NANDINI NAYAR
 May05 Enid
Blyton II
Apr05 Enid
Blyton I
PENI GRIFFIN
Mar05 Last
Column
Feb05 What's
In Your Notebook?
Jan05 Read
A Little Louder
Nov/Dec04 Creativity
IV
Oct04 Creativity
III
Sep04 Creativity
II
Aug04 Creativity
Jun/Jul04 Social
Angst and All That
May04 Reading
In Public
Apr04 Elephant
In The Living-Room
Mar04 Literary
Synchronicity
Feb04 The
Most Important Thing in the World
Jan04
Year-End Wrap-Ups
Dec03 Editors...
They Ain't Want You Want, They're What You Need
Nov03 The
Secret Formula for Originality - Revealed!
Oct03 An
Incoherent Message Concerning Narrative Structure; or 'Reality. What a
concept.'
Sep03 Preaching
to the Choir
Aug03 FanFic
on ACHUKACHAT, the website discussion board...
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Year-End Wrap-Ups
by Peni Griffin
Ah, the end of the old year, the beginning of the new. The time of year's best lists, year-end wrap-ups, and futile resolutions; the time when I pretend to clean my study and re-organize my filing systems.
I'm too much of a realist to expect much in the way of result from the annual mental assessment and tidying-up; but I do it anyway. During the year, I make a note of each book I read and on New Year's Day I count them up.
This year I even performed a minimalist statistical analysis, dividing my reading into four obvious categories - adult fiction, non-fiction, juvenile fiction, and young adult fiction. Unfortunately, I could not get my statistical breakdown to match my raw count, or one count to match the next, and I noticed two books which I know I'd read that didn't get written down; so a certain lack of precision haunts my steps. But anyone who's ever seen me add a column of figures would expect that.
Adult fiction trails the pack - out of a total somewhere between 229 to 235, a maximum of 20 books could be classified that way. Nine titles are the result of a year-end Tony Hillerman binge. One was Nicholas Nickleby, technically an adult book though I was 12 when I first read it. The rest were all genre titles, the result of either buying an author I considered reliable or amusements previously vetted by someone who understands my taste better than most.
Since my research on the Paleo-Indian book was substantially completed in 2002, my non-fiction may be assumed to have returned to a base level. I seem to have read not quite 70 titles - less than half of total input, but a substantial percentage. Almost all were targeted at adults. Excellent non-fiction exists for young people, but that's not where scientists aim their primary research. Also, some topics in which I am interested don't belong in the children's or even the teen section - the most recent stab at identifying Jack the Ripper or the Black Dahlia murderer, for example.
Despite this, the non-fiction I check out now clumps into the same categories as that I read in junior high and high school - adventure (though escapes from prison camps have given way to Arctic/Antarctic and sea exploration), anthropology, history, archeology, true mysteries (criminal, historical, scientific, and Fortean), biography (mostly literary), what the Victorians called natural history, and literary criticism. Sprinkled in are the books on topics so off the wall I couldn't resist them - the science of superheroes, for instance.
Fiction for young people made up more than half of my reading, though the total in each heading fluctuates wildly depending on what I'm classifying as juvenile and what as YA at the moment I'm making the tally. Generally YA comes out as the more numerous category, which seems peculiar given that I sometimes read four or five juvenile titles in one afternoon - but at my library, the new non-fiction and YA are on the first floor and the children's section is on the third. Convenience matters when you only have 15 minutes to book-hunt and if I only get up to the third floor say, one in every four library trips, that would limit the total titles seen. (When I go to a children's bookstore, I spend hundreds of dollars; so I only go once or twice a year.)
I read one book of poetry, subcategory lyrics to folk songs/ballads. I do not read picture books without an ulterior motive, though come to think of it I never noted down the ones I read when selecting gifts for my two-year-old niece. (No, dadgum it, I won't do the count again!) Magazines read consistently, as opposed to received, were Fate, Fortean Times, and a handful of comics. I did extensive work on two books of my own, but wrote none from start to finish. My movie and TV watching record is such a mixed bag that I won't attempt to make sense of it.
So what were the literary highlights of 2003?
Any given year's reading consists of a lot of reasonably interesting or amusing books more or less meritoriously written, a few clunkers, a small amount of impressively good stuff, a binge or two, some comfort reading, some massive information dumps, some re-reading of past highlights, and - if I'm lucky - a new Big Book that makes me feel physically as if my skull had been opened up and light shone in. Jane Eyre is a Big Book; Little Women; The Lord of the Rings; A Christmas Carol; and, more idiosyncratically, Christopher Isherwood's Lions and Shadows and Rodman Philbrick's Freak the Mighty. The key element is that, at the end of the book, I feel wiser than when I started.
  
This was a good year on the Big Book front. I discovered Neal Shusterman, who may be compared to Diana Wynne Jones, in that he takes unpromising premises and turns them into absorbing books with a skill which is breathtaking to watch. In any other year, I'd be going on and on about him. This year, however, Elaine Marie Alphin got to me firstest with the mostest, with Simon Says. This book has the distinction of being the only one, in a lifetime of obsessive and incessant reading, to accurately depict my interior universe.
Like many Big Books, Simon Says is not a comfortable read, and it has been generally avoided by the critical establishment, for reasons which are stated in the text. Like her protagonist, Elaine is not supposed to express what no one wants to hear. The setting is an arts magnet school in Houston, one of the world's least fantastic places; yet the characters and plot are as hyperbolically metaphoric as any fairy tale that was ever deconstructed by a psychoanalyst.
And that's quite enough book reviewing. If I'm not careful I'll go on and on and on, and turn you off the book completely.
Other highlights - I binge-read Diana Wynne Jones in the spring and Tony Hillerman in the fall. Sometimes nothing will do except to consume mass quantities of a particular author. No one else, even your other favorites, holds your interest. Sometimes there's an obvious trigger - reading one Jones is likely to lead to me on to read a dozen more - but sometimes the causes are hidden and secret. Related to the binge read, but more reasonable, is the need to read an entire author's oeuvre, or a complete series, preferably in chronological order, but not to the exclusion of all else. Generally, I check out one book per library visit. I had a number of serial reads during the year, the most prolonged being John Marsden's series about the invasion of Australia. The least satisfactory was Lireal/Sabriel/Abhorsen. I'm afraid I don't see what all the fuss is about, and I basically skimmed the last chapters of Abhorsen in order to not have to renew it.
Which brings us to my perennial failure to keep up with the latest buzz. I didn't even try to read Nix's trilogy till the last book landed in the library. I haven't started Lemony Snicket yet (hey, not my fault Book 1 is always checked out), or His Dark Materials, though that's the next book up, promise. I got Order of the Phoenix the first legal moment, but only because my husband - excellent man - stayed up late to get it for me after I'd told him I could wait a day or two. I managed to read The Thief Lord, but not Stravaganza or Inkheart, and though I'd heard of a number of the Newbery and Printz honor books, I had only read one of them.
So - where does this leave me? What is the point of these year-end wrap-ups, anyway? If these things have any use, it must be to point us in fruitful directions. Two binge reads - what did they do for me? Am I keeping up with my field well enough to understand trends within it, or do I need to be more agressive about getting new books? Why am I so reluctant to do so? Why was it such an urgent pleasure to get through Marsden's series, and why did I persist to the end of Nix's when I wasn't impressed? Is the non-fiction pointing me toward a topic for fiction? Should I spend more time doing unreliable statistical analyses of those books to find out?
And what about y'all out there in achukaland? What did you read last year?
January 2004 © Peni Griffin
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