Once again I've made it nearly halfway through the year before posting my 2016 reading goals. However, to be honest, this year's goal is the same as last year's: read my own books that I haven't read yet. I'll be crossing off the books that I listed last year but have since read, and adding new ones. This time the order is sorta random. I've got 13 books to go, in comparison with last year's 31, and given my actual efforts to get through this list lately, I'm pretty confident that I'll manage it.
Othello by William Shakespeare.
Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford. Still need some time before I'll be ready to jump into this one.
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.Random review coming!
Q-In-Law by Peter David. (This isn't in the photo because it's on my bedside table waiting for me to start it.
Garden in the Wind/Enchanted Summer by Gabrielle Roy.
The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence.
Living and Party Going by Henry Green. I didn't actually read these books, I just got rid of them.
Wonderbook by Jeff Vandermeer.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
Walden Two by B. F. Skinner.
Joe Hill by Wallace Stegner. I got this at the used bookstore, for some reason skipping over the three or four other Stegner books I already had on my to-read list. It's about a union leader guy, not Stephen King's son.
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. I'm thrilled but also a bit nervous to read this book on the topic of climate change vs. capitalism.
The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.
A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman.
Rich Man, Poor Man and Beggarman, Thiefby Irwin Shaw. I only read the first of these two, but can guarantee I'm not interested in the second.
Amber Chronicles 6-10 by Roger Zelazny.I've decided not to finish this series, and not to add it to my permanent collection. The style is just too different from the kind of thing that I love.
The Portable James Joyce. Still just hanging onto this because it contains a copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but also I think I might give Dubliners a shot. (Not shown cuz it's actually sitting behind the other books right now.)
The other books on the shelf are new ones that I've acquired since the beginning of the year and am not including in this year's reading plans, although I'd like to read Rage as my annual Stephen King summer book.
First Sentence: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
Review:
It's taken a long time for me to get around to writing this review, so I almost decided to just not write it. But given that I already left it off of my year end wrap up for 2013 and how I really want to spread the word about this book, here we are after all. (And let me explain, since I am actually posting this in May of 2016: I originally read the book and wrote the review in late 2013/early 2014. I have… quite a backlog of Random books.)
The Haunting of Hill House is retroactively confusingly titled, thanks to the existence of the 1959 film House on Haunted Hill and its 1999 remake, which has nothing to do with it. The book actually inspired 1963's The Haunting, which I saw long ago and found ridiculous and, even more loosely, 1999's The Haunting remake, which I also saw long ago, this time while flirting with a boy.
Anyway, the book easily surpasses every single one of these movies in the creepy and super good departments. I'm not sure if I've ever read "The Lottery" or just know of it by reputation, but I feel like I can state with confidence that Shirley Jackson is a genius after having read just this one book.
Doctor Montague provides the impetus for the events of the novel. He wants to study spookiness, so he discovers Hill House and invites a group of people to spend several weeks of summer there with him. These people have all had some sort of experience with the unexplained. Most don't respond. The two who do: Eleanor Vance, who previously experienced a rain of stones on her home as a girl, and Theodora, a possibly-lesbian possible-psychic. Rounding out the quartet is young Luke Sanderson, a member of the family that owns the house.
Creepy things begin to happen almost instantly upon the characters' arrival at Hill House. It is a place of dreadful and oppressive silence (except at night), odd angles, clouded history, and doors that won't stay open. Eleanor is the true main character (other than the house, that is), a woman in her early 30s who has cared for her sick mother for eleven years, and is now shiftless, unwanted, and friendless. From the very beginning, the house gets her firmly in its clutches. The subtle ways the stress of the experience drives wedges between all of the characters are wonderful to behold as well.
There is so much good stuff in this book. There were parts of it that made my skin crawl, particularly when Eleanor first enters the house and the way her conversation with Mrs Dudley is immediately duplicated with Theodora. The interpersonal interactions are spectacular to read and so is the manipulation of Eleanor. Really the whole thing is just the best haunted house story I've ever read. I'm not sure that the geometric oddity of the house as described by Dr Montague is possible as written, but that's my only complaint and it's one I don't care about.
Read this book, but maybe do it in the daytime.
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No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.
As with A Natural History of the Romance Novel, I came to this book via a Goodreads comment about Tania Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance. Get ready for some raving this time, though.
If I'm not mistaken, Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan are the co-founders of the blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (Tan doesn't seem to be around there anymore), which I don't really have the time or desire to read, because despite my interest in the genre, I'm not a fan and thus definitely not a part of the community. Anyway, this book is Wendell and Tan's snarky love letter to the romance genre, written by fans for... hard to say. I think other fans, but I found the book really funny and enlightening and I've been known to be a bit of a hater. Also, it's accessible in a way that Loving with a Vengeance and A Natural History of the Romance Novel really aren't.
The authors lampoon the "Old Skool" clichés of the genre with a lot of wit, and also deal with some of its seedier aspects (rape, in particular, which apparently was a mainstay for many years) with intelligence and aplomb. I learned a lot about romance and people who like it from this book. Basically: it's just a different kind of fantasy. Who would've thought!? (i.e. this should have been obvious all along, but here we are.) There are some cute sections at the end including romance novel Mad Libs and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.
My one quibble is that sometimes the jokey aspects of the book got a bit out of hand. The word "come" was footnoted with the word "literally," like, five times too many for my liking. Other than that, though, I highly recommend this to anyone who's curious about the genre, and probably people who like it, too.
