Dangerous Librations

I came! I read! I got really freaked out! Huzzah!

I'm wrapping up My Year of Reading Dangerously. Last January, I compiled a list of thirteen books of which I was, in some way, afraid. The goal was to read twelve of them, one a month, slowly inching my way through biliophiliac terror toward enlightenment or education or at the very least nearsightedness. Along the way, I would point out the dangers, real and imagined, of my reading list. I would slap fear up against reality and catalog the carnage.

And that's exactly what I did, less a few hitches. During the fall, I lost three months of reading time as real-life fear blew literary fear out of the water. I worried I wouldn't be able to finish, but I picked back up in December, powering through the final book with three brave days to spare. When everything was said and done, I'd finished twelve fearsome, fearful, awesome, awful books. Sometimes my fears were realized. More frequently, they proved baseless. Every book taught me something different about danger.

So here they are again, defanged, muzzled, and neatly corralled:

Required Reading

• Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
  
• Netherland, Joseph O'Neill
  
• An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination, Elizabeth McCracken
  

Fearsomely Good

• American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld
  
• My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, ed. Jeffrey Eugenides
  
• Downtown Owl, Chuck Kloosterman
  

Nothing to Fear

• An Abundance of Katherines, John Green
  
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
  
• The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
  
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  

No

• Twilight, Stephanie Meyer
  
• I See you Everywhere, Julia Glass
  

But wait a minute, you think. There were thirteen books! Which one got away? What was the one book I was too craven to confront?

The Great White Whale

• The Ambassadors, Henry James

This probably isn't a shocker. Maybe next year.

#12: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

My mother likes memoir. For years, I have taken this as a sign of dullness, soft-mindedness, just general momliness. Mothers always like memoir. It gives them other lives to hit you over the head with, to brandish in front of your nose and say: Look, here, this is they way you should be doing it.

I loathe memoir. Mostly because it is less fiction-like than fiction. Or, to put it more baldly, because it is not fiction, but has dug through fiction's closet and is wearing its clothes. How presumptuous, to dress up your life in narrative! A person writing memoir is making a statement that her life deserves a capital-S story. This makes me dislike her right up front as self-aggrandizing.

Plus my mom likes memoir and I am ten years old.

Mature, tough-minded woman that I am, I shoved memoir all the way to the back of my list for My Year of Reading Dangerously and tried to forget about it. Uck: memoir! About a dead baby, no less! Thus it was that I picked up novelist Elizabeth McCracken's slim memoir of stillbirth, An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination, a mere four days prior to end of the calendar year.

And sped through it. After that murky, mucky Julia Glass novel, McCracken's book was like a draught of cold water. McCracken can WRITE. This is a relief. Moreover, her motives in doing so are pure, or at least purer than the motives I impute to the archetypal memoirist, whom I imagine blowing hot words into a sorry balloon of a life. For McCracken, words are needles: swiftly and methodically, she lances a period of overwhelming pain.

Less memoir than dissection, An Exact Figment probes period of approximately one year during which McCracken gave birth first to a stillborn boy and then to a live one. The book feels in no small part like an autopsy: Why? McCracken demands of her memory. Why this way? Why that next? Why this particular configuration of days? Her prose is knife-sharp and woundingly lovely.

There's a magnet on my refrigerator, a picture of an aproned, glamorous woman in a 1950's kitchen. Oh my God, she says, my mother was right about everything.

Needless to say, the magnet was a gift from my mother. She thinks it's hilarious. I've never seen the humor. I came very close to giving the magnet away or shoving it drawer, but in the end I kept it on the refrigerator to remind myself that sometimes -not very often, mind you, only occasionally after the pigs have flown a full circuit around the chimney and the moon has turned a brilliant turquoise- my mom is on to something.

Shhhh.

#11: I See You Everywhere

The really scary thing is that sometimes what you're afraid of happens. Sure, mostly the car doesn't crash. Your library books are where you left them and you grab, effortlessly, the bar of the trapeze.

But sometimes -only sometimes, enough to give your fear a frisson of reality but not enough to have it do you any good- you slide off the road. You left Anne of Green Gables under the seat on the bus to Camp Digeridoo at Lake Lemon, and your hands clench midair.

In such cases, it is important to remember that fear, realized, is the exception. 98% of what you're worried about never comes to pass, and the rest of the shit that happens to you is stuff you weren't smart enough to dread. Still, when that 2% of your nightmares solidifies into just exactly what kept you up at night, it sucks.

I was afraid Julia Glass was overrated. When I added her novel I See You Everywhere to my list for My Year of Reading Dangerously, I had been tracking the book-world buzz over the unexpected nomination of her earlier book Three Junes for a National Book Award. I was afraid that Glass's critics were right, that she wasn't National Book Award material. I was afraid that her novel would be tepid, like tea from a twice-dunked bag.

Make that tea from a thrice-dunked bag. A four-times-under-the-water bag, a bag so thoroughly abused it releases no color, but floats to the top of your cup like a white, sad, overweeningly dead teabag-shaped jellyfish.

Say you are a book. You are permitted to have a) a good plot or b) good writing. If you are exciting drivel, I will read you. If you are glacial but lovely, I will read you. In an ideal, fairy-princess, castle-in-the-sky world, you are possessed of clean prose and masterful plotting and we will retire to bed together and be very happy. But you are not allowed to be BOTH boring and stilted. No no no no!

Louisa and Clem (short for Clement) are sisters. One is beautiful and brave; the other is smart and scared. They fight. They chase men. They feel sorry for themselves and housesit and edit art magazines and regret not pursuing their pottery and...ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. Whoops, sorry, dropped off there.

The most maddening thing is that every single potentially interesting scene -the sisters fighting over the same man, a maiden Aunt striking out on her own- HAPPENS OFFSTAGE. I wanted to howl. I wanted to seize Julia Glass by the shoulders and shake. I wanted to sweep aside the interminable phone conversations and the poorly-drawn cleaning-out-the-barn scene and the scene where Louisa sits on the beach and thinks- and drag the meat of the story back where it belongs.

Alas, I'm not the author. If I were, I'd refund myself the seven hours of my life I spent slogging through my massively mediocre novel.

Don't read I See You Everywhere. Read a better, older young adult book by Katherine Patterson called Jacob Have I Loved. It's about two sisters. One is beautiful and brave. The other is smart and scared. Their names are Louise and Caroline.

Gosh, now, this is starting to sound familiar.

#10: Downtown Owl

OK, I'll confess: I'm scared of books by men.

Yes, I realize I shiver in my boots before the literary output of half of the known world. Yes, I understand that my prejudice limits my reading list largely to this century and the last, given that -with a few notable exceptions- pre-20th-century writing was the province of men. And, OK, I'll admit I've read some awesome books by men. I think Rabbit Run is a masterpiece, and I'll read pretty much anything Michael Chabon writes.

Still, I approach the work of male authors -especially young male authors- with trepidation. Men can be so...maximalist. Many a male author likes to set his hunting cap for the biggest game he can think of -the BIGGEST IDEAS; the MOST ENCOMPASSING THEMES; life, the universe, and EVERYTHING- and then proceed to hound it to death over the frozen tundra of 900 swooping, posturing, chest-thumping pages. It's like the novel is his territory and he's going to make sure he pees all over it.

(David Foster Wallace, I'm looking at you.)

I am not a maximalist. I like small, densely drawn worlds in which nothing much happens yet everything changes. It just so happens that most of the people who inhabit these worlds, who jolt them to life with words, are women.

Which is why I selected Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl for My Year of Reading Dangerously. Klosterman is a man. He is not an old man. And his biography is less than reassuring: He's worked for Esquire, for starters, and the title of his previous novel, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, smacked of urine in print.

Fortunately, I was (mostly) wrong. Downtown Owl, a portrait of a fictional North Dakota town on the eve of a blizzard, is profoundly concerned with the small. Small lives, small town, small time. Klosterman is a detail man: the book is a less a narrative than a galaxy of specificities. These are at the very least entertaining and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny:

"John S. Laidlaw was a football coach, a pheasant hunter, a two-pack-a-day smoker, a notorious cheapskate, a deeply closeted atheist, and an outspoken libertarian. But he was also an English teacher, and -were it not for his preoccupation with convincing female students to have intercourse with him inside his powder blue Caprice Classic- he might have been among the best educators in the entire state of North Dakota. He was certainly the finest teacher in Owl, even when you factored in the emotional cruelty and the statutory raping."

If I'd been smart, I would have guessed Klosterman's obsession with detail from the exactingly detailed title: Downtown Owl, with it's hidden howl (ow ow ow) and its double connotation of town square and down-and-out.

Sometimes, Klosterman's cataloguing of the very small gets in the way of his unfolding narrative, as when all dialogue, in its specific hilarity, begins to sound the same. Klosterman writes largely from the perspective of three Owl residents: an indifferent football player named Mitch; Julia, who moves to Owl to teach history and finds herself the center of male attention purely by dint of being female and alive; and Horace, one of the coffee-swilling oldsters at the cafe. A few extra voices are thrown in, but as all the voices are distinguishably Klosterman's, it doesn't much matter.

Still, Owl is a joyful, nosy, and very occasionally lovely little book. "All great books seem boring until you've finished reading them," Laidlaw tells his students. Downtown Owl is not a great book. It's far too engrossing for that.

#9: Netherland

I read this book months ago for my year of reading dangerously, and then shit happened. Which is a paltry excuse for not alerting you earlier to the delicate dangers of Joseph O'Neill's critically-acclaimed hymn to dislocation, cricket, and the American dream, but there it is.

The perceived dangers were these:

1) I do not like novels about immigrants in America.
2) I do not like novels written by handsome men.
3) I do not like novels that treat Big Issues.

The actual dangers where these:

1) I do not like being forced to confront my own prejudices.

Netherland is gorgeous. I used the word "hymn" deliberately: O'Neill's book is measured, tuneful, and serious, a full-throated song. Hans, the novel's narrator, is a displaced Dutch financial prognosticator living in New York City. His wife leaves him. He meets a guy who plays cricket. That's basically the sum of the plot, but the writing plumbs every inch and color.

From p. 200 (Hans describing a thunderstorm):

In my last American August one thunderstorm followed another: I can still picture a suddenly green, almost undersea atmosphere, and hailstones hopping like dice on asphalt, and streams criss-crossing Chelsea, and huge photographical flashes visiting my apartment. It's hard to believe, from my Englander's perspective, in those subtropical weeks, when the humid air could be so blurred with reverberated light as to leave me with a mild case of color blindness. Everyone scurried in the shadowed fraction of the city. Few things were more wonderful than hopping into a cold summer cab.

From p. 201 (Hans at a restaurant with his friend Vinay, describing his wife's new squeeze):

"The guy specializes in boiled potatoes and turnips and beetroots," Vinay told me. "Old English vegetable ingredients. Very interesting." He said pompously, "I'd classify him as a cook, not a chef."

No doubt, I thought, he was also an expert in reviving Anglo-Saxon erotic traditions. A sensualist who embodied a classic yet contemporary approach to carnal pleasure.

I told Vinay the score.

"Oh fuck that," he said.

"Yeah," I said.

"Jesus. Martin Casey."

"Yup," I said, feeling brave.

Vinay, excited, said, "The dude's short. He's a fucking dwarf, Hans. You're going to blow him out of the fucking water."

It was good of Vinay to say this, but Vinay, in spite of his own six feet, had a terrible record with women and was, I knew for a fact, a bonehead about anything he couldn't eat or drink.

From me: Read Netherland. Soon.

#8: Catch-22

Because I read the bulk of Catch-22 at music camp, it seems only fitting to describe the novel in musical terms. Catch-22 was like a baroque trumpet fanfare that, despite containing only three notes, nevertheless saw fit to carry on loudly and with great exuberance over an extended period of time. Catch-22 was the brassy, drawn-out exegesis of single chord.

I GET IT! I wanted to shout at Joseph Heller twenty pages in (and 40 pages, and 140, and 400). WAR IS ABSURD: I GET IT. Enough already.

Catch-22 was a book I'd dreaded -guiltily- for years. I hate war novels. But even the title was a cultural touchstone! People were always citing Catch-22: it had become one of those books so integrated into the fabric of contemporary culture that to not read it seemed untenable. The perfect candidate, in sum, for My Year of Reading Dangerously.

Except I should have read the thing years ago. I mean this both in the sense that I have been culturally delinquent, and in the sense that Catch-22 seemed to me to be a novel profoundly sympathetic to the adolescence predicament. Yossarian, Heller's infamous bombardier, is the only sane man in a universe full of lunatics. Isn't that what most teenagers feel like every day?

Catch-22 was clever, funny, and boring as all get out. Just because a whole line of baroque trumpets playing a C chord in tune is impressive doesn't mean you want to listen to it.

#7: My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead

More than what I read, it was the way I read it. One story a lunch break, give or take, sometimes a fraction of a story or sometimes two. For that brief half-hour, sandwiched between lunch duty and my 12:30 paperwork prep, I would shut the door, hide behind my filing cabinet if anyone knocked, and read about love.

If you're going to read about love, the time to do it is in the middle of a work day at an inner city school. You keep love in perspective if you do it that way; you understand its limitations and its boundaries, the things it can't do. Love can't feed a child or clothe it or make it happy; it can't help you pound knowledge into a kid's skull or make the school day go any faster. Love isn't an agent at all -it doesn't act, but sits there shimmering soundlessly between the cafeteria tables and the old computer.

It goes without saying that love, despite its lack of agency, is dangerous. Our language reflects this: you're sick in love, you fall. So what could be more dangerous, for the seventh installment in My Year of Reading Dangerously, than an entire book of love stories? Even if it was edited by the spectacularly gifted Jeffrey Eugenides (see Middlesex; The Virgin Suicides)?

I must confess that, in the face of this book, I quailed. My Mistress's Sparrow spent some quality time under the bed, followed by some additional months on the bookshelf, where, day after day, its maroon heart heaved reproachfully against the edges of my sight.

Finally, slowly, I broke. I sickened; I fell. And it was good, really good. A few of the stories I loathed; most of them were OK; some were so lovely they hurt. But such is love: a hit or miss, twisting, flickering nothing of a feeling. Eugenides's singular wisdom was to understand this: instead of presenting stories that orbit around love as if around blazing sun, he chose stories that are prisms, refracting love into a hundred scattered colors.

I read Robert Musil's thankless Tonka over two or three thankless, luckless days. William Trevor's Lovers of their Time, a wistful meditation on ephemerality, I read on a day when two kids threw up in the lunch room and had to be hustled out like surrendering bank robbers. The day I finished Deborah Eisenberg's Some Other, Better Otto, perhaps my favorite story in the book, there was a hot, wet rain of the kind that coops you up but doesn't relieve the pressure in the air.

And through it all: love. Love limp, love tired, love wizened and sad. Love worth closing the door for, perhaps worth propping it open again.

#6: American Wife

So I'm a little bit like a back-up sprinkler system: cry within my line of sight, and I'll cry, too. Yes, it's embarrassing, but on the other hand, empathy is the backbone of civilization, so I don't really mind having a little more than my share.

And yet, like most of us, I have empathetic lapses: dry, barren places inside me where nothing finds purchase and imagination won't sprout. If empathy is a backbone, imaginative flights are its vertebrae: to empathize, you must imagine yourself out of your own skin and into someone else's. You must live, temporarily, two lives at once.

Over time, I've managed to drum up empathy for a number of folks who initially gave me trouble: cheating boyfriends, teenage mothers, zealots. But still, there remain people for whom, even when I try to squeeze out empathy as if it were a kidney stone, I feel nothing. Mass murderers. People who have significant credit card debt. George and Laura Bush.

I mean, seriously, why the heck would you spend money you didn't have? Unless your liver failed while you were vacationing in a totalitarian dictatorship with no functioning health care system and you needed to buy another liver on the black market, why on earth would you think something was worth paying 22% APR? Have you no self-control, people? Did some kind of alien parasite gobble your brain? Wait, save, AND THEN BUY THAT GIANT FLAT-SCREEN SOUL-SUCKER.

See what I mean? No empathy.

Fortunately, there are books. It's easy to forget in these days when a book is supposed to be either an entertaining diversion or Art with a capital A, but another thing a book can be is a gardener. A good book cultivates empathy. A great book cultivates empathy in those parched, scorched reaches of yourself you thought were forever sere.

American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld's third novel and my sixth pick for My Year of Reading Dangerously, is a great book. Not because of any particular felicity of prose or superiority of structure, but because, by the time I reached the last the of hundreds and hundreds of pages of this pseudo-auto-biography of a (lightly) fictionalized American First Lady, I was a) crying and b) almost able to comprehend how a woman could first sleep with and then marry G. Dubya.

This is, self-evidently, a miracle. American Wife is a readable, thoughtful, occasionally off-putting perpetrator of miracles. And how many books can claim that?

#5: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The idea of reading books in translation has always gotten me hot and bothered. I'm keenly aware of the rhythms and colors of words; I have to be careful, in my own writing, to prevent style from dragging substance along by the scruff of the neck. Many's the time I'm scrapped precision or truth in favor of some tempting turn of phrase -and I can't even dredge up much guilt about it.

To me, translated books -and don't even get me started on translated poetry- are like island nations with fragmented, unstable systems of government. There are too many would-be dictators: overarching issues of plot and narrative, the rhythm and play of the words in English, and of course the question of fidelity to the original text. No matter how good the translator, the finished prose always seems to have the awkwardness of a shy woman playing strip twister. It feels contorted, stilted, ashamed: someone with a fake smile and her rear end higher than her head.

The issue of translated writing cuts to the heart of why we read. Is it for the details of story and plot? Is it for the glimpse into someone else's mind, life, or culture? Or is it for the pure pleasure of the press of words against the skins of our minds? Ideally, it's a combination of all three, but I find that without a good, solid foundation of words, reading palls. I've read a number of translated novels for school and a fair amount of translated poetry: nothing I've ever read in translation has stuck with me for longer than it took to put down the book and go hunting for cheese.

Yet, every time I admit to my prejudice, I feel like a backwoods literary bigot. There's that obvious counterargument: isn't it better to read stories and authors in translation than not at all? If you restrict yourself to languages you can read, you've walled yourself off from whole cultures, rich streams of thought.

To which I say: Good thing I'm doing my year of reading dangerously. My fifth pick (actually my sixth, but I haven't gotten around to reviewing number 5 yet) was Steig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland. Larsson, a left-wing journalist, died of a coronary event in 2004. He left behind three finished mystery novels he'd completed in his spare time, all three of which are being published posthumously. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first of the these.

According to Wikipedia, the Swedish title of the novel was Men who Hate Women, and I can see why. Larsson's hero, left-wing journalist Mikael Blomkvist, and his strange, traumatized heroine, computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, stumble across a veritable viper's nest of men who prey upon women. Using the 30-year-old disappearance of heiress Harriet Vanger as a starting point, Blomkvist and Salander investigate whole generations of wrongdoing. There are two or three mysteries here, some of which overlap and some of which slither off toward their own corners, but all of them trace back to gender-based violence. I enjoyed the MI-5-style descriptions of information gathering, as well as the off-hand details of Swedish life. How can you fault a book that describes bacon pancakes with ligonberry jam?

Still, there was that troubling stiffness to the prose. Characters seemed awkwardly drawn, as if a pencil was lifted from the paper every few millimeters and set back down. I couldn't quite get a handle on the tone of the book: one of the hallmarks, to me, of books in translation is that their linguistic atmosphere seems to shimmer from color to color, never quite coming to rest. Was it off-hand? Formal? Racy? A smattering of all of these?

Its faults aside, this was a big (465 pages), meaty, overflowing mystery novel in the tradition of Elizabeth George and Sara Paretsky. (Interestingly, we witness Blomkvist reading books by both authors, along with several other notable crime novelists: the man has good taste!)

Also, I started the thing at 8:00 AM and finished it by 3:00 PM. They say actions speak louder than words. And there's no need to translate.

#4: Olive Kitteridge

I like the way Elizabeth Strout's prose locomotes. It doesn't race, like Victor Hugo's breathless 19th-century effusions. It doesn't strut, like David Foster Wallace's chest-thumping, maximalist outpourings. Nor is it hobbled by the crippling self-consciousness that seems to plague the recipients of the modern MFA, as if the degree were a bullet to the leg and everything the author did thereafter bore its gimpy stamp.

No, the writing in Olive Kitteridge, the third offering from former law student Elizabeth Strout and my fourth selection for my year of reading dangerously, is like a good walk. It's purposeful, natural, engaging, and functional; it gets you where you need to go. It is seldom showy but often lovely -and it's a loveliness that unfolds subtly, with the steady tempo of a stroll.

Here's the book's opening paragraph:

"For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy. Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold."

By the end of this paragraph, I was hooked -but gently, so that it took me several more weeks and many more paragraphs to work out how the story was lodged, the ways in which it pierced me. Olive Kitteridge takes the form of a series of interlinked short stories, each viable on its own but echoing in the next, so that the various resonances and cross-currents build into something loud.

That something is Olive, a big, capable, angry woman living an ordinary life in coastal Maine. Olive is at the heart of some stories and at the margin of others; in a few, she barely registers. It's a fractal portrait, a juddering biography, and it is enormously compelling. I was afraid of this book because I'm not especially partial to short stories: I find them too self-conscious, too neat; they try too hard. In a good novel you can feel the characters stretch and breathe; in a good short story, the breath and the reach are almost without fail the author's.

Yet, somehow, Olive Kitteridge splutters to life. There are a few misteps, a few stories in which Ms. Strout's hand shoves you a degree too hard and you feel, for an instant, as if you might fall, but for the most part, you walk. A long way, and sometimes over rough ground, but you end up in the right place.

#3: Twilight

Let it never be said that I don't know how to kick it up a notch! My second pick for my year of reading dangerously was a YA novel. My third pick was a bestselling smash hit major-motion-picture-fodder YA novel about teen vampires.

What's not to dread?

If you haven't heard of Twilight and its successors, you've obviously spent the past four years living under a rock. Mormon housewife Stephanie Meyer has penned, to date, four volumes of this ungodly successful series about a lonely teenager named Bella who moves to a new school and falls in love. Standard stuff, except -get this- her Lothario is an ageless, deathless vampire. Bet you didn't see that one coming.

Twilight's principal effect was to make me long with every fiber of my being for the smart, gutsy heroines of the novels of Robin McKinley. Those girls were embattled but strong, intrepid but thoughtful, and, above all, masters of their own fates. Sure, Bella is smart -smart, gorgeous, soft, pale, virginal and perennially in need of hunky vampire assistance! I counted at least four separate instances of Edward rescuing Bella from mortal peril, and we're only one book into the series. (Number of people/undead rescued by Bella herself= 0).

Twilight panders to every stereotypical female fantasy you can think of. Edward is "God-like" in his handsomeness, smart, cool, popular, older, protective, rich, and powerful. He is irresistibly drawn to Bella (she smells, apparently, like the best dinner *ever*), and ignores every other female. Best of all, he's locked in a holding pattern of longing: since even kissing threatens to make Edward "lose control," he nobly resists pursuing his physical desires, content to watch Bella for endless hours while she sleeps. Ick.

Which is not to say I didn't suck this one dry in less than 24 hours.

#2: An Abundance of Katherines

Librarians go nuts for it, but I've always avoided the Young Adult section like the plague. When I was a bona fide "Young Adult," the last thing I wanted to do was read books a bunch of old people figured I'd like; once I'd lopped off the "young" and lapsed into the general fiction demographic, books about teenagers held all the appeal of freeze-dried meal worms.

Thus, at age 28, my first foray into YA fiction. For my year of reading dangerously, of course: what's more dangerous than bottled angst? The plan was to wet my YA whistle with something allegedly not-awful, so I picked up An Abundance of Katherines, the second novel by Printz Award-winning YA Author John Green (who, coincidentally, lives in Indianapolis. Not that I am a stalker or anything. Nope).

In Katherines, 17-year-old prodigy and anagram fanatic Colin Singleton only dates girls named Katherine. After getting dumped for the nineteenth time by a Katherine, Collin sets out on a consolatory road trip with his best buddy Hassan. The pair make their way to Gutshot, Tennessee, where they encounter a nerd-in-hiding named -unpromisingly- Lindsey, her popular friends, and her powerhouse mother, Hollis. Hijinks, explicated by pleasantly dorky footnotes, ensue.

The Gestalt reminded me of a nice conversation you have with someone on an airplane: enjoyable, engaging in the moment, but ultimately forgettable. What I liked best was that Katherines didn't seem to feel the need slot itself into one of the prefabricated adult fiction subgenres. It was neither wordy/fraught in the manner of a literary novel, or taut/formulaic in the manner of a Romance, a Mystery, etc. Instead there was a generous scope for a silliness, as when Collin wallows in his pain:

"Eventually, he found the bed too comfortable for his state of mind, so he lay down on his back, his legs sprawled across the carpet. He anagrammed "yrs forever" until he found one he liked: sorry fever. And then he lay there in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and wanted to cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus. Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word -forever- and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage

"It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he'd ever gotten. And he'd gotten plenty. It hurt like this until shortly before 10 PM, when a rather fat, hirsute guy of Lebanese descent burst into Colin's room without knocking."

Ah, but danger! I'm supposed to be charting danger, flagging the mines, winkling out the verbal TNT! The principal treachery of YA books is that it only takes one slip, one empathetic step too far, and suddenly you're whisked back 10 years, a pizza-faced geek with seventeen dictionaries and no dates. Or else, like me, you're mortified to confront a neurosis you'd never admitted to in the first place:

"...he couldn't help but feel that he would never be a genius. For as much as he believed Lindsey that what matters to you defines your mattering, he still wanted the Theorem to work, still wanted to be as special as everyone had always told him he was."

Yeah, OK, OK. So I grew up smart and it was hard -actually really excruciatingly hard- to realize I wasn't, after all, going to amount to much.

BOOM.

#1: The Inheritance of Loss

There is a frisson of danger in every reading venture. It sharpens as you grow older and begin to understand that reading does not last forever; you will lose your eyesight or your money or your mind; and eventually some book -the thought of it roils my gut- will be your last.

It's an Apocalyptic notion, the end of reading, and in its wake trot the four horsemen of bibliophiliac anxiety. You will read something bad. You will read something unpleasant. You will read something not as good as something else. You will read something you don't like, and meanwhile your book -the book that will scrub you, turn you inside out, hang you up to dry- remains undiscovered.

It's especially dangerous, then, to pick up a book you're afraid you won't like. This month, for the first installment of my year of reading dangerously, I inched chapter by chapter through The Inheritance of Loss, the Booker Prize-winning novel by the young Anglo-Indian author Kiran Desai.

I knew the writing would be good -the Booker Prize committee is like a really large, really intimidating literary bouncer; you don't get past the velvet rope without gleaming prose- but I had the sense that, as in so many novels of colonial and post-colonial India, bad shit would happen to the characters. And the times are few and far between when I can race eagerly across pages and pages toward the humiliation/rape/torture/death of someone in whom I've invested.

As it turned out, The Inheritance of Loss was dangerous. Just not in the way I'd guessed.

In the most northerly part of India, under the shadow of the Himalayas, seventeen-year-old Sai is raised by her sour, Anglophile grandfather and a rag-tag passel of servants and neighbors, all of whom seem to live their lives splayed between First and Third Worlds. Sai's grandfather, the Judge, was the object of scorn when he studied in England; now he indicts everything and everyone around him. Father Booty, a former Swiss monk, makes cheese and guzzles liquor with his particular (Indian) friend. Mrs. Sen and Lola grow their gardens to bursting but dream of the lives of their children in India and America. The Cook -who is never named- lives for letters from his son, Biju, who's working his way through the restaurant kitchens of America.

Meanwhile, cultural unrest in the remote province intensifies. Tibetan nationalists march in the streets and prey upon non-natives. Sai and her neighbors are caught up in the crisis, and yes, indeed, bad shit happens.

Fortunately, by that time, I didn't care. Desai writes with a finely-tuned ear and a sharp wit- too sharp. Her depictions are on-target; her language is exquisitely wielded; yet, just as a history of violence underlays every pleasure in the province, Desai treats every passage as a weapon, mercilessly flaying her characters until, stripped of all pretensions, all illusions, all dignity, all humanity, they're nothing but lumpen narrative clay.

It's a ruthless novel, a novel that gives no quarter. Every person is revealed as base, every motive as petty, every struggle as shameful. In the novel's final pages, the cook's son, Biju, is torn between returning to India or sticking with his thankless American life. He muses:

"If he continued his life in New York, he might never see his pitaji again. It happened all the time; ten years passed, fifteen, the telegram arrived, or the phone call, the parent was gone and the child was too late. Or they returned and found they'd missed the entire last quarter of a lifetime, their parents like photograph negatives. And there were worse tragedies. After the initial excitement was over, it often became obvious that the love was gone; for affection was only a habit after all, and people, they forgot, or they became accustomed to its absence. They returned and found just the facade; it had been eaten from inside..."

The loss of the habit of affection is, indeed, dangerous. Forget how to love even the most odious of your characters, lose the trick of forgiving them, and a rich, bustling, narrative collapses into a stark account of crime and punishment.

Do yourself a favor: go back a year in the Booker Prize cycle and read John Banville's The Sea, instead. Our books are numbered.

My Year of Reading Dangerously

If I were a cow, I would be the watch cow. You know the watch cow: the one standing at the edge of the herd swishing its tail while all its bovine brethren sleep standing up. The watch cow is on guard. It's nobly alert. Its liquid eye is fixed on you.

Unfortunately, I'm not a cow, so the fact that I have a nervous system tuned like a really sharp e string is just annoying. Danger jangles me. I know it's not lurking in even a fraction of the places I think it is, but I can't help but spend an inordinate amount of time identifying, tracking, and responding to its movements in my life. As long as I'm alert for danger, it can't sneak up on me.

It's in the spirit of the watch cow, then, that I approach My Year of Reading Dangerously. To participate in this blogosphere book challenge, you pick 12 "dangerous" books and finish approximately one a month. They can be banned books, books you're afraid of, books you're loath to tackle without public accountability -just as long as they're in some way threatening.

I've developed a list of 13 fanged, slavering, yellow-eyed books for 2009. 12 I'll read; one will end up being too scary. Once I've sussed out dangers of each, I'll be sure to sound the alarm.

The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
An Abundance of Katherines, John Green
Netherland, Joseph O'Neill
My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories, ed. Jeffrey Eugenides
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
Twilight, Stephanie Meyer
The Ambassadors, Henry James
American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
I See You Everywhere, Julia Glass
Downtown Owl, Chuck Klosterman
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Elizabeth McCracken
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson