Was It Good for You?

Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood

The Pleasure Principle

I read half of A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen (Random House) before I kicked it under my bed, bored and peevish. The essayists tended to say the same glowing things about Jane Austen and her books; the unintended effect was to send me away from the book and straight to my shelf to reread the real deal. Because, really: Life is short, and reading is so often a luxury. If you've got the time, why waste it on books that don't give you pleasure?

So then, in no particular order, the nine books that got me most jazzed this year:

Wells Tower's debut collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories, for one. The North Carolina native did surprising things with plot (Viking marauders? Really?) and downright shocking things with language, putting words together in a wondrous way (did I imagine the kinship with Saul Bellow?). Language was key, too, in Thomas Mallon's erudite, hugely enjoyable study Yours Ever: People and Their Letters (Random House), but it was the pictures that rose to the fore in David Mazzucchelli's graphic rumination Asterios Polyp (Pantheon).

Most critics called the history-bending novel Homer & Langley (Random House) lesser E.L. Doctorow, but most critics, frankly, can go suck it: Doctorow's final lines read like Greek tragedy to me. For actual Greek tragedy, there was Anne Carson's lively new translation of An Oresteia (Faber & Faber). Even Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf) spelled katastrophe in a post-9/11 Midwest and rejiggered to Moore's signature wordplay.

Lev Grossman's The Magicians: A Novel (Viking Press) fell short of the fun implied in the advance buzz – "it's like Harry Potter for grownups!" – but, still, it was nicely four-lettered and moody, a welcome spot of darkness to the summer reading list. Certainly you'd expect Lit, Mary Karr's memoir about addiction and religious conversion, to be pitch-black,and it was; it was also lippy and comic and, naturally, poetic.

And then there was Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? (Ecco). A curiosity in every sense of the word, it surely doesn't qualify as a novel; novels tend to have plots. And periods. Powell's cheeky query, on the other hand, consisted of 164 pages of questions – "Do you miss Tab and do you fully comprehend its disappearance? ... Are you surprised at the low number of people crazy or the high number of people crazy? Do you know offhand whether a hippopotamus sweats?" – with nary an answer in sight. It's the world's weirdest conversation starter (that is, for a conversation with yourself), and every few pages you'll want to pause to pursue a path some question turned you onto. Is it exhausting? A little frustrating? But also a pleasure?

Would I have mentioned it otherwise?