Books of the Year 2009: Nonfiction, Short Fiction, and Plays

I read 4 books of nonfiction this year, but my favourite is clear. I read 18 plays, mostly for school. Four of my reads I consider short fiction. I'm kind of arbitrarily deciding how many favourites I get in each section, it's just how many seem to fit there--one nonfiction, two short fiction, three plays.

Nonfiction
The Mitford Girls, by Mary S. Lovell, would definitely be in the running for most enjoyable book in any category this year. It is 529 pages but I absolutely sped through it. I forget how much I love biographies, but this was biography at its best, giving both a picture of its subjects' personalties and a clear view of their place in history. I found it completely fascinating. Original post here.

Short Fiction
The Lady in the Van, by Alan Bennett, doesn't quite count as fiction at all, because it's a true story and is mostly made up of Alan Bennett's diary entries about Miss Shepherd, the woman who lived in her van on the author's door step for 20 years. Despite its truth, though, I'm including it here because it is a story, and isn't comprehensive the way nonfiction would be. It was one of those stories that induced compulsive reading aloud, and I loved it. Original post here.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, is kind of a given for good short fiction. It's one of those books that is an experience to read, because it's so evocative and intuitive. I'm sorry I never really wrote a post about it; I would have liked to revisit my initial reactions. But I know it was good.

Plays
It feels somehow like cheating to include The Real Inspector Hound, by Tom Stoppard, since I didn't just read it, I produced it and costumed it and assistant stage managed it. But all that aside, it is a good play. It's one you sort of have to read more than once to get the full meaning out of, because it has so many layers. It's very good fun, and I can't resist theatre about theatre.

The Zoo Story, by Edward Albee, is a short, contained play. What I liked was the language, something about the two characters' expressions, the way it rolled. I don't know that I would have expected this to be the one play out of the thirteen from my comparative literature class that I liked best, or even that it absolutely is the best, but it's one I know I'll remember.

What can I say about Shakespeare's King Richard III? It always feels odd somehow to put a Shakespeare play on a list like this. But I suppose there's some Shakespeare I wouldn't put on this list, so putting Richard III here works. I thought he was a fascinating character, historically accurate or not, and this play does have some really great lines.

13

I'm nearing the end! All I have left to do in my classes is take two finals tomorrow. And study for them today, but that's not a big deal. Yesterday, I turned in my final essay for Comparative Lit, so now I'm thinking about all the plays I read for that class this quarter.
The Good Person of Sichuan by Bertolt Brecht, Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'neill, The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder, The Lesson by Eugene Ionesco, The Balcony by Jean Genet, Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, The Zoo Story by Edward Albee, Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, The Caretaker by Harold Pinter, Offending the Audience by Peter Handke, Biography: A Game by Max Frisch, and Indians! by Arthur Kopit.

Thirteen plays in ten weeks. My favourites, I think, were The Skin of Our Teeth, The Zoo Story, Offending the Audience, and Biography: A Game. I can't quite say what sets these apart. They're not all the most experimental or all the least, they're not all from the same country or language. Two American, one Austrian, one Swiss. I think they all just had certain qualities, whether of story or language, that I liked. The Skin of Our Teeth is cheerfully absurd, I liked something about the language in The Zoo Story, Offending the Audience just rolled so nicely, and Biography had a fascinating premise (the main character gets to go back and re-do his life like it's all a rehearsal for a play he's trying to perfect).

All these plays, though, are worth reading. Some of them wouldn't have struck me as experimental if I hadn't been told they were, but they all are. Something we spent a lot of discussion on in class was the theatrical illusion, and how it is broken or maintained in these plays. It's something to think about, if you ever read or see any of them.

I'm so glad I took this class. I started it out thinking myself extremely knowledgeable about theatre, just by loving it and having done a few plays, but there's a lot I don't know and a lot of plays I haven't read or seen, and the class taught me to push at the boundaries of what theatre is and what I expect from it.

On the Table: Plays

There are three plays I want to see in the month of December. I don't know if I'll make it to all of them, but I would like to. Theater Schmeater is doing At Home at the Zoo, by Edward Albee. This play began as The Zoo Story, a one act, but Albee later wrote a sort of prequel to it, and then mandated that they always be performed together as a full-length play. I read The Zoo Story for my comparative literature class, and it was one of my favourites, so I'd be pretty interested in seeing it performed.

The Bathhouse Theatre is putting on its yearly production of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. I've never seen it though it seems they've been doing it for nine years, so it might be fun to finally see it. And I know some of the actors from Lebensraum.

The one I'm most excited for, however, is Seattle Repertory Theatre's production of Equivocation. I say it's the Rep's, but actually it's traveled from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I don't know if much has changed in the production since it was performed there, but I was told (by someone whose opinion on theatre I trust a great deal) that I absolutely had to see it. So I shall see it. It's about Shakespeare, apparently, and contains overtones of King Lear and Macbeth, and you know how I love picking out references like that.

So expect to hear more about these. And also expect to hear about what's next in terms of reading, too, since the quarter's coming to its end and I'll have more time to read soon.