Where Was The Boom? There Was Supposed To Be An Almighty Boom!

Never fear, I haven't forgotten. Just trying to cram in two extra books that might make my lists. It's going to be a busy last three days of the year here on Bait For Bookworms, I promise.

2012: Secondary Stars And Other Satellites

The real countdown begins on Thursday (when Louie and I have a few days of batching to fill) but before I get stuck into it, and to allow myself those crucial extra four days to read my five remaining books, here, as always, are the Secondary Stars and Other Satellites, my best of everything else for 2012.(Note: This is an edited version with the addition of twos albums in my top "10")

BEST BOOKS NOT FROM 2012

The Devil All The Time - Donald Ray Pollack (2011). Delivering on the promise of his breakthrough short story collection Knockemstiff, Pollack's debut novel is part John Steinbeck, part Nick Cave, with the assured punch of a man who has lived rough and real. A testament to the late bloomer.

Purgatory - Tomas Eloy Martinez (2011). Probably the best book about The Disappearances that i have ever read, Purgatory is a moving examination of national identity in times of crisis. Beautiful, wistful and brutal.

The Family Carnovsky - I. J. Singer (1969). OK, it's no Brothers Askenazi, but it's still the better Singer at the top of his game. A powerful tale of assimilation and destruction set between fin de siecle Germany and the onset of World War 2.

My Life in CIA - Harry Mathews (2005). Hilarious memoir by the only American member of the Oulipo group, My Life In CIA recounts the time Mathews pretended to be a CIA agent simply because all his friends in Paris already assumed he was. Literary loopiness at its best.

Beside The Sea - Veronique Olmi (2002). The saddest, most harrowing book I read this year, Beside The Sea will crush your heart, mince it, feed it to wild boars, kill the boars, burn them on a spit and feed what's left to a crocodile. Then it will skin the crocodile for boots. Yeah, it's beautiful but holy crap, the sheer awfulness of it all could destroy even the most sturdy of readers.

PODCASTS TO CONQUER THE BOREDOM OF CROSS CITY DRIVING

KCRW Bookworm. My man crush on Michael Silverblat continues. The guy has to be the most well-read person on the planet, and to listen to him really immerse himself in a book in the presence of its author is a true privilege. In other words, he is the James Wood of the audiolit world, but without the massive arsehole tendencies.

Literary Disco - A slightly slicker Bookrageous with three fellow booknerds yacking it up in an engaging, enjoyable hour of random bookishness.

BBC's A Good Read. Two random celebrities (some from the land of literature, some theatre, some politics, etc etc) and the host recommend a 'good read' each then set about either blowing smoke up one another's arses or diplomatically stabbing one another in the throat.

The New York Times Book Review. Still the best weekly wrap up of what's going on in the literary world. News, reviews and the most important chart around.

Judge John Hodgman. The cases are real. The decisions are final (and wonderfully ridiculous). Welcome to the court of Judge John Hodgman. Comedy geek extraordinaire Hodgman plays Judge Judy in real life cases and makes a total mockery of justice.

THE SOUNDTRACK TO MY DOWNTIME

It's been a pretty great year for music and I couldn't, in good conscience, whittle my list down to just ten top releases. So here's my baker's dozen, in which I kind of cheat even more and shove a few together as ties:

13. Ty Segall - Twins: The new messiah of surf rock dropped a chronically catchy, distortion soaked album of consistent greatness. This weirdo is poised for huge things.

12. Locked Down - Dr. John: He may be around 150 years old by now, but the old rocking bluesy jazzman (can't really lock him down - pardon the pun - to a readily definable genre) still has the kinda balls anyone a tenth of his age would envy. Revolution has to be one of the songs of the year.

11. A three way tie: NOFX - Self Entitled, Propagandhi - Failed States, Bad Brains - Into The Future. Ah, it's my teenage years all tied up in a neat package. None of these records were amazing, but all were very good. Propagandhi was a bit samey, NOFX had some killer tracks but a bit of filler, and Bad Brains... well that was the most infuriating record of the year; moments of absolute brilliance and then some absolute crap.

10. Public Enemy - Most of My Heroes Still Don't Appear On No Stamps: It's been a while since I listened to these guys, but this was a welcome return to form. Angry, smart, suprising and damn catchy. Unfortunately, their second album of the year, The Evil Empire of Everything, didn't quite live up to this one. PE, Green Day, listen here. One album a year please. That's it.

9. Another tie. Future of the Left - The Plot Against Common Sense and Toys That Kill - Fambly 42: FOTL bring you another serve of abrasive chaos just to remind you that they are the masters of the form. I preferred Travels With Myself and Others, but this was still pretty great. As for Toys That Kill, it's been a long time between drinks but this is speedy pop punk perfection from probably the most underrated bunch of champions in the biz. Get it if you even slightly like yourself.

8. fun. - Some Nights: Go f&^% yourselves, cred police. I totally fell for this throwback to bombastic Freddie Mercury opera pop. Wonderfully tender commercial perfection.

7. Classics of Love - Classics of Love: Jesse Michaels returns with his best work since Operation Ivy. Actually, I think this is even better than Op Ivy. There, I said it.

6. Not On Tour - All This Time: Most unexpected album of the year. Israeli speed punksters with kick-arse female vox deliver the best thing to come out of that region since hummus.

5. Frenzal Rhomb - Smoko In The Pet Food Factory: I always enjoy these Aussie legends, but it seems they've been back on the funny juice because Smoko... really is the best thing they've done since Meet The Family. The fact they've finally gone to an amazing studio and don't sound like they've recorded in an underwater outhouse didn't hurt either.

4. Burning Love - Rotten Thing To Say: Dirty, rocky, punky awesomeness from a band I hadn't even heard of before I downloaded this album on a whim. Trust me, you've got to get some Burning Love in your ears.

3. White Lung - Sorry. Can't believe I forgot this on the original post. Amazing, buzzsaw punk record from one of the most exciting bands around at the moment. It's fast, ferocious and femme fronted - a killer combination.

2. Pennywise - All Or Nothing: The dinosaurs return with a new lease on life thanks to the best pipes in the business, new singer Zoli Teglas. Sure, it just sounds like an awesome Ignite album but what's not to love about that? I was dismayed to hear they've since booted Zoli in favour of bringing Jim back into the fold. Back to the graveyard, I guess.

1. Morning Glory - Poets Were My Heroes: There are plenty of great heroin records out there but this would have to be the most beautiful one I've ever encountered. Part recovery diary, part hymn to hope, Poets Were My Heroes left me emotionally spent, but with a new appreciation of the fragility of life. While Stza continues to be a self-centred douchebag deserving of every fist a fan throws his way, his Leftover Crack bandmate Ezra Kire has triumphed with true grace. An easy winner for me.

2012: The New Year's Aspiration Scorecard

I really don't know why I bother setting goals for myself each year; I clearly do very little to achieve them. This year was no exception. I completely disregarded them all in favour of a characteristically lassaiz faire approach to reading and writing. I'm almost reluctant to write this entry, but if I won't whip my own back with stinging nettles, who will?

1. Read Less, Write More. Not a complete failure. At 120-odd books and still counting, I'm down on my usual average so that's something. I also did a fair amount of writing albeit not quite as much as I'd hoped. My self-imposed deadline of September 30 flew by without so much as an ink splotch but I am making progress (more tortoise than hare-like, it seems). Looking back, 2012 will be remembered as a year cushily spent resting on my laurels. My two published stories enjoyed quite a prolonged life - publication in The Age, Best Australian Stories 2012 and Award Winning Australian Writing 2012, licensing by the ABC to be read as a radio program, participation in my first ever writers' festival, public readings, etc - and I was quite happy to just sit back and enjoy the ride. Alas, the fire has now been reduced to its last few embers (or ash, to be more precise) so 2013 is going to have to be a much more productive one if I don't want to feel totally stagnant this time next year. But there I go putting the cart before the horse again...

2. Stop Being Such A Lit Wanker. Genre fiction and graphic novels didn't exactly feature heavily on my 2012 reading list but I did make a fairly decent showing of trying to read a bit more of them. For the most part they were enjoyable (special props to Lost Dogs by Jeff Lemire, The Postman Always Rings Twice by James Cain and, yes, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn) so there may still be hope for me yet. Don't hold your breath though. I'm still a total wanker.

3. Smell The Roses. End-of-year rush aside (I'm trying to rip through ten more books before NYE), I think I did a pretty decent job. And even though I'd like to credit a concerted effort on my part to stick to at least one of my New Years Aspirations, I simply cannot. Any success on this particular point stemmed from serendipity, not design. I read as I usually read. Sometimes it was slower, sometimes faster. A busier law calendar certainly contributed, as did my 2012 tendency to travel whenever the opportunity arose. So great success, but not thanks to me.

4. Tangible Aspirations: War and Peace, Sartre's Roads To Freedom, Lev Grossman, Gaiman's American Gods. Here's where I really set myself up for failure. Nope, nope, nope and nope. Holy crap, those nettles sting!

5. Lose 95 Kilos and Exist in A Vacuum. Strangely, I didn't do too badly on this one. I did lose a few kilos and, by becoming ever more hermit-like, existed somewhat in a vacuum (at least so far as my friends were concerned). So bravo me. Successful at the one NY Aspiration that was totally absurd.

Well, that about wraps it up for another year of predictable stumbles. Of course I'll come up with new ones for 2013, but I'm thinking it might be more prescient to set the bar much lower so I can smash it out of the park. Read 25 books? Write half a chapter? Take Louie for three walks? Yeah, I think I can do that.

Be sure to check back over the next ten days as I unveil all my picks of 2012. It's been a great reading year, so I have hell of a lot to say about some truly remarkable books!

2012: The Shelf of Shame

You know the drill. Before I go singing the praises of the truly remarkable books that came out this year I must first clear my throat of the phlegm. And so it is with green, mucilaginous glee that I bring you 2012's Shelf of Shame.

MOST OVERRATED BOOKS OF 2012
Sometimes the shepherds of literary culture lead us into apoplectic anticipation by pulling the wool over our eyes. Time to give the sheep a fringe:

HHhH by Laurent Binet. Sometime in March, I began to hear whispers about a revolutionary work of historical fiction that had won every prize under the sun in France and was about to take over the rest of the literary world. Those of us interested in Holocaust fiction trembled with anticipation, occasionally stopping to wipe the saliva from our shoes. When it finally arrived, HHhH proved to be a crushing disappointment. Hardly a revelation of any kind, it was a simple piece of documentary storytelling (not unlike a Wikipedia entry) with the odd intrusion of a very annoying knob putting in his two cents about the writing process.

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz. Critics went nuts for this. Readers lined up in droves to heap the stars on their online reviews. I, however, saw stasis, not progress. Yes, Diaz is an exciting voice in fiction, but he is starting to sound a little monotonous. I ended up wanting to push Yunior under a train.

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens. Don't crucify me. I believed the hype. One of the great minds of modern times honestly and defiantly reflects on his descent into the abyss. This could have been so great but, when all was said and done, Hitchens found the one topic against which he could rage but on which he seemed to have little true insight. Mortality certainly had moments of epiphany, but they were drowned in a swamp of confusion. Remember Hitchens for everything else he wrote. Let this be just a footnote.

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENTS OF 2012
2012 was a bumper year for expectations. Quite a few of my favourite authors published new works. Some came through. Others... well:

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan: Many readers thought Sweet Tooth a return to form after the disappointing Solar (which, it seems, I am the only person to have liked). Strangely devoid of the familiar McEwan formula - catastrophic event befalls ordinary person - this one revisited the mindfuck device he used in Atonement, albeit in a classic 70s MI5 spy context. Unfortunately, lightning did not strike twice. Sweet Tooth is not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a little lazy and ultimately unsatisfying.

The Investigation by Philippe Claudel. Holy shit I was excited about this. Claudel, the author of my favourite novel of the past five years, returned with a book that promised to be part Kafka part Calvino (and, I suppose, part Claudel). Instead, The Investigation turned out to be a self-conscious meta wankfest that wasn't a patch on either of the aforementioned authors and did very little to further Claudel in my estimation. As I said in my review, only one person ever did the Kafka thing well and he died of TB back in June 1924.

Dirt by David Vann. To my mind, Vann has positioned himself to become the true heir to Cormac McCarthy. Equally bleak and nihilistic, with enough originality to avoid simply being dismissed as sycophantic fan fiction, both his debut story collection and first novel absolutely blew me away. This Oedipal mess had its moments but for the most part was an exercise in losing control. I'll allow him this misstep on the basis of "difficult second album syndrome", but I expect far better in the future.

Dishonourable Mentions:
Stonemouth by Iain Banks. Someone please tell me why I still expect good books from this guy.
Zoo Time by Howard Jacobson. This time the joke is on him. Ho hum farce of a middling order.
Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. Following all the buzz, I'm not sure what I expected. It was not, however, this amalgamation of Carlos Ruiz Zafon and Dan Brown.

MOST ANNOYING TREND
50 Covers of Grey
Yes, yes. Tawdriness is the new Twilight. But must every book that involves fisting and gerbils have the same bloody cover (metaphorically speaking)? I smell a cynical cash-grab aimed squarely at bored housewives. As I said to one bookseller after he sold an E.L. James novel to an ageing tennis mum, "Now imagine her reading that in the bath while masturbating."

FLAT OUT WORST BOOK OF 2012
It's a tie between We All Fall Down by Peter Barry and Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis

You may recall Peter Barry from last year's list. No, not the shelf of shame. The top ten. His debut, I Hate Martin Amis Et Al was one of the most refreshing, hilarious, gutsy novels I have read. This, however, shared none of those qualities. I'm not sure whether We All Fall Down was sitting in his bottom drawer and pounced upon by the publisher after the unexpected hit of Amis, or whether he quickly cobbled it together in the hope of keeping up the momentum he had suddenly generated, but whatever the reason someone should have nipped it in the bud. We All Fall Down is a boring, turgid, indulgent waste of trees.

If only I could say such lovely things about Martin Amis's latest disaster. Subtitled A State Of The Nation Novel, Lionel Asbo was merely a vehicle for Amis to toss nerf pebbles from his crystal palace at his distorted idea of England. And what a tosser he was! Neither funny nor excoriating, this was about as useless a novel as I could imagine. I'll always love The Information but oh how the mighty can fall. Now I'm with Peter Barry. I too hate Martin Amis.

2012: The Countdowns Begin

2012 has been a bumper year for literature and though I didn't get to read as many books as I had hoped, and missed out on a few in particular that I suspect I would have liked, I still got through almost 120 which gives me a decent pool from which to draw my end of year lists.

To counter my ever-growing penchant for procrastination, I'm setting out a timeline for the rest of the year. I'm spacing them out as much as possibly to allow me to get through the last few books before finalising my top ten. So, assuming I can actually stick to a deadline (first time for everything), this is how it will go:

Sunday 16 December: The Shelf of Shame

Wednesday 19 December: The New Year's Aspirations Report Card

Sunday 23 December: Secondary Stars and Other Satellites

Thursday 27 December: The "Best Of" Bridesmaids

Saturday 29 December: The Final Countdown

Sunday 30 December: 2012 Book Of The Year

The Worm Goes Wireless (and National)

Just a quick one to let you know that my story, The Prisoner of Babel, will be read on ABC Radio National Sunday Story tomorrow (Sunday, December 16) at 2.30pm. I'm super excited that it was chosen, a little nervous to hear it and still a tiny bit hopeful that it might be read by James Earl Jones (even though I know it will not). Check out the feature on the ABC here, where I think you will also be able to download it as a podcast.

For those of you who want to read it in print form, it was published in The Sleepers Almanac Vol. 7 which you can check out here.

The End Of The Year As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

After a fairly long absence, I'm glad to report that I am well and truly back on board and frantically compiling my end of year lists. Prepare yourselves people. The Mayans were wrong. There is no escaping the deluge of sanctimonious literary judgement that is about to ensue!

Philip Roth: Bring Out Yer Dead ("He's not dead yet...")

Only last week I was having a chat with someone in a bookstore about authors due a new novel. Coetzee sprang to mind. Haven't heard from him for a while (though, I have since found out there is once called The Childhood of Jesus in the offing). Then there's Cormac McCarthy's who has the unenviable task of following up the single greatest literary work of the late 20th century. I'm also ready for newies from Delillo and Doctorow, as well as lesser names who thus far have only produced a single, great book: Salvadore Plascencia, Ferenc Karinthy, Rivka Galchen and Tirdad Zolghadr.

Naturally, the conversation drifted to the great master Philip Roth who, prior to 2011, had been churning out a book a year and lately has seemed to have fallen silent. We mused over the prospect of another fine late-career work. If his most recent book, Nemesis, was anything to go by, there was still a lot to look forward to.

Alas, Roth's silence has now been broken, but not in the way I had hoped. As I'm sure you've heard, he announced his retirement in an interview with a French magazine (as translated by Google Translate). In the pithy style of his last few books, he summed it up in two words. "I'm done."

Roth hasn't exactly made any secret of his struggles with his own mortality. Books like Exit Ghost, Everyman and The Humbling were all cloaked in the shroud of death, be it literal or metaphorical. Ironically, much like Don Delillo, when faced with the cataclysm he had for so long foreseen, Roth wasn't up to the task. Death bogged down those novels, and it was only when he broke free from it that he produced masterpieces such as Indignation, Nemesis and The Plot Against America.

It is weird to think of writing as a career like any other. Authors don't just 'retire' in the usual sense. Some stop writing out of necessity - Gabriel Garcia Marquez's dementia put an end to his output, even the prolific Bryce Courtenay called it quits after being diagnosed with terminal cancer - but for the most part, great writers keep working until death. I guess Roth doesn't agree. He hasn't been well of late, but I doubt he has reached a stage that he is no longer able to write. For him it was clearly a choice. Having read over his own work from end to beginning, he is now happy to rest on his laurels, knowing that he did not waste his life (if I might be so bold as to paraphrase him). Talk about an understatement!

Sunrise On The New Avenue

Naysayers and e-traitors, step aside! I have visited the latest kid on the block and can confidently assure you that that bricks and mortar book selling is alive, well and in very good hands thanks to Chris and his team at The Avenue Bookstore. Any tears you might still be shedding over the loss of the much-loved Sunflower can now be flicked away with glee thanks to the arrival of The Avenue's sister store in Elsternwick. Fans of the original Avenue will instantly feel at home - it's as if Chris took a shrink ray and transplanted the result into the somewhat smaller Glenhuntly Road space. Indeed, there is something surreal about walking around the site of a shop in which I practically used to live only to find it replaced by a midget replica of my other literary home. Initial headspin aside, I love what they've done with place!

I'm glad to see that The Avenue Bookstore Elsternwick has retained all the things that made Sunflower so great (including, but not limited to, the city's best Judaica section and some of the amazing staff). Add to that everything we know and love about The Avenue Bookstore Albert Park and we've all been gifted with one hell of a great store that, while small, still packs a serious literary punch.

It was a gutsy move on Chris's part, not only to expand his golden fiefdom but to do so on what amounts to the Melbourne Jewish community's ancient literary burial ground. Thankfully for all involved it has paid off. The Avenue Bookstore Elsternwick is a fresh, vibrant little shop sure to please old Sunflowers and new visitors alike. Moreover, it might coax a few of you e-tragics and Book Depositors away from your screens and into a good ol' fashioned bookstore. Don't resist the call. Your soul will thank you for it.

Microviews Vol. 19: Powers, Danielewski, Olmi

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
It begins with a beautifully brutal line. "The war tried to kill us in the spring." So simple, and yet completely devastating. The riff goes on. "While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire." Holy shit!!! Right? I don't even know how to describe The Yellow Birds in a way that could possibly do it any justice. At its most basic, it is the story of John Bartle, a young soldier stationed in a small Iraqi frontline town who, it becomes apparent, has been complicit in a moment of horror that subsequently destroys him. It is the story of youth betrayed, friendships forged and sorely tested, sacrifices made against one's will. It is an angry prose poem about the way in which war ruins lives, literally and metaphorically. No surprises that Powers himself is a returned soldier, having been stationed in the very town he writes about here. That he also happens to be an accomplished poet won't shock anyone either. Every observation is crisp and original. The tension is almost unbearable. Indeed, there is not a single misstep in the entire book. I expect that The Yellow Birds will go down as the great novel of the Iraq War, and one of the greatest war novels ever written right up there with All Quiet On The Western Front, The Naked and The Dead, For Whom The Bell Tolls and, more recently, Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn. If I'm wrong, court martial me!

The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski
When House of Leaves was unleashed back in 2000, the hipster chorus went into overdrive to herald the coming of the new messiah. Granted, it was a very cool book - absurd, creepy and endlessly inventive - but it set a ridiculously high bar that Danielewski was always going to struggle to meet. His follow-up, Only Revolutions, was a decent effort but, once the smoke had cleared and the mirrors were shattered, it turned out to be little more than a conventional love story. Then there was silence. Long, unremarkable silence. Until now, with the release of The Fifty Year Sword. Oh wait, no, don't be fooled lit-nerds. The Fifty Year Sword was actually first published in 2005, a year before Only Revolutions. You just haven't heard of it (unless you are a total MZD fanatic) because it came out in a tiny print run in the Netherlands, had a second run a year later, and then disappeared. Only now do we 'regular folk' get let in on the whole schtick. And schtick it is. The Fifty Year Sword is another reasonably entertaining work (this time a short fable) scrambled up to resemble a stylistic extravaganza (albeit one already visited in HoL). Purportedly cobbled together from the recollection of five characters, each one adds to the narrative in his or her own voice, indicated by different coloured quotation marks. The wankery gets tiring soon enough, and we learn to just read it straight as if it were a regular story. Lovers of good, old fashioned fables will be glad to hear that what lies behind the facade is actually quite good. Five orphans, drawn in by a story teller, who recounts what eerily resembles Monty Python's Quest for The Holy Grail, with a tinge of Kafka's Before The Law (the hero chooses the sword that has always lain in wait for him) and lashing of Edgar Allan Poe to round it out. It is fun and absurd, presented in a stunning pock-marked package, with gorgeous stitched illustrations to boot. Sure, it ain't no House of Leaves, but as some sorbet between great novels (yeah, I'm still holding out hope) it will do just fine.

Beside The Sea by Veronique Olmi
In all my years of reading I have never come across a book as thoroughly depressing or horrifying as Veronique Olmi's short novel Beside The Sea. Rendered in a voice so convincing, so maudlin, so devoid of hope, it is the confession of a young mother who has taken her two young sons to a seaside town in order to kill them. There are no fancy tricks here, just the crushingly pained words of a woman who has been failed by the system and sees no alternative but to snuff out their little lives. There are moments in which the light creeps in - she wants to make this last trip as much fun as she can for the boys - but they are soon closed off as she struggles to cope with even the most basic of tasks and gets angry at her sons for just being kids. Beside The Sea is a damning indictment on the many facets of a system that can let someone slip through the cracks - from doctors whose incompetence borders on malpractice to child welfare workers who fail to properly identify the glaring risks. The mother herself carries some responsibility too; she stops taking her medicine and refuses to avail herself of the help on offer. Although it is clear from the first page how this book will end, Olmi reserves a small sting in the tail that will break whatever little pieces of your heart are left when you finally get there. Beside The Sea is a magnificent achievement, the likes of which you are unlikely to ever encounter again. And for that you will be very thankful.