Books of 2008, such as they were

I complained last summer about my reading habits, saying I was reading "fairly undemanding non-fiction books, mostly about movies or music." Things didn't get better in the second half of the year. I used to read a wide range of fiction: literary, popular, midlist (the stuff in between), fantasy, SF, mysteries, and gay novels. Now, apparently, I read only light non-fiction about the movies and music that I consume when I'm not reading.

I am just geeky enough that I keep a blank book journal of everything I read, with comments. Back in 2002, to pick a year at random, I read 74 books: 45 non-fiction, 29 fiction. 8 were mysteries, 6 were SF/fantasy/horror, and 17 were about movies. In 2008, I read 45 books: 37 non-fiction, 8 fiction. I didn't bother to do a genre breakdown, but I can tell you that I only read one mystery, The War Against Miss Winter by Kathryn Miller Haines. I didn't finish The Underground City, the WWII novel I'd been reading back in August when I made my last book post here. And I didn't bother to make a best-of list for the year; everything seemed so-so. If I had to pick standouts, I'd pick The Star Machine, a book about the old star-making machinery of the movie studios in the 30's and 40's, Pictures at a Revolution, about the movies of 1967, and Bright Boulevards Bold Dreams, about black Hollywood of the 30's and 40's.

I also enjoyed Reagan: The Hollywood Years by Marc Eliot. I like Reagan's scrappy little B-movies of the 40's, especially the Brass Bancroft series, and this book was stuffed with information about his acting career and the womanizing he did back then. The author has an irritating habit of including lots of movie info and gossip that isn't germane to the subject--he seems to include it just to show that he knows his stuff--but as a light movie-star bio, it's one of the better ones I've read lately. I also liked The Defining Moment, by Jonathan Alter, about FDR's first 100 days in office. It got some press in the fall when it was mentioned as one of Barak Obama's reads. Obama could do worse than pick FDR as a model, though this book doesn't treat Roosevelt as a saint. It stops at the end of the 100 days, and makes me want to read a more encompassing bio of FDR soon.

In the first 9 days of this year, I've finished 2 books, both more or less mysteries: The Lying Tongue by Andrew Wilson is about a young man who finds himself in Venice, working as a companion for an older man who wrote one book for which he became famous, and never wrote another one again. The narrator decides to pry into his life and write a tell-all bio, but first he has to: 1) get the old man talking, and 2) do something about the pesky woman who is already working on a bio. The book works well as a "literary" thriller, though things were tied up a bit too neatly at the end (though the last plot twist is a good one). I also read Bone By Bone by Carol O'Connell, about a man who returns to his hometown to solve the mystery of the disappearance of his younger brother some 20 years earlier. Her writing style makes the narrative feel rather oblique; I kept thinking I was missing something, grasping at straws to get the plot to come clear. I finished it and I guess I didn't miss anything because it all made sense, but it's a rather convoluted plot with lots of blind leads and characters who are thrown in just so there will be a lot of folks as suspects. But hey, that's 2 novels so far, so maybe I'm off my non-ficiton kick for a time.