We say humbug to holiday book lists. Naturally, we created our own. You may rejoice.
We’re no fans of year-end book lists.
We bear no grudges against the books, exactly, just those who assemble smug literary roundups, boring as Melba toast. It’s the same holiday song and dance: only glossy, big-name titles with rapacious marketing campaigns make the cut and, somehow, one breakaway book on grammar. Think Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, 2005’s The Elements of Style Illustrated and this year’s Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences. No wonder holidays bring out the worst in people.
Critical subjectivity and explanations for why choice books deserve superlative recognition ring hollow, without real discussion of why they are better and more meaningful than other works of comparable merit. Conspicuously absent are imaginative works produced by small presses and books lowbrow enough to contain (gasp) pictures. And who, pray tell, has time to read at this time of year anyway?
Writers commissioned to compose their best lists of the year leave a different bad taste in our mouths. Their favorites are overly subjective and self-interested when considered in their respective entireties. Besides, they have their own agendas within the book sections of periodicals and zines. There are far more literary circle jerks than literary circles.
Therefore, we cobbled together a reasonably biased and intensely visual list of literary mavericks, dark-horse compilations and provocative gems.
The following titles are what we would love to unwrap: true gifts and events in themselves, not filler packages to give like underwear. While each is designed with heart and old-school craftsmanship, they are not necessarily for your grandmother’s coffee table. They are what a coworker of ours called, in an incandescently blonde moment, “beautiful…in a very scary way.” They are books your friends will covet. They may even make you a hipper, smarter, richer and better all-around person in 2007.
Only Revolutions Mark Z. Danielewski
Mark Z. Danielewski doesn’t write novels so much as he builds them. His works are more than merely books for reading; they are spaces to explore and inhabit. His first novel, House of Leaves, found a cultish online following through a tale that bleeds the postmodern gothic: the story physically twists into a Borgesian labyrinth, footnotes reveal subterranean horrors, text folds into doors that are opened by the reader and closed by the protagonist.
Only Revolutions, shortlisted this year for a National Book Award, is an elliptical, epic travel tale told twice, once each by an American Juliet and her Romeo, who are always sixteen, always en route, and always figuratively and literally surrounded by death. It’s dizzying: “We buzz by The Party Ongoing,/scud baps & hot cats groaning/tram, gobble pipe, git, stick, skins, and woodpile, swing out!” And beautiful: “Higher on, to alpine meadows, groves of powder./Glacial glades we cross out of…Beyond even time’s front. Because now/we are out of time. We are at once.”
The conjoined narrative is as lighthearted and expansive as House of Leaves is labyrinthine and macabre. The book’s very binding is a dazzling collage, and, inside, the text’s shifts in dimension, direction, and color make Only Revolutions an unexpected surprise upon opening one of its two front covers. The revelations within are even more astonishing.
Constance: A Collection of Forty New Orleans Artis Erik Kiesewetter and Patrick Strange, editors
“To every role I play, I bring everything that I was, everything that I am and everything I hope to be.” Whether or not that was rightly attributed to Clark Gable, it is true of the artists in this portable installation who assemble fragments of their post-Katrina exile and return to capture, in an inchoate way, the zeitgeist of the City that Time Forgot. In the shadow of the nation’s worst man-made and natural disaster, here is that singular borderland of the south and the dreamscape, the pleasure of the moment in jazz discord with the betrayals of yesterday, the urban ennui ripped through with serendipity.
Sound depressing, rife with survivor’s guilt? Constance is unabashedly hopeful. In photos, paintings, collages, graphic arts and poetry, visionary phoenixes rise from floodwaters and debris in a hip, sunny layout. In fact, as an object libre, Constance is blessedly free of over-baked goth imagery and trite, atmospheric visuals that infect most New Orleans publications for one salient reason: the Katrina generation prefers renaissance to romanticized glass darklies. Samia Saleem, Beth Fandal, Natalie Sciortino, Brandon Mansell, Mitch Paone and Scott Ray, among others, have fashioned works that are energetic testimonies to the necessity of their crafts as response to catastrophe and to New Orleans as an inimitable lens for art.
Santa doesn’t go down FEMA trailers, kiddos. That’s why, with any luck, proceeds from this 1,000-print run will go to a second volume to expose more artists who lost public and private spaces and professional connections. Best of all, collectible postcards and a sticker serve as lagniappe. Levees may break, but Louisiana lagniappe will always remain.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 Dave Eggers, editor
In which: Cat Bohannon travels halfway around the world to watch dead bodies morphed into “Art” with a big, silicone-infused “A.” Rick Moody envisions the lifecycle of a pirate radio station. George Saunders gets a wedgie in a Dubai water park. Robert Coover asks, “Puff that mighty dragon: where is he?” A judge’s verdict determines that a school board’s zeal for intelligent design doesn’t merit the subversion of science. The Iraqi constitution is printed in full. A graphic nonfiction terror details two Iraqi businessmen’s attempt to sue the U.S. government (with a cameo by Donald Rumsfeld, who’s just as unnerving in two dimensions as three). Kurt Vonnegut graphs fiction and is generally crusty. The mighty, menacing Chuck Norris counts to infinity (twice), gets blackjack with one card, and is revealed to be the reason that Waldo is hiding. Plus: hoboes, headlines from The Onion, North Korea and much more in the best American book most likely to wind up on the back of the recipient’s toilet.
Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow Zak Smith
Let’s get the title out of the way. Penguin, owner all things Pynchonian, threatened to take Tin House to the cleaners if it did not change Zak Smith’s original title, Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated: One Picture for Every Page, which the publishing bully deemed “misleading,” to this substitute for retards. We hope Penguin is not misled by us raising our middle fingers.
It took an artist whose work was as intricate, radioactive, and unhinged as Pynchon’s prose to conceive of illustrating the notorious war phantasmagoria and executing it. Smith’s communion with the text has yielded manic drawings, paintings and experimental photographic treatments that complement the head-trip of events in literal and interpretive ways.
Don’t think the works portray a self-evident chronology, supplementing actual reading the tome. Unlike traditional illustrations, they abstractly confound as much as they realistically elucidate. Smith’s sublime range is sexy and nauseating, delicious and terrifying. His eye portrays anything Pynchon commited to print, even metaphor. Roger Mexico, for instance, is described as “the spider hitching together his web of numbers,” which Smith literally sets down: a thick, sinister spider knitting a jumble of numbers into some as-yet-unseen design.
We’ve been hot for this book for months and will have our gift cards ready to swipe on its December 30 release date.
The Best American Comics 2006 Anne Elizabeth Moore, editor; Harvey Pekar, guest editor
Harvey Pekar admits in his introduction that the opportunity to “[lend] legitimacy to the cause of comics” helped him overcome his distaste for anthologies. In art, legitimacy sometimes houses complacency, and younger forms of expression wield a powerful freedom channeled, in part, from lower expectations. That power is evident in this newest addition to the Best American series. Pekar’s anthology portrays a medium whose boundaries are as transient as any given author’s imagination. An unlikely superhero aspires to be a chef, Paul Bunyan struggles with purposelessness, and the grisly, revolving lifecycle of RabbitHead subdivides into matrix of wordless cruelty. Most surprising is the abundance of nonfiction, including journalism from Iraq, a variety of political satire, and the tale of an execution witnessed. This anthology bounds eagerly from the overtly disturbing to the metaphysically speculative to simple hilarity. At least one story, David Heatley’s “Portrait of My Dad” deftly provokes cringing, blushing, laughter, and tenderness in a series of vignettes that cover five crudely penned pages.
Powerful medium indeed.
An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories Ivan Brunetti, editor
After the former survey of 2006 is complete, check out this retrospective whose cartoonists are organized according to the form’s artistic process: from doodles, to the emergence of personality, to multiple panels with storylines, to full-page spreads that self-consciously play on the former stages.
“Ultimately, my criteria were simple: these are comics that I savor and often revisit,” says Ivan Brunetti. “They move, in every sense of that word: they come alive and elicit tears, laughter, and sometimes indescribable emotions.” For that reason, this sizeable compilation can be entered at any point, put down for lengths of time and returned to seamlessly, and moved through backwards and forwards. In fact, it begs a non-linear, interactive approach. It begs never to be fully finished.
A cooperative intimacy is experienced with many of these cartoonists, whose many styles work with the reader’s eye to provide the crudest, but most organically magical, animation. After that experience, repeated in myriad styles across genres, we emerged to see ourselves differently, as if we, too, were drawn characters whose color got printed outside our borders by accident, escaping our outlines to bleed into a far crazier but somehow more accurate world than this.
Between the Covers is a biweekly book review and publishing analysis.
