Update

Since it's almost the end of the year, I thought I'd try to post a short note about all the books I read but didn't post review of this year. I don't feel like going back and writing long reviews, but I want to have some note about how I felt about them.

Red Azalea by Anchee Min - was pretty good, but hard to tell where the author ultimately landed on the whole Mao thing. She seemed to be sort of negative about the regime in some parts, but still super-romanticized Madame Mao.
Atonement by Ian McEwan - Such a fabulous book! The ending devastated me, but only a good book could have such an effect. McEwan is a great writer and I hope to read more by him soon. Tried to start Amsterdam tonight, but it wasn't doing it for me.
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God by Etgar Keret - I love this book. I want to start a whole blog dedicated to how much I love this book. I like to immerse myself in novels and I don't usually do too well with short stories (or poetry), but these stories captured me and wouldn't let me go. I'm dying to read The Nimrod Flipout, but that would require a purchase, and I haven't seen it at the used bookstore or Half-Price Books yet.
Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand - This was kind of boring and hard to stick with, but it was educational.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - Oh my goodness, I loved this book. Humbert Humbert is such a creepy character, but I found myself loving him because the he told his story with such skill. I read this book in a very short period of time because I just couldn't put it down. It was fabulous.
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov - This wasn't as great as Lolita, but it was still good. The Zembla parts kind of made me crazy, but it's such a rich book. I love Shade's poem, and there's so much to wonder about after reading this book.
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead - I really enjoyed this book. I might be dumb, and there might a be a word for this kind of book, but I don't know it. It's not quite a dystopia, but it's similar, and I tend to enjoy books like this. It's an interesting concept, and Whitehead is a great writer.
Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett - I wanted to kill myself reading this book, and it's only like 100 pages long. Malone drove me nuts and I thought I might drop out of grad school because this was the first book we had to read in my 20th C. Lit class.
The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer - This book also made me want to drop out of grad school. It was so horribly boring and I wanted to kill Norman Mailer. He was so full of himself, and not in a way that I found entertaining or interesting.
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter - This was a pretty good book. I enjoyed it, and there's a lot going on in it, but I guess I don't have a lot to say about it.
The Dream Songs by John Berryman - These poems are utterly inscrutable, and they were extremely difficult for me to read because I'm not good at reading poetry to begin with.
Girls on the Run by John Ashbery - If I hadn't read the Berryman earlier, I would have said that these poems were completely inscrutable. They're most valuable to me for introducing me to the interesting figure of John Darger.
Doubled Flowering by Araki Yasusada - These poems and the story surrounding them were very interesting to me; so much so that I wrote two papers on them.
Lanark by Alasdair Gray - This was a great book, and as soon as I can get my hands on more of Gray's writing, I plan to devour it. Very funny and interesting, and original.
JR by William Gaddis - As hard as this was to read, I have to say I really enjoyed it. It was hilarious and very interesting. I need to read it again to piece more things together, and I definitely want to read more by Gaddis.
The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru - This was a pretty decent book. It was a page turner and kind of thought-provoking, but after reading the Nabokov and Gaddis earlier, there's a limit to how impressed I can be by this book.
Top Girls by Caryl Churchill - This play was kind of boring to me. I probably won't be tracking down any more Churchill to read, plus I'm not that into reading plays.

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

This book reminded me a lot of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, only not quite as good. I still enjoyed it but Eggers' book seems edgier to me and more well-written. Basically I'm a sucker for any book with descriptions of driving on beautiful California highways. I've never been further west than Chicago, so any book with descriptions of A. California, B. Colorado/mountains, or C. the Pacific Northwest, gets me drunk with desire to visit these places. And somehow this gets lodged in my brain as a positive thing. I guess I'm also a sucker for anything that's 90's nostalgia. I was a teenager in the 90's who wished she was an adult, so books about being an adult in the 90's appeal to my teenage self that's locked away somewhere. So these two elements appealed to me.

The textual manipulation was kind of dumb to me because I don't really get into that kind of stuff. I found myself skipping the free-association pages by the time I was midway through the book. The writing itself wasn't that great either, which kind of bugged me. I know this isn't a super-serious text or anything, but it seems like we have too many books in the world to be publishing anything that's not excellent. I think I'd like to read more by Douglas Coupland, but only as a quick read after something heavier. Coupland is a balm to be used in the same manner as chicklit, and I think that's the bottom line of this review.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

I finally finished this last night - it took me a week to read this book, which is ridiculous, because it's less than 200 pages. It was good, but it wasn't great, and I keep feeling like I wanted to read a different book, but I didn't want to start another one because I was afraid I'd never come back to this one. My new motto: no more half-finished and barely started books on my bookshelves! I made it through JR by William Gaddis, I can make it through anything. Anyway, it wasn't fascinating in a sick sort of way like Lolita was, and it wasn't quite as funny as Pale Fire, but it was still pretty funny. It was mostly just sad and depressing. Pnin wasn't such a bad sort, but he just couldn't catch a break. The most notable thing about this book for me was the narrator. This is the third Nabokov book I've read where he frames the story and gives his narrator an identity. Pnin's narrator in particular was troubling to me, though, because the he seemed to know things that only an omniscient narrator would know. How does he know details of Pnin's life and actions when no one else is around to observe them? Should we believe Pnin when he claims that the narrator is a liar? So it's a problematic book, but not in the same way that Pale Fire is, and it didn't have the emotional effect that Lolita did for me. But overall, it was decent. Nabokov could hardly write something bad, that's for sure.