I’m afraid I lack the time for a full-featured wrap-up, but I’ve summarized the relevant information into a table of handy stats. In short, the general makeup of this past year’s books was about the same, with slightly fewer re-reads.

1. Missy Higgins – [On A Clear Night #09] Peachy
2. Mogwai – [Come on Die Young #02] Cody
3. Opeth – [My Arms, Your Hearse #02] April Ethereal
4. Joaquin Rodrigo – [Concierto de Aranjuez (Romero) #10] Invocation et danse: 2. Allegro moderato: Polo
5. Nightingale – [I #02] Still In The Dark
6. Foo Fighters – [There Is Nothing Left To Lose #09] Headwires
7. Swarm Of The Lotus – [When White Becomes Black #09] Episode Infinity
8. Jason Falkner – [Presents Author Unknown #05] She Goes To Bed
9. Michael Jackson – [Bad #04] Liberian Girl
10. Gustav Mahler – [The Complete Symphonies CD9 #01] Symphony No.7 in E Minor – 1a. Langsam (Adagio)

1. Nine Inch Nails – [The Downward Spiral #04] March of the Pigs
2. Nine Inch Nails – [With Teeth [5.1] #12] Beside You In Time
3. Virgos Merlot – [Signs of a Vacant Soul #12] Disregarding
4. Beirut – [The Flying Club Cup #02] Nantes
5. Sergio – [Swords #02] The Spendthrift
6. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – [Nocturama #03] Right Out Of Your Hand
7. John Vanderslice – [Pixel Revolt #09] Dear Sarah Shu
8. Mogwai – [Happy Songs for Happy People #02] Moses? I Amn’t
9. Mew – [And The Glass Handed Kites #05] Apocalypso
10. Grails – [Doomsdayer's Holiday #01] Doomsdayer’s Holiday

1. Zao – [Legendary #04] Suspend Suspension
2. Pain of Salvation – [Entropia #12] Plains Of Dawn
3. Cave In – [Perfect Pitch Black #09] Tension In The Ranks
4. Paul Hindemith – [The 3 Piano Sonatas #03] Sonata No.1 III.Lebhaft
5. Ben Folds – [Ben Folds Live #11] Army
6. Leaves – [The Angela Test #04] As We Walk
7. Feist – [Let It Die #09] Secret Heart
8. Five Pointe O – [Untitled #05] Freedom?
9. Nine Inch Nails – [The Fragile CD1 #11] La Mer
10. Enslaved – [Below The Lights #04] Queen Of Night

Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman

I’m familiar with Chuck Klosterman’s work from reading Chuck Klosterman IV and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. I have not, however, read what is probably the most pertinent work in this case—Fargo Rock City—though I am familiar with Klosterman’s predilection for the Midwest (North Dakota especially) as a narrative theme. His consistent juxtaposition of the urban sensibilities of the hyperliterate and the trendy with the inherent backwardness of small Midwestern towns is both a little old and still remarkably effective.

Downtown Owl is Klosterman’s first full-length work of fiction. He doesn’t suffer from the sort of stilted or overwritten prose that afflicts so many budding writers, mostly because he isn’t a budding writer. In fact, it’s surprising—though it shouldn’t be—how Klosterman manages to make his narration feel so similar to one of his many cultural commentaries from previous books and magazines. There was some small part of me that expected him to turn into Patrick Bateman and start reviewing 1980s albums in the middle of the rising action.

What I can’t quite shake about Downtown Owl is Klosterman’s practiced insouciance as a narrator. He is, he’s taken great pains to show us over the years, painfully hip. He manages in this book to hold the characters at arm’s length so that he can describe them and pontificate (in a roundabout, expository way) about their archetypes. In this way, he creates characters that are two-dimensionally complex, but which have no apparent depth and inspire no empathy on the part of the reader. If Klosterman doesn’t appear to care about any of the characters, then I can’t either.

Perhaps that’s the point. Downtown Owl was never a story so much as a tableau of Klosterman’s reimagined North Dakotan town. There’s a collection of characters who do thing and think things, but there’s no central plot, no narrative movement toward something; it’s a limited character drama that ends with a single shared event that ties—loosely and impersonally and by virtue of location only—these disparate characters together. Actually, think of the movie Magnolia; now set it in a small North Dakotan town in the 1980s and you’ve got Downtown Owl. The movie, however, managed to create much more likable and interesting characters (at least their personal dramas were somehow resolved or mutated by the movies events).

Despite it being, technically, a fictional book, Downtown Owl was much more a series of interwoven vignettes that simply served as a vehicle for Klosterman to talk about subjects he’s already covered—North Dakota, 80s rock and metal, social archetypes, &c. I feel a bit cheated, as there was really nothing in this book was wasn’t in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs in some form or another. Klosterman’s a good writer, but I don’t understand what motivated him to write a work of fiction: he’s a much better essayist than he is a storyteller.

1. The Dillinger Escape Plan – [Ire Works #13] Mouth Of Ghosts
2. Sentenced – [Frozen #03] Dead Leaves
3. Nick Drake – [Five Leaves Left #06] Cello Song
4. Giants – [Demo #02] Berlin Rooftop
5. Tenhi – [Kauan #02] Huomen
6. Sergei Rachmaninov (Vladimir Ashkenazy; André Previn, London Symphony Orchestra) – [Complete Piano Concertos, Rhapsody CD1 #05] Piano Concerto No.2 in C minor, Op.18: 2. Adagio sostenuto
7. Conor Oberst – [Conor Oberst #01] Cape Canaveral
8. The Tea Party – [TRIPtych #12] Gone
9. Metallica – [S&M CD2 #08] One
10. The Decemberists – [The Tain #01] The Tain

1. Sondre Lerche – [Don't Be Shallow #03] I Know I Know
2. Paco de Lucía – [Antología CD1 #01] Almoraima
3. Fiona Apple – [Extraordinary Machine (Brion version, unmastered) #05] Oh Well
4. Paragon of Beauty – [Comfort Me, Infinity #01] This Impossible Moment
5. Cave In – [Jupiter #06] Requiem
6. Ben Folds – [Songs for Goldfish #05] Weather Channel Music
7. Mogwai – [Rock Action #01] Sine Wave
8. Sigur Rós – [( ) #02] Fyrsta
9. Fastball – [All the Pain Money Can Buy #08] G.O.D. (Good Old Days)
10. Darkane – [Rusted Angel #06] A Wisdoms Breed

1. Ved Buens Ende – [Those Who Caress The Pale #05] Those who Caress the Pale
2. Opeth – [My Arms, Your Hearse #02] April Ethereal
3. Mum – [Go go smear the poison ivy #11] Guilty Rocks
4. In Flames – [The Jester Race / Black Ash Inheritance #03] Artifacts of the Black Rain
5. Doves – [Lost Souls #01] Firesuite
6. Neurosis – [A Sun That Never Sets #07] Crawl Back In
7. VAST – [April #04] Sunday I’ll Be Gone
8. Samuel Barber – [Orchestral Works, Volume 4 #03] [Concerto for Piano and Orchestra] – III. Allegro molto
9. Jason Mraz – [Mr. A-Z #11] The Forecast
10. No-Man – [Flowermouth #02] You grow more beautiful

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

To be honest, I hadn’t heard of The Omnivore’s Dilemma until I heard it referenced as something that White People Like in… Stuff White People Like. In a turn of events which is far too easy to ridicule, I read it.

Like many of its ilk, The Omnivore’s Dilemma taps a particular sort of (White?) guilt about the inevitable consequences of a modern, technologically-advanced culture. Think of it as Cat’s Cradle, but instead of world-ending weapons, we’re talking instead about the financial perils of agricultural monocultures, the oversaturation of corn as a foodstuff, and the heady thrill of having to shoot your own meat.

This book, by the apparently-notable Michael Pollan, seeks generally to look at not simply what we eat, but how and why it gets from its most basic components to the end results sitting on our collective table (and ultimately passing through our collective colon). Most illustrative, I think, is Pollan’s first section, which details the unlikely rise of corn as one of the most important foodstuffs in the American diet. Different from Old World cereals like wheat, corn (maize) is in just about everything we eat, from the high fructose corn syrup in our soda (actually, is the primary sweetener in just about everything that requires it, including such unlikely candidates as hamburger buns) to the starch in our cereals to the major source of calorie for most of the meat we eat. Americans have surpassed every other country in the world (including South American countries, which we usually think of as “corn” cultures) in the production and consumption of corn. Most tellingly, according to Pollan, farming corn is more or less a guaranteed financial loss, since it’s impossible to grow it for less than the market value. Farmers grow it only because the government subsidizes them to grow it.

This is all very fascinating, of course (though the agricultural history of the plant was genuinely new to me, I was aware of its extended reach in processed foods), but what I found most interesting was Pollan’s look at how corn has changed the face of ranching. Chickens, for instance, naturally eat grains such as corn, and are very efficient in terms of converting corn calories into protein (muscle) calories. Cows, however, the most American of American meat, is a ruminant, extraordinarily adept at digesting grasses. Modern cows no longer eat grasses, as the picturesque notion of a Western rancher watching his cows graze over fields of clover has given way to large tenements of tightly-packed bovines living brief, brutish lives of corn-based feed, recycled animal products. Since cows grown on corn tend to be sickly and diseased, they are also fed a continual diet of antibiotics and medicine.

This, I think, is the most politically-charged of the sections, and also the most difficult, since it has to weigh the obvious faults in the current agricultural scheme against the low price of meat—so low, even poor families can eat their fill. Compare this to the next section, that of organic food.

Pollan makes the distinction early on between “organic” as defined by the USDA—a ruling made late in the game of the organic movement, and often motivated by the wishes of Big Agra—and “organic” as defined by historical usage. There’s a list of list of allowable synthetic additives in USDA certified organic food, for instance. And “Big Organic,” as Pollan calls it, is that subsection of the organic movement which has adapted to using modern mainstream agricultural methods (mass production, mass transit, &c.) while staying to varying degrees true to the spirit of the movement. Think of Whole Foods and you’ll understand what Pollan means by “Big Organic”: Whole Foods doesn’t stock its shelves by buying up all the produce at local farmers’ markets, it forms deals with a few large distributors for consistent delivery of consistent quality. That means large-scale agricultural, at least amounts of preservatives for transit and shelf-life, and a certain degree of marketing legerdemain to produce what Pollan likes to call “Supermarket Pastoral,” this quaint notion that one can have a “pure” food experience, free of cruelty and preservatives and machinery, simply by shopping at the right franchises.

The other side of the coin, of course, is those farmers (some call themselves “grass farmers”) who grow grass-fed animals and insecticide-free crops by utilizing knowledge of the land. Their livestock live long(er), happier lives, roaming free on the pastures with personal masseuses. This is all well and good, and certainly Pollan cites examples of such farmers/ranchers who have been extremely successful, but the conclusion is obvious: this will never scale up. Either we can all do our own tomato-growing and cattle ranching, or we have to submit such things to the efficient cruelty of mass production. Farmers markets will remain the occasional province of lucky few, and the sole province of an even luckier (and richer) few.

For his last section, Pollan embarks on a journey to grow, gather, and hunt a meal all his own. This, I feel, is the most pointless of the sections, since even Pollan seems to realize that while novel, it’s a ludicrous idea to propose as a standard.

I’m as culturally-savvy as the next guy; I’d probably do some shopping at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s if there were any near me. I sympathize with those that mourn the plight of the modern beef cow; I’ll give the finger to Archer Daniels Midland and the rest of Big Agra for being crass and profit-driven. But I also realize that in any society with a sufficiently robust and automated agricultural system, the origins and process of boxed or prepared food is out of sight and out of mind. I truly liked Pollan’s look into the rise of corn and its current influence in American agriculture; to be honest, I would have been happy with a book solely about that. The rest of the book, with some exceptions, felt like a foregone conclusion: pure organic and self-gathered food are doomed to be ignored by any modestly-pragmatic person. “Big Organic,” while we may root for it as a slightly more eco- and health-conscious alternative to normal agricultural methods—and more importantly, one that is probably sustainable even on large scales—is to a non-negligible degree a triumph of marketing rather than agriculture or ethics.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a good book, but inconsistent. If nothing else, it’s a good jumping-off point for getting one’s mental juices flowing, though it’s superfluous chapters tend to drag it down. To Pollan’s credit, he manages to avoid the fawning, hippie-like pro-organic bent that I feared when picking it up; quite the contrary, in fact, he seems every bit the lucid pragmatist, and so manages to write a book worth reading even to those who have never bought into the Whole Foods trend.

1. October Tide – [Rain Without End #03] All Painted Cold
2. Samuel Barber – [Orchestral Works, Volume 3 #06] [op. 28] – III. Pas de Deux (A Corner of the Ballroom)
3. Low – [The Great Destroyer #03] Everybody’s Song
4. Neurosis – [Given to the Rising #02] Fear and Sickness
5. Elend – [A World in Their Screams #01] Ophis Puthôn
6. Solefald – [Red For Fire: An Icelandic Odyssey Part 1 #02] Survival of the Outlaw
7. Agalloch – [Ashes Against the Grain #03] This White Mountain on Which You Will Die
8. Regina Spektor – [11:11 #07] wasteside
9. Sigur Rós – [Ágætis Byrjun #05] Ný Batterí­
10. Sufjan Stevens – [Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake State #06] Tahquamenon Falls