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Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Alice McDermott’s “Someone” was originally published in the January 30, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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Just as I was crawling out of the hole I was in, my blog gets hacked! Things are back up, and I will finally start catching up on my reading of The New Yorker. I will have thoughts here soon.
I’m not one to go digging around for old psychological studies — or any old studies, for that matter. Because of this, it is unlikely I would have ever heard of Milton Rokeach’s fascinating The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (1964). Why did I end up purchasing and reading this? It’s an NYRB Classic. That’s enough. If they publish a psychological study from fifty years ago, that means it’s worth reading. This one is.
In 1959, Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist working at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, brought together three patients who each firmly believed he was Jesus Christ. Rokeach says, “Initially, my main purpose in bringing them together was to explore the processes by which their delusional systems of belief and their behavior might change if they were confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity.”
His study was inspired in part on an account set out by Voltaire in which a man, Simon Morin, believing he was Christ ran into another man proclaiming to be Christ. Simon exclaimed that the other must be crazy and, realizing what this meant, was cured of his delusion for a time (though he was eventually burned at the stake). As he introduces the study, Rokeach says, “This is the only study on which I have ever worked that has aroused the interest of children.” I must say, it’s easy to see why. This is a fascinating look into the minds of three disturbed men.
The three patients are not referred to by their real names, though the book is so well written that these names, as simple as they are, are permanently part of my literary consciousness.
Clyde Benson was the oldest. At 70, he had been hospitalized for 17 years after suffering from a series of tragedies in a short period of time that took from him his parents and his wife (in a botched abortion). Rokeach makes the case that Mr. Benson was never really his own man, that since childhood he had allowed others to make decisions for him, and the strain of losing these authorities in his life was too much. In this book, Mr. Benson is easily forgotten. He’s always sitting there during the meetings, but he rarely speaks, or if he does it is mostly gibberish. Perhaps because of this, Rokeach rarely has the book focus on him, though he does have some good lines, like this one:
Late at night. All fifteen patients in the dorm are in their beds, but there is a great deal of restlessness because one of the patients is snoring loudly. Finally one of the patients, exasperated, yells: “Jesus Christ! Quit that snoring.” Whereupon Clyde, rearing up in his bed, replies: “That wasn’t me who was snoring. It was him!”
Joseph Cassel was 58 and had been hospitalized for nearly 20 years. A timid man, he grew up with a strict father (who called him Josephine) in a french-speaking household in Canada. Perhaps as a response to the fact that he was not allowed to bring anything “English” into the home, Joseph, besides considering himself Jesus Christ, also considers himself a patriot of England, who protects him and whom he protects. One of the strangest accounts in the study is one when, in peril of losing his beloved placebos, Joseph still will not say that the hospital is not an English stronghold. He doesn’t even have to believe this to keep his placebos; he need only pretend — to lie. He won’t do it. Interestingly, Rokeach notes that had he lied, it would have been a sign of improvement.
The youngest was Leon Gabor, at 38, who had been hospitalized for five years already. Leon was raised by a super-religious mother who, by all evidence, was severely psychotic herself. She instilled in Leon a profound sense of sexual guilt that he struggles with through the entire book, particularly since he is probably gay. Leon receives a great deal of attention throughout the book. He’s vocal and causes the most conflicts. It also seems he is the smartest, or, at least, he is the only one of the men who doesn’t simply deny the others’ claims but tries to reconcile everything. Rokeach seems particularly hopeful that Leon can be helped.
So Clyde, Joseph, and Leon are brought together. They sleep in adjacent beds, eat in the same room, have the same work duties, and hold meetings each day. The meetings take up a large part of the book as we watch these men interact with each other, sometimes with a great deal of tension and sometimes with what can almost be brotherly love — I say “almost” because even though the relationship gives them some contact they desperately desire, they also desperately want to hold on to their beliefs and fret each time they are challenged.
Remarkably, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is not clinical in tone. Indeed, Rokeach has a great sense of tone, understatement, and timing, that one would think he was also a great novelist. These men are brought to life before our eyes, and we feel their pain and feel compassion towards them. Some parts are funny (like the “squelch eye” incident), and many are incredibly sad.
Yes, it’s very sad, and we can credit Rokeach for helping us feel these emotions through his highly skilled presentation. However, we can also blame him for being the source of some of the more terrible passage. This is a deeply troubling book. In his afterword, written twenty years later, Rokeach doesn’t apologize for his experiment, but he admits that, in a way, there were four men who thought they were god — the three patients and himself, the psychologist who, albeit in the pursuit of knowledge and in the hopes of helping the men, played with their lives.
In the introduction, Rokeach explains that while the initial plan was to see what happened when these men were brought together, “[s]ubsequently, a second purpose emerged: an exploration of the processes by which systems of belief and behavior might be changed through messages purporting to come from significant authorities who existed only in the imaginations of the delusional Christs.” Fully hoping to help these men out, constantly scrutinizing ethical concerns, Rokeach assumes writes letters to Joseph and Leon pretending to be authority figures from their delusions. For example, Joseph rejects his real father (to an extent — he calls him Josephine after all) and has taken to calling the head of Ypsilanti “dad.” With permission from “dad,” Rokeach begins writing to Joseph, asking him to do certain things, hoping that because of his trust in this authority figure, Joseph will begin to changes some of his delusions. This failed, as shown above when Joseph simply would not disclaim that the hospital was an English stronghold.
But even more heart-breaking and cruel were Rokeach’s letters to Leon in which Rokeach assumed the guise of Leon’s non-existent wife. Though never married, Leon often buttressed his claims to godliness by giving details about fictional women in his life, many of whom were gods in their own right and who became his wife. But does Leon actually believe in these women? And what if he received a letter from one? Here is his response to the first:
Leon’s initial response is disbelief. Without divulging the contents of the letter, he tells the aide that although he has never seen his wife’s handwriting he knows that she didn’t write or sign this letter. He says further that he doesn’t like the idea of people imposing on his beliefs and that he is going to look into this.
A couple of hours later, during the daily meeting, we notice Leon is extremely depressed and we ask him why. He evasively replies that he is meditating, but he does not mention the letter. This is the first time, as far as we know, that he has ever kept information from us.
August 4. This is the day Leon’s wife is supposed to visit him. He goes outdoors shortly before the appointed hour and does not return until it is well past.
So, yes, both Leon and Joseph believe in the delusions they have constructed, and in assuming these authorities’ voices, Rokeach, in a way, assumes the role of a god in the lives of these troubled men.
As I said above, the book is hardly clinical in its tone. It does not read like a study at all but rather like a deeply felt narrative of the troubles of these three men who came together for a time in Ypsilanti State Hospital. I highly recommend it.
After working nearly 40 hours over the weekend, including all night Sunday, we finally finished a substantial part of the work that has kept me from my family and from this blog. I will have substantially more time! To ease back into things, a simple announcement everyone has probably already heard by now anyway: the NBCC finalists have been announced.
Fiction
- Open City, by Teju Cole
- The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides
- The Stranger’s Child, by Alan Hollinghurst
- Binocular Vision, by Edith Pearlman
- Stone Arabia, by Dana Spiotta
Nonfiction
- A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War, by Amanda Foreman
- The Information, by James Gleick
- To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, by Adam Hochschild
- Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War, by Maya Jasanoff
- Pulphead: Essays, by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Autobiography
- One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing, by Diane Ackerman
- The Memory Place, by Mira Bartók
- Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
- It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing, by Luis J. Rodríguez
- Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, by Deb Olin Unferth
Biography
- Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of the Revolution, by Mary Gabriel
- George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis
- Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961, by Paul Hendrickson
- Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by Manning Marable
- Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, by Ezra F. Vogel
Criticism
- Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, by David Bellos
- Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, by Geoff Dyer
- The Ecstasy of Influence, by Jonathan Lethem
- Karaoke Culture, by Dubravka Ugresic
- Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, by Ellen Willis
Poetry
- Core Samples from the World, by Forrest Gander
- Kingdom Animalia, by Aracelis Girmay
- Space, in Chains, by Laura Kasischke
- The Chameleon Couch, by Yusef Komunyakaa
- Devotions, by Bruce Smith
Of the fiction, I have read only Teju Cole’s Open City, which I liked a great deal, though I have yet to review it here. I began The Stranger’s Child and simply wasn’t enjoying it enough to finish — and I don’t feel now that I should go back and try again. I have both The Marriage Plot and Binnocular Vision, and my plan for the last six months has been to read those, but other things keep jumping up the line. Soon, perhaps.
For the nonfiction, I have read many of the essays in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead that were published (perhaps in different form) in a variety of magazines and journals over the past few years. I think he’s an exceptional writer and a great essayist. This one goes highly recommended.
Then I have to skip down to criticism before I have anything else to say, and that is that I have read the title essay to Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture and found it delightful and funny. I will review that book here when I get through more of the essays.
And for poetry, I’m only familiar with Forrest Gander’s lovely Core Samples from the World, which is a nice compilation of poetry and photography. I never know what to say about poetry, so I review it rarely here, but this is a nice book.
Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Roberto Bolaño’s “Labyrinth” was originally published in the January 23, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I can’t wait to get caught up and read this one. Feel free to leave any comments while I get back on my feet.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s “A Brief Encounter with the Enemy” was originally published in the January 16, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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As you can see from my complete lack of posts and commentary, I’ve still been under the work bus. I’ll get caught up eventually — I promise!
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). John Lanchester’s “Expectations” was originally published in the January 9, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I am, obviously, getting behind here. The culprit is work. I have been at the office from the wee hours of the morning until the wee hours of the morning for some time now, and I haven’t had a second to catch up. While there are a few more days that promise to be just as bad this week, there should still be some time to catch up on sleep and on my reading/reviewing. Until then . . .
Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Etgar Keret’s “Creative Writing” was originally published in the January 2, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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Despite the fact that this is an incredibly short story, Ihave been too busy to post yet. Or perhaps I’m still hung up on 2011. I’m ready to move on now, I suppose, and will get back in the swing of things by reading and posting on “Creative Writing” as well as the new Lanchester story soon.
I’ve felt I should read Denis Johnson for a very long time. I have most of his books on my shelf. The problem has always been that there are many other books on my shelf I feel I should read as well, so I keep pushing Johnson back. Fortunately for me, then, this past year FSG published in hardback a novella Johnson published in The Paris Review, Train Dreams (Summer 2002), which won the O’Henry Award in 2003. It was short enough that there was no good excuse to pass it up for another book.
Though it runs for only around 100 generously spaced pages, Train Dreams takes on one man’s entire life through snapshots and segments. Here is how it opens:
In the summer of 1917 Robert Granier took part in an attempt on the life of a Chinese laborer caught, or anyway accused of, stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Reailway in the Idaho Panhandle.
In 1917, Robert Granier is around 30 years old, he’s married, and he has an infant daughter. But we don’t know any of that yet. Johnson allows this opening scene – where several men are carrying the Chinese laborer to a bridge where they plan to throw him to his death – to play out in its suddenness for the first few pages.
They all went down in the dust and got righted, went down again, the Chinaman speaking in tongues and terrifying the four of them to the point that whatever they may have had in mind at the outset, he was a deader now. Nothing would do but to toss him off the trestle.
Throughout his life Robert Granier will think back on this event with gut-churning horror. It’s not because he nearly killed someone, though he does feel some guilt about that (he can’t believe how quickly, how mindlessly he was embroiled in the commotion), it’s that the Chinese laborer cursed the group of men, and Robert Granier believes that the curse settled on him viciously.
From this compelling beginning, we move back and forth in Robert Granier’s life. He doesn’t know where he came from, only that in 1893 he arrived by train at his cousins’ home in Fry, Idaho. His cousins had various explanations for his origin, but they were contradictory; surely his aunt and uncle knew, but while they were alive he never thought to ask. Though there are pockets of what cannot quite be called happiness, most of Robert Granier’s life is incredibly lonely, passing with the seasons as if in a dream he’s not sure he wants to be part of. This is because, early on in the book and in Robert Granier’s life, the meager life he’s building for himself is completely gutted by “a fire stronger than God.” One day, after working many miles away, Granier returns to the valley where he’d built his small cabin for himself and his wife and daughter:
All his life Robert Granier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dream-like business he’d ever witnessed waking — the brilliant pastels of the light overhead, some clouds high and white, catching daylight from beyond the valley, others ribbed and gray and pink, the lowest of them rubbing the peaks of Bussard and Queen mountains; and beneath this wondrous sky the black valley, utterly still, the train moving through it making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world.
Not sure what’s become of his wife and daughter, Granier enters a kind of fugue state (made worse by the smoke and ash he inhales while searching for his home and then for his family). This sets up the lonely, guilty life Granier will lead until his death sometime in the 1960s, becoming himself a kind of ghost of the region from a time almost forgotten, when forests were cleared and railroads spanned the mountain ridges.
I should have posted this yesterday, but at the stroke of midnight December 23 – 24 I got incredibly sick. I agree: being sick on Christmas Eve is no fun. But I must say it was better to be sick on Christmas Eve than to go through what Gogol puts his characters through in The Night Before Christmas (Noch, pere Rozhdestvom, 1832; tr. from the Russian by Constance Garnett, 1926).
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
It begins peacefully:
The last day before Christmas had passed. A clear winter night had come; the stars peeped out; the moon rose majestically in the sky to light good people and all the world so that all might enjoy singing kolyadki and praising the Lord.
That peace doesn’t last long. Within a couple of sentences a witch has taken off and is stealing all of the stars from the skies. To make matters worse, the devil steals the moon. Such is anadolu yakasi escort bayan the setup to a type of romantic comedy. The town blacksmith, Vakula, is in love with Oksana, who, “like a beauty, was full of caprices.” Oksana’s father, Tchub, doesn’t like Vakula – not at all. But he does like Vakula’s mother, Soloha (who happens to be the witch). Unfortunately for Tchub, the devil also desires Soloha.
No one has an easy time with these relatioships. Soloha actually does desire Tchub (not the devil), but everyone is after her. Furthermore, if Vakula manages to wed the shallow Oksana, that will make it impossible for Soloha to wed Tchub (custom prohibits the parents of the young couple from wedding themselves). Not that it’s likely Vakula will be able to win Oksana’s heart. For one thing, she does not love him. For another, to make it impossible, Oksana has said that the only way she’ll marry Vakula is if he brings to her “the very slippers the Tsarita wears.”
Surely we can see where this is all going. Now that Vakula’s interests are aligned with the devil’s, they manage a way forwad.
The Night Before Christmas is a lot of fun. No, it’s not much more, but it is certainly worth the short time it takes to read it, even if holiday cheer doesn’t necessarily ring through it.
Merry Christmas to all!
The following twelve books are the best books I read in 2011. All of these have in common sublime writing and are filled with subtle, nuanced life. Each of them surprised me, as well, constantly helping me rediscover the joy of reading.
Here they are, my favorites, in the order in which I reviewed them:
Vivant Denon: No Tomorrow (original review January 14, 2011) — This was one of the first books I read this year and before I was even half-finished (which is only, like 15 pages in this short volume) I knew it would be on this list come December. I’ve read it many times through the year and will probably read it again during the Christmas holiday (it’s very short, so maybe again at New Year’s). Denon packs an amazing amount of lust and mystery into this short tale about a one-night fling at the mistress’s estranged husband’s house — while the husband in the other room. It is sweet and savage at the same time, and I have been completely charmed. This is certainly one of those rare literary relationships that will last a lifetime. One thing: I highly recommend the translation by Lydia Davis — I’ve sampled another and it simply wasn’t as good.
Gert Hofmann: Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl (original review February 15, 2011) — This is probably the saddest book on this list, yet it is also one of the most tender and boisterous. And, like No Tomorrow, it reaches its depths through a unique kind of whimsy that most authors couldn’t handle when treating such a narrative. This is the story (based on fact) of Lichtenberg, an eighteenth-century physics professor with a hunched back and a gift for composing witty aphorisms, if not a gift for advancing studies in physics. The little flower girl is Maria Stechard, the young girl who lives with him, at first in innocence. Then, abandoning the oft-used exclamation point, Hofmann has the Stechardess say one powerful line: “Don’t hurt me, she said.” As it deals with yearning in a life shadowed by death, it is witty, funny, and it expressly includes the readers in the text as we continually ask: “And then?”
J.A. Baker: The Peregrine (original review March 3, 2011) — When I reviewed this memoir/nature book I made comparisons to W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. I still stand by those statements. Baker’s book is searching as it takes into account something that lies beyond mankind and that is dying. As the memoir progresses, we see an amazing transformation; slipping into the text are Baker’s own desires to escape humanity and become one with the creature he hunts. Nearing the end, the transformation — at least psychologically — is complete: “We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men. We hate their suddenly uplifted arms, the insanity of their flailing gestures, their erratic scissoring gait, their aimless stumbling ways, the tombstone whiteness of their faces.”
Cynthia Ozick: The Puttermesser Paper (original review March 25, 2011) — Ozick is one of my favorites, and this book compiles short pieces she wrote about Ruth Puttermesser over the course of four decades (Puttermesser is also a victim of the passage of time and ages the four decades with Ozick). It’s a fantastic series of tales about this rather lonely woman who, at one time, becomes the mayor of New York and unleashes a modern-day female golem (she really wanted a daughter of her own) in the city. In another chapter, when she’s in her fifties, she relives — she thinks, she hopes – the love affair between the similarly aged George Eliot and the much younger George Lewes. All of this leads to the last story where, at the beginning, we witness her violent death at nearly 70 — and then we go a bit further.
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynard: A Life on Paper (original review April 13, 2011) — I nearly missed this title, which would have been a shame. Had I missed it this year, it is unlikely I would ever have encountered it again once its publication date drifted back in time. I only heard about it when it was a finalist in the Best Translated Book Award (this year’s finalists should be announced sometime toward the end of next month). It happened to be a book I could acquire rather easily, and what a surprise! This selection of Châteaureynard’s short-short fiction is the first time this prolific writer has been translated to English. The tales are lovely and strange, mixing the realistic with the bizarre to both sad and comic results (which reminded me of one of my favorites, Steven Millhauser — more on him in a moment).
J.M. Coetzee: Youth (original review April 22, 2011) — Coetzee is another long-time favorite. I’ve been working my way through his work for a few years, enjoying everything a great deal — and I mean everything. This particular book, the second part in a loose autobiographical trilogy (both the trilogy structure and “autobiography” should be interpreted loosely), is one of the best. Here Coetzee writes in the first-person about his (or his character’s, rather) time in London working as a computer scientist at IBM. He’s young, alone, and melancholic, and he’s trying hard to develop a tragic, romantic spirit to become an artist, but he’s failing at things as foundational as passion because his cold, rational brain cannot, for example, understand why any woman he barely knows would give herself to him. He seems to belong to the world of IBM where there’s no possibility of a drunken brawl. As an autobiography, Youth contains blatant untruths and, therefore, probably some truth, but none of that really matters: it’s just a fine book.
Alan Heathcock: Volt (original review May 1, 2011) — It took only a few lines in the first story, “The Staying Freight,” before I was convinced Heathcock was something special, providing something new that still paid homage to the old masters as it shows us the lives of a few inhabitants of the fictional small town Krafton. The whole book is an excellent exploration of guilt and redemption that reminded me of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, the sense of space — apparent in the first few paragraphs as an unmanned tractor slowly pulls away from the protagonist in a large arc of dust – reminded me of Maile Meloy. Yes, it reminded me of other authors — the best of these other authors — but it still has a distinct life of its own, and I hope someday Krafton is known as well (or nearly as well) as Winesburg, Ohio.
Steven Millhauser: Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943 – 1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (original review May 24, 2011) – Millhauser brings childhood back to haunt us, reminding us of just how much our innocent minds actually knew and how terrified we were, in this very strange fictional biography. The author is the very young Jeffrey Cartwright; the subject is his tragic, genius friend, Edwin Mullhouse. Millhauser often reminds me of the great Edgar Allan Poe, both in writing skill and in tone, particularly here when we see just how jealously Jeffrey guards Edwin from some young romances (which were admittedly ill-advised to begin with). This is possibly the most outrightly terrifying book on this list, in spite of (or perhaps because of) how seductive it is.
Jean Echenoz: Lightning (original review June 22, 2011) — If this list has a consistent theme it could be quasi-fictional biographies on eccentric personalities. Lichtenberg, Baker, Puttermesser, Coetzee, Mullhouse, all lives worth reading about, whether fiction, real, or somewhere in between. Adding to the list is another whimsical (though ultimately tragic and lonely (another theme here?)) fictionalized biography, this one of Nikola Tesla, the famed scientist that helped usher electricity into our lives and caused a famous fued with his one-time employer, Thomas Edison, who managed in the end to at least die in better circumstances than Tesla. Again, the author brings the reader into the story; it’s as if we’re sitting down with Echenoz as he offers us refreshment before continuing the tale, and we can’t wait to hear more.
László Krasznahorkai: The Melancholy of Resistance (original review July 11, 2011) — The most outwardly challenging book on this list is this 300+ page single paragraph (okay, there are some breaks, but not enough to really count). But, just like the others here, it pays back a great deal as we read about a dead whale brought to a small Hungarian town by a wandering circus. The opening pages about the increasing tension as people on a train platform wait for a late train, followed by the terror of arriving somewhere much later than anticipated, soon give way to coldly calculated chaos. Eventually the town is torn apart by anarchy. The story focuses on an evil woman (whom we watch twitch in her sleep for a time), her reclusive husband who is working on his ideas about the Werckmeister Harmonies, and the village idiot. What a strange — and magnificent — book. I’m very excited for more Krasznahorkai (New Directions will be publishing his Satantango early in 2012).
Gyula Krúdy: The Adventures of Sindbad (original review November 30, 2011) — A fantastic late-year surprise from NYRB Classics, The Adventures of Sindbad continues to show that, for whatever reason, this year my tastes ran to the bizarre, with a generous touch of modern style. This collection of stories about a paramour’s many many pursuits takes us back and forth in time, into dreams, into the grave, into a sprig of mistletoe. There’s a lingering air of melancholy over the whole thing (in the very first story a young boy with a hunchback drowns in a river), but that’s one of the reasons that, despite the obvious strangeness, it feels so real. Furthermore, this is a story about a wandering paramour, so melancholy is actually to be desired. It makes the lust more poignant, which in turn makes the affair more — but, out of preference, not wholly – satisfying.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky: The Letter Killers Club (original review December 19, 2011) — After finishing The Adventures of Sindbad, I thought this “year’s best” list was done. I should have known better than to discount NYRB Classics, who’d just published yet another lovely book. Just as the year began, when I knew Denon’s No Tomorrow would be on this list after just a few pages, the year comes to a close with another NYRB Classic that, after just a few pages, I knew this list would have to accomodate. The Letter Killers Club, which takes us to secret meetings where men tell stories without writing them down (and not without a great deal of suspicion), may have been my favorite book of the year (though, looking at this list, it’s hard to make that a definitive statement). Krzhizhanovsky again touched on my apparent taste for the bizare portrayed realistically in an effort to depict the familiar even better.
Going over this list again, I can’t wait to see what 2012 has in store! To everyone: a happy holiday season!
— Trevor
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