtlety in English but not in Chinese, and vice versa, so there is an inherent problem in translation that just can’t be fixed. I could be wrong; maybe this is a terrible book in any language. To my American brain, this is a very terrible book in English.

Still Life With Woodpecker. I have read this book approximately seventeen thousand times, starting when I was fifteen. I am old and grumpy enough now that I roll my eyes at Robbins’s romantic mystical bullshit, but I still love his metaphors and similes (“Max’s heart made a sound like the sleigh bells on Mrs. Santa Claus’s dildo”) and I secretly still like some of the romantic bullshit, too.

As I said back in October when I was listening to a different Robbins book (I didn’t finish it because my Otis crapped out in the middle):

Tom Robbins is out of fashion and I feel like maybe I’ve outgrown him myself, but I still love him. I am not lying to you if I say that Still Life With Woodpecker changed my life. At least, it changed what and how I read. I read it when I was fifteen, after my brother-in-law gave me a copy. It took me almost a year to get through it, but then I turned around and read it again immediately. When I was fifteen I didn’t do a lot of reading, although I had been a book-a-day reader as a kid. In high school, though, I basically read books for school, Agatha Christie, Stephen King, and whatever dirty thing my friend Keri was passing around. Still Life turned me back into a reader, made me realize how much fun language could be, and clued me in to the fact that there were adult books out there that were actually better than children’s fiction, instead of vague disappointments like King.

Wonder Boys. I loved this, but then I love Chabon, love his characters, love his writing style. I do think he is far and away the best of the young American writers working right now, the clear heir to Fitzgerald. Nobody else really touches him.

I think I’ve now read everything he’s published in book form, and while I loved Kavalier and Clay as much as the next girl, after reading Wonder Boys I would say that his real strength is in these quirky little character studies, this one and Mysteries of Pittsburgh and a lot of his short stories. He has a really astonishing ability to adopt the voice of a not especially appealing character and tell an entirely engaging story through that voice. If you’d asked me a week ago if I thought it were possible to write a good novel through the voice of a self-centered, irresponsible pot head with failing delusions of grandeur, I would have had serious doubts, but damn if he didn’t pull it off.

I had no complaints and there were paragraphs that I read aloud to Jeremy because they were just so good. Loved it.

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden. Amazingly creepy. I can see why K. liked it; you have to love a book that features bisexual three-way incest on page three. Ian McEwan was definitely better before he got to be so fucking clever. It is amazing to me that the same author who could write so sympathetically and without condescension about this weird little family could go on to write overrated crap like Amsterdam and Atonement.

(I really hate Ian McEwan. I only read this because K. promised me that it wasn’t like his other books.)

The Ground Beneath Her Feet. God, what an amazing book. I never know what to say about Rushdie. I just love him. I don’t think he is difficult at all, although I know I miss a lot of stuff; his books are just so lush and fun and surprising and exhilarating and all of those things that make me sound like a dork. I think you either love him or you don’t, so whenever people ask me what it is they aren’t getting I don’t know what to say. I loved this book. I guess that’s all.