There was a span of time in the early to mid-aughts where I would buy every man I was romantically interested in a copy of An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender. I probably hold the record for buying the most copies of this book. I could probably write a memoir called Books I Used to Unsuccessfully Woo Men in My Life. There must have been something about this compulsive book giving. Some sign of my own I was trying to show the men I wanted to love me, but I have no idea what it was.

Maybe it’s just that I really love this strange, quirky novel and I thought men who could appreciate it would be worthy? Who knows. The real question is, would An Invisible Sign of My Own hold up to further scrutiny, a re-reading nearly a decade after I first read it?

The answer is a resounding YES. I re-read Bender’s debut novel as part of my re-evaluation of personal artifacts project, and it really does hold up.

The story? Mona Gray is a twenty-year-old whose beloved dad was struck by a mystery illness that may or may not be real when she was ten. Dad’s sickness puts the fear of death into Mona and turns her into a serial quitter and knocker on wood. She quits everything she loves: piano, running, sex. She knocks on wood whenever she gets anxious, sometimes spending hours knocking until her knuckles bleed.

Mona’s kind of humdrumming it through life when she’s asked to become the math teacher to a group of second graders. Here Mona discovers she’s kind of good at teaching math but in an unusual way. She introduces the children to Numbers and Materials, where they find numbers out in the world. One girl brings in an IV tube from her near-death mother’s hospital room as a zero. Another kid brings in his dad’s severed arm as a seven.

Meanwhile Mona’s developing a thing for the new science and health teacher who intermittently intrigues and infuriates her. It’s good.

Oh and then there’s the mysterious neighbor who used to be Mona’s math teacher but instead goes into the hardware business. Mr. Jones is a wearer of necklaces. These necklaces are made of wax numbers and denote the day he’s having. An eight is not so great, a twenty is pretty damn good. Mona is, of course, obsessed with Mr. Jones and his numbering system, even though she’s kind of pissed at him for not taking any notice when her dad fell ill.

Okay, this probably sounds like entirely more quirk than one novel can sustain, but it’s not. In fact, in Bender’s sure hands it all rings emotionally honest and genuine. There isn’t a single point in the book where Mona’s tics seem forced or like some sort of affectation adopted for the sake of being unique. Instead, this is Mona’s reality and the novel follows her trying to figure it all out — her fear of death and her overwhelming anxiety and her need for love and companionship.

It’s such a beautiful book and I’m so glad that it has held up to a re-reading. I’m also pretty glad to keep on my list of most beloved personal pop cultural artifacts.

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Hilary Jordan’s novel When She Woke is a modern day mashup of The Scarlet Letter and The Handmaid’s Tale. In this futuristic United States abortion has been banned because some weird STD called The Scourge has left many women sterile and the birthrate around the world has plummeted. Apparently in the future we’ll have solved the problem of over-population so well that a nearly non-existent birthrate will be a huge cause for concern. Or maybe it’s just the platform super-conservative Christians were looking for to spread their anti-woman agenda. It’s never clearly addressed, but if you just go with it you’ll enjoy the book much more.

It opens with Hannah Payne waking in a Chrome ward, a shiny white and steel cube. She’s clad in only a paper gown, her actions are broadcast to viewers around the world, and her skin has been genetically modified to appear bright red. This chroming, as it’s called, is the punishment the government doles out to lawbreakers. The colors vary based on your crime, some people are yellow, some purple, and murderers are red.

Hannah was convicted and found guilty of murder. Her crime? Aborting her fetus. She’s given extra Chrome time because she refused to name the father, a super popular married preacher, Reverend Aidan Dale, and the person who performed her abortion.

The government is not messing around with this Chroming stuff and the author does a great job explaining it. Whenever the book spent time discussing Chroming, Chromes (those who have been Chromed), and their treatment in society I was in love with this book. I, the hater of details, wanted to know more and more and more about this terrifying United States and their new-fangled draconian laws.

So the concept and the structure supporting the story are top notch, where it kind of falls apart is, well, Hannah’s story.

Hannah’s a twenty-six-year-old seamstress who has an affair with the Reverend Aidan Dale, stays silent because she thinks she’s in love and sacrifices everything to keep their secret safe. Hannah comes from a super conservative religious family where women do what they’re told, honor and obey their parents, and generally exist without any minds of their own. I think Jordan uses this as a crutch for Hannah’s naivety and gullibility. As a reader, I’m not sure if I buy it, especially because by the end of the book Hannah’s gone through a huge change and it doesn’t feel as though she’s earned the wisdom she extolls.

Anyway, after Hannah’s let out of the Chrome ward her parents send her to a sort of religious repatriation camp, full of all kinds of wicked stereotypes you’ve come to expect from those sorts of situations — the soul-matey buddy, the weak-minded child, the cold, cruel mistress, the ass-kissing tattletale. Nothing surprising really happens here until Hannah decides to step off the path in defense of her soul-matey buddy, Kayla.

From there the two women start a weird, underground railroad sort of adventure filled with nefarious men and militant women. There’s danger everywhere, and it all feels a little bit predictable complete with wholly unnecessary lesbian sex scene, and at times ridiculously melodramatic.

And even with all those complaints, I’d still say this novel falls on the better side of okay. Read it for the very interesting take on what a post-Roe v. Wade America might look like. It’s chilling. Don’t read it for Hannah’s personal insights and growth because those seem to appear out of thin air and not because she earned them.

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Just like many pop culture nerds, I too like to impost arbitrary rules on any list I make. I think it imbibes the list with some significance, importance, or something else that lists of crap don’t have naturally. For this year’s list of Favorite Reads, I gave myself two rules. One, I couldn’t include books I’ve read before (The Giant’s House and An Invisible Sign of My Own). It’s just not fair to the books of 2011 to compare them to my all-time favorites.

Second, I decided not to include books by my friends. But I will say that I loved reading The Mostly True Story of Jack by Kelly Barnhill, Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff, and The Tanglewood Terror by Kurtis Scaletta. I loved them not just because I know the authors but because they are smart, entertaining beautiful novels that people of any age would enjoy. You wouldn’t go wrong by reading any (or all) of these books.

So with those two arbitrary rules in place, I present to you the ten books I enjoyed reading the most this year (in no particular order) not all of which were published this year.

The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips: I’m not even a Shakespeare person and yet this novel about the discovery of a long-lost Shakespeare play was totally captivating and fun and, as weird as it is to say, educational. I learned a lot about Shakespeare and the theories that revolve around his famous plays. Lest you think that sounds kinda snoozy, it’s not at all. In fact, it’s super engaging and keeps you turning pages to see what’s going to happen next. Plus, most of the book takes place in Minnesota and I love that kind of stuff. [review]

The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure: It was a banner year for non-fiction as far as my reading list is concerned. I hardly ever read non-fiction and this year, I’ll have three on the list. First is Wendy McClure’s memoir about her search for the “lost world of Little House on the Prairie.” But the book is about more than that, it’s about grieving a lost mother, a lost childhood, and accepting the fact that yes, indeed, things change when we grow up. Also, a ton of Little House trivia, and what I loved the most is that McClure tries to reconcile her modern-day sensibilities with some of the seamier sides of the Ingalls. Such a good book. [review]

Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King: This young adult novel has all the great things I look to in literature: humor, sadness, smart female characters, and beauty. Vera Dietz’s story about the death of her friend Charlie and how he haunts her is at times funny and heartbreaking. But perhaps what I loved the most about ‘Vera Dietz’ is that A.S. King so brilliant illustrates Vera’s “deal” with great writing and wonderful scenes without ever saying, “hey this is Vera’s problem.” So much love for this one. [review]

Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Lowe: If you had told me 368 days ago that I’d be including a book by Rob Lowe on my favorites of the year list, I’d have given you a withering, condescending stare along with a snooty sniff and probably said something kind of assholey about not reading celebrity memoirs or not digging non-fiction. Well, here I am, and her’s Rob Lowe’s memoir on my list. I will offer one caveat, had I not listened to this book on audio read by Rob Lowe it might not make this list. But listening to Lowe tell his story complete with dead-on impersonations of the entire Brat Pack and a bunch of other celebrities captured my heart, just like Ponyboy Curtis did the first time I read the words “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.” [review]

Just Kids by Patti Smith: Two celebrity memoirs in a row? Yeah. I guess I’m just that kind of hypocrite. But come one, Smith’s at least won a National Book Award so I got that kind of cred to fall back on, right? Actually it doesn’t matter because I loved this memoir of Smith’s life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and I generally don’t love NBA-winning books. This book is steeped in misty-pink magic that will make you long to be really poor in the fairytale New York of the 70s that was filled with rich, famous people just aching to be your friend. Also, it will make you care a lot about a desk. [review]

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline: Like Christa so wonderfully depicted in her review, the 80s worshipped in Cline’s sci-fi-y paean to video games is not the 80s I grew up in, and yet I loved spending time in Cline’s 80s. Well, it’s not really the 80s. It’s really 2044 and the world spends all it’s time in the video game called the Oasis and their a search for the keys to a huge fortune. The book is the most fun you’ll have reading. Seriously. [review]

Orientation and Other Stories by Daniel Orozco: I’m fond of making really asinine proclamations along the lines of “Everyone should just quit writing about Vietnam because Tim O’Brien already wrote ‘The Things They Carried’.” It’s fun you should try it sometime. Anyway, after reading Orozco’s hotly-anticipated short story collection, I proclaimed that everyone should stop writing about office life in corporate America now, he’s done it. I stand by that assertion because Orozco seems to bring the humanity to the drab greyness of corporate life that so many other authors forget about. This is a great, great collection of stories. [review]

Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schapell: This is a book filled with really great stories about really real women at different stages of their lives. All the stories are good. I want to emphasize that before I say the very last story, which is about the same character as the very first story, is so fucking good it’s worth the price of the book alone. For real. [review]

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell: This novel about an odd family in the swamps of Florida owes a lot of George Saunders (think about the stories “CivilWarland in Bad Decline” or “Sea Oak”) and Katherine Dunn (think Geek Love). Lucky for me I love Saunders and Dunn, and I really enjoyed Swamplandia! This is one those books where the journey is the reward because the ending kind of stinks. Still, totally read-worthy. [review]

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson: This book about a strange family of performance artists surprised be at every turn. It never went where I thought it would go and I loved that. I would say more but I’m really tired of writing this list. [review]

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It’s ironic that a book about bullying can be so full of cruel, negative stereotypes that it verges on bullying itself.

Lucky Linderman, the teenage protagonist of A.S. King’s young adult novel Everybody Sees the Ants, has been routinely bullied by an asshole named Nader McMillan since he was seven years old. Nader’s antics grow ever more cruel until, one day at the pool, he uses Lucky’s face to try to erase the cement.

With a giant wound in the shape of Ohio on his cheek, Lucky’s mom packs them up and heads to Arizona to the safe confines of her brother and sister-in-law. They leave behind Lucky’s father a chef who can only cope with his falling apart family by disappearing into work.

Once they land in Arizona things aren’t too ducky either. Aunt Jodi is convinced Lucky’s suicidally-depressed which he and his mom say is ludicrous even though Lucky got into quite a bit of trouble over a school project that involved asking his classmates how they’d commit suicide if they wanted to die.

Lucky, the son of two escapists (his mom swims compulsively claiming she’s part squid and his dad to the restaurant), escapes into his dreams where he’s on a mission to find his POW/MIA grandfather, Harry. He believes this is his life’s mission, because his grandmother mentioned it on her deathbed. Through these dreams which have weird endings, Lucky is trying to work out the crap in his life.

The book is engaging, Lucky’s a smart kid who is struggling with some real issues and A.S. King is an excellent writer. That cannot be argued. I’d have probably loved this book if it weren’t for the awful, offensive treatment of Aunt Jodi.

See Aunt Jodi is fat, and Lucky tells us this right off. Fat Aunt Jodi then proceeds to (and I’m not exaggerating, she’s described using these exact words) flop, plop, glop, slop, and waddle all over the narrative. She eats too much processed, high-calorie food, she finishes other people’s meals, she talks with her mouth full, and food flies from her gaping maw landing on other people. At one point someone tells Aunt Jodi that if she ate less and exercised more she would lose weight, she acts as though this is brand new information she’s never heard before even though it’s made abundantly clear that Aunt Jodi spends a lot of time reading celebrity tabloids which, if you’ve ever seen one, are filled with hot Hollywood diet secrets of the stars.

Are you kidding me?

I’m not entirely sure what Aunt Jodi’s weight problems have to do with Lucky’s story. Are they there to show that Lucky, though the bullied victim, can be an asshole too? Or is she supposed to be an unlikeable character that shows how magnanimous Lucky is when he takes pity on her and starts to cook real food?

It’s unclear to me. What I do know is that if the stereotypes heaped on Aunt Jodi were of a racial or LGBTQ nature, readers would be outraged and there’d be many a hand-wringing blog post about the offensiveness. But since Aunt Jodi is fat, and it’s still okay to bully and berate fat people, it’s all okey-dokey. This is a damn shame because fat kids are so often the victims of all kinds of bullying and instead of finding solace and strength in Lucky’s story they will only be shamed and shown that even as adults the bullying never ends.

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After reading The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson I have come to the conclusion that I enjoy reading novels about art and artists entirely more than I enjoy art. To back up my argument I’d also submit into evidence What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt and The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd.

Art is hard to process, books are much easier.

The art that Caleb and Camille Fang create in The Family Fang is even harder to process. These two crazy cats like to create happenings. The duo stage these events where they plunge their children, labeled Child A and Child B when the work is presented to the art world, into horrifyingly awkward situations and then film the chaos that ensues. In one piece the children are sidewalk buskers trying to raise money for their dog’s operation only they play horribly and appear to be heckled by a random stranger (it’s their dad) and the agitated crowd turns violent.

Other events include a lot of barf, shoplifting, fires, and assorted awfulness.

So what happens to Child A and Child B when they grow up and decide not to be props in their parents’ performance art? Let me tell you, it’s nothing good, which is what makes The Family Fang so fantastic.

Annie (Child A) becomes a drunk almost A-list actress who does her career no favors by marching around topless on the set of a movie. The movie’s a flop and cellphone images of her breasts zing around the Internet at the speed of light. This, of course, disturbs Buster (Child B) a sometime novelist/sometime journalist who takes an assignment that lands him in the middle of Nebraska with a disfigured face caused by a potato gun accident.

So with their lives falling apart, Annie and Buster find themselves back at the family home in Tennessee. They’re bitter and resentful and full of anger and rage and love for their aging parents. Neither Annie nor Buster know quite what to feel or how to reconcile their bizarre childhood. They can’t seem to move on. Being at home with their all-for-art parents doesn’t help matters either.

When you least expect it things for Annie and Buster go from awful to so astronomically bad you can barely comprehend it, which as a reader is the kind of awesome every book needs to have. Not once did this book ever go where I thought it was going to go. When I thought it was going to go left, it kicked me in the shins and then used my hobbled body as a catapult into a place I’d never been before.

The story is so fun and inventive, told in alternating chapters between what’s going on in the now with grown up Annie and Buster and sharing their childhood through Camille and Caleb’s art. The art stuff is kind of funny but that humor is washed over in sadness when you see how it has effected the adults A and B have become.

What makes this novel so great is not just the story, but that each character — Camille, Caleb, Annie, and Buster, is so well-developed and so genuine that you kind of love each of them even when what they want is diametrically opposed to what the other one wants.

I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed, maybe even loved, this book until now as I sit down to write about it. But when I think about it what’s not love about a book that includes art and love and dysfunction and humor and a KAPOW! HOLY SHIT! sort of climax?

The Family Fang are just the kind of family I’d want to read all about but never, ever have dinner with.

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