A year spent reading

Let’s forget those little red stars for a second. Anyone interested in books knows they can—when they hit their mark—alter our experiences in real time and color our memories of the time of their reading. So this week, rather than recount my favorite books of the year—or the “best”— I’d rather recall which books meant the most to me at various hallmarks along the way through a weird 2009.

In January, six of us rented a minivan and hauled it out to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration. It was one of those trips: In a car for 12 hours, in a city for less than 48, then back in the car for another 12. Stuffed in the middle of that, of course, was the most momentous inauguration of our lifetime, an event that seemed to cohere a million people (standing in 20-degree weather) into one generous narrative. On the ride back, I read Jesse Ball’s novel The Way Through Doors (Vintage, $13.95). Ball’s famous for writing his books in one go, over the course of a month or a few weeks, without turning back. So I read the book in its entirety on one leg of the trip. It’s a mystifying and beautifully told story of a guy, conscripted into a strange bureaucratic “ministry,” who tries to keep a concussed woman awake by telling her story after story. The book flips through a series of sidetracking myths and fables, and on the way back, The Way Through Doors seemed to be saying something about the stories we tell as a means of self-discovery or self-mythologizing. And having witnessed a bloviated, milquetoast speech by the recently and questionably appointed junior senator from Illinois, Roland Burris, the book seemed doubly important.

Chicago isn’t likely to see a repeat of the enormous amount of literary activity that February brought until 2012, when the Association of Writers and Writing Programs brings its conference back to town. For two weeks in February, every night was packed with half-a-dozen events I wanted to check out, and the energy surrounding the normally nebulous idea of a literary life was palpable. Mary Miller’s Big World (Hobart, $9.95) is emblematic for me of this time. Not only is it a knockout collection of stories, but after a Literary Death Match at the Hideout, I met Hobart publisher Aaron Burch, who described lashing copies of the book together and painting the pages’ edges to give it that old-school, library feel. That sort of focused passion and sense of play was the perfect reboot for anyone jaded with the tribulations of small-press publishing.

Around March is when publishers start rolling out heavy hitters for their winter catalog. This year, aside from Cristina Henriquez’s rich The World in Half, most left me feeling underwhelmed. That’s when James Morrow’s unheralded Shambling Towards Hiroshima (Tachyon, $14.95) came shuffling onto my desk. The book was such a strange brew of Vonnegut and Heinlein that it completely shook up what was becoming a long winter. Though I suspect few critics would admit it, books like Shambling are a necessity for the job.

Summer is difficult to recall. Generally, my memories of summer reading are woven into trips, or at least loads of outdoor reading. But this summer was more about upheaval. My wife and I moved to a larger apartment, mostly because we were expecting, and needed more space. If I’m honest: I spent most of the summer freaking out about being a father, and to that end, the one book I recall clearest was Billy Lombardo’s How to Hold a Woman (OV Books, $16.95). A general rule for me goes like this: If you want to feel better that other people have the same problems you do, see a movie and be comforted that the beautiful people are having trouble, too. But if you want to feel worse about yourself—meaning actually have to face your issues and make sense of them—read a book, watch how the characters fail, and work it out with the author. Lombardo’s book is full of dead ends at the termini of good intentions.

The inverse of this, of course, is that what happens in our own lives can often strip bare the aspirations of an author, revealing a work to be meaningless, spineless, or at the very best, useless. In June, a dear friend committed suicide, and a couple of months later, I encountered The Death of Bunny Munro (Faber & Faber, $25), the story of a guy whose wife hangs herself, and his initial reaction is to remark upon how great her chest looks. It’s such a vacuous, shallow book that I couldn’t even bring myself to write a negative review. Some artists are just lost in their own worlds, and no tough love is going to drag them out.

In September, my son, Griffin, was born seven weeks early, after what could be casually referred to as the scariest night of my life. He was in the hospital for nearly three weeks, hooked up to enough wires, tubes and lights that it seemed we’d produced a cyborg baby. Left without much to do in the neonatal intensive care unit, I read to the little guy. These books will be the ones that I’ll never forget from 2009. I read him The Wild Things (McSweeney’s, $19.95), tacitly giving him permission to grow up and growl at me and strike out on his own voyage. And I read him Chronic City (Doubleday, $27.95) by Jonathan Lethem, so he could get a head start in understanding that adults are much more screwed up than kids.

Now it’s mostly Dr. Seuss and Eric Carle. But I decided I was going to try to write a sci-fi adventure for Griff, so I’ve been outlining it for him just before bed, cribbing elements from the books I’ve loved, casting friends as characters. So far, nothing puts him to sleep faster, which seems about right.

• More Books articles