2010 was very productive, yet very American for me as a reader. Maybe my most American yet. The only book I remember reading in French is Citoyens Clandestins, an award-winning french political thriller, which left me profoundly disappointed. The plot and the story arc were decent at best, but kind of mechanical and monotonous. It's one thing to have a deep and layered plot, but it's another to keep your cast in a manageable number and to develop your characters enough to make them differentiable from each other. Citoyens Clandestins was a long 700 pages.
This year has also marked the end of my path in Academia. I placed so much hopes into a long academic career and left so disgruntled, it made the landing very hard. I have no faith in Academia anymore and my readings reflect this disenchantment. We didn't read much American writers in college, because they don't fit the portrait. At least not as well as some European writers do. Flamboyant wankers with a skill for quoting - within fiction or not - like Umberto Eco gather a lot of attention for other quoting monkeys that are literature students, but his fiction doesn't take risk and doesn't ask questions that matters to him. Eco's novels are enjoyable to a certain degree, but they are only a reflection of his involvement with his own studies.
My two main discoveries this year, Franzen and Wallace, show open contempt for Academia. It's refreshing to see somebody of Wallace's intellect display such a visceral attachment to his work of fiction and level of awareness towards self-indulgent quoting. Reading Wallace this year was to find an answer to how to survive what I call an "Academic Divorce". I thought I knew how to read after college, yet he taught me another way.
So, given that I broke up with any sort of formatted thought process for reading and writing, 2010 was by far the most D.I.Y year of my existence. I broke up with my fiction dogmas and broadened up my perspective. I have read ten, maybe twelve "writing help" books (I can't pinpoint an official title for them yet), only to find out they can get you so far before you have to sit behind the word processor and do the work yourself. The most interesting reads I have made so far in "writing help" are the Donald Maass books, who stand out due to his experience based approach and his motivating skills and the classic The Elements Of Style by William Strunk and E.B White, which was concise, accurate and rather original, when compared to others.
Last, but not least, I have explored the genres of essay and non-fiction novel and somewhat fell in love. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote was by far my favorite reading this year. The elegance of his style and the originality of his approach to the darkest crime was truly enlightening for the young reader (and younger) writer that I am. David Foster Wallace and Chuck Klosterman also made me want to write essays. I've discovered this genre to be fairly trendy in magazines and a fine way to express concern on subjects and be heard by a greater audience...while getting paid for it. It's a genre where writers take tremendous liberties in style and content, so that it never loses its actuality.
So what's on the program for 2011? My love for American writers will continue throughout the years with maybe occasional stops in U.K and Japan. I have a Haruki Murakami itch that is starting to be felt under my left ear. Maybe some Yukio Mishima also. I have read (and enjoyed) many of his works, so 2011 might be the time to read the Sea Of Fertility tetralogy and Sun And Steel. More re-reading also? I have talked so much about Mystic River this year that I feel like reading it over. But all these plans are accessory to one quintessential reading I have to do.
