The Hobbit. Jeremy thinks I should be embarrassed that I have only read this twice. (The first time was in 1997 or so, under threat of being dumped if I didn’t read some damn Tolkien.) I think I should be embarrassed that I have spent the week googling Middle Earth maps to find out what the geographical relationship is between the mines under the Lonely Mountain and the Mines of Moria. (Answer: none, really; they are pretty far apart.)

Maya wants to see Top Fives for the year. I might post my other top fives over at Jerbet if I can ever decide on five albums, but books I can do right now.

This was sort of a grim year for me, book-wise. I did not read very much that was not on my comp exam list, and I had already read everything on the list, mostly multiple times. After the exam I was just burned out and did not want to read much of anything, so I spent the rest of the year rereading Jane Austen, a lot of children’s books, and some bad crime fiction. So there are not many contenders for my “best” list. (Although I am listening to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and it might qualify if I manage to finish it before Sunday.)

Here are the five best new-to-me books I read this year:

• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. Pure fun. I know a lot of people hated it or found it too long and convoluted, but I loved it.
• Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray. I read this at the same time that I was listening to Jonathan Strange, which made for a weird experience since they are set in the same time period and even cover some of the same battles. Also pure fun.
• Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. I dreaded this book for years but in the end it answered every complaint I had about Jane Eyre, and made me appreciate the latter more than I had before. Really a beautiful book.
• Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen Gold. You might notice a theme here — most of the books I loved this year were books I’d classify as “fun,” but the kind of fun that doesn’t make you feel dirty when you’re done. This one also fits the theme.
• Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut. The last choice for this list was a close call between this one and We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. I chose Vonnegut in the end, because I guessed how the Jackson novel was going to end, but Vonnegut surprised me.

And here are the five worst:

• Solar Storms, by Linda Hogan. I might not have hated this so much had my expectations not been so high. But I did hate it.
• The Kite Runner. See above re: expectations.
• The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. I didn’t hate this one, exactly, but it was not a very good book. Another disappointment.
• The Fourth Hand, by John Irving. This one was not a disappointment because I did not expect much. I used to love John Irving but it is way past time for him to retire. Maybe he can get a blog or a puppy or a motorcycle or something. Anything to make him stop writing books.
• The Game, by A.S. Byatt. I did not finish this one, because oh, my God, was it boring. I am never reading anything else by Byatt; life is too short.

Little Men. Reviewers always diss this book, but when I was a kid I liked it much better than I liked Little Women, in spite of the syrupy moralizing. While the March girls mostly sat around dropping literary references that went right over my head, the boys in Little Men actually did stuff: tamed horses, set the house on fire, ran away.

Rereading it as an adult, I can see where the critics are coming from, and I think I can pinpoint the problem. In all three of the books about the March family, Louisa May Alcott is sort of telling her own story, but not really. The early lives of the March girls are somewhat autobiographical, but the later books veer off into pure fiction, since of course Alcott did not marry a German professor and start a school and later a college. It’s not just the story that becomes fictional, though; the character of Mrs. Bhaer is not the same character as Jo March. And I think the problem is that at some point Louisa May Alcott stopped writing her own flawed but engaging autobiography, and started writing a fictionalized biography of some woman (or amalgamation of women) whom she admired.

She always writes best about people she does not entirely admire. The best characters in Little Women are Jo and Amy, and the earliest version of Meg: the characters based on Louisa May Alcott and her living sisters. By the time Meg is out of the house and married, she is portrayed in as treacly and angelic a light as are Beth and Marmee and Mr. March. Amy also turns into a distant angel by the time Jo’s Boys comes along, which is probably explained by the author’s note indicating that the sister on whom she was based had died before she began writing that installment: the author must not speak ill of the dead. Meanwhile, Mrs. Jo turns into a paragon of motherly virtues as her story diverges from Louisa May Alcott’s own.

I am not explaining this very well. Basically, I suspect that Alcott did not like to portray any characters in a negative light if those characters were modeled after her heroes, or after loved ones who had died. I suspect that Mrs. Jo is not remotely based on Alcott herself, but on some other woman whom she admired a great deal. And the story suffers from that, because the character is not fun and endearing and engaging like the very flawed Jo March, but is instead distant and, well, kind of revolting.

This reading also made me realize why most girls reading these books now don’t realize until someone tells them that Alcott was in any sense a feminist. See what Mrs. Jo has to say about the education of girls:

My girls shall learn all I can teach them about [needlework], even if they give up the Latin, ALgebra, and half-a-dozen ologies it is considered necessary for girls to muddle their poor brains over now-a-days.

Blech. I always preferred Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, anyway.

This year I read 39 of the 75 books on my reading list, a statistic that becomes even less impressive when you realize how many of those were rereads. My excuse is my stupid M.A. exam, but at some point I am going to have to go back to reading books. Meanwhile, these are the books from the list that I started but just could not finish:

Alai, Red Poppies. This is a novel about Tibet, and I struggled with it for weeks before giving up. I felt completely distanced from all of the characters, and the prose was rough going as well. I might try again someday, or I might just decide that I am too stupid for this book.

Maryse Conde, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. I gave up on this one because I hated it.

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss. I might try this one again someday, but I gave up on it because it was too twee.

William Faulkner, The Hamlet. I just started this one last night and I love it and I never want to read anything that isn’t Faulkner ever again.

Carlos Fuentes, The Years With Laura Díaz. I don’t remember why I quit this one; I think it was just too long and I got distracted and lost the thread. I will finish it eventually.

Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red. I have been struggling with this one for a couple of months. I really like it but the story is very intricate and I need to read it much faster than I have been, because I keep forgetting details and having to reread everything. I am about 100 pages in but I think I have read those hundred pages three times, all told.

The last three are the only ones I really care about finishing. I will see what I can do.

Okay, so I was gone for three or four or five months. I have decided to catch up, all at once, with short reviews of everything I’ve read in the meantime. (Or everything I can remember having read.) I considered just writing, “Sucked,” or “Didn’t suck,” for each of these, and maybe I should have stuck with that idea.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Remember when I read that first collection of her stories and immediately loved her and thought that I’d better never write another word? Yeah, same thing here. I understand the reviews that complain that this novel is too disjointed, but I think those reviews are dumb. I loved this little book; I think Moore gets all the details of girlhood exactly right.

This is also for my new book club.

Mother Night. I should be ashamed of myself that this was my first Vonnegut. I read it for my new book club, which meets at a bar by my house. I think books and beer might be even better conceptually than books and pie. I enjoyed this book a lot, although I wasn’t as sure as the other book club members that the point of the novel was “judge not lest ye be judged” or whatever. I am not sure about that. I am sure, however, that it was dumb of me to lump Vonnegut in with the white-men-on-drugs like Thompson or Robbins or Kerouac or Burroughs, all of whom I am thoroughly sick of. I will read more, I promise.

The Beet Queen. This was my first Erdrich novel, and I hesitated to read it because I have heard her compared so often to Linda Hogan, whom I apparently hate. But I loved this book. I love it whenever I get female characters who are interesting even when they aren’t falling in love, and who aren’t pretty or even very smart or noble. Because most actual humans aren’t very pretty and aren’t especially smart or noble, and we are all boring when we are falling in love.

Little Women. I have read this novel 8,347 times and until this year I never noticed how totally insufferable it is. I wanted them all to get scarlet fever.

The Fourth Hand. No review this time, just a cry in the wilderness. What is the point of this ridiculous book? Has John Irving ever met an actual woman? Why do I want this love story to work out? Where did whatsername get her obvious premonitions, did she go to India and take that drug, too? Were you high when you wrote this, John? GAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH.

This was a very bad book.

I was an early Lemony Snicket adopter, but then I got bogged down in The Miserable Mill and gave up on the series. I recently went back, this time with audiobooks, and I am a fan again.

The Miserable Mill
The Austere Academy
The Ersatz Elevator
The Vile Village
The Hostile Hospital
The Carnivorous Carnival
The Slippery Slope
The Grim Grotto
The Penultimate Peril

I am not going to discuss these individually because there is not that much to say. I love that series has gotten more complex as it has progressed, although I half believe that the author has nothing up his sleeve and that it is all going to end in a big mess, or another thirteen books. I also half believe that Count Olaf is the Baudelaires’ uncle, or Lemony Snicket himself, or something. I am not sure and I am not sure that the author is sure, either, if you know what I mean. Tim Curry is a better reader than the author but they are both pretty good, and these books are well-suited for audio.

A Mind to Murder. I am over Ruth Rendell, but I still like P.D. James. She is similarly prim and her plots occasionally border on the ridiculous, but there is less literary pretention to James, and her early works in particular are still perfectly acceptable guilty pleasures. I have not enjoyed any of her recent work, but fortunately her plots are so intricate that I forget them after a few years, so I can just keep rereading the old ones until senility takes me away.

I am going to lump all of these in together. I listened to them all on audio, and I more or less hated all of them. I was a big Ruth Rendell fan about ten years ago but I think it is safe to say that I am over her. I had forgotten most of these by the time I started the next one.

A New Lease of Death (aka Sins of the Fathers). This one was a reread but I did not really remember it. The plot’s dependence on coincidence annoyed the fuck out of me.

Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter. Also a reread, and this one I remembered. One of my favorites by Rendell, probably worth checking out if you are a mystery fan. If you aren’t a fan, this won’t change your mind.

One Across, Two Down. I really don’t like the novels that aren’t about Inspector Wexford, because they tend to go on and on, and they aren’t anywhere near as deep as they pretend to be. In this case, Rendell threw together a couple of quirky personality traits that didn’t really fit together, I guess in the hope that this would lead to a more complex characterization. It didn’t — it just led to a lot of contrived nonsense about crossword puzzles. This novel also went on long past the point where it should have ended.

Put On By Cunning (aka Death Notes). Hands down, the dumbest mystery novel I have ever read. It does not work as a police procedural because the procedure is outlandish. It does not work as a character study because there aren’t any characters, just figurines stuck into a stupid plot. It does not work as suspense because it is impossible to care.

Shake Hands Forever. A reread. I guessed the plot twist the first time I read it and this time it just seemed ludicrously obvious, but I think most mystery fans like this one okay.

The Babes in the Woods. Her latest, and yet another in a long line of Rendell books that rely on ridiculous examples of perversity. She occasionally betrays a very provincial sort of morality that really bugs me.

The Face of Trespass. This might have been a decent novel if she had ended it about three chapters sooner. (I listened to it so I don’t actually know if there even were chapters. I am estimating.) The laborious explanations at the end were silly and destroyed any tension she’d managed to create. Until she takes you by the hand and walks you through the obviousness before eventually making everything better with a pointless happy ending, it is a surprisingly tense novel, considering how little the reader cares about this dumb guy and his dumb problems.

Small Sacrifices. Please kill me if I ever mention reading any true crime again. I read this because I was planning to include a famous true-crime writer as a character in my own novel, but after I finished this I just could not do it. I hated this book, I hate all the true crime I’ve ever read, I think most of it reflects a fundamentally racist worldview, and I hate Ann Rule. Ick.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. This book is the real reason I have not been posting, because I read it back in August and I did not care very much but I felt like I should really say something about it. At this point I can’t even remember if I liked it — I think I did, but I have not felt any urge to reread it, and I am not especially on the edge of my seat waiting for the next sequel.

I posted about it a little bit over at the Usual Suspects, and this is what I said, more or less. Don’t read any further if you have somehow managed to stay unspoiled all this time:

The only thing I find interesting is how many people are clinging to the “Snape is good” theory. (Or in some cases, the “Snape is hot” theory.) I am wondering if this is more of an issue of “Alan Rickman is hot.” Because I just reread the whole series, and Snape? Not so much a good guy. I don’t mean “not good” in the sense of “playing for Voldemort’s team;” I mean he’s a dick. There is not one single thing about Snape that is noble, or particularly brave, or kind, or empathetic, or admirable. He is a small-minded spiteful prat who plays favorites, carries petty grudges, gets off on pathetic power trips, and basically has not one single likeable, redeeming, or vaguely sexy trait. He is a gross bully.

Which always seemed until now like Rowling’s misdirection, where we’d find out that Snape had done some big heroic thing. And maybe he did, but I don’t think it matters. I don’t think Snape is a good guy, at all. I don’t think there is the vaguest glimmer of good in him.

But I also don’t think he’s really a committed Death Eater. Because just as there is not one glimmer of basic goodness about Snape, there is also not one glimmer of the sort of cringing humility that Voldemort’s true followers have to display. Even Bellatrix — who is probably the most evil of the bunch — fawns all over the Dark Lord. Snape doesn’t.

My theory? Snape is the real baddie here. He never had any loyalty to Dumbledore or Voldemort; he wants to be the new big bad and he’s been playing both sides of the fence for his own reasons. He is, in some ways, a definite counterpart to both Voldemort and Harry in terms of origins and talents. But in temperament, he is closer to Voldemort than he is to Harry.

Snape is a free agent, and very much a bad guy. That is my prediction. I think he and Dumbledore may well have been working together at the end, but I don’t think Snape has a decent bone in his body.