[MUSIC] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. If you go over there now, you can check out the top 10 episodes from 2013. That's tops in terms of downloads, not quality. You can also find us on Twitter at vmspod@facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumblr.com. This is the final episode of 2013, and I am awfully happy with how the show has progressed throughout the year. I feel like I've gotten a bunch better at interviewing, although as a booker I still need to work some things out. I have to admit, I am at a total loss for figuring out what sort of guests are going to bring the most traffic. Not that I'm seeking some gigantic audience, but I had a couple of guests that I thought would be big hits, and they sort of fizzled, and I had some I was pretty hesitant about who turned out to really bring in a nice audience. The key lesson, and it's one that I've kept in mind for most of my life, is that I don't know a damn thing. We've got another 50 or so episodes in 2014 to iron that stuff out. For the year-end episode, rather than post a new interview, I decided to hit up the past year's guests and find out about the books they enjoyed the most in 2013. Like I said, it's a podcast about books and life, and that's what you're here for. This isn't necessarily books that were published last year, although some of them did pick new books. More than half of our guests from 2013 participated. Some were recorded after our main interviews were over, others recorded segments of their own, and some of them sent me text, which I'll read to you. I'll also share my favorite book at the end of this episode. And as a sort of companion to this, you may want to go to chimeraobscura.com/vm and check out another year in the books. It's a blog post about all the books I read in 2013 with a big group photo of them. If that's your sort of thing. And now, in no particular order, our 2013 podcast guests tell us about their favorite books. Ron Rosenbaum, one of my favorite living writers, tells us, "One of my great regrets is that I chickened out of continuing Latin study after I hit the wall my freshman year at Yale. I had a glimpse of the greatness there from translating badly, Catolis, Properchius and Tibolas. I've rationally called Catolis 64 the greatest poem written in the western world, but maybe it was because it was brain damagingly hard to translate, and I just lacked the courage to go further. Still, I've discovered one can get a glimpse of that ancient beauty and wit in certain translations. This year I reread the great classical scholar Peter Green's edition of "Avid," the erotic poems. And once again, it was a revelation. How her bane, sophisticated and wise about these matters, Publius Obidius Nasso, born 63 B.C. was, or is. Even contemporary feminists will enjoy the account of what fools men be. No matter what stage of love you have been in, aspiring, conniving, enjoying, despairing, has got it covered. Not just the famous, ironic art of love, but the lesser-known cures for love, from which we are advised, let love wane and slow of an essence fade on the breeze and die, to hate the girl you once loved as a crime, an end to be fitting, none but the savage. Sure, easy for him to say. Ron's most recent book is "How the End Begins," the road to a nuclear World War III. You should check that out, but you really should check out his other books, "The Shakespeare Wars," "Explaining Hitler," and most importantly, "The Secret Parts of Fortune." These picks come from Willard Spiegelman, professor of poetry at SMU and the author of "Seven Pleasures," essays on ordinary happiness. He writes, "I have read two wonderful new books this year, and by new, I mean new to the world, not new to me. The first is the latest book by the great octogenarian James Salter, "All That Is," a novel that works beautifully at the level of the sentence, of the storyline, of the characters. Salter's sensibility is one of feline heterosexuality. He writes with flair, nuance, and a sensuous understanding of human complexities. At the other end of the chronological spectrum is Caleb Crane, whose first novel, Necessary Errors, is a reminder of what it is like to be young. But bliss wasn't in that dawn to be alive, wrote Wordsworth of the early, still unbloody years of the French Revolution, but to be young was very heaven. Crane's protagonist and his friends are part of a circle and prog in the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution. It's 1990, our hero has just graduated from Harvard. Like others in his circle, he's an English teacher. All are in the process of becoming adults, trying on roles, learning about the world, and about themselves simultaneously. Something that happens, every feeling possesses the urgency, the pleasure, the thrill of happening as if for the first time. But in this book, nothing really happens. Crane is not especially interested in plot, per se. Some characters hook up, the gay protagonist develop self-confidence and strength. One couple splits up, another one forms, people gather and drink and talk. They talk a lot. Think of Shaw's plays, or some of Aldous Huxley's early novels of ideas. Crane has a Jamesian sensibility, and he deals with the great Jamesian theme of the American Abroad, the new world confronting the old world, but now an old world that's in the process of making itself new. Communism has been defeated, but nothing, as yet, has taken its place. Czech society resembles the individual expats inhabiting the landscape. Everyone and everything occupies a zone of betweenness. I think again in literary terms, Matthew Arnold's "wandering between two worlds, one dead, and the other powerless to be born." There are Jamesian themes and scenes. Luckily, Crane writes in un-Jamesian sentences. His English is deft and fluid. He is a marvelous stylist capable of creating appropriate metaphors, scintillating conversation, and depictions of urban settings to bring the city and its inhabitants alive. For a senior citizen like me, the novel has a double pleasure. As I have said, it makes one recall the intensities of youth, driven equally by idealism and hormones, in the way in which everyone plays at maturity and achieves it en route. At the same time, it reminds one of how lucky one is not to be young anymore, and to have passed through the tribulations and ecstasies of youth, and settled, on the other side, into a more placid, less intense, old age. Go check out Willard's book, Seven Pleasures. Also, we recently celebrated his 69th birthday, and we wish him a happy birthday. Our next pick comes from Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Matt Wurker. Matt writes, "I was traveling and picked up "River of Smoke" by Amitav Ghosh, and loved it. I didn't realize until I was well into it that it was a second in what will be a trilogy, but that doesn't matter. It's a very colorful, historically rich tale of the opium trade to China, and it's a timely parable of an earlier era of globalization. I'm circling back to read the first in the series now. The perfect companion to "River of Smoke" is Robert Kaplan's "Monsoon," a look at the world from the point of view of the Indian Ocean, putting it at the center of history and trade. It's a good workout for our ethnocentric brains. You can find Matt's editorial cartoons at politico.com. Craig Gittney's YA novel from 2013, "Be Ref'd," has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award, the Moonbeam Children's Award, and the Lambda Literary Award in YA Writing. Here's his favorite book of the year. One of my favorite books in the last year was "A Stranger in El Andrea," the debut novel of fantasy author Sophia Cemitar. All of the reviews I've read about "A Stranger in El Andrea," talk about it being about bibliophilia, that is, the love of books. The love of books certainly does run through the novel, but I actually think it's more about spirituality, with the written word being the locust through which transcendence is achieved. The form the novel takes is "The Bill Duns Roman," a novel about the initiation of a youth into the wider world. Jevic is the son of a prosperous pepper merchant, a tyrant of a man who has two wives and controls a plantation on a tropical island. When it becomes clear that Jevic's older brother is unfit for inheritance, Jevic is trained to be his father's successor. A tutor from the distant northern land of El Andrea is hired, ostensibly to teach young Jevic the language and customs of that land in order to be a competent traitor. But the tutor instills in the boy a love of the written word in an obsession with the exotic land. Jevic eventually travels to El Andrea on his first routine trade trip, and very much against his will, becomes literally haunted by the ghost of a young woman in fellow islander he met on the voyage from the tea islands. Ghosts in a heretical Elandrian religion are considered angels and those who communicate with them are living saints. When Jevic's hunting becomes public knowledge, he's placed under arrest and becomes the unwilling pawn between two religious factions. In spite of this fairly complex setup, this novel isn't about politics. The narrative is in the form of the memoir, or it's even more antiquated cousin, the philosophical romance. Jevic's narrative meanders, often interrupting the narrative flow to quote poetry or bits of Elandrian philosophy. It's slow and richly descriptive, a market difference from the often breakneck pace of other fantasy novels. At times, the book becomes a travelogue. Because of this solemn equality, the magic in the world building is organic and believable. Other times it has the elegiac melancholy of Herman Hess's novels, particularly Steppenwolf and Siddhartha. The land of Elandria is a character. The country has a Mediterranean feel in its fauna and cultures. The imaginary religion borrows from Hinduism and Egyptian mythology and is resonant of the Greek mysteries. The novel's ending is ambiguous. No magic ring is recovered or kingdom conquered. Rather, Jevic and Elandria itself are spiritually changed. A stranger in Elandria is a rich, rewarding experience for those who love prose poetry and non-traditional narratives. Go check out Craig's book Bereft and look for him on Twitter at ethereallad. At Herman's owner of Giovanni's room, Philadelphia's legendary queer bookstore, offers the following fave. I tend to like the book I'm reading now, probably because I remember it best. In any case, I love Mary Beard's new book, Confronting the Classics, Traditions, Adventures and Innovations. I first came across Mary Beard in the mid-1970s when I was working at the University of Pennsylvania Library. Of the many translations of Sappho, hers was the only one that made sense to me, so I've been interested in her work ever since. Her ideas in this new book are fresh and startling, at least to me. A thread that runs through several of the reviews is the effects of the Roman Empire of not having a settled order of succession, or any clear idea of how decisions should be made. Augustus's constitution for the Empire was the blueprint for charades. He would tell the Senate what he wanted them to do, then let them consult and debate to their hearts content, as long as they ended up doing what he wanted. See, they were a free people. Some of the later emperors didn't understand that they needed to tell the Senate what it should decide, so things got messy when the Senate voted something other than what the Emperor wanted. You know, hurt feelings, exile, executions. Dr. Beard suggests Caligula may not have been as crazy as his reputation makes him out to be. Making his horse a member of the Senate was a gesture of the contempt he had for the supposedly free institution. In the case of the noble who nobly offered to commit suicide if Caligula recovered from an illness, Caligula didn't play along with the charade of devotion, so when the nobleman presented himself for his reward, Caligula saw to it that he committed suicide. Fun times! Ed looks to be closing down Giovanni's room after a forty-year run after failing to find a buyer in 2013. Ben Catcher, the great cartoonist, writes, "This year I read closing time by Joe Queenin from 2009. It's an autobiography that incidentally describes the mechanisms by which culture and taste were established, transmitted, and stymied in Philadelphia and New York City in the 1950s and 60s. In his description of his life, no cultural artifact is below serious consideration. I came away with a renewed understanding of how my own cultural life was formed. Ben's most recent collection is "Hand-Drying in America." This pick comes from Wallace Wilde-Monozzi, who recently published a novel, "Toscanelli's Array," and a collection of essays, "The Other Side of the Tiber, Reflections on Time in Italy." She writes, "In memoirs, I'm drawn to work that crosses borders, and, by narrating a life, throws out new views on a specific subject. God's Hotel, by Victoria Sweet, is a radical human meander on her twenty-year practice in the Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, the last alms house in the country. Their experiences go to the heart of healing and offer balanced insights into what medicine can offer. Oliver Sacks gave it high praise. Alms hospitals, which once reached across the United States, offer care to anyone who needs long-term assistance, many of whom, as street people, do not particularly want it. The concept of long-term care has roots in the Hotel du, God's Hotel, created for the indigent in the Middle Ages. More more than a memoir, this doctor recounts an inspiring journey in which health is often a low-tech definition brought about by time and human attention. The patient's stories are riveting tales of drugs, poverty, mental problems whose solutions offer often require considerable amounts of imagination. When the efficiency experts finally take over, this disciplined physician, who, by no means against high-tech medicine, emerges as a wisest thinker, showing us how we have narrowed our sights. Searching the past for insights, she studies Hildegard of Vengine, an 11th-century abbess, who finds that attention to patience, listening, and continuity are powerful medicines and finally touching what needs to be fixed. Go Read Wallace's Book of Essays, the other side of the Tiber. It really was one of my favorites from 2013. My pal Ian Kelly writes, "My favorite read of 2013 was Skag Boys, Irvine Welsh's recent train-spotting prequel. I re-watched anti-boil screen adaptation of train-spotting earlier this year and found it just as amazing and even more disturbing than I did when I first saw it in 1997. Reading Skag Boys was more bracing than either of these. Every character was sympathetic, yet many were still horrid and beyond redemption. The characters live and express the widespread disappointment of early 80s Britain, and much of the book's action is shocking, as idleness, frustration, violence, and substance abuse become dominant in working-class Edinburgh. But the story is redeemed by its fascinating characters and plot, wicked humor, and peculiar indefatigable levity and hope. I look forward to reading it again. Ian does not have a book out, nor does he keep a blog. Fantasy and Science Fiction writer and editor Scott Edelman recorded this selection for our list. The book that gave me the most reading fun last year turned out not to be a novel, but The Man from Mars, a biography of early science fiction magazine editor Ray Palmer. That name might be familiar to you, even if you don't know, he edited amazing stories from 1938 through '49, because Ray Palmer is also the secret identity of the Justice League of America member, the Adam, a name used by writer Gardener Fox because of his friendship with that diminutive editor. But it's Palmer's early days and fandom, he edited one of the first, if not the first science fiction fan scene, and involvement in the stories known as the Shaver Mysteries, which created a controversy that rippled throughout the SF community, which are the true source of his fame. And hey, he even bought Isaac Asimov's first short story. Author Fred Natus brings these early days of science fiction and science fiction fan into life, and made Palmer real to me in a way he never was before. It's a fascinating peek behind the scenes at the early days of science fiction. Scott's most recent book is "What Will Come After?" a collection of his zombie stories. He's also an editor at Blaster, the online magazine of the Sci-Fi channel, and you can find more of his stuff at scottedelman.com. Nancy Hightower recorded this segment at a party she was throwing, so if you hear some background music, that's why. I would have to say it's, well first of all it's the Waking Engine, which is an arc coming out from David Edison with Tor, and I'm just falling in love with it. I'm still kind of going through it, but the language is rich and wondrous and I love the world that he's created. Sea Change, also by Tor, SM Wheeler, that has a crack in it and it's very cool. Really an interesting story, especially if you're, it delves into gender construction and gender change, and I would say it's a very different sort of take on the fantasy world that kind of moves into a grim fantasy world, but I'd say it's a different kind of fantasy that I really, it was refreshing to encounter. Go read Nancy's debut novel, "Elementari Rising," musicologist and philosophy professor David Rothenberg sent in this recording from his studio in Berlin. The best book I read this year was "The Woman Who Lost Her Soul." It's a novel by Bob Chicagois. We Bob Chicagois fans have been waiting 20 years since his first novel for him to write this and it's really a gigantic book that reads as if a lot of time has been spent on it. It's a novel full of war and strife, secrecy, like all such giant novels. It is as much about the history of America itself, America that may have lost its soul and America trying to do good in the world, as it is a story of people, relationships. There's a human rights campaigner. There are secret CIA agents. There's a young woman in the middle of it, her father's a CIA agent and a long history going back to the Balkans after World War II and it goes back and forth in history. I wouldn't say it's like a film noir kind of novel that would owe something to that. It really is aiming towards epic, deep, poignant description of what has happened to America and relationships and I would say it's kind of a boy book rather than a girl book. This book has its kind of tough guy macho war story size but it's the other side there's a deep yearning for sensitivity, for finding soul, finding what love really is, finding one's way in a world that's gotten dark, mysterious, full of deception and secrets and it's a very intimate, strange, personal story with a small group of major characters set against all the horror and the bad stuff that America is doing all around the world and not going to give much away in terms of plot or quote anything for you. I'd say that the first third of the book you think it's about one person and then one third of the way and it sort of switches it's really about someone else you didn't realize was the major character so that's the interesting plot twist. Some people may find this book too dark and depraved but others I think will find it's really aiming for something deep and I think for me as a reader and also a writer I think it really shows the value of really an author spending 20 years on one book to try and get it right and you can tell that it's worth attending to an author who has spent that much time between his first novel and his second. So the woman who lost her soul by Bob Shekakis, that's the best book I read this year. Go check out David Rothenberg's book Bug Music. It's easily the strangest book I read last year. Jonathan Hyman, photographer and author, writes, "The best book I read this year and one of the best books I've ever read is The Power Broker by Robert Caro. Having read three of the four Caro books on the life of Lyndon Johnson, I took a break from that exercise and picked up The Power Broker when a friend of mine dropped it in my lap. He read the book after being approached on a commuter train by a stranger while reading Caro's Lyndon Johnson book Means of Ascent. That guy told my friend, "If you like this book, you'll love The Power Broker." I had heard about and known to this book for quite some time because many of my friends had read it as a scholarly requirement in grad school. People confessed to not really actually finishing the book and having read only parts. Too long, they said. Too heavy and cumbersome to read, literally. Too much. This is mostly what the people I know said about the book, but it was not too much for me. Turns out this book fulfills my needs. If you want to learn about how to go from an idealist to a realist to a political person to a motherfucker to beyond powerful, this book is for you. If you want to learn about the history of New York City, its politics, its German Jews, its reform movement and organized labors part in it, this book is for you. If you want to learn about various New York City and New York state politicians, including Governor Al Smith, this book is for you. If you want to learn about immigrant living conditions and social class in New York City and state and how Robert Moses transformed the landscape of Long Island and the self-image of an entire class of people by developing a visionary park system with amenities and roads for city folk to get there, this book is for you. And I think, most of all, if you enjoy wonderful writing and storytelling, this book is for you. Oh, and I almost forgot, everyone needs to learn the story of Mrs. Moskowitz. You could pick up Jonathan Hyman's The Landscapes of 9/11, a photographer's journey in bookstores. You should read it. You won't be sorry. Philip Lopate's personal essays are a national treasure and it was an honor to record a conversation with him last summer. He writes, "I read many wonderful books this year, including James Anthony Fruits, Thomas Carlisle, Natalia Ginsburg's The Manzoni Family, Garza's Autobiography, and Ron Padgett's Collected Poems. It would be silly to name any of these the best. However, I would like to say a word for two short novels that were reprinted by the New York Review of Books classics. Alfred Hayes's "My Face for the World to See" and Alberto Moravia's "Contempt." Curiously, both came out around the same time. Moravia in 1954, Hayes in 1958, and both are in the voice of a disenchanted, highly literary screenwriter involved with a beautiful, unintellectual woman. The implicit condescension and self-dislike of the protagonist make for a dangerous game. We could so easily dismiss the project as appalling on the basis of one false move, but the sure psychological touch of both writers results in embracing astringent veracity. Hayes captures the mood of Los Angeles and the film industry precisely, making it one of the best Hollywood novels ever written. As for Moravia's novel, which served as the basis of a cinematic masterwork, one can see how ungrateful Godard was in speaking dismissively about it over the years, perhaps ashamed of how much he owed the Italian realistic writer. There is so much overlap, especially in the psychological nuances, between Moravias and Godard's telling. All of Lopate's most recent collection of essays is "Portrait Inside My Head," but you can't go wrong picking up any of his collections. Legendary cartoonist Drew Friedman writes, "Superboys, the amazing adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster by Brad Ricka, is a fascinating and finally sad, apathetic biography of the two Cleveland-born, nerdish Jewish creators of Superman, who signed away all rights of their character in 1938 for the astounding sum of $130. Others became incredibly rich off of their character and the empire that was built upon him while writer Jerry and artist Joe disappeared into poverty and obscurity. Even the final shaming of DC in the 1970s to throw a little money their way is too little and too late. It's a riveting book with many lessons to be learned based on one huge mistake." Drew Friedman has done a lot of wonderful books of portraits and comics over the years. You should check out "The Fun Never Stops" too soon and his old Jewish comedians collections. Charles Blackstone, managing editor of Bookslut and author of the new novel Vintage Attraction writes, "months after reading it, it's still inconceivable to me just how good Tampa by Alyssa Nutting is. It's not just one of my favorite novels of the year, but quite possibly one of my favorite novels of life. Celeste Price is the kind of character you read and whose words you want to keep on your skin for all times. Before Tampa, it had been a long time since I'd encountered a novel that did this sort of thing to me. But enough about me. This book is really a joyous and momentous occasion for prose. The fact that there's been a certain degree of controversy surrounding it, mostly innocuously on internet book chat boards, just makes me admire the book and be grateful for its existence even more. Of course, many people haven't understood it. I've never believed anything truly significant in art can make sense to everyone. But a major work of art still be considered major if it was universally admired. The problem people have with Tampa has nothing to do with the novel, its author, or its characters. The problem people have with this book, with any book they have a problem with, comes from within. So many readers are afraid of themselves. Celeste Price isn't afraid of who she is. People can't be afraid of seeing the world truly. Seeing themselves truly. True art reminds us of us. Seeing a book like Tampa pretty much forces you to scrutinize the world and yourself. A lot of people don't want to do that. Okay, but then I'd ask, why read a book if you're not looking to be provoked, to be changed, to be improved? The fear of art, and not the art, should be what's under indictment here. Tampa will bang around my head for a long, long time, and I encourage anybody tired of reading the kind of books that leave impressions on you that quickly disappear to check this one out. If you like wine and books, go pick up Charles Vintage Attractions. It's getting a lot of praise. The great cartoonist Roger Langridge writes, "One comic I really enjoyed this year was Double Barrel, the digital-only anthology published by Top Shelf, which featured work by Xander Cannon, Kevin Cannon, No Relation, and Tim Seavert. The early issues feature two main stories, the serialized graphic novels Crater 15 by Kevin and Heck by Xander, along with other shorter pieces by each cartoonist. The comics' content is solid, well-crafted fantasy adventure cartooning with a great blend of thrills and humor, and is very attractive and a lot of fun. Tim Seavert's clandestine aughts, which fits right in, joins with the ninth issue. Each digital issue, and these things were huge, typically over 100 pages each time, is filled out with cartooning how-to text pieces, and whatever else takes the canon's fancy. As engaging as the content is, though, what really pushed my enthusiasm over the edge about the comic was the way it reinvented the periodical alternative comic book format for the 21st century. In print, the cartoonist-driven periodical comic book is almost dead. Only a handful of die-hard guys like Noah Van Shiver are still putting them out. It's early days yet, but I kind of feel like Double Barrel might be a complete game-changer in this area. It's proven that the publishing model can work in the digital age, and I find that really exciting. There are world of possibilities waiting to be explored there, and none of that would matter if Double Barrel wasn't worth reading, but fortunately, it totally is. For these reasons, Double Barrel is my choice for Book of the Year. You can check out Roger's work at HotelFred.blogspot.com. He really is one of my favorite cartoonists. Journalist Humann Majd writes, "My favorite book this year was After Visiting Friends by Michael Haney. It's a non-fiction story of discovery, of a father the author never really knew. He lost him when he was a child, a little of the details of his death, and it's a mystery that unfolds gracefully, much like the best of fiction. Haney's style is arresting, his prose elegant and endearing, and as a new father myself, who lost his own father last year, the story of a son's quest to know his father resonated deeply. It's a book for everyone, because ultimately it's about family, love, truth, and honesty, told in a most beautiful way." Humann's new book, The Ministry of Guidance, invites you to not stay, is really an eye-opener. Give it a read. Maxime Jakobowski was in a bit of a rush, so he just sent "The Art of Disappearing" by Ivy Pochota. It's not new, but I caught up with it after reading her second later novel. It's absolutely enchanting. After a podcast in November, I asked Lisa Border's author of the 51st State for her pick. The caveat I will throw out is that I am friends and colleagues with the author, but this is not a ringer. I love this book. All this talk of love by Christopher Castellani, and it's one of those books that I've actually had a lot of friends have books come out in the last year, so I have a stack of books -- many of which I haven't even gotten to yet. This is one of those books that I read it and I thought, "I am so proud to know the person who wrote this book." I just can't say enough good things about it. In many ways, it speaks to themes that are near and dear to my heart. It's about family and fractures within families and how family members deal with each other. His characters are very round, very deep, very complicated. It's an Italian immigrant story to some extent, but it's actually part of a trilogy. The first book is set in Italy during World War II. The second book moves -- I think it's in the '50s in Wilmington, Delaware, which is where the family ends up. Then the last book is contemporary. Even the characters that on the surface I would not think I'd be able to relate to, I just found intriguing and believable in all the right ways, and even when they frustrated me, I wanted to see what happened to them. The writing is also really beautiful, so I'm just a huge, huge fan of that book. Go read Lisa's novel, The 51st State, and check out LisaBorders.com for more on her writing and teaching. Zach Martin, former U.S. Marine, and very thoughtful guy had a lengthy take on this question, but stick with it for a while, I think it's pretty good. I reread Anna Karenina, and as I was discussing with you earlier, I've read Anna Karenina before, but I've never really read Anna Karenina, and not having known in the past really how to read well. I read the story. You're the words. I read the words, and I said, "Oh, wow, what a great book," but I really didn't take anything away. It was shocking to me to see how far I had misread that book, or I'd not read it, and a part of that is probably because the book does it on purpose. I certainly think that there's a bit of peeling away of personalities to leave you in doubt about your first impressions of all the personalities, and so I think that I'm very impressed at the method of that book, and while I didn't, I sort of don't believe the punch line, so to speak, you know. Levens. Levens, well, and really, Anna is either. I find Leven's realization at the end of the book to be one of the most wonderful moments in all of literature, but your mileage may vary. Right. Right. Yeah, I did not take that away at all. I certainly -- I'll give it a spoiler alert for your book. It's 140 years later. Yeah, right. Yeah. I wouldn't want to give it away, but I found -- well, I find the reasons for his withdrawal of the way he was pursuing life before, and I see why he's dissatisfied with his answers, his previous answers, or his previous search for an answer, I definitely sort of am not overly pleased with the answer of that it's who am I to ask these questions in a way. In a sense, but I think the bigger -- the transformation I think he gets at the very end is the realization that there's no transformation, that, you know, there's not going to be a lightning bolt. I'm going to have to work at this every day to not curse out the driver for screwing something up and not immediately resent my wife over this or that moment. And just understand that it's not, you know, there is no great cosmic epiphany that's going to suddenly hit you. And that is the cosmic epiphany that hits him. Yes. You -- that is an interesting reading, and I may be extrapolating for my own experience, of course. Well, but that's what we all do. And so that's part of why I read it so differently when I read it the last time. You know, I was painting on the things that appealed and were interested in me, and that's always what you do. That's part of why it's interested in reading books, in addition to just the fact that I really had no understanding of human nature when I read it, and it's kind of giving myself too much credit to think I have understanding of it now, but in fact, I'm standing. Well, I was shocked about, you know, here I am at 40, and I'm still figuring things out about myself, and that is just frightening in a way because I thought I had everything figured out. Certainly about me and generally about other people, and now I'm really questioning all my assessments of other people, and I see that when I look at literature because I read the characters in that completely differently before. And again, I feel -- I feel to some extent that that's a -- that's deliberate on the part of the author, and that we're given one vision, and then as that's -- as things develop, I feel that we find that the villain wasn't really the villain we thought he was, and the sympathetic character that we thought was sympathetic is actually not particularly sympathetic. And I think that's -- I think that's -- I focus on that because that's me projecting onto the book, because that's what I've found that's probably the evolution that I've had, where I have recognized that things are complicated. You know, I love -- I've been reading Montana because I -- I -- it resonates with me that he goes through all this and says, "But on the other hand," and -- and -- and then kind of says, "So, you know, who knows?" Sorry that one went on as long as it did. It was right after Zach and I had finished our main podcast, and I thought it was a pretty good segment to hold on to. You can find Zach's blog at booksandmovement.net and go back and check out that episode if you're interested in more of our conversation. Peter Trachtenberg, whose non-fiction works, "The Book of Calamities and Another Insane Devotion" blew my mind this fall, offers up our next pick. He writes, "I love the Patrick Melrose novels. Never mind, bad news, some hope, mother's milk, and at last." Okay, briefly, on a languid September afternoon in the late 1960s, in a summer house in southern France, a decaying minor member of the English aristocracy rapes his five-year-old son under the pretext of teaching him a lesson. The episode goes un -- the episode goes unnoticed by any of the house's other occupants, including the child's alcoholic mother, nor does anybody remark on the obvious disturbance afterward. Edward San Oban calls the first novel of this beautiful, devastating Patrick Melrose quintet, never mind. It gives you an idea of the author's sense of humor and of the social milieu he bivisects with such unflinching precision in this and the succeeding books. Over their course, Patrick Melrose will grow up, cultivate a drug habit that makes Keith Richards look positively benign, get clean, marry, raise two young sons, and try to do better by them than either of his ghastly parents ever did by him. The material could be melodramatic, it could be embarrassing, but San Oban addresses it with such humor, cold horror, and compassion, and with such jaw-dropping command of the English language that I put down the last of the books exhilarated, humbled, too. If I were still writing jacket copy, I'd say it was Sophocles as he might have been translated by Evelynne Waugh, but San Oban's characters don't have grandeur. They're human-sized, and I suspect he's a better stylist than Waugh was. Peter Trachtenberg's newest book, Another Insane Devotion on the Love of Persons and Cats, recently came out in paperback. It's a really good book. And for our final one, Kip Friedman, author of Barracuda in the Attic, offers up his choice recorded right after our podcast a few weeks ago in December. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and I've read half of his novels, but Blood Meridian about the Old West in the 1870s, the descriptions of life among the Indians and the people wandering through the Arizona, Colorado, that area in the 1870s, you really feel like you're there. It's dreamlike and beautiful writing, and it's a great story. It's gritty. To me, that was, and I don't even like poetry, so I love that. But I've read a lot of great stuff. Right now, just reading Winter's Bone is probably, it's like pizza. It's the pizza that's in front of me that I'm eating right now is the best pizza I've ever had. As somebody from New Jersey, I'm totally down. I am, in fact, totally down. Go check out Kip Friedman's memoir, Barracuda in the Attic. It's really a lot of fun. Now, my own fave, at least, of books I read for the first time in 2013, is Stoner, a novel from 1965 by John Williams. Here's what I wrote about it in my "Another Year in the Books" post, which you can find at chimeraobscura.com/vm. I think Stoner's the best novel I read this year. It's certainly the most harrowing. I'd heard about this book, and it's lost classic status for a few years now. I started reading it after an appreciation of it came out in The New Yorker by Tim Kriter. Kriter refers to Stoner as the anti-Gatsby, and I think that's dead on. It tells a story of an English-lit professor in Missouri in his humble beginnings, his frustrations in both his profession and his marriage, and the few brief, magical moments in his life. All told, at chronicles a forgotten and forgettable life, and beautiful, but austere prose. In a sense, I could compare it to the other university books I read this year, Lucky Jim and Confusion. There's little overlap with Zweig's book, Confusion, but it does make for an interesting contrast with Amos's Lucky Jim, both in terms of being an unlucky stoner, and in the way in which it's very prose-style and depth-feeling form this midwestern contrast to Amos's Londonness. I'm assuming somebody out there has already written a piece on this, but if not, there's your thesis. But please give Stoner a read, but keep in mind it's almost unremittingly sad and frustrating, and yet quietly beautiful. And that's it for the Virtual Memory Show in 2013. Thanks so much for listening and for cluing your friends in on the show, hand-to-hand. We'll be back next week with a conversation with Brett Martin, author of Difficult Men, behind the scenes of a creative revolution from the sopranos and the wire to madmen and breaking bad. Until then, do me a favor and go to our iTunes page and post a review of the show. Or head up our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm, and make a donation to this ad-free podcast. And if you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at groff@chimeraobscura.com, or VMS pod on Twitter, or even on our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. Until next year, I'm Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
