I don’t think I’ve made a New Year’s resolution since I was about 10 and probably required to by a schoolteacher, and I’m not going to start now. That said, putting together my charts yesterday revealed even more disappointments about my reading and blogging lives than I had anticipated, and I hope 2012 will be a much better year—for me and for my readers.

First, I discovered what complete shambles my LibraryThing account is in. I’m surrounded by piles of books right now and need to spend the weekend scanning barcodes and getting them organized. I am an organized person, I swear. What on earth has happened to me? When I was a kid and had nothing going on, I was ridiculously organized; now, so much of that energy is devoted to work and other stupid grownup things that I feel like the other side is really not getting enough attention.

Unfortunately, the first part of the year is not exactly going to help. Right now it’s looking like in some ways my life may become less complicated, but in other ways still more. And to top it off, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and decided to move into a bigger place—and moving is like, the most horrible thing in the world. Being organized in advance should help, and the dream is that that organization just gets that much better when I have more space and more advance time to think about planning that space.

Oh, and one other thing about that move: I am officially not buying any physical books between tonight and my birthday (aka moving day), because that would just be stupid. Hopefully I’ll also be downsizing what I do have.

I do have a couple goals. First, I’m going to continue to work through all my (sometimes mental) lists of project books, books that Simply Must Be Read, Dehumiliations, etc. That means, of course, Richard’s Savage Detectives readalong next month, and something a bit later for Tom’s Portuguese challenge, but probably not much more in the way of that sort of thing. And while blogging may remain light-ish for a couple months, by April I hope to be banging posts out like I used to—because I really, really want to be doing that.

I also have an announcement: due to my current levels of disorganization and inability to stick to plans (and the fact that Richard is also behind, yay!), the great bibligraphing Reading Challenge of 2011 is being extended through Q1. What does that mean for y’all?

• Richard, we have some time! I’m pushing so hard through this giant War & Peace thing, but it keeps being giant. I’ll email you so we can try to iron something out, or kick the can a bit more.
• David has made me some offers I can’t refuse; I just need to pick one of his three. Again, I will email you!
• Mel, I hope you’re in! Maybe that Henry Green we talked about?
• Rise, allow me to call you out, although you did do Ubu with us. I would be honored if you joined in yourself.
• And…?

And now, back to my Tolstoyan serfdom. Thanks to you all for reading along with me for another year, and I hope some relative newcomers (or more oldtimers!) will run me through the challenge wringer for the next few months. If I owe you an email, mea maxima culpa, and you will probably get an answer sometime this weekend in between champagne cocktails. I hope!

I didn’t even attempt to come up with a top ten, just grabbed whatever seemed to really stand out from my reading list this year. The fact that seven rhymes with eleven is a bonus!

• Little House on the Prairie (full series, especially By the Shores of Silver Lake and The Long Winter). I opened up the year with a re-read of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic children’s series, and it was an excellent decision to go back to these books when I did. They not only held up over time but seemed to get better; what I appreciated as a child was still charming and what I often thought was boring now seemed much more interesting, for reasons I couldn’t have predicted back then. Overall, one of the greatest measures to me lately of how good a book is seems to be how much time I spend thinking about its themes, arguments, scenes, characters, mechanisms, etc., weeks and months after reading it. Every one of those items I just listed comes back to me from somewhere in Little House on a regular basis—and that’s true of all the books below as well. The items on this list are excellent in and of themselves, but they are especially good because for whatever reason they stuck with me this year and will shape my reading to come.
• The Good Soldier. This was also a re-read (something I’ve been doing more of lately), and while it’s in my top seven today it’s in my top five (probably, or at least ten) of all time as well. I don’t think I will run out of reasons to re-read it anytime soon, and writing about it, my only trouble was how to stop. Can I re-read, alternatingly, this and Parade’s End every year for the rest of my life please?
• The Luzhin Defense. Also at the beginning of the year, I decided to start in on a project of reading all of Nabokov, chronologically. Despite pretensions to reading one novel per month (making it about an 18-month project, plenty long), I made it through only VN’s first four this year. I enjoyed them all, but The Luzhin Defense is certainly the best. With Nabokov I do have trouble writing, but go visit number six on Tom’s list of the Wuthering Expectations Best of 2011, where The Defense also made the grade.
• Lord Jim. Re-reading Ford early in the year, along with some short works by Conrad, launched me into another half-assed project (like the VN one, still ongoing of course, albeit slowly): to read all of Ford’s and Conrad’s work, including their co-authored novels, also chronologically. I read Lord Jim before making that decision and it’s part of what led to it. I never thought I would think there was Conrad better than Heart of Darkness. Now I feel just the same about Lord Jim.
• Your Face Tomorrow. I must thank Richard at Caravaña de Recuerdos right off for hosting this Javier Marías reading challenge (as well as the rest of my co-participants), because I can’t imagine when I would have “gotten around” to this quite long trilogy without it—and now that it’s past, I can’t imagine how I could have lived without it any longer than I did. As soon as I find and move into a bigger apartment, one of the first things I’ll be buying for it is this poster.
• American Masculine. I did an “okay” job of writing about Shann Ray’s short story collection earlier in the year, but I don’t think I could have satisfied myself even if I had done twice as well. It’s not quite one I’m throwing at everyone, because it’s very me, but believe me, if I thought you were me-enough I would throw it at you. Decide accordingly.
• Glass, Irony & God. A very late entry, and yes, horrors, only the second on the list from a woman! My first Anne Carson collection gets in on the strength of “The Glass Essay” alone. I think I’m going to just go read that again, actually…

I have several other honorable mentions. First, anything in the bibliogrraphing Reading Challenge, and not just because it’s all about me. From Hermann Broch to Tout Ubu to Goethe to the book currently trying to kill me, War and Peace, it’s been wonderful reading along with my readers (as best I can) and moving outside of my comfort zone, or at least outside of my plans. And I will finish this Tolstoy by the end of the year so it can be the first thing I write about in January and I can officially close out the challenge successfully! (Once again, thank you Richard—especially for following this with another nice long novel.)

Kathleen Rooney’s Oneiromance almost beat the Carson collection into this list; it’s a close call. Alan Heathcock’s Volt is right up there with American Masculine, as well, and if I were to judge on a story-by-story basis I would probably commingle them considerably (and let’s not forget Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It while we’re talking about that).

That doesn’t even touch on the entire Art of the Novella series, most of which I read this past August. Or Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Louis Stevenson, Patrick Somerville, Kipling, war poems… An embarrassment of riches, I suppose, but the real embarrassment is how badly I do by all this great writing.

Earlier this week, Greg Zimmerman of The New Dork Review of Books posted at BookRiot on the search for the elusive novel-equivalent of the movie “Office Space” (which I have seen far too many times to count) or “The Office” TV shows (of which the only acceptable version is the original, sorry peoples).

It’s not hard to explain why that show and movie resonate with people: They’re both premised on the fact that the modern office environment is absurd. And so they give viewers the sense that they’re above the fray of their own cube existence. Also, both are hilarious. (Indeed, what the f$#k does “PC Load Letter” mean?)

So as much as people love Office Space and The Office, why aren’t there more novels that capture the absurdity of cube life? There are some, but not many. Here is a guess why not: Perhaps it’s because most (not all, by any stretch, as you’ll see in a sec) people who are good at writing fiction haven’t had the cube experience, like the rest of us. And therefore, they don’t see the potential for humor.

My first reaction to this post was to launch into a D.G. Myers–style diatribe (and I mean that in the best way possible) about how there isn’t nearly enough work in contemporary American fiction. I felt a little bit bad about doing that since I don’t read any contemporary American fiction*. But I really do lament in some way the professionalization of writing (and especially novel-writing) that leaves us with relatively few characters (especially intelligent, relatively sympathetic protagonists) who have jobs outside a range of certain acceptable occupations: writer, professor, artist, general East Coast media elite… I’m being facetious, yes, and I may even be an East Coast media elite myself, or something like one, but I recognize what an insular world that is and I don’t really feel a part of it at all. And neither do most people.

I was going to write about Bartleby, which is more in vogue now than ever due to Wall St. and fellow Occupiers. I was also going to think about how to write about Netherland, which my friend reminded me was a rare example of a very different type of worker—though his job is really not a part of the novel, so perhaps it’s actually an example of the problem in some other way. And I was going to write, as I have in the past, of the prominent role of work in so much of the maritime literature I have read, and especially in Melville. But then I spent some more time thinking about “Office Space.”

First of all, it’s not exactly the most high-brow of films. The consumption partner suggested that we should really be looking to lighter fiction to fill its role, and that probably “chick lit” is a much closer thing than we might expect to the whole concept. I think, in fact, that Bridget Jones’ Diary is probably the closest literary equivalent I have read, and the film bears the office-absurdity aspect of the book out very well. Bridget’s office rivalry with Perpetua, her slightly senior nemesis, is just what we’re looking for.

But also, what is the message of “Office Space”? That “you’re one of the millions who dutifully wakes each morning to file off to your soul-crushing day job, the only redeeming quality of which (other than financial) is that it provides you a never-ending stream of unintentional comedy to share with your friends at the bar,” as Zimmerman says of its audience? The wisest line of the movie ultimately comes from Joanna (Jennifer Aniston), who is now waitressing at a new soulless chain restaurant after getting fired for flipping off her boss at her old one.

“Peter, most people don’t like their jobs. But you go out there and find something that makes you happy.”

This is a pretty basic continuation of her earlier scolding of him to simply grow the hell up already. Which is also my message to Bartleby. It’s not that there isn’t a ton of absurd shit about office life—and “Office Space” and “The Office” do brilliantly expose it—it is in so many ways a basically absurd social situation. There is great comic potential, and if there aren’t more books that make use of that potential, it is a shame. But the point isn’t that it’s soul-crushing, it’s that it doesn’t matter. It’s partly absurd because you spend so much of your time doing something that doesn’t matter, but that’s why you get paid for it. Then you go home and are able to live. And that’s why, really, it doesn’t matter.

I wouldn’t look to most top contemporary novelists to take this tack. They want work to be “rewarding,” intellectually, spiritually, whatever, but not (necessarily) financially. What’s really absurd is to expect most people to either want or get this. I don’t want my job to be the most rewarding part of my life. In fact, I would be pretty depressed if that were the case. And I’m far from considering myself a cubicle drone. Somewhat tangentially, I wonder what a cubicle drone even really is—are there that many people employed and not adding any conceivable value to a product or service someone is eventually buying?

Let me try to finish off this meandering and mostly pointless post with a few more concrete thoughts:

• The absurdity isn’t really in the “soul-crushing” nature of your job, but in the fact that your job is a facilitator of something else—your actual life—and that you spend a large share of your waking hours doing something that is not, in fact, your ultimate objective.
• Part of the problem with contemporary fiction ignoring work outside of certain limited bounds isn’t only that it ignores a large share of the human experience, but also that it invalidates that experience—you are being judged for not deciding (or wanting) to be a starving artist, but a reasonably compensated “office drone” who comes home to a meaningful life.

Melville is particularly interesting to me because he wrote about real manual labor, but also about complete slavery to the artistic impulse that makes other kinds of work seem impossible. Which is also how he lived. And I believe he had Ishmael sum up the whole mess best in Moby-Dick with a simple question: “Who ain’t a slave?”

*This is a total lie.

Happy October everyone! There’s no question that it’s fall in my neck of the woods, nor in my parents’, where I am this weekend. Faithful readers will remember this is my favorite season, and I’m beyond pleased to be wearing jackets and scarves and soon to be buying a decorative gourd or two.

Unfortunately, the advent of October also means that I’m quite behind on my reading plan, which began last month. Out of four books I wanted to read in September, I managed two (and change), and have only written about one so far. And if anything, my stress levels are getting higher, not lower, so it will be a bit of a struggle to get on track and stick with it. On the other hand, I feel I’ve done a lot to conquer my writing block, especially with my recent posts on Your Face Tomorrow and The Eye. I hope to have some good stuff for you to read this week on Robinson Crusoe, which I feel particularly pleased about having finished. That’s really a dehumiliation, and also an important step in my journey to understand the evolution of the novel.

I don’t have much more to add, but I wanted to check in before potentially going quiet—yet another business trip this week. If anyone has some spare time to send me, I could use a few more hours in the day!

Sadly, even my updated Art of the Novella Challenge goal of “fanatical” will have to fall by the wayside as I give in to the incipient joys of a business trip. I can’t thank Frances or Melville House enough for sponsoring this challenge. I didn’t make it to 42, or even to 37, or even to 27, but the 25 novellas I read were, overall, a joy and a much-needed shock to my reading system.

The last one I completed is Michael Kohlhaas, which I can now rightfully call a masterpiece by Heinrich von Kleist. It was this that made me determine to end the challenge: I simply don’t have time to write about it adequately before my seven AM flight tomorrow. (GAH! It’s already past my bedtime.) It deserves more.

Your Face Tomorrow also deserves more than a rush-job through the last volume, so, Richard, please forgive me for posting late on that. I have a lovely four-day weekend coming out that should get me back on track for this.

September as a whole will get me back on track, and I’m looking forward to it. It’s my official mental beginning for autumn, even though it will still be summer weather for a while, and we know how I feel about fall. The first of the month is my anniversary, and however much it may not really count with that darn ring still missing from my finger, seven years seems like an auspicious occasion. And, most importantly for this blog, it means a return to longer books. And boy, do I have plans.

What are they? Well, without giving too much away, I have a few projects I’m planning to follow, spending one book per month on each. The first is the Nabokov read-through; The Eye is coming up in September. The second is the Great Dehumiliation Project, and the first book on the menu there is Robinson Crusoe. I’m also going to continue my Conrad/Ford co-project with their first joint work, The Inheritors. And I’ve also decided it’s time to get in some of the big re-reads that I really, really should do. I think Dead Souls will be first. You can see a more complete list of my plans here, though they are, of course, subject to change. But do let me know what you think.

Coming to the end of this post, I realize that last August I was in a similar situation. I took a trip the last week of that month, though a personal one, which would end up being the last time the consumption partner and I saw my grandfather still doing well, not to mention an occasion for excellent literary tourism. And I was rush-rush-rushing to blog before I left then too—but the project was vastly different. One August, I spent a month with what may the longest English-language poem of all time, and certainly not the easiest. The following year, I spent August with dozens of short prose fiction works. What is it about this month and crazy projects?

A few weeks ago I mentioned briefly that I had acquired a Kindle and become particularly enamored of the first-chapter sampling functionality available for any (presumably full-length) book available in the Kindle store. It looks like a similar feature is available for NOOK books, though I don’t know the length of the free samples, and it’s certainly not revolutionary—definitely not something you need a Kindle for, even on Amazon.

But this has changed my reading in a pretty big way. Normally, I’m a “go down with the ship” kind of girl; I could count on one hand the number of books I’ve started and not completed in my reasonably adult life. I may put down a book I hate, but I will pick it back up—and for a lot of what I read, “hate” is not a relevant reason to stop reading anyway. It becomes a much bigger issue when it prevents me from trying almost any newer fiction. There’s just so much out there that’s “okay but not great,” or even “good but not great,” and it’s hard to trust anyone to draw the same line as you or find the same pop-cultury things annoying.

Enter the free first chapter, the key to my mental block. Somehow, with these samples, I’ve never actually started reading the book. The total lack of commitment at the outset means that when I’m reading that chapter, I’m just floating, doing a fixed, short-term activity with a specific goal: finding out whether there’s any possibility I will ever read the whole thing. It’s like some kind of very exploratory research, and if signs point to no, that’s no problem. In fact, I can then check the “not interested” box next time Amazon recommends me the book! (Yeah, I’m way into that shit, and I never check that box, because you just never know…but now, I do.) And that little piece of reading is offically “done,” no laboring through to the end of the book, and the sample deleted from the device, and it’s all over.

Where, before, I would have read a book review and thought, “Hmm, interesting, but that will probably not get read…” now I can grab the first chapter and then say, “Hell no, that will not get read!” Or, you know, sometimes it goes better than that. This is how I got into Karen Russell, how I decided it looks like Ann Patchett is a lot better than I would have given her credit for, and how I have not totally foreclosed the possibility of reading The Tiger’s Wife. I’m sure there are more, but one really crap thing about this system is that there doesn’t appear to be any way of keeping track of what you’ve sampled once you’ve deleted it. Boo! I’ll need to be better about it manually I guess.

Pretty much all of these features were available to me before I had the Kindle itself, but there’s something to be said for the comfort of checking out these chapters on my own actual reading device, not on a computer screen. And I’m just not the type to stand in a bookstore and read more than the first page or so—but now I can go into one and buy without having to do even that. It’s the converse of the brick-and-mortar-bookstore-as-Amazon-showroom phenomenon.

There is another negative though, and maybe a worse one. Is this just another way for the internet to reduce my attention span?* I’ve got 14 samples I’d like to look at now, and I’m much more in the mood for that than picking up my “real” book. Even though I still love you, Javier Marías.