In binary, I've already read 10 books this year, and that's before the book in translation bonus. I rule

So after I finished Ulysses I went and re-read Jeff Noon's 2002 novel Falling Out Of Cars. I dig Jeff Noon a lot. Vurt is like prose-coke; one line is never enough. Falling Out Of Cars saw him taking his verbal pyrotechnics down a notch to highlight the darkness that's sort of lurked around the corners and edges of his work to date (that I've read). It's probably his most mature book, and it's really a shame (I think) that he's since then decided to get into screenplays instead of focusing on novels, but hey, whatcha gonna do, eh?

FOOC isn't available on these western shores but I'd say you're better off starting with Vurt anyway. If you dig that then you can do Pollen (which is good but not Vurt-tastic) and Nymphomation (which was very nearly Vurt-tastic, actually). But skip Automated Alice--it was a nice idea, nice concept I guess, but it seemed sort of ephemeral compared to his other stuff. Also I've never felt the urge to track down Cobralingus--remixing text is sort of a nice mental game to play after a couple pints but from what I saw the one time I flipped through the book in the bookstore, it wasn't something I wanted to really spend time reading. And I've only had vague desire to catch Needle in the Groove, which sounded sort of like Cobralingus with a plot. Eh.

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So after my Jeff Noon kick I finished off 2005 by jumping into the stack my girlfriend gave me for Christmas with Heavy Water and Other Stories by Martin Amis. I'd never read Martin Amis before and I don't know what I thought he did before I read him but now I know at least one thing he does, which is funny, which he does very well. "Career Move" was one of those "wow, I look like an idiot because I keep laughing out loud in the coffee shop" stories, and "The Janitor on Mars" is good funny sci-fi. There's a few less than memorable stories in there, but generally, hey, I know a bit of Martin Amis now, and I like what I now, and I'll be (eventually) raiding my girlfriend's bookshelves to borrow her copy of Money. I mean, assuming she's cool with that.

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(My girlfriend, I feel the need to interject here, is sort of freakishly well-read, and makes me feel inferior. Just wanted to get that out there.)

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I kicked off 2006 with a loaner from my girlfriend, a book she'd handed to me sometime earlier in 2005. She'd caught me looking at her bookshelves--which when there's bookshelves in a room I sometimes I just do, I just look at them, regardless of the fact that I have no intention of actually taking books from the shelves, I think it's something about all the bars of color and hypnosis or something, I dunno--and, figuring I was looking for something to read, she went to some other shelves and pulled down Peace Under Heaven, a 1930s era Korean novel by Ch'Ae Man-Sik. (Book in translation--score one extra book point for me! Ka-ching!) It was good; I liked it. I won't pretend to know enough about Korean culture (of the 1930s or not) to be able to speak as anything like an authority about it, but I'll say that the book is lighter than one might suspect a book written in 1930s Korea to be, probably due in no small part to a very readable, fluid translation, while also probably being more informative about the time and place from when it came than I suspect I realized it was when I was reading it (as was suggested by the couple sentences of the introduction that I read after I finished reading the book).

The novel's described as being a satire, or at least as being satirical, but whether due to the fact that we live in an age when The Onion defines what "satire" is--and don't get me wrong, The Onion's hella funny at times, and is now and then dead-to-rights on, but whoever it was who said we live in a golden age for satire was smoking a little bronze-aged crack, if you know what I mean, which if you do, congratulations, now you explain it to me for me--or due to a general lack of knowledge about the culture, I'm sure plenty of the humor was lost on me, though I'm not a complete dunce and I guess I have at least half-formed non-verbal theories about the whole thing. But then, plenty of humor definitely is easy to pick up...I mean, when the main character refers to every other male in the book as a "bastard whose balls he'd have cut off," well, I mean, come on. Comedy goldmine right there. So, you know, funny ha ha, but then you've got the novel's more sinister aspects--females don't seem to exist in a PC world, let's say--and the book muddies matters up a great deal, at least from a modernized western standpoint. I guess I could say in conclusion that the book both enlightened and confused, which, well, I'm cool with.

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And finally! My second book for 2006 is sort of a new tradition, I guess, which may or may not last past this year; around this time last year I read a Douglas Coupland novel, Hey Nostradamus!, and now here it's a year later and I've just finished (another Christmas gift from my girlfriend, who, in case you're not keeping score, has been sort of the theme-giver of these last three books) Miss Wyoming.

I'm going to go ahead and put this out there: Douglas Coupland doesn't get enough play. If you're like me, you once read Microserfs and were tickled by it and then later you found out Coupland was the guy behind the term "generation x" and then you lost his phone number and changed your own phone number and next thing you know years have passed and you forgot all about him. It was one of those fluke things that I saw Nostradamus in the bookstore one day in 2004 and I stood there in the aisle and read the entire opening section (which when usually in a bookstore I'm lucky if I even finish the opening sentence of a book before I'm putting it back on the shelf) before I figured I should just buy it, already, because my feet hurt and I wanted to go sit down.

A year and two books later and I'll tell ya, Coupland's a good writer. He's interested in some stuff, to varying levels of blatantness: the overbearing parent, how to disappear completely, quietly playing with the structure of the novel to reach strange dramatic effects. He gives good quick read (you know that means something coming from me--if it seems like I read fast, I don't; it's more like I just read for long stretches of time, often to the exclusion of life) that doesn't lack thematic or narrative depth. If you're interested in things like that, which I kind of feel icky for having just typed out, but whatever. Let's put it this way: there's mental meat on the textual skeleton, neither overpowering nor undercutting what's essentially good, off-beat story-telling.

Miss Wyoming is one of those "it all makes sense by the end" books, I guess you could call that little sub-genre; what's remarkable about it is that you (by which I mean me, as I by no means mean to suggest you are as dullardish as I) don't realize it's going to be one of those sorts of books until you're almost there. The book offers surprises; it's not perfect, but it does have one of the finest closing sentences I've read in a while. In short: a most satisfying read.

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And that's where I'm at. Somewhere in there I did read the opening essay--the one about porn--out of the new David Foster Wallace book of essays. (I'll tell you, reading about porn--and I mean, porn, what-for--in a coffee shop near your Catholic alma-mater in a highly Jewish, family-friendly neighborhood? Sort of confuses your brain.) So that'll probably be the next book I look to finish. Then after that, I'm not sure. The To Be Read stacks, which were under control for a while there, they kind of, ah, grew limbs and began throwing the lamps at the walls. There needs to be some pruning going on up in this joint.