A look ahead

[Editor's note: an earlier, incomplete, inferior version of this post was leaked through authorial incompetence. The hopefully less sucky version appears below. Responsible parties have been sacked.]

Ladies and gentlemen, you, the People of the Internet, have spoken, and your multifarious voices have raised a most glorious collective cry, ringing in the New Year with a singular, overwhelming, and beautiful Truth, in your official nomination of me as Your Official Authority on Things I Know Nothing About. I shall serve faithfully but inexpertly in this role to the best of my inabilities.

In the meantime, while I'm setting up my office (and getting the number of Gaius Baltar's portrait artist), does anybody need to slay some vampires? Because, holy wiggins-makin' site-stats spike, Buffy.

But no, this is no time to dwell on that which is behind us--neither 2006, nor the young ladies sitting behind me in this coffee shop, who, were they to judge my character based solely on the things I've fact-checked via Google during the writing of this post, would probably find me morally and intellectually lacking. Not that I would blame them. If I saw someone who wasn't me googling both "Gaius Baltar" and "chick lit" within the same quarter hour, I'd probably politely ask them to leave so as to free up that bandwidth for people with more pressing things to waste time on.

Ahem. It's 2007 now, and that means there's lots of 2007-y things to look forward to. There's posts at The Millions and Bookdwarf and Conversational Reading and stories at the New York Daily News and the Guardian that suggest many upcoming titles that you might consider eagerly anticipating. If 2007 is already a little too Web 1.0 for you, you can take a look ahead at 2008 at The Millions.

Me, my plans for the year are sort of half-retro, half-futuristic. You can probably align me with Matthew Tiffany--I'll keep slugging grenades at the TBR pile in a futile attempt to make some holes in it, while looking forward to the stuff that's going to come out of nowhere to take over my mind and not let go. Yes: these goals are mutually exclusive. No: that's not going to stop me from pursuing them both.

Looking at the 2007 lists, a few names jump out:

• I can see myself dropping everything for Jonathan Lethem's You Don't Love Me when that comes out in March. I've enjoyed most everything of his I've read. The Fortress of Solitude holds a special place in my heart. Lethem says the book should be "funny and sexy...a brave foray to retrieve irrelevance for American novel-writing." I look forward to seeing what he does with that.


• Then there's the William T. Vollmann book, Poor People, which I suspect will be the exact opposite of funny, sexy, and irrelevant. I'm ready to go either way on this one. A lengthy break from Vollmann's stuff would probably be healthy. But, the topic sounds interesting.


• There's a new(ly translated) Haruki Murakami book I'm curious about, After Dark. I've opted to ration out my Murakami reading rather than gorge on his stuff, since I gather that he treads a lot of the same ground across his books, and it can be easy to burn out if you read too many of his books too fast. (An experience I can relate to with my own reading of Stephen Dixon's stuff, though I like to think I've caught that in time to prevent long-term damage.) Murakami's new book might be fun to read, to compare notes on how it stacks for a relative newcomer with how it works for people who have read more of his books.


• AL Kennedy and Rupert Thompson are two writers who I learned about from Maud Newton back in the hazy, uncertain days of 2005. I read one book by each author, liked each book a lot, and then promptly forgot both authors existed, because I am morally and intellectually lacking. They both have new books coming out in 2007. I don't know whether I will read the new books when they are released, but I do plan on re-visiting their back catalogues, probably within the next six months.

As for more general plans:

• I look forward to finishing Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Before July. Please, God: I know we haven't spoken in a while, but give me the strength.


• I've developed a low-level fascination with historical fiction. This list and these two lists seem like good places to start searching for additional titles. (Fair warning: that first list is aimed at young adult readers. Therefore, by merely pointing at it, I've caused many people to think better of me, and many other people to think worse of me. I hope the two groups balance each other out.)


• I nominated five authors for the 2006 Underrated Writers project. Now I need to read every other author on the list. Then I can start tackling the the 2005 list. I plan to complete both lists by Tuesday.


• I'd like more people to tell me I'm wrong. So that means trying to work a few more current, hot titles into my reading list, so as to facilitate more cross-blog conversation. Or I could take some initiative and form some discussion groups (like the Roundtable model that is currently being used to discuss Against the Day at Metaxucafe) to get some more talk going about books I find conversation-worthy. Or I could start writing reviews for the New York Times Book Review section.


• Two words: shorter novels. Not that I'm done reading long novels. But once I finish the Baroque cycle, in September or October, I'm going to give myself a pass on anything over 400 pages for a while. Hell, I'd love to make the next twenty or thirty books I read all be less than 250 pages. With my last two or three months being consumed by Pynchon and Stephenson and Ann-Marie MacDonald (for which I'm awarding myself an early win on the Chunkster Challenge), I'm ready for a long season of high variety. (Meaning Don Quixote is going to have to wait just a bit longer, I'm afraid. But, I'll probably make an exception for Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, sometime this year.)


• Take the above general directives and filter them through my realization that even though I recognize that I don't read enough female authors, I still don't read enough female authors. A while back, sparked by a funny story that involved me accidentally going out on a date with a lesbian (no-really-I-swear-it-was-hilarious), I realized that 97 percent of the music I listened to was created by all-guy bands or bands fronted by guy singers. Some vigorous soul-searching and corrective action ensued, and I've been a much happier person ever since. The kind of person who can now smarmily and accusingly point out that female artists were horribly underrepresented on Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2006 list. (It's been a few days since I ran the count, but I think there is a single-digit number of albums by acts that feature a female singer, and of those, only one, maybe two, could be "classically" classified as albums by female singer-songwriters. Disgraceful! Smarm!) It's feeling like a good time to do the same sort of thing for my reading habits. That This Is Not Chick Lit collection, edited by Elizabeth Merrick, is probably as good place as any to start finding new-to-me authors.