On the way to work I read “The Bible” by Marguerite Duras. I don’t have much intelligent to say about the story itself except that I liked it, and I marveled that I could feel as if I knew the female character completely in the space of two pages (the male character less so, but he was more a symbol of something, a foil for a shoe store clerk). I mentally dragged my highlighting pen over this passage:

In a sense, she was lucky; she told herself that she learned things when she was with him. But those things brought her no pleasure. It was as if she had already known them, so small was her need to learn them.

But more than the story itself I found myself thinking about the short story, and how much I love the form. Short stories are like traveling on a puddle-jumping airplane: when the journey is over, you think “wow that was quick” but all the same, you are in a different place than when you started.

Short stories appeal to my sense that it is impossible to tell the whole story, so why even try.

On the way home I read (or rather started — I finished it at home) “My Father’s Suitcase,” by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist. This isn’t a short story but rather the text of a 2006 Nobel Lecture (available online here). Though a speech, it reads like an essay — another beloved form.

This piece is wonderful and beautiful in so many nuanced ways — about father and son, and about writing, and books. A paragraph toward the end about why he writes, too long to quote in full here, could easily stand in for my own sentiments, with the change of a few words here and there:

I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone….I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

Earlier, Pamuk writes about journeys and traveling:

The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people’s stories and books.

Physically I traveled there and back. My material self was grateful for the security of the home I left in the morning and returned to in the evening, and for the salary earned in between.

Spiritually I got on a one-way train this morning and for this I’m grateful to the writers in question, and for coming to them via an American magazine found in a Japanese bookstore and costing less than a dollar.

Like my budding interest in soccer which was just impossible to maintain upon returning back home to the States, these being the days before I had satellite TV (I didn’t even have cable at the time), and no home internet either (though I’m not sure it would have occurred to me to follow Premiership soccer on the web even if I had had access), so too I found it hard to sustain interest in Hornby’s memoir of his obsession with the Arsenal football team, and I soon abandoned it. Quite honestly, I couldn’t understand it. It was far too impenetrable for a Yank soccer neophyte like me.

I don’t think at that point I had even heard of Arsenal (though after finishing the book I realized I had actually watched an Arsenal game on TV once, their infamous shock FA Cup loss to Fourth Division Wrexham in January 1992, when I was living in London during an internship at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative), and had little understanding of the geography of London in relationship to the various clubs. (I may have still thought at this stage that Tottenham played their home games somewhere near my company’s office/flat since we were located one block off of Tottenham Court Rd.) To say nothing of where the hell where places like Ipswich or Swindon or Derby (Christ, those places might also be in London for all I still know). My mental map of English soccer was Chelsea in London (because the first time I visited London in 1986 I had stayed in a B&B in Chelsea), Manchester United somewhere up north (because that’s where The Smiths and Joy Division came from), and Liverpool somewhere near Manchester (because that’s where The Beatles came from).

Beyond the amorphous cities and towns I was coming across in Hornby’s book, the names of the soccer clubs were befuddling. Arsenal. What kind of name was that? It just sounded, well, medieval actually. Wasn’t there some old building in Venice called “Arsenal?” How could one support a team named after a stockpile of weapons? (Actually, the naming thing still befuddles me. Sheffield Wednesday? Who puts a day into their club name? Leyton Orient? And what’s with all the “x United” team names?)

This time I was primed for Hornby’s book. It’s not that I had just read in succession three of his other books, but I had also just spent a good part of my New Year’s holidays watching English soccer during what they call the “festive” program which crams four games per team into the space of about ten days. I must have watched about 12 games during this time.

Well, here’s the strange thing. I still had trouble getting into this book. Part of it I think is that this is one of Hornby’s earliest books (his first mass-published book at any rate, in 1992), and the voice therein is just different than that of the books I had recently read, all of which had been written in the last five years. Not better or worse, or younger, just different. But more substantially, a lot of why the book didn’t really grab me until I was about a quarter of a way into it was that my lack of any grounding in the history of English soccer — and to a lesser extent, having only a superficial idea of English culture — was leaving me feeling rudderless, not sure of where I was standing.

Ask me about baseball’s Bob Feller, or Enos Slaughter, or Johnny Mize, and I can place them into a context for you, even though they finished their playing days before I was even born. Of course, I have my father to thank for this, just as Hornby has his father to thank for introducing him to soccer. For the most part, the Hornby takes the names and a lot of the historical context in his book for granted, and this made it hard for me to get into the book. But then again, Fever Pitch is not about soccer, it’s about Hornby, and once I started to realize this, the somewhat arcane nature of its ostensible subject ceased to be much of a barrier to enjoying this book. More importantly, there was much for me to relate to about how his obsession with the Arsenal soccer team has been not only shaped by his life, but has given his life the shape it has.

Hornby was the same age — 11 — as I was when our respective parents divorced, and while naturally our individual family circumstances were quite different (for starters, my mother moved out, my brother and I remained at home with my father), what he has to say about how that informed his early teens, and his latching on to soccer and specifically the intoxicating atmosphere he found at Highbury (Arsenal’s old stadium), was very resonant for me, as someone who also felt marked by the divorce of one’s parents, who took on the loner role almost as a badge of honor or martyrdom, and who developed obsessive interests to help define who I was, and to create something I could belong to, that was all mine. (Though it must be said, Hornby has been particularly consistent with his now almost 40-year old obsession with Arsenal, while I have burned through many different obsessions in my life, and continue to do so).

The book is structured as essays, each one based on a different soccer match, and these progress chronologically, starting from his first live soccer match in 1968, and continuing through 1991. But these are not match reports, or even diaristic essays of that particular day and match (for the most part, the results and any other details of the game such as who scored are presented parenthetically), but rather as a starting point to talking about his childhood, or his family, or the atmosphere at the grounds, his schooling, the struggles to find something to do with his life after school (another aspect that seemed to speak directly to/about me), his love life, and his getting older. (In an “essay” entitled “Seats” near the end of the book, about finally purchasing season tickets to Arsenal’s matches, there’s a great list of some of the things that have happened to Hornby in his thirties, including “I have stopped buying New Musical Express and the Face” (same here) and “I have bought a CD player” (ditto).)

So I learned and related to Hornby’s life, and his obsessions, and in the end I also learned a few things about this sport we Americans call soccer that I seem to find so fascinating at the moment. One aspect of the book that I really liked is that through Hornby’s experience and his thoughtfulness about both the game and its fans and what it means to him and many people, I could also learn about certain negative aspects of the sport which have really been up to now one-dimensional images. Here I’m talking about hooliganism, racism, and the twin tragedies at Heysel and Hillsborough.

I never got a sense that Hornby was writing about these things because he had to, that somehow you couldn’t write about English soccer of the 70′s and 80′s without mentioning these subjects. Indeed, when writing about hooliganism in particular, it is what Hornby writes about his own flirtations with violence, his teenage “hooligan fantasies,” that illuminates the larger picture:

In many ways, of course, this was funny, in the way that the vast majority of teenage hooligan pretensions are funny, and yet even now I find it difficult to laugh at myself: half my life ago, and I’m still embarrassed. I like to think that there was none of me, the adult man, in that furious fifteen-year-old, but I suspect that this is over-optimistic. A lot of the fifteen-year-old remains, inevitably (as it does in millions of men)[....]

I was lucky [...] that I nauseated myself pretty quickly; lucky most of all that the women I fancied, and the men I wanted to befriend [...], would have had nothing to do with me if I hadn’t.[...] But there are football fans, thousands of them, who have neither the need nor the desire to get a perspective on their own aggression. I worry for them and I despise them and I’m frightened of them; and some of them, grown men in their mid-thirties with kids, are too old now to go around threatening to kick heads, but they do anyway.

For all the trouble that I had getting into this book, in the end I didn’t really want to leave the milieu Hornby had created, which was as much London and soccer matches as it was Hornby’s obsessions. As is my wont with all good books I read, as I got nearer to the end, I started to slow down my reading, putting distractions in place, dipping into what was next in the reading queue, all to delay the inevitable. If there was any hint of dissatisfaction at the end, it was only that the book ends in 1992 and I wanted the story itself to keep going, to reach into the present, a time that, even simply confined to English soccer, seems radically different than the time of Hornby’s book.

After finishing Fever Pitch I looked through my copy of Football Days: Classic Football Photographs by Peter Robinson, a “coffee-table” type of book of soccer photography from Robinson’s career. I had bought it last year (remaindered, and very cheap) but had never looked through the whole thing, perhaps because a lot of it was, like Fever Pitch was initially, hard to get into, so many unrecognizable faces, clubs, grounds, etc. But on this second look, I found that much of it was the perfect visual complement to Hornby’s book. While the photography spans several continents and events up to the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea, football in England in the late 60′s and the 70′s makes up the heart of it.

The photo shown below of the Arsenal team at Highbury circa 1969 (Hornby’s first match was in 1968) is from a section of photos titled “Home,” focusing on various grounds and stadiums, much of them in England, much of them pre-Hillsborough. (That tragedy eventually led to the conversion of most stadiums in England to all-seater venues.) Robinson’s photos really helped me to conjure up what it must have been like to attend matches at those places during the time Hornby’s obsession was being born. Beyond that, the photography (one needn’t append the qualifier “sports”) is excellent all throughout the book.

I decided to take my chances this time around and my commute was all the better for it. However, I’m not sure I have much constructive to say here. I enjoyed the collection, that’s for sure. Some of the pieces are hysterically funny (“Us and Them,” “Blood Work”), some are poignant — and also rather funny (“The Ship Shape,” “Full House”), and all but two or three hit the right note for me.

Only knowing the name Sedaris before but never having paid much attention, minus the odd New Yorker piece, I had no idea that he was gay, and this was a nice bonus in the sense that had I known, I would probably have had different expectations about the book. (I’m not sure what I would have expected but probably something where gay themes were more prominent. This speaks to both how things can become pigeonholed in one’s own mind despites best efforts, and also how many writers, gay or otherwise, are happy to fall into those same pigeon holes). Sedaris’ homosexuality is always there of course, and sometimes he might write more directly about his sexuality (the essays “Full House” and “Chicken in the Henhouse” particularly stand out for me in this regard) but the book is no more “about” homosexuality as a straight writer’s work would be a priori “about” heterosexuality.

I have another Sedaris collection, Naked, that I had bought at the same time as Dress Your Family… and initially I had planned on continuing with that next. However, after finishing this book I realized that perhaps one Sedaris was enough, at least for the time being. So, it was somewhat unfortunate that just as I was finishing Dress Your Family…, a co-worker lent me his copy of Holidays on Ice: Stories, and I didn’t feel comfortable turning it down. (And at any rate, it’s a short book so I knew it wouldn’t take long to finish it).

It would be easy to blame “Sedaris fatigue” for my rather negative opinion of Holidays on Ice, but I don’t really think that is what was going on here. I just didn’t like the majority of this book. There are only six essays here, all having something to do with the Christmas holidays. However, only two (“SantaLand Diaries” and “Dinah, the Christmas Whore”) involve Sedaris and his family, unlike in Dress Your Family… where they all did. And these were, perhaps not surprisingly, the only two pieces in this book that I liked.

The other four are basically short stories of a satirical nature. But they are so over the top that reading each one was like having a hammer pounding my head, and while each provided some chuckles, the overwhelming takeaway was “Why?” I just didn’t see any point to any of these. They seemed to have been scraped off the bottom of some barrel just to fill out what is in any event a pretty slim volume.

It was hard to believe that the person who wrote the essays of Dress Your Family… had also written these stories. I don’t know how they fit into the trajectory of Sedaris’ oeuvre but they struck me as bordering on juvenilia. They seemed like the kind of thing you might write to relieve a case of writer’s block, or something one might send around to friends in a private email, but it’s hard to believe anyone saw these as worthy of being published.

I really liked this book, although somewhere around the three-quarters mark it lost a bit of its luster, for reasons I’m not sure I could explain. I suppose I started to lose a bit of clarity as to character motivation, and some of the decisions taken by the main characters didn’t ring quite as true as the did earlier in the novel. But overall I thoroughly enjoyed what was by turns a very funny book and at the same time rather sobering, especially for anyone who is married or experienced divorce. There are a few brilliant set pieces as well (the party and church scenes in particular) that could stand out on their own almost as short stories.

The main character (Katie Carr) seemed to be excellently drawn, by the end (minus some minor quibbles as mentioned) I really felt as if I was in her head. I really enjoyed the interplay between what she said to others, and what she was merely thinking (although given the book’s small print and the use of only a single apostrophe to not quotations, I often had to go back and check whether she was speaking or merely thinking). I found the criticism that goody two-shoes liberalism comes under to be absolutely spot on, even as the book shows that liberalism is not such an easy target as we might like to think it is. The question the book mainly addresses, eg. how to be (a) good (person), on both a personal, one-to-one level and a societal level, is completely valid and not easily answerable.

What I particularly liked was that it’s very difficult to draw sides amongst the characters here. At the outset, Katie is a doctor, doing that not for money but because she wants to be good, and she is the breadwinner of the family. Meanwhile, her husband David is a house-husband, a hack writer, and generally an insufferable Angry (Middle-aged) Man. Yet it is Katie who has had an affair. Later, we see that Katie may well be a “hack” doctor, slugging it out with incurable patients but perhaps not as committed as she’s led us to believe, while her husband has seen the light and now — in addition to turning a new leaf in his marriage — also wants to save the world, even if it’s just one household at at time (and it literally does start with his and Katie’s household). He then becomes an insufferable liberal, yet patently doing good things, while Katie finds herself pining for things the way they were before, when she was on the verge of divorce.

I’m glad I finally gave Hornby’s fiction a shot, and I can easily see myself reading some of his other novels, particularly his most recent A Long Way Down, before too long.

This post is actually not really about 2006 like Part One was, but rather about looking ahead to my reading plans for 2007. So here are some book-related resolutions for 2007:

Read more books on my shelf instead of always buying new ones.

I need to read more books on my shelf, rather than always buying new ones. Like a lot of folks who enjoy books, I suspect, I tend to buy a lot of books, knowing full well that I can’t possibly read all of them before the next urge to buy a lot of books. I rationalize this by telling myself that I’m creating a library, and that I’m creating a situation for myself where I will have a book on my bookshelf to suit any whim or fancy or urge I might have as to what I want to read next. The problem with this rationalization is that a) it’s doubtful my “library” as such would ever reach such a settled state, and b) I LOVE BUYING BOOKS AND I’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO STOP! (Phew, I feel better now.)

Still, of the 26 books I read last year, only three of them were books I had already owned for any length of time (here defined as being on my bookshelf for six months or longer). This wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t have a lot of books, of course, but I have plenty of them. (Just last year alone, I probably bought, if I include photo books, about 75 books). So the bottom line is that this bought-read imbalance needs to be redressed.

Therefore, my first resolution for 2007 is that for every newly purchased book I read, I must read at least one book that I already own (this means any book bought before the start of 2007). So far I’m off to a good start: I read Nick Hornby’s Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, which was bought in December; I then moved on to Hornby’s How to Be Good, which had been sitting on my self for almost a year; and now I’m on to Hornby’s Fever Pitch, which I bought (used) last week. (At this point, you might be wondering why my first New Year’s resolution isn’t, “Read at least one book by someone who isn’t Nick Hornby.”)

So I’m off to a good start, but how sustainable it is I don’t know. Already in 2007 I’ve bought ten books (plus one photo book, but that doesn’t count here), which means that before I can read all of them (not saying I would want to read all of them, you know, that “library” thing), I would have to also read 10 books off my shelf. (And that’s assuming the impossible, which is that I don’t buy another book this year.) That would pretty much finish off 2007, so…. Ah, I can already see where this resolution is headed: to the same place as last year’s “continue study Japanese and pass 1st level” resolution.

(The astute will notice that I haven’t resolved to NOT buy so many books in 2007 as I did last year.)

Read more fiction.

Looking over the books I read in 2006, only two of them were fiction. I want to try to change that a bit, not necessarily even the balance but at least work a few more fiction titles into my reading pattern. I used to read so much more fiction than non in the old days, not sure exactly what happened. One thing I think is that, when deciding to read a non-fiction book, I usually don’t get hung up about whether the writing is good or not. I sort of make the assumption (somewhat naively, I admit) that it wouldn’t have been published if the writing hadn’t been half-way decent. And anyway, I figure I’m reading the book for the subject matter, and that if the writing rises above the pedestrian, well then, that’s a bonus.

But with fiction, I’ve always been attracted to the writing as much to the story or plot. I suppose I shouldn’t cop to it, but it seems I like the “literary” part of literary fiction more than the fiction itself. I suppose this arose from an earlier time when I had some aspirations of becoming a writer myself, and I therefore gravitated to those writers where the writing seems to stand out, not necessarily to call attention to itself but certainly not fade into the background. So I end up judging a book more on that than on other concerns (plot sensibility, well-drawn characters, fully-realized locales, etc.).

Like a lot of films, novels dissipate from my memory all too quickly, and I don’t like that. Part of that is that I don’t spend enough time thinking about the books after I finish them, and certainly very rarely if ever discuss them with others. But maybe this ephemerality is part of the medium, and it’s not so bad.

As of this writing I’ve already read one novel this year, and have quite a few in the hopper that I’m itching to get to, so I feel pretty good about my chances of making good on this resolution. And like a chair by the window on a rainy day, just thinking again about fiction and getting immersed in characters and lives makes me feel cozy.

Expand the times and places I read in.

I want to try to read more outside of my designated book reading time, eg. my commute to and from work. With a child, and distractions like satellite TV and high-speed internet, it’s well-nigh impossible for me to read at home. So I’ve already started to carve out little spaces of time where I can go to a cafe and read (like the couple of hours between dropping off and picking up Kaika at his school).

Jot down more thoughts on what I read rather than chucking them to the memory dustbin.

I would like to write more about the books I do read. I started to do that last year, but only ended up making three posts about books. Even making them more “thoughts about x book” rather than “reviews” didn’t really help ease the burden of having to articulate what I liked about each book. So I’m going to try to make it a rule that I have to write at least one paragraph about every book I read, even if it ends up being just a Cliff’s Note of my opinion (eg. “I hated it.”). Hopefully this will help me remember it better, as now only a couple of months (and a few books) are all it takes for me to almost completely forget about the book, how I felt about it, why it was worth recommending (or not), which understandably is rather frustrating.

Improve my reading speed.

I’m an embarrassingly slow reader. I had a feeling that “remedial reading” class I took in the 9th grade would come in handy later, just too bad it had to be taught by the most Nurse Ratched of all the teachers at my school, and hence I did my best to thoroughly not put into practice anything I was taught. I remember the basic concepts of speed reading (reading three words at a time, for a start), but every time I try to do this, it lasts for about a paragraph before I unwittingly return to my one word at a time snail’s pace. Henceforth, given the when and where of my book reading (see previous resolution), it takes me ages to finish a book. This not only obviously affects my enjoyment of what I’m reading, but impacts what I choose to read.

Basically anything that’s over 300 pages prompts me to ask myself if I should take it on. Of course it depends on the subject matter and/or the author. Bill Bryson, no questions asked. Sports books, yeah probably okay, even at 400 pp. A collection of essays, not a worry. (Who’s going to know if I conveniently forget to read two or three?) But just about anything else and there’s this fear I won’t finish it, or it will take two months to read. And in the past, I’ve been really bad about getting to page 350 or a 400-page book and then quitting, which really is a waste.

So, I’m going to try to improve my reading speed in 2007, as best I can. Any resources in this regard would be appreciated.

So, five resolutions in all, perhaps I’m biting off more than I can chew but I think they’re all doable. At the very least, like my desire last year to keep the reading kick going for the whole year, these should help keep me focused and committed to my reading rather than getting lazy. Hopefully, they’ll help me expand my horizons as well, and move a few of those books on my shelf from the “unread but looking good in the library” stage to the “read and justifying their place in the library” stage.

Something similar happened when I read these two books, The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, which gather together Hornby’s monthly “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column from the literary magazine The Believer. Though it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what is Hornby’s style (unlike say that of Bill Bryson), it’s clearly there, and it’s peculiarly infectious for me.

Each month Hornby goes through the three or four (sometimes more, sometimes less) books he has read. These are not reviews per se, and sometimes they serve merely as springboards for other ruminations. He talks a lot of why he read the book in the first place, how he came to buy it or receive it (naturally he is sent a lot of books by publishers hoping for a review). He’s up front when he’s reading books by friends or relatives, and tries to be honest when books or genres that don’t tickle his fantasy, which requires some verbal dancing given The Believer’s policy of not being unnecessarily negative. He takes to task the “literary” novel, especially what he sees as a disturbing trend of novels about writers or literary folk, and book blurbs don’t fare much better either.

But more than that, the columns are about books, and people who not only read books, but buy them as well. Each column begins with a list of not only what Hornby has read, but also the books he has bought, and it should surprise no one who, like Hornby (and myself), likes to buy books, those two lists rarely if ever correlate. So much about what Hornby writes about in this regard, such as the compulsion to buy books that stand very little chance of actually being read, or the idea that sometimes, buying and collecting books with the purpose of appearing cultured seems to matter more than whether or not we’ve read the book, was so spot on with respect to my own book buying that I couldn’t help but curse Hornby a bit for seeing right through me (and himself). He also has a lot of good things to say about how books have acquired this feeling that they must be hard work, that unless they’re a struggle then perhaps they’re not worth it.

If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity — and there are statistics which show that this is by no means assured — then we have to promote the joys of reading rather than the (dubious) benefits.[...] [P]lease, if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren’t enjoying a TV program.

Along these lines, he talks about his publisher sending him a new version of the classic Candide, and after discovering that it’s only 90 pages, he decides to read it, to “chalk it off” the list of those books one is supposed to have read. And he does. However,

There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you’re a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I’m beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun. Persons of Letters have to read things like Candide or they’re a few letter short of the whole alphabet; book lovers, meanwhile, can read whatever they fancy.

(How’s this for a coincidence: the very same day that I read those words, I was in one of Tokyo’s big bookstores, on the English language floor, and in the “Penguin Classics” section. (Hornby had written glowingly about David Copperfield in the first book and I felt I should at least thumb through it.) There were three American (?) friends standing next to me, from their conversation it seemed they were studying in Japanese universities, and one of them was asking the others if they had read Candide: “Oh man, you gotta read it, it’s so awesome.” I kid you not.)

I loved both collections, and took away so many recommendations as to what I should read that really, I could fill 2007 with only Hornby-recommended books and more than likely that would suffice to keep me contented. (I have already purchased four books that were a direct result of reading these two books, and my Amazon wish list has been thrown out of whack). Both books also feature selected excerpts from some of the books Hornby talks about, which I suppose in this day of the “Amazon Online Reader” might be somewhat superfluous, but I found to be a nice bonus. (The excerpt from the yet to be published Then We Came to an End by Joshua Ferris in the second book was so frickin’ hilarious that it practically justified the book in and of itself.) And since Hornby has been so honest, let me cop to the fact that this particular book fetishist loves the look and feel of each book (they’re identical really beside the slightly different cover designs). I wish all paperbacks felt like this, nice and solid, yet supple.

If I have a criticism about the books, it would only be that after a while, I found his running gag about the “polysyllabic spree,” a kind of white-hooded editorial body who proscribe all sorts of restrictions against what Hornby can write about, to grow old after awhile. I just didn’t find it very funny to begin with, and it wore fairly thin by the end. Additionally, while the book collector in me loves having two great looking books (that I’ve now actually read, what a bonus!) to add to my bookshelf, in truth each volume is rather slim and one wonders why The Believer didn’t wait and then publish a single, more substantial collection. Perhaps when they published the first they weren’t expecting to publish another one, I don’t know, but there is a lingering feeling they were trying to milk the readers a bit. Or maybe that’s just my sour grapes at blowing through both of these books so quickly and wanting more.

You can read excerpts (and one full text) of Hornby’s Believer columns online to judge for yourself. (There’s also a nice review of The Polysyllabic Spree from Salon.) Hornby hasn’t written one since October of last year so I’m not sure if the series will be continuing or not. I for one hope it does, and if there is another collection put together, I have no doubt I’ll be adding that to my book collection, er, I mean, reading it.

For some reason I end up viewing past years as Year of…something. For example, 2005 was “The Year I Studied Japanese,” 2004 was “My Year of Shooting” (photos, mind you), 2003 was “The Year I Became a Father” (sub-head: “…and bought a Leica”), 2002 “The Year I Moved to Japan” (sub-head: “…and started a blog”), etcetera. It’s as if nothing else happened in those years but what they’ve become known for in my own mind. In part that is because in fact, not much else did happen. I have such a one-track mind, and am so bad at multi-tasking, that I end up focusing on just one thing to the exclusion of pretty much anything else.

So 2006 has formed itself in my mind as the year I read what for me was a lot of books. Actually, I think it became such for me even before the year was half over. I could tell that not only was I enjoying reading, and enjoying again my own language after feeling like I had done nothing but eat drink sleep Japanese the year before, but I started to see it as a challenge, to see if I could sustain my interest in books beyond the mere “good form” of a three or four-book run. I wanted to see if I could keep it up until the end of the year, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t proud that I did.

To recap (you can follow along at home here):

* I read 26 books, or about a book every two weeks, not bad considering that a) I didn’t read my first one until sometime in February; b) I pretty much only read on my commute to/from work; and c) I’m a notoriously slow reader.

* Of the 26, all but two were non-fiction. This is slightly embarrassing, I have to admit, and something I’m hoping to “correct” as it were in 2007 (see Part Two), but on the other hand, I can’t deny that at this point in my reading life, as opposed to say when I was in my 20′s, I just naturally seem to gravitate to the non-fiction side of the bookstore.

* I only read four Japan-related books all year, which is somewhat of a surprise given my reading interests in the past. Nothing really intentional here, although two things I’ve noticed about my reading (and general interest) is that 1) the longer I stay here, the more I find sustenance from abroad — and particularly from America — something I long for; and 2) with respect to fiction, having done read a bit of reading in Japanese (nothing too serious, mind you — still have a long way to go) I’m more aware of the different nuances of it and English, and it’s hard to feel I’m anywhere close to the original when I now read translations.

* Only two books by women. In the past I used to seek out female writers, now I can’t say I give it much thought either way. In fact it wasn’t until I started to write this post that I even noticed the disparity (unlike say the disparities between fiction/non-fiction or Japan-related/non-Japan-related, which I’ve been conscious of for some time). Not even sure it’s worth commenting on, and it’s not really something I feel I need to be conscious of or attempt to redress in my reading going forward. Who knows, maybe after all these years I’m finally getting in touch with my masculinity.

* From a genre perspective, in addition to the two novels, I read three out-and-out history books, three biographies, two memoirs, five sports books (three for soccer, two for baseball), six books of collected essays, and two au courant who-hasn’t-read-’em books. (I still cringe when I think that back in 1985 I thought The Breakfast Club was such a great, deep movie. I wonder if 20 years from now, folks will be similarly cringing about Freakonomics and The Tipping Point?)

* Regarding where I got my 26 books from, seven were bought at “foreign book sales” at various Tokyo bookstores (one of the great semi-secrets of how to maintain a good book library in Japan without getting murdered by one’s spouse); five were bought when I was vacationing in the States; eight were bought “full-price” at a couple of big bookstores in Tokyo (mainly Maruzen, my personal favorite); three were got via Amazon (two from the U.S. store, one from the Japanese); and as for the remaining three, one was a gift from my mother, another a loaner from someone at work, and the last a book bought used at Kitazawa in Kanda-Jimbocho.

Believe me, I’m as shocked as you that out of all the books I read last year, only one was purchased secondhand. (I did of course buy other books secondhand — though not many, I must admit. I just haven’t gotten around to reading them yet). In my defense, there were zero used bookstores visited during the trip to the States, and really, Tokyo isn’t teeming with them either. The best known of these, which shall for the time being go unnamed, also happens to suffer from acute “used book store-itis,” which is closely related to “secondhand record store-itis” (cue up the High Fidelity dvd here), and thus has to be patronized at very spaced out intervals so that this particular customer can resist the urge to go postal.

With only 26 books, a top 10 list seems silly, and frankly, not really doable anyway (I count only 15 unconditionally recommended books amongst my list). At any rate, here are some comments about some of the books I read:

* Best book of 2006 is a tie between Edward Said’s memoir Out of Place and Larry McMurtry’s biography (the word is used loosely) Crazy Horse. Both brilliantly written, in their own unique way. I’m not sure I could read a memoir/autobiography with as much introspection and vulnerability as Said’s that wasn’t also maudlin and overwrought, which Said’s most patently wasn’t. As well, I doubt there are many writers out there who could make an economically written, 150-page biography of someone with as little documented facts of their life as Crazy Horse had, seem more satisfying and more fulfilling than most tomes 4-times the length, than McMurtry.

The McMurtry biography is short precisely because he doesn’t attempt to engage in hagiography and extrapolation that colors so much of what has been written about American Indians. As he writes,

[...] I am not writing this book because I think I know what Crazy Horse did — much less what he thought — on more than a few occasions in his life; I’m writing it because I have some notions about what he meant to his people in his lifetime, and also what he has come to mean to generations of Sioux in our century and even our time.[...] The literature of Crazy Horse is about evenly divided between that produced by “writers” and that produced by “historians.” Neither, so far, have convinced many readers — and certainly not this reader — that they have an accurate grip on the deeds, much less on the soul, of the Sioux warrior we call Crazy Horse.

*Worst book — or perhaps better to say, most-waste-of-time book — would go to Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World (see my review). It wasn’t a badly written book, it was just a book that went so completely against the expectations of what I thought it would be about. Not Winchester’s fault I suppose (and to prove I’m fair, I did pick up his The River at the Center of the World at a book sale to give him another chance, although I see now that the Amazon reader reviews aren’t all that favorable so who knows if I’ll ever read it), though I do fault him for choosing to write so voluminously — and quite frankly, in such an arcane manner — about geology while giving short shrift to the much more interesting story of San Francisco at the time of the 1906 earthquake.

* Funniest book of the year: Without a doubt, Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Big Country (published in America as I’m a Stranger Here Myself) was the funniest thing I read all year, and then some. It came as no surprise that Bryson’s book was funny. They all are. But something about Bryson’s short essays about the America he returned to after having lived in the UK for 20 years, essays that I dare say only an American could fully appreciate (and indeed, I specifically read this book the week before our trip to Kentucky and Texas in order to “prepare” for that journey back to the motherland), not just tickled the funny bone, but ripped it out for all to see. I had one memorable occasion when I was returning from a night out in Tokyo, not drunk by any means but a bit loosened up, shall we say, and attempting to read Bryson’s book on the train home. It was the essay about going to an American supermarket and stocking up on long-lost junk food (god-awful Count Chocula cereals, cheese whiz, breakfast pizza, etc.) while his (British) wife wasn’t looking, and I pretty much lost it right there on the train. I was laughing about as hard as anyone could without opening their mouth, my eyes were tearing up, I was sweating in a cold-sweat kind of way, and I could feel the woman across trying not to look at me. I’d never felt so deliriously embarrassed in all my life. Later, each time I tried to relate the story to my wife (Bryson’s story, not my own about the train), for I thought she could well sympathize with Bryson’s exasperated wife, I couldn’t get but two words into the story before I would break down with uncontrollable laughter.

* Most disappointing book of 2006: The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup. I was really excited about this one, having come across some excerpts printed in National Geographic, and I thought 32 essays about each of the 32 countries participating would be the perfect complement as I was anticipating the 2006 World Cup in Germany. (If there is a subhead to “A Year of Books,” it would probably be “…and watched all 64 games of the World Cup and generally became a major soccer fan.”) I tried like the devil to get it too, none of the local stores had it (eventually got it from Amazon Japan), and initially I was quite pleased, seeing as it comes with lots of facts and statistics about each participating country (both soccer- and otherwise), and generally useful statistics about things like per capita incomes and infant mortality rates which helped to put the sporting event into context. However, by and large a lot of the essays about each country seemed rather arbitrary, and while I wasn’t expecting and didn’t want essays specifically about soccer or a particular national team, a lot of the essays were just too far afield for me (like Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) writing about the Swedish prison system). And there’s no escaping the offensive title, the thinking fan’s guide, as if any other guide on the subject of the World Cup is clearly meant for those fans who don’t think.

Anyway, perhaps that’s enough for 2006. In part two of this, I’ll take a look at some of my book-related resolutions for 2007.

Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld, Expanded Edition
David E. Kaplan, Alec Dubro
(University of California Press, 2003)

Originally published in 1986, this “expanded edition” was published a few years ago, and it’s hard to imagine there’s a more comprehensive book in English on the subject of Japan organized crime. It’s also hard to imagine, given the intimidation and threats the yakuza bring to bear related to anything negative published about them in Japan, that such a comprehensive book exists in Japanese.

Indeed, one of the main themes running through the book, eye-opening and depressing at the same time, is how entrenched organized crime is within Japan’s social and political fabric. It’s not just the tattooed, pinkie-less punch-permed toughs that one usually associates with the syndicates, but the suited racketeers shutting down stockholder’s meetings (sokaiya), or the politicians relying on yakuza money (or muscle) to get elected, or the “respectable businessmen” laundering yen, that make up today’s yakuza. You begin to wonder if there’s anyone not “associated” in some way with them.

Kaplan and Dubro do a great job tracing the yakuza from their beginnings as master-less samurai up to their present-day manifestation. The book is very detailed (almost dizzyingly so) about all the various “rackets” the crime groups are in, their attempts to expand overseas, and their relationships with other crime syndicates like the Mafia or The Triads. But where the book really shined for me was in unravelling all the ties amongst convicted Class-A war criminals like Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, their cooperation with US intelligence during the American occupation (to fight Communism), and how their tainted money helped not only create the Liberal Democratic Party but also the modern yakuza. Reading all this, you soon begin to realize why there probably will never be a Rudy Giuliani style take-down of the yakuza. There are just too many people in important positions profiting from their associations with crime figures.

Recommended.

Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan
Robert Whiting
(Vintage, 2000)

This book is ostensibly the life story of one Nick Zapetti, who lived in Japan for almost 50 years, and made his fortune with a series of Italian restaurants named Nicola’s. I’d never heard of the guy before (he passed away in 1992), but author Robert Whiting sure knew he was sitting on a gold mine of a story: an Italian-American from New York with relatives in the Mafia, involved in all sorts of shady and illegal activities in Occupation Japan, owner of a restaurant that was the place to be for celebrities and Japanese yakuza, more than passing acquaintances with the hugely popular (and secretly Korean) pro wrestler Rikidozan and his Korean patron and gangland boss Hisayuki Machii, several times jailed, four times married, many times sued, and one time naturalized Japanese citizen, and at one time the richest foreigner in Japan. Whiting must have been licking his chops as he bided his time before publishing his book, needing to try to confirm or corroborate all the amazing stories Zapetti had told him before he passed away. (He might have also considered it prudent to let some of the other folks he wrote about, like Machii, pass away.)

But while a great story in and of itself, Whiting doesn’t just give us Zapetti’s biography but rather uses it as the glue to hold together a myriad of stories related to post-war Japan and Tokyo’s underworld, and Whiting does such a good job weaving back and forth from Zapetti’s life to the larger picture that at first, I hadn’t even realized Zapetti was the main character (to be honest, I only realized the book’s subtitle — “The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan” — about half-way through the book). It’s the popular, cultural history to Kaplan/Dubro’s drier, almost academic look.

One thing I also appreciated about the book was the very detailed notes section at the back. Ostensibly to note the source(s) of what Whiting was writing about, in reality the notes section is so full of supplemental information that it becomes in effect an extra chapter. It also goes a long way toward showing the depth and breadth of the research Whiting put into writing the book.

Recommended.

I’m really glad that I read these books back to back, and in the order I did (Kaplan/Dubro’s Yakuza first). While one certainly doesn’t need a detailed history of the yakuza to appreciate Whiting’s more popular social history, it does help put a lot of the important figures like Kodama and Machii into context, and makes Whiting’s book a nicer, breezier read. The books really complement each other, and it was really serendipitous that I found the Whiting book on sale as I was reading the Kaplan/Dubro one. In a way, I needed something to breathe a bit more life into the more academic account, and Whiting’s book was just the ticket.

A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
Simon Winchester
(Harper Collins, 2005)

* As the secondary title indicates, this is a story about the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. It was written by Simon Winchester, a writer whose name I had recognized from book spines but who wasn’t someone I had read previously. I picked this up brand-new a few weeks ago at one of those “foreign book sales” that seem to pop up every now and then at various Tokyo bookstores, for only 700 yen ($6.20). Given that on the copyright page I noticed it said “1st paperback printing: April 2006,” (most books at these type of sales are several years old, at least), and seeing as I lived in San Francisco for 14 years (and experienced the destructive power of an earthquake there firsthand in 1989), picking this up seemed a no-brainer. (Curiously, checking Amazon and the like now, I notice that the book is still being sold in hardcover and that the paperback version is not expected in the US until October. Go figure why the “international” version ended up in a Tokyo bookstore so soon!)

* I have to be honest, this book was a struggle. As it is, I have yet to read the appendix and frankly I’m not sure I will. At this point I’m just glad I got to the end of the main book, for I wanted to give up many times on the way. The book really seems to me to be two books: one about geology and earthquakes and plate tectonics, and the other about the Great Earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1906. Unfortunately for me, I bought this book for the latter (and indeed, this is how the book is marketed on the back cover — “An absorbing narrative of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906…” croons the quote from The Independent), while it seemed to me that Winchester was more interested in the former.

* Now, I’m not the best one to make comments about books about science. Frankly, the subject has never been a strong suit of mine (I actually had to take a night school course in biology just to be able to graduate high school on time), and while I’m not particularly averse to science, nor philosophically opposed to the pursuit and understanding of it, my eyes do tend to glaze over rather quickly once the subject goes beyond a layperson’s understanding. And with this book, Winchester seemed to enter specialist territory very quickly into the book, and stay there for way too long to suit me. You can sense that Winchester was aware the he was always running the danger of losing the layperson like myself, but that somehow he felt confident, no doubt born of his many years as a newspaper correspondent, that he could pull it off. For this reader, he didn’t.

* Somehow, based on skimming the prologue in the bookstore, and from the back cover (always a bad idea I know), I not only expected much more of a focus on San Francisco and the actual earthquake, but I also expected that when Winchester did delve into the science of earthquakes, the approach would be less academic, and more of something along the lines of Bill Bryson. (I actually have Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” — another “foreign book sale” purchase — on my to-read list, though after the Winchester, even a book by Bryson on science has me intimidated.) It was a relief to finally, after page 200 or so, get to San Francisco, and not surprisingly the book really picked up for me then. However, I felt that Winchester didn’t go into nearly enough detail — either about the city itself, nor the earthquake and subsequent fire, the book’s ostensible raison d’etre — and so in the end I’m left puzzling as to what this book was really supposed to be about, and who was the audience Winchester intended.

* For me, the best part of the book was the Epilogue, and not just because it meant I was nearing the end of what was overall a rather tortuous book to get through. In the Epilogue, Winchester writes about a road journey up to Alaska, the site of two huge earthquakes (1964 and 2002) of interest to him and his story about how even seemingly far-off seismic events are related to the activity along the San Andreas Fault, and then finishing up at Yellowstone. Here the writing is more travelogue reportage than anything else, and it left me longing that Winchester had chosen more of this style of writing than the scientific reportage that he did employ — as admirably detailed as that was.

* All in all, as I think it should be clear by now, the book struck me as simply too uneven, too scattered, and in a way, too broad. It seemed as if Winchester was always going off onto tangents, as when he digressed into the various issues related to insurance companies and how they behaved vis-a-vis the claims resulting from the 1906 earthquake and fire (in a word, scurrilously). Even more tangentially, Winchester writes at length not commensurate with its importance about the start of the Pentecostal religious movement and how the 1906 earthquake may have been the spark that created Pentecostalism as we know it today. Fascinating — albeit not completely convincing — to be sure, but perhaps better relegated to a footnote rather than 7 pages. Indeed, throughout the book Winchester footnotes items I thought were worthy of being fleshed out more, and conversely, went on for pages about things I felt were better left to a mere footnote.

* Aside from my thoughts about Winchester’s writing and the book’s structure, my main takeaway from the book is just how fragile the earth is, and how inevitable is the destruction that comes in the form or earthquakes, volcano eruptions, tsunamis, etc. His cautions about the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake — the one I experienced personally — and the fact that it had little to do with the San Andreas Fault, couldn’t help but make me worry about the friends I still have in San Francisco and to feel in some part that I “made it out alive.” (Of course, the irony being that I moved to another of the world’s most seismically active places, Japan). Winchester finished his main story with Portola Valley, a well-to-do community foolishly — so Winchester posits — built right on the San Andreas Fault, and while residents such as this one might not be happy with the portrait he paints, I for one would have liked him to have focused more on this aspect of the problem — man’s tendency to play russian roulette with nature in exchange for short-term gain and comfort.

* Not recommended.

Berlin – The Downfall 1945
Anthony Beevor
(Penguin, 2002)

* I didn’t think I’d be able to get into the book at the outset. Not having read any histories of this period of WWII for quite some time (and certainly nothing as limited in terms of time span as this), the amount of detail that gets thrown at the reader, seemingly all at once, is rather intimidating. All the names of various military divisions, names of Generals and other important military figures, on both sides (Russian Red Army and Wehrmacht), names of weaponry and tactics, and geographical locations, was dizzying. As well, I was hampered by insufficient knowledge of events outside the purview of the book’s focus but naturally important (like the July 20 Plot to overthrow Hitler), which were not really explained in any sort of detail. I’m glad I stuck with it though. There are still plenty of details I don’t quite understand, but in the end it didn’t detract.

* While the various maps (both general and military-focused) provided helped a lot with getting a sense of where things were, I thought the included Glossary rather inadequate. I’m still not quite sure what terms like panzerfaust, or katyusha, or bridgehead mean.

* The book’s most controversial aspect, I garnered later by skimming online reviews and such, is its detailing of the widespread rape committed by Red Army soldiers as they invaded East Prussian and made their inexorable march towards Berlin. Quite frankly, I was unprepared for this, and admit with some embarrassment that I had never heard about these heinous crimes before. Quite a lot of the book, in impression if not in pages, seems to be concerned with the behavior of the advancing Red Army with respect to the raping and looting, to the point where in places it seemed like overkill.

Naturally, with crimes as hideous as these, covered over as they are in Soviet and Russian histories of the “Great Patriotic War,” can there be a point of “too much?” It’s not that I didn’t want to read about it, far from it. It’s just that at some point it started to take on an aspect of “Beevor’s axe to grind”. And, in those passages where he tried to explain it, in particular at the end of Chapter 21, it strikes me as only slightly more perceptive than bubblegum psychology. “[...] the basic point is that, in war, undisciplined soldiers without fear of retribution can rapidly revert to a primitive male sexuality.” And a few sentences later, in case we didn’t get it, he writes, “[...] there is a dark area of male sexuality which can emerge all too easily, especially in war, when there are no social and disciplinary restraints.”

* I had never read any of the books that detailed Hitler’s last days. Although I suppose much of the detail has to be taken with some grains of salt, I found it all very fascinating, and in fact would love to read a book which just dealt with these last days. I never knew for example that Hitler and Eva Braun had married at the 11th hour, nor had I ever read before about the Goebbels and the tragedy of what happened to their 6 children.

* I thought Beevor did an excellent job jumping from the various POV’s and storylines, be it the Red Army, or the German defense, or Eisenhower, the Hitler Bunker, etc. I can’t claim to not being confused on occassion, but overall I thought he did a good job maintaining interest in all the storylines and advancing each to an appropriate point before changing to another (or another POV of the same storyline).

* It was interesting to me how few times the concentration camps were mentioned, in fact when they were mentioned it was usually in only the most cursory fashion. I suppose in a book like this, where momentum was trying to be maintained, and given that there are plenty of books that focus on the Holocaust, Beevor felt it could be glossed over, if such is possible. But given how much focus he paid to the atrocities commited by the advancing Red Army, his lack of detail with respect to the camps — even on the level of how Red Army soldiers dealt with the liberation of them — seems curious.

* I found the various machinations of Stalin, and the “behind the scenes” political manoeuvrings among the Allies fascinating, but here too without context a lot of it didn’t make sense to me. Particularly confusing were the various intrigues involving Stalin, Beria, Zhukov, etc. The same could be said for much of the Nazi treachery and backstabbing.

* It seems incredibly naive to say so, but one can’t help but just feel overwhelmed by the brutality of it all. It’s probably the hardest aspect of the book, where page after page reveals a brutality so commonplace, so de rigueur of the environment, that, to borrow from Hannah Arendt, it becomes banal.

* Recommended.