2005 Recap

There was only one new year's resolution, a tripartite goal between Lindsey, Davey, and I: read 52 books this year.

I'm afraid the finale was not a trifecta finish. One stipulation was that books over 400 pages should count as two (or was it 200 pages?), but I read so much children's literature that I don't think that's fair.

In conclusion: I definitely did not read 52 books this year. In the spirit of the Polysyllabic Spree, here's what I did read. Boys? E-mail me your final tallies and I'll post 'em. The escapist tendencies of my literary taste are a little embarassing; judge not, my friends.

By order read, re-reads annotated with an (R)

1. The Outlaw Sea, by William Langewiesche
2. I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe
3. Delta Wedding, by Eudora Welty
4. Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov
5. Edisto, by Padgett Powell
6. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
7. Cuba Diaries, by Isadora Tattlin
8. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
9. Naked, by David Sedaris
10. The Magus, by John Fowles
11. Edisto Revisited, by Padgett Powell
12. They Marched Into Sunlight, by David Maraniss
13. Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson
14. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
15. Dog of the South, by Charles Portis
16. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
17. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
18. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling
19. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, ibid.
20. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, ibid.
21. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (R)
22. Glamorama, by Bret Easton Ellis
23. Miami, by Joan Didion
24. Up For Grabs: A trip through time and space in the sunshine state, by John Rothchild
25. Norwood, by Charles Portis
26. A Place to Come To, by Robert Penn Warren
27. Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace
28. Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis
29. A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby
30.The Elementary Particles, by Michel Houllebecq
31. The Silver Chair, by C.S. Lewis (R)
32. Bright Lights Big City, by Jay Macinerny
33. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris
34. Pastoralia, by George Saunders (R)
35. The Brief and Terrifying Reign of Phil, by George Saunders
36. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris
37. Prince Caspian, C.S. Lewis (R)
38. Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh
39. Jarhead, by Anthony Swofford
40. A Room With a View, by E.M. Forster
41. Howard's End, by E.M. Forster
42. The Black Dahlia, by James Ellroy
43. Persuasion, by Jane Austin

If you wanted to count the Wolfe, Dickens, Fowles (3?), Ellis, etc. as two each then I almost made it. But then the C.S. Lewis shit would have to count as like half a book. One must keep up, if only slightly, with current events, at the sufferance of a simple resolve.

Also:
Favorite 2005 release goes to Nick Hornby for A Long Way Down, which made no critic's list but was so good.
Favorite old book: E.M. Forster ties with himself.
Favorite not-so-literary book: Snow Crash.
Genius, as usual: Oblivion.

If Penguin wasn't stupid they would sell these separately. I saw these at Paul Smith and tried to buy just one. ("On Forgetting," Freud.) If I could I would buy the whole thing.

Christmas recap

We went to New Hampshire. There we ate mucho chocolate, cookies, ham, brussel sprouts, turnips, homemade bread, biscuits, cabbage, wine, coffee, borscht, pirogies, latkes, homemade applesauce, oysters, nog, and geese. Not goose, but geese. I returned to Miami laden with chocolate and cookies, and will maintain a steady diet of chocolate and cookies until the next family gathering where my mom/aunts spend eight hours a day in the kitchen producing obscene amounts of food.

The award for best present goes to Stephen, with the Minipops book. When not engaged in a ridiculously complicated German board game called Puerto Rico we were all hunched around this book, making a list of the ones we could get. We did okay on everything but the obscure British bands, and the BBC sitcom characters, which were impossible.

The illustrator, Craig Johnson, has a very nice site featuring his account of the MTV VMAs mostly at the Setai. Don't be a jerk like me: it loads fine, it just scrolls horizontally.

Today I got a call from People's Miami correspondent. Do I want to go to Jaime Foxx's New Year's party at the Delano? Well yes, sir. I would. Quite. If I'm going to welcome 2006 with strangers, I might as well get a free dinner at the Blue Door out of it. This probably won't work out, which is why I'm writing about it now.

Philip Pullman! Kitties!

Christmas cheer from Christopher Hitchens.

A revealing mark of their insecurity is their rage when public places are not annually given over to religious symbolism, and now, their fresh rage when palaces of private consumption do not follow suit...But there are millions of well-appointed buildings all across the United States, most of them tax-exempt and some of them receiving state subventions, where anyone can go at any time and celebrate miraculous births and pregnant virgins all day and all night if they so desire. These places are known as "churches," and they can also force passersby to look at the displays and billboards they erect and to give ear to the bells that they ring. In addition, they can count on numberless radio and TV stations to beam their stuff all through the ether. If this is not sufficient, then god damn them. God damn them everyone.

This article from the Guardian about Art Basel summed it up best, I think.

If Venice is about the artists, and discreet Basel about dealers and collectors, brash Miami is about money. It is money that you can not only taste in the air; you can hear it discussed, and see it being spent all day long. The effect is strangely distorting. Twenty-four hours in, and you feel a touch under-dressed. Forty-eight hours in, and you wonder WHY you don't own any Chanel couture. Thirty-six hours in, and you no longer turn clammy when you're told the price of things. "It's $68,000," the bald guy in the Prada suit will tell you. "Hmm, not bad," you think, aware that the woman with the stretched face to your left has just written a cheque for six times as much.

Uh-Oh

Police raid on the apartment next to me. Everybody arrested. I'm up late working on a story and all of a sudden it's cop city on my stoop. Of my neighbor's eighteen-year-old girlfriend one little piggie says to me: "Too bad. That girl was cute. She had a nice waist." Ugh.

The drugs! They don't pay! Poor neighbors. They're broke and never have jobs and listen to bad house music, but they're my friends.

FINALLY

I can't believe I've been in Miami nearly six months and I only just now saw Gloria Estefan. She was in an Italian restaurant where I had dinner, with a long, long table full of guests that burst into Happy Birthday for a pleasantly nerdy preteen with big glasses. Miami Sound Machine, go!