If anyone who knows me from Synergy ’06′-’07 is reading this blog, then you might perhaps have heard me expound (in a rather drunken fashion) on the idea that eventually became the genesis (five years later) of this story. Vive la Darcy.

Oh, also, my story “What Everyone Remembers” is up at Clarkesworld. I think that I like this story more than anything else I’ve ever published, so I encourage you to read it.

It’s not only fun to make friends with delightful new people, it’s also fun to make new acquaintances. It’s nice to see someone every month or every two months and have a nice chat with them and not necessarily feel the need to see them more often. It feels very balanced.

With regards to my work life, things could not be better. I’m truly fortunate in my consulting schedule. If I could keep doing this amount of work for the rest of my life, I would. Unfortunately, my situation is inherently unstable, so I imagine that the day will eventually come when I’ll need to seek more traditional employment (or, at least, when I’ll need to hustle to find some alternate revenue streams). Still, for the last year, things have been ideal on that front.

Also, I quit smoking, which is pretty good. Woohoo for those seven additional years of life!

It’s been a good year, and it’s taught me a lot about myself. This year, I’ve come to realize that nothing new and transformative is really going to happen to me. I’ll have many more years. I’ll have good years and I’ll have bad years. I’ll have moments of joy and moments of despair. However, my future is going to be made of basically the same sort of stuff as the past. In the years to come, I might change significantly as a person, and my setting and situation will certainly change quite a bit, but the types of feelings I have are not going to change.

Basically, I don’t think that I’m ever going to be sadder in the future than the saddest I’ve been in the past, and I don’t think I’ve ever going to be happier in the future than the happiest I’ve been in the past. There are no higher peaks and there are no lower valleys.

So if I take this year as a model for how happy I am able to feel, then I am fairly hopeful for the future. I would love if I was as happy in every future year as I was this past year. This past year certainly had some darker periods, weeks and months where I felt quite pessimistic, but these were short-lived and manageable. Mostly, it was a time of contentment, punctuated by days (or even weeks) of outright joy.

Furthermore, I don’t even think I’d mind if all my future years were fractally similar to the year that just passed. If I never achieved artistic success and never found romantic fulfillment, I think I’d still be content as long as I was able to spend my days reading, writing, and hanging out with people that I enjoy.

However, when I’ve had good years in the past, I’ve always made a botch of them by attempting to hold onto them for too long. I’m not going to do that this time. I’m well aware that one can’t simply replicate a good year. Good years only come when you are alive to the present, and when you do one’s best to cultivate the good that appears in your year (rather than pining for good qualities that are absent)

Still, it can’t hurt to remain cognizant of the essential elements of (this) good year (freedom and good people) and to attempt to seek them out whenever I can.

This year, I increased the number of capsule reactions (1-2 paragraph write-ups) of books I read. Thus, I ended up writing about way more books than I ever have before. All told, I wrote 123 books. I’ve listed them below, along with links to the relevant blog posts. In a surprisingly large number of these cases (particularly Working, Burmese Days, Fun Home, and Frankenstein), the links go to full blog posts that discuss the work in question. In most of the others, the link goes to a page that aggregated my reactions to many books. Finally, some of the book-links go to blog posts that are mostly about other things, where I also off-handedly mentioned book and my reaction to it.

My Favorites (Amongst The Books I Blogged About)

The Other Books I Blogged About (Which Were Mostly Pretty Good Too)

Fifteen Other Books That I Read This Year And Also Liked Alot

After assembling the above lists, I realized that I had also read a bunch (100+) other books and not posted about them. In some cases (as for Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!) this was because I couldn’t think of something interesting to say about them. In other cases (like Orwell’s Fifty Essays and Charles Yu’s How To Live Safely In A Science-Fictional Universe) I had tons of stuff to say, but I never got around to sitting down and writing it all down. In any case, these unwritten-about books are not unloved.  Some of my favorite books of the year are in the below category (particularly Jeffrey Eugenides’ Virgin Suicides, on which I would paste a gold-star, if I had any).

Even that seemed like way too much work, actually, so I decided that I was just going to make a copy-editing pass-through and then send it out. I figured that novels really stand or fall based on their totality, and that a little stylistic roughness wasn’t going to hurt the novel.

Then, in July, a friend of mine visited and asked to read the novel. She’s a huge reader of YA and someone who I could trust to be both discerning and sympathetic, so I deviated from my normal practice (of never letting any of my friends read my unpublished work). When she finished it, she said the requisite number of nice things, but when I talked to her a bit more, it seemed like she felt that the beginning was pretty weak.

That’s what I’d been afraid of. Something about the beginning was really nagging at me. I decided that even if the rest of the book wasn’t going to get much more editing (except to ferret out typos), I should at least polish up the beginning a little. By this time, I was taking a writing class taught by Nick Mamatas (at the Berkeley Writer’s Salon) and I asked him to look at the first three chapters. Actually, I primarily wanted him to look at them so he could tell me what genre label I should market my novel under (you put the novel’s genre front and center in your query letters, usually), but he also gave me some really good advice on how I could structure the beginning.

The day after I got comments, I had an epiphany while I was in bed. I realized that one major character could be eliminated entirely, and that doing so would substantially improve the first third of the novel. This epiphany both energized and exhausted me. There was no question that I was going to do it, but at the same time, I didn’t really want to do it right then.

When the class ended, I spent a few weeks revising the stories I’d written, and then I tackled the novel. First I wrote a synopsis of the first nine chapters of the novel (so I’d know what I was deleting), then I pulled up my last draft of it (the one from the end of June), and selected the first third (about 22,000 words from a 75,000 word novel) and deleted them.

I spent about ten days (from October 7^th to 16^th) rewriting the first nine chapters. It came out really well, and I was quite satisfied with it. During the rest of October (in addition to other writing projects), I went through the rest of the novel and made sure it agreed with the new beginning (and made all the other major changes I needed to make).

After that, I was possessed by a kind of madness. I’d put in too much time. It wasn’t an eight day novel anymore. Now it had to be as good as I could make it. So I decided to make a pass for style. A few hours into this pass, something weird activated in my mind, and I started cutting words like crazy. On a paragraph and scene level there was not much that was extraneous. Nor did I cut very many entire sentences. Instead, I just rewrote sentences to make them shorter. At the end of the day, I’d worked for about four hours to cut 600 words. It was mesmerizing.

For the next twelve days or so, I followed that pattern. During four hours, I’d go through about eight or nine pages (twice). The first time, I did really micro-level cuts. The second time, I’d see if there was any obvious chunks of fat that I’d been blinded to. That’s when I cut out whole paragraphs and sentences (I know, it seems like I should’ve done sentence-level second, but that’s not the way it worked out).  At the end of four hours, I’d usually have cut an entire page of the novel.

Halfway through this cutting-room march, I got kind of worried that maybe I was eviscerating the tone of the novel and making everything sound very clipped and stilted and featureless. I tried reading and reading the sections I’d cut yesterday, but I couldn’t perceive the distance. However, I’d gone too far and made too many cuts. I’d also been making numerous tiny substantive changes along with the cutting, and there was no way to separate out the substantive from the stylistic. I was stuck with the cutting, unless I wanted to roll back entirely to a previous version. And the novel couldn’t be half stripped-down and half verbose. That’d be absurd. Instead, I continued grimly onward. It was kind of scary, but very satisfying. By the end of this pass, the novel was down more than 7,000 words from its previous draft (down to about 67,000 words).

That was in mid-November. After taking a week or so to recover, I engaged in the most incredibly, dreadfully boring part of the whole endeavor. I downloaded a program that reads out text (NaturalReader) and had it read the novel to me while I followed along. I found a typo on maybe every other page (much less than I thought there’d be). This part took more than a week. It was utterly miserable. I don’t think I’ve ever been as terribly bored by any other writing-related task.

And then the novel was done. A few days ago I wrote a draft query and sent out a novel query, just so I could say that the novel had been submitted this year (though I still intend to revise my query a little bit).

In summary, my revision included:

• 3 weeks – One passthrough to clean up the rough edges from the eight-day novel-writing binge and make everything cohere and actually look like a real, completed novel
• 3 weeks – One passthrough to totally rewrite the beginning and then make the rest of the novel agree with the new beginning, as well as fixing continuity problems and other niggling little things
• 2 weeks – One passthrough to  cut 10% of the novel’s word-count, fix any remaining stylistic problems, and take a final look at all the substantive issues
• 1 week – One passthrough for copy-editing.

Last year, I surpassed every writing-related benchmark of my life, except for two (most words in one day and most words in one month). Today’s blog post was going to be about how I’ve surpassed last year in every benchmark except the one which is perhaps the most important: quality of sales. As of yesterday, I hadn’t yet made a sale that exceeded last June’s sale to Clarkesworld in goodness.

I mean, Nature and Daily Science Fiction are great markets, but (rightly or wrongly) they don’t receive any critical attention. My Clarkesworld story got more reviews and notice than anything else I’d ever published in my life.

Furthermore, I hadn’t yet sold a story that I’d written this year. With the exception of one Nature story, all of this year’s sales were written last summer. I’d started to worry that maybe my stories were getting worse.

The anxiety was getting pretty heavy, and it made me realize that no sale is ever really going to satisfy me. Even if I did sell stories to all the big magazines, I’d immediately start worrying about how none of them had been chosen for Year’s Best anthologies or been nominated for awards. Even if I do sell my novel, its sales will inevitably disappoint me. Even if I do get awards, I’ll worry about the years when I don’t get them. A writer is always going to find something to worry about.

It was a lot to think about, and it made me start to do some pretty heavy thinking about how I was going to build some psychological defenses against this kind of disappointment

But then I got an acceptance from Clarkesworld yesterday. My story “What Everyone Remembers” will appear in the January 2012 issue. And this story is recent. I wrote it in July of this year. I’ve had four near-misses with Clarkesworld this year (stories held for 20+ days and then rejected) as well as ten or so less encouraging rejections, so it’s good to hit with them again.

The only bad part about this is that now I have to wait six months before I can submit again to this really good magazine that’s demonstrated that it really likes my stories.

In other news, I also sent out my first novel query today. The novel is completely and totally done. Nothing on hell or earth is going to make me revise it further. The query might still need some polishing (ugh, and the synopsis still needs to be written). But otherwise, this is the end of my journey with this novel. I’m happy to have finished and submitted a novel, even if I am dreading the dozens of rejections that will inevitably arrive.

Finally, this year in writing has been really good. I’m attaching a table below that shows my yearly progress (with the caveat that my word-count includes words spent on revising, so it self-consistent but not consistent with other peoples’ yearly totals, i.e. my 2011 total of 500,000 really does represent more than three times more effort for me as 2009’s total of 150,000, but it does not necessarily represent twice as much effort as your total of, say, 250,000).

*Statistics are through 12/19/2012; I hope to hit 500,000 before the year is done.

**Prior to 2010, I didn’t track when I finished revising a story and submitted it for the first time.

Additionally, the best writing day of my life was June 7^th of this year (the day I finished the first draft of my novel), with 11,450 words. My best writing week was the week beginning on May 30^th, when I wrote 53,050 words (the first 5/7ths of my novel).

I made seven short story sales this year: two each to Daily SF and Nature, and one each to Clarkesworld, Brain Harvest, and Polluto. Of these, four have been published.

I also completed my first novel revision this year (which I will talk more about tomorrow).

In case it’s not obvious, my new productivity this year is largely a result of me moving to California and having to put less time into my job (I work long-distance now). I think that last year I pretty much hit the limit of what I could do with a full-time office job (I was writing about 2 hours a day). Now, I still have many 2-hour writing days, but I also have 4, 5, and 6 hour days (which I never had before).

I think the best things to come out of this year were two writing techniques that I’ve already discussed: one-week novel writing and iterative short story writing. One week novel writing is great because it only takes a week…and then you have a novel.

But iterative short story writing is what has really revolutionized my writing. Because I rewrite each story 3-5 times now, I’ve stopped writing a number of different kinds of bad stories. The most notable of these is the story that sort of slinks along for 3,000 words and then quickly wraps up in a way that’s both abrupt and predictable. Now, I take the time to figure out what my story is actually about. I don’t settle for the first ending (or beginning) that occurs to me.

This has resulted in a new way of thinking about writing difficulties. Now, when I am having trouble with a story, I don’t spend time trying to think it through (which was often a waste of time, since stories don’t come from the thinking parts of the brain). Instead, I just write my way through it. My cognitive input in stories is limited to discrimination: it’s just me saying, over and over again, “This doesn’t work,” until I finally write something that does work.

I don’t think that the resulting stories are a quantum leap better than the ones that I was writing before (although these stories are never as awful as the worst of what I wrote before). However, I do think that I had reached a plateau with my old technique. My new technique will eventually result in stories that are much better than anything the old technique could’ve produced.

My concern for most of this year was structure. In the upcoming year, I think I want to focus more on tone and language. My language feels too thin and flat to me. When I love some other author’s story, I usually love it from the very first sentence, because that sentence distills down everything that is good about the story. I don’t think that people get that feeling very often from my own stories. I want each of my stories to construct its own dreamscape and to describe that dreamscape using its own rhetoric.

Something Happened by Joseph Heller – I really liked Catch-22, when I finally got around to reading it last year. This book is nothing like Catch-22. For starters, it’s not really very funny. It’s a book that’s hard to describe. It’s a 1950s businessman (basically Don Draper) monologuing for 200,000 words about his life (how he’s driven to cheat on his wife, how his daughter hates him, how he’s worried that his son is growing to grow up and lose his vitality). The reminisces are not chronological and none of the book takes place in scene, except for short snippets of reported dialogue. The narration is manic and insane. It sounds like a man ranting to you while under the influence of heavy doses of amphetamines. But it’s also hypnotic. It’s a man trying his best (and failing) to gain some understanding of his own life.

Dropsie Avenue by Will Eisner - A pretty awesome graphic novel covering two hundred or so years in the life of a street in the Bronx. You see ethnic groups jockey with each other and then move on, giving way to the next group. You see the architecture and the zoning and the economics of the place change. In its portrayal of any given era and group it might be a little simplified (and sometimes seems to come close to stereotyping), but the epic sweep of the thing makes the book worthwhile.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens – It’s surprising how little personality David Copperfield (the character) actually has. The entire book is fairly episodic, and the only real throughline is David Copperfield’s involvement with each episode and character, but it’s not easy to get a grip on Copperfield’s character. It’s hard to say anything about what kind of person he is. In fact, when Copperfield becomes a novelist (about 2/3rds of the way through the novel), it kind of comes as a surprise, because there had never seemed to be anything of the artist about him. Still, this book ultimately succeeds because of David Copperfield’s narrative voice. There’s something very kind and worldly wise about him. The book is filled with memorable caricatures: the penurious Mr. Micawber; the scolding Betsey Trotwood; and David’s first wife, the silly Dora. But they only come alive under the kindness of Copperfield’s tone, which is really just a distilled version of Dickens’ overall narrative outlook. Under a harsher gaze, the characters all would’ve seemed like scoundrels and fools, but the virtue of this book is that, even though it’s about really harsh stuff like being an orphan and losing your home and having to work in a bottle factory, it never descends into horror.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson – I’m not sure why Shirley Jackson has become so indelibly associated with speculative horror (other than the vaguely fantastic nature of the short story “The Lottery”), since her work doesn’t seem notably stranger than other writers of grotesques, like William Faulkner or Flannery O’Conner. Still, regardless of genre distinctions, I really like her two novels (both this one and The Haunting Of Hill House). Both her novels start off very nice, and then become terrifying, particularly this one. Her talent is developing situations that you really care about—families and communities that seem like they should continue on in merry eternity­—before brutally destroying them.

Burmese Days by George Orwell- This is kind of a speculative novel. It’s what George Orwell imagined his life would’ve become if he had never left the Burmese Civil Service. It’s a naturalistic novel about an 40 year old civil servant who’s living a life of quiet desperation: he’s hated by the natives and by his fellow civil servants alike. The novel is filled with Orwell’s eye for detail with his satirical powers. I really have no idea how Orwell does what he does. Every page of this novel so sharp, and all his character portraits are so clear and severe.

Just Kids by Patti Smith – Patti Smith’s memoir about rollicking around in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe when she was in her twenties got a huge amount of favorable press coverage when it came out last year. I think this is because book critics are huge nerds, and they really love it when they get to interview rock stars (although I am still not quite sure how much of a rock star Patti Smith is, I’d never heard her music before reading this book). Still, if you love stories about 23 year old bohemians, then you cannot dislike this book.

In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck – I think this is the fourth book I read this year that had a strike in it (the others were Germinal, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Jungle). But this one was the best of the lot. In it, a (Communist) Party organizer goes out to California’s central valley to foment a fruit-picker’s strike. It’s almost a documentary novel, it’s all about the give and take of the strike: the tactics, shifting movements, and compromises. There’s a lot of fire in this novel, but also a lot of loss. Probably a better strike novel than any of the others, because it’s not heroic, but that also makes it kind of disquieting at times. Steinbeck was really schizophrenic. It’s so strange that the person who wrote novels like this and Grapes Of Wrath could also write novels that idealize working class life in the way that Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat did.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – This book is by a hedge fund manager who claims that we’re terrible about predicting the future because none of our projections allow for ‘black swan’ events, which are huge, discontinuous events that change everything (like, 9/11, or the Harry Potter phenomenon). That part is pretty interesting and even somewhat convincing. What’s more fun, though, is the narrative tone of the book. The author comes off sounding like a megalomaniac and an amazing dick. He sounds like such an asshole that he almost feels fictional. It’s as if Taleb was writing a very experimental novel where a fictional persona expounds upon a science-fictional idea. It’s a really engaging book.

Candy Girl by Diablo Cody – This is Academy-Award winning screenwriter Diablo Cody’s memoir about her year as a Minneapolis stripper. I was really sick when I read this book, okay, but I still enjoyed it. It goes into all the proper anthropological detail about what being a stripper is like…and I am sucker for that kind of stuff.

Paying For It by Chester Brown – There are a surprising number of graphic novels about the author’s sexual dysfunction, but I think this own stands out even in that crowd. For years (decades?) the author has been patronizing prostitutes exclusively (as in, he has not been pursuing any other kind of sexual relationship) and in the course of this pursuit, the author has developed all these theories about why patronizing prostitutes is a sensible alternative (for people like him) to romance. The book covers his odyssey, beginning with his first visit and ending with him happily ensconced in an exclusive (though still monetary) relationship with one prostitute. It ends with fifty pages of appendixes in which he details his views on prostitution. Oh, and for some weird artistic reason, he never shows the faces of any of the prostitutes he visits! They are always turned away, or their faces are hidden. The book is really bizarre, but it was also really good.

The Professor’s House by Willa Cather – This is a series of three linked novellas that doesn’t sound like it ought to cohere at all. The first is about an elderly professor reflecting on his family and on the son-in-law (who died in the war) who was the only person he felt close to. The second is a flashback to the summer that the son-in-law spent excavating a New Mexico plateau that held a Native American city. The third is about the professor’s lonely summer without his wife and daughter (they’re vacationing in Paris). And yet, somehow, it all does come together. It’s about excitement, and the intellectual life, and loss. It has a very wistful tone, which avoids being cloying because it’s broken up with the very exciting, adventurous middle. Also, maybe I just love Willa Cather so much that I can even enjoy her minor novels.

Portrait of the Addict As A Young Man by William Clegg – Literary agent Bill Clegg’s memoir about a two month $70,000 crack cocaine binge. I don’t know why this was so entertaining. I think it’s because the dreamlike tedium of the narrative kind of echoed the tedium of the binge: the endless succession of hits in an endless succession of five-star hotel rooms. Also, I was really sick when I read it.

Local by Brian Wood – If there’s anything I’ve learned this year, it’s that I am a sucker for graphic novels about shiftless twentysomethings. In each of this series of twelve comics, the main character, Megan, ages by one year and moves to a new city (and grows up a little). There’s one about her having a horrible roommate in New York and one about her being a fairly creepy movie theater clerk in Nova Scotia and…well…if you like this sort of thing, you’ll really like this series: it is wanksty early-20s at their most elemental.

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey – Reading this book made me realize what I dislike about biographies. They’re too long. You know, I’m only going to read maybe (at most) 10,000 books in the whole rest of my life. It seems like a huge waste to devote a whole .01% of that to learning about a single person. What have all these famous dead people ever done for me? Why do they deserve so much of my headspace? This book neatly solves that problem through the novella form autobiography. I’d probably never read a full book about Florence Nightingale, but I will definitely read a novella about her. There’s definitely room for biographies at a length somewhere above a Wikipedia entry and somewhere below a full book.

Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert – This title makes the book sound like a self-help guide or a memoir, but it’s actually a sedate work of science popularization. This is a nonfiction book about why we’re unable to accurately assess what things will make us happy (and then achieve those things) because our brains basically our imaginations are not very accurate. When we are asked to imagine how we will feel in a given situation, we feel like come up with a pretty good simulacrum of that feeling, but actually, we’re totally wrong. In fact, the book is kind of pessimistic about whether human beings will ever (or should ever) overcome these failures of imagination. However, the most important thing to know about this book is that it’s one of the best written works of non-fiction I’ve ever read. There’s a certain non-fictional tone—one exemplified by humorous political books (like those of Michael Moore or Al Franken) or by travelogues for sedate people (like those of Bill Bryson) or science popularization books for teens (like those of Isaac Asimov) – that I find to be very cutesy and twee, and this book has a tone which is very much like that tone, except it is exciting and sharp. On a prose level, the book continually upsets your expectations (and it is very funny). It was only after finishing the book that I read (on the back flap) that the author (who is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard) has also published stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Does anyone know anything about that? I would really like to read those stories.

 Tell Them Who I Am by Elliot Liebow – The author of this book was an anthropologist (the head of the NIH’s National Institute for Mental Health) who was diagnosed with terminal cancer, quit his job, realized he wasn’t going to die, started volunteering at a women’s homeless shelter, and ended up writing a participant-observer study about the shelter’s homeless women. It’s a very powerful and fascinating book about the day to day lives of these homeless womens: how they spend their time, their friendships, their romantic relationships, their monetary situation, and all kinds of other stuff. As a bonus, it is annotated with footnotes by two of the women (so they’re literally speaking at you and sometimes disagreeing with the author). It was really cool. I don’t know how generalizable the study is, but it’s always cool to get a glimpse into someone’s life, even if it’s just twenty women who lived on the streets, twenty years ago.

 Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington – When I read this memoir, last December, I had tons of things to say about it. I had reams and reams of quotations marked out for the blog post I was gonna write. But then my Kindle crashed and I never got around to it. The first third of this book is about Booker T. Washington’s own struggle. It’s a fascinating portrait of a person and a people who are only one generation out of slavery (Washington was born a slave and was freed by the thirteenth amendment when he was like three or four). Washington got his education at a black teacher’s college and then went to go run his own college (The Tuskeegee Institute) and develop his own theories regarding the further socioeconomic development of his race (which are set out in the rest of the book). It’s well known that Washington did not view things the way that people do now. In some ways, his writings are kind of unbelievable. At one point he claims that he had never had a single experience of racism from a white Southerner. I wonder to what extent he self-censored himself because he knew he was writing for a mostly white audience. Still, there’s a tremendous moral force in his writing. In my recollection, every page of the book contained something exciting, beautiful, or startling. He reminds me of Gandhi (another great man who had some very simplistic views).

 The Organization Man by William Whyte – This was Whyte’s 1950s indictment of the way that modern American men were becoming homogenous and risk-averse. This is truly an obsolete document. In 2011, there are no more Organization Men. Nowadays, no one has job security. Nowadays, sucking up the boys upstairs and expressing only the right opinions and living in only the right neighborhoods will not get you nearly the rewards that it gave you in the fifties. Still, this book is very interesting as a historical document. It’s a portrait of what can happen to the human spirit in a very affluent society. I have no doubt that if the good days ever come again (and, economically speaking, the fifties were very good days, with huge growth in wages, GDP, and opportunity), that we will start to see some of these conformity pressures once more.

 Germinal by Emile Zola – I kept meaning to write a comprehensive post about Emile Zola. So far this year, I’ve read six of his novels, and each one has impressed me with its grotesqueness and power. Germinal is the one that I read first, though, and it’s still my favorite. This novel is about a labor strike at a coal mine in 1860s France. Most of Zola’s novels are about how human beings are horrible and wicked and love to do terrible things to each other, but they paint that world in tremendously grand and heroic strokes. The typical Zola is a series of grand set-pieces: one chapter will be a mob riot; another will be a series of workers excavating for coal deep underground; another will be three morally bankrupt children picking flowers. He’s one of the few naturalist-type authors who is as exciting for his artistry as for his content. No one writes crowd scenes like Zola. And, although it still ends in death and despair, Germinal is actually a lot more hopeful than most of Zola’s novels. At least this one shows the heroism in united action (although the typical sexual and moral sordidness of Zola-world is also on display).

I can’t tell whether the final book is actually better than all of the previous books or if I only enjoyed it more because the previous books had taught me how to read Proust, but I think this book contains three of the most delightful set-pieces in the whole septology.

Firstly, roughly the first third of the book contains a discussion of Paris during war-time (and the activities of some of the characters during the war). I’ve always thought of Proust as being a very domestic sort of novelist, but he’s surprised me time and again. Throughout the series, he devotes considerable attention to political matters (such as the Dreyfus affairs) and technological ones (such as lengthy meditations on first the telephone and then the airplane). But, considering that he began the novel during peace-time, in 1907, I think it showed a lot of courage for him to incorporate the war into the work, and I think he does a really good job of using it to start wrapping up a lot of his threads about patriotism, nationalism, and masculinity.

The next fourth of the book balloons outward from when the narrator steps on an uneven pair of cobblestones and immediately remembers another uneven pair of cobblestones mentioned earlier in the novel (I know that this kind of seems like a joke about navel-gazing French novels, but that’s really how it goes down) and realizes that in the circumscribed span of time between the two events—the present moment and the event he’s remembering—he’s found the grand theme of the literary work that he’s been thinking about writing for the past 3500 pages (the narrator is an aspiring writer).

The next sixty pages basically contain Proust’s guide to the themes and aims of the book that you’re holding in your hand. I’m sure I’m going to garble this, but he basically writes about how we live primarily in our own memories, and how, in remembering, we resurrect the past, but we also fill it with a kind of goldenness that didn’t exist at the time. He writes about how he can be filled with exhilaration by the memory of his childhood, even though it was actually filled with boredom and anxiety. That’s because the moment is kind of a mishmash of sensory perception, but in our memory, we craft a sort of more idealized, more artistic moment. We select the stimuli we will remember, and we create something beautiful out of our raw impressions. He thinks that the purpose of his literary work will be to capture these intervals of time and allow the reader to not only live within them, but also teach the reader how to recapture his (or her) own past and own memories and reanimate those as well.

The rest of the book is given over to a description of a dinner party where Proust highlights how everyone has aged by describing them as if they are actors who are wearing makeup. It’s one of the best 100 page dinner parties of a book that has at least six or seven 100 page dinner parties. You get to see what everyone is doing and how they ended up. You get to see characters whom you met as youths and see how they’ve been transformed into old women.

For me, the prime joy of this series was always in its characterization. Proust doesn’t pay attention to any of the normal ways of making a character arcs. His characters don’t progress from one goal to another, from one personality quirk to another. Instead, his characters are discontinuous. He spends fifty pages sketching a static portrait of a character, and then, two books later, he’ll spend another fifty pages sketching a portrait of that character is mostly, though not entirely, different.

Proust is the only novelist who shows people from multiple angles. Like, you know how when serial killers get caught, their wives and neighbors will often describe them as alright guys? Well, that’s not just because they’re putting up a façade. It’s also because we are simply different people at different times and places. That’s why Proust can show someone like his maid Francoise as being devoted to correcting anything that might even slightly inconvenience him, and then later show her as being selfish and bitter and cruel. Even though they can be contradictory, his portraits retain enough overlap, and resonate strongly enough with each other, that they never seem arbitrary.

I don’t think any other novelist has yet done anything like Proust. In a way, it’s kind of demoralizing, because it exposes how much of ordinary novel format is a kind of consensus fiction. We know that humans are really much more complicated than the way they’re shown in novels, but we accept that as “reality” just because we’ve been taught to.

Still, his work is not something that can be followed up or built upon. It’s hard to imagine imitating its structure. Actually, I’m surprised that even Proust managed to do it. This is the kind of work that seems like it ought to be forever unfinished. However, even though he never managed to edit the last four volumes, I think that the series comes to a satisfactory conclusion. Part of me would like to see someone try to give the Proustian treatment to something other than fin de siècle French high society, but I don’t think that anyone else can or will try.

Anyways, when I started reading Swann’s Way, I was like, “Holy shit, I am going to have to read all the rest of these now, aren’t I?” and when I read the next book In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower and saw how interconnected it was with Swann’s Way, I realized that I was going to have to read the whole series in a pretty short timespan, if I wasn’t going to forget who everyone was. So I did, and it was pretty decent. If anyone wants my tips on reading the series, I offer them as follows:

·         I have absolutely no opinion on which translation is the right one to read. I chose the more recent Penguin translations because I had a suspicion that the Moncrieff translations (from the 30s) might bowdlerize the homosexual content (which I was particularly interested in). The last two volumes of the Penguin translation are not available (due to copyright issues) in the U.S. I ordered them from amazon.co.uk because I figured that I might as well.

• If you’re not sure whether you’ll like the series, then I recommend that you read the middle section of Swann’s Way (entitled Swann In Love) first. It’s about 200 pages long. If you like it, you’ll probably like the rest. It’s kind of the whole series in miniature.
• You can’t really skim Proust, since it doesn’t go anywhere. There’s no point rushing to reach a destination that won’t give you any satisfaction when you reach it, since the main pleasures of the book don’t arise from resolution of plot threads or character development. Whatever pleasure you derive from each page is pretty much it. The sum is not much greater than the parts. However, I do recommend that you don’t read too closely (unless that kind of reading comes naturally to you, of course). The writing is very dense, and it’s easy to read and reread the same passage, but I didn’t find that very rewarding. I found that whatever I didn’t quite get on my first read-through of a page was unlikely to reveal itself on a subsequent read-through of the same page. I tried, as much as possible, to read it like a regular book, and to keep going through it at a reasonable clip, finishing each book in a week, at most.
• Read the books in rapid succession. Even ten months between the first and last book was almost too much. There were allusions in the final book to events that I didn’t remember from previous books.
• Don’t worry if you get bored sometimes. Sometimes I’d be reading the book and I’d start thinking about something else, and I’d read several pages without retaining a word of them. I don’t think the solution to boredom is to keep re-reading the boring part until you remember it; I think the solution is to read onwards until you reach an interesting part.