Top Fiction Books 2012

My top list of fictional books I read this year.   No particular ranking.  Other lists will soon follow.  I thought of the music show Later...with Jools Holland when putting my lists together, looking at literature and film from a variety of genres and time periods.

The Mayor of Casterbridge

by Thomas Hardy

The story of Michael Henchard begins with him getting drunk at a fair and then selling his wife.  Remorseful of his actions, he gives up the drink and eventually becomes the mayor of Casterbridge.  When I read the back cover of this book, my first though was that this book has to be read.  A great melodrama.  One scene worthy noting is when the townspeople skimmity ride through the town to publicly shame Henchard and Lucetta.  This part of the story demonstrates that big new scandals and carnivalish ways of gossiping have been around for quite a while.  Hardy leaves us wondering whether or not this is a novel of fate. Probably one of the best books I have ever read. 

The Shining

by Stephen King

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is one of my favorite films and what led me to go to film school in 1993.  I finally read the book to see what Kubrick left out of the story.  This is a great book and much different from the movie.  Whereas King emphasizes the supernatural, Kubrick underscores the psychological.  I particularly love the The Wasp's Nest sequence.  Of course, in the novel you get a deeper understanding of Jack Torrance and his dissent into madness. There are some really scary moments, especially "The Elevator" scene.  King is a great storyteller.

Fahrenheit 451

by Ray Bradbury 

Bradbury's dystopia world where books are banned and burned.  Great book about literature and mass media.  It is worthy to note that this book came out shortly after Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's essay: "The Cultural Industry," which deals with mass entertainment and mass culture.  Francois Truffaut's film adaption of the novel is also worth checking out.  

 

The Invisible Man

by H.G. Wells

One of the great all-time science-fiction novels about Griffin (the invisible man) who takes residence in a small village to conduct his research.  Griffin eventually turns to robbing the villagers in order to generate money for his rent.  Once the villagers discover that Griffin is invisible, a mob is formed and they attempt to capture him.  I kept thinking about Michel Foucault's work on the panopticon as I read this. In many ways, Griffin intensifies the villagers' sense of looking and self-scrutiny in a sort of surveillance fashion.  When it comes to surveillance, Foucault argues that it is not that someone is actually watching you that makes the panopticon effective.  It is the fact that you don't know if someone is watching you and what internalizes the gaze.  I believe Griffin has this effect on the villagers.

Freedom

by Jonathan Frazen

Franzen covers a lot of ground in this long tale of the Berglunds family.  Franzen takes his time, providing the reader a detailed account of each character.  The description and dialogue are excellent here.  The storytelling is non-linear, suggesting the disconnection of the Berglunds.  I particularly love the character Richard, a disenchanted punk rocker who has a sort of strange relationship with Walter Berglund.  Though not as great as The Corrections, this was a long, yet rewarding read.  Franzen is one of our best contemporary writers.

Young Hearts Crying

by Richard Yates

Yates' gritty and melodramatic novel about of the Davenport couple.  For more, see my random review.

 

The Dead

James Joyce

Joyce's beautifully written novella at the turn of the twentieth century.  See my random review on John Huston's film adaptation.

Mother Night

by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut's novel tells the story of Howard W. Campbell Jr, an American Nazi playwright living in New York city.   See my random review about the film adaption.  

From Hell

by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

Alan Moore is known widely for writing Watchmen, probably one of the most important graphic novels of the twentieth century.  From Hell deals with Jack the Ripper which speculates the motives behind these horrific murders in England.  This is a haunting, gruesome and philosophical tale on the nature of evil and madness.

Random Reviews - November 3, 2012 - Young Hearts Crying and Watchmen

Young Hearts Crying, Richard Yates, 1984

This was a book recommended to me by my wife who has read all of Yates' work.  Yates is known widely for his book Revolution Road, made recently into a film directed by Sam Mendes.  This is a powerful and gritty book about the marriage and divorce of Michael and Lucy Davenport.  It spans almost forty years, beginning with Lucy and Michael's meeting at Harvard and their marriage in the 1940s, ending somewhere in the late 1970s.  The novel's twist is that Lucy comes from money and has inherited 3 million dollars.  But Michael refuses to live the life of a wealthy couple, and decides they should live by everyday means.  This is because Michael is an aspiring poet and believes that wealth will distract his passion and imagination as a writer.  This is a brilliant move on the part of Yates, because it directly taps into the novel's emotional realism about creativity and the struggle of the everyday, something one would likely find in the works of Charles Bukowski.

Young Hearts Crying has similarities to the emotional experience of watching a John Cassavetes film.  Yates' minimalist and Hemingway-ish dialogue is pungent and hits you right in the gut, so to speak. The dialogue also indicates the novel's passage of time.  For example, you can hear Michael's dialogue changing as he becomes older.  I also could not help noticing how many moments in the novel are reminiscent of the character Pete Campbell from the show Mad Men.  One wonders how much inspiration Matthew Weiner may have gotten from Yates's work?   

Michael and Lucy have their own separate stories after their divorce, as they each try to pick up the pieces and carry on with their lives.  Part of their struggles stem from the desire to create, whether its Michael hyper-focusing over one line of dialogue in his poem, or Lucy seeking approval for her paintings from her neighbor and artist Nelson.  Like the book itself, its about tapping into those deep emotions and trying to find the right word or image to convey expressions of loneliness, melancholy or frustration.

  Watchmen, 2009, Zack Snyder

Watchmen has had a long history in Hollywood. It was acquired by Hollywood in the late 1980s, and a number of directors have been attached to the project, including Terry Gilliam.  I even purchased a copy of the screenplay in the late 1990s from a nascent eBay. When I finally heard the film was actually in production, and then saw a trailer in 2008, I was quite eager to see how director Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead, 300, Sucker Punch) would adapt what many have called the "Citizen Kane" of comic books to the screen.

Snyder compacts twelve chapters of Watchmen into roughly a three hour film.  The set design and art direction of the film are magnificent. The film's use of colors and light, in many ways, reminded me of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. I would even go as far as to add that the film has a sort of surrealistic quality.  I also love how Snyder incorporates popular music as part of the score.  Rorschach, played by Jackie Earle Haley, is fantastic and has a Taxi Driver/Travis Bickle-like quality.  As a side note, I highly recommend reading Rorschach's back story in Before The Watchmen, written by Brian Azzarello, writer of 100 Bullets.

Many reviews for Watchmen have not been enthusiastic. Yet, I believe that as time passes,  Watchmen will be considered a significant film in the cannon of the comic book film genre.  Putting that aside, Watchmen, as a graphic novel, is arguably an important work of literature of the twentieth century.  Overall, I think the film is quite entertaining and something of a tour de force for its tone, art, and set design.