Bet you never thought I'd get around to this final entry, did you? Well, it's one thing to read the books, and quite another to write about them, as I continually find to my chagrin. It is alway more pleasant to have written than to write, even though once I get going on the keyboard I often find I'm enjoying myself.

The upshot for this February experiment was that I exceeded the 28 book requirement and read 30 books, though I overlapped into March a bit. Not bad, considering I started around February 10. I plan to do this again next year, and already have a large pile of books set aside -- books I didn't get to this year. In fact, there are 29 books in that pile, already more than there are days in February 2010. We'll see if I can pull it off two years in a row.

Now, without further ado, the books.

Borges and the Eternal Orangutans by Luis Fernando Verissimo. This book, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, was probably my favorite of all the books I read during this experiment. It is a locked room mystery narrated by a wanna-be author -- indeed, a wanna-be Borges -- who gets to meet Borges and discuss with him who could have committed the crime. The possible solutions to the crime become ever more outre as together Borges and the narrator come up with strange signifiers and symbols and delight in their cleverness (until you wonder, really, whether Borges could possibly be so very odd, despite his very odd stories -- really, wasn't he more mysterious and interesting and intellectual than this?). I read with increasing joy and wonder as the tale wound in on itself, and wove around itself, and ate its own tail. There is no question that I will now return to Borges himself -- and will be reading The Club of Angels, apparently the only other book by Verissimo to be translated into English, as well. If you choose anything to read from my experiment, do choose this one; it's a wonderful book.

Jack of Fables: The (Nearly) Great Escape, Jack of Hearts, The Bad Prince, Americana, Turning Pages, written by Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges. One of the best things this experiment did for me was get me back to reading graphic novels, which I haven't done in a long, long time. (I got a big shipment from Lone Star Comics yesterday, my favorite online source for comics -- more about that tomorrow -- but let me just say that I am feeling very happy.) Unfortunately, though, this spin off from the popular Fables comics series isn't my cup of tea. I couldn't even tell you why I read all five volumes, except that I have a weird completist gene in me somewhere that doesn't let me not finish books. The "Jack" of these books is the Jack you read about in "Jack the Giant Killer" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" -- the "Jack" of any fairy tale or fable is apparently all one and the same. In the first volume, Jack is thrown out of Fabletown and promptly falls into the hands of Mr. Revise, a very bad man who is trying to rid the world of all notions of fairy tales and fables. In the second volume, he has an unfortunate encounter with Lady Luck -- a literal Lady Luck -- in Las Vegas. The third book finds him in the Grand Canyon with a sword through his chest that somehow doesn't kill him; I guess you can't kill a fable. Americana, a sort of fairy tale America, is the setting of the fourth book, where we meet Mr. Book Burner, who is apparently somehow a rival to revise, who, we learn, is somehow related to the Pathetic Fallacy, who we know as Gary. Yes, things are getting pretty complicated. The fifth book has us in Western Americana, and tells us more about the Page sisters, who are Revise's henchwomen. All of it gives me a great big feeling of "Eh!" Maybe I just don't like Jack, a classic anti-hero who treats women like dirt and cares about nothing but money. Or maybe the weavings of the plot, which appear to be trying to say something about literature -- something that would normally fascinate me -- just fall flat here. In any event, this is one series I won't be following any further.

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates. If there was ever a book that was utterly inconsistent with my image of an author, this is the one. Every photograph of Joyce Carol Oates I’ve ever seen shows a woman who appears to be quiet, composed, peaceful, at home in her skin. One would never guess that that mind could contain the killer who rampages through Zombie. This is a most unpleasant novel about a man who is obsessed with the idea of creating a perfect lover for himself, a zombie that would worship him and be his sex slave forever. How does one create a zombie? Why, by performing a lobotomy upon a normal human, of course, even if that means becoming an amateur surgeon. Quentin, despite seeming to be somewhat mentally challenged, is smart enough not to get caught as he wreaks havoc on men in his university town, his cruelty hidden by his kindness to his grandmother and parents who seem to know what he is but choose to ignore it. It is a chilling novel that, I must confess, I found much too realistic to really enjoy reading. I love a good serial murderer novel as much as the next thriller lover, but this one was too much for me, too real, it seemed; I guess I like my horror novels to be much more like fairy tales. This is well-done, well-written, well-executed; I can fault it on no grounds whatsoever except that it’s simply ugly.

Ex Cathedra by Rebecca Maines. I love small press volumes of short stories by science fiction and fantasy writers whom I might otherwise not discover. This charming little book has a few stories that seem flat and amateurish, but there are a few gems, too. Even though I’m not a baseball fan, I loved “The Next Ted Williams,” in which a married couple decides to raise from birth a star baseball player to lead their beloved Boston Red Sox to a World Series win (the story was written in 2002, before the Red Sox surprised everyone with their 2004 championship). But DNA proves to be insufficient, and the parents are disappointed when their son chooses quite a different path, regardless of his achievements -- and what a comment on parenting this story is! Another baseball story, "They Still Play the Blues in Chicago," is a bit darker, and makes me feel sorry for my poor father, now almost 77, who still hasn't seen his beloved Cubs in the World Series. Will it happen in his lifetime? "Liquidation" tells the tale of the bankruptcy of a cryogenic facility in an amazingly touching manner, while "The Canterbury Path" is an interesting story about how Catholicism might be interpreted by alien species. An interesting collection by an author to watch.

Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness by Lauren Slater. Lauren Slater has written a number of memoirs, each more interesting than the last. This appears to be her first, and it is apparent that she hasn't quite found her footing yet. Not that the book isn't fascinating nonetheless; it is. It mostly relates Slater's experiences working in a residence for male chronic schizophrenics immediately after completing her medical training. Her treatment is not entirely standard, for she is determined to break through to the men in her group, to somehow find a way to communicate with them; sometimes she succeeds. But their worlds are almost entirely alien, and she must enter them in order to understand them, and the work is difficult and stressful, and Slater manages to make us understand both this and the rewards. How lucky I am, I came away thinking; how lucky I am to have a brain that functions properly.

House of Mystery Vol. 01: Room and Boredom, written by Matthew Sturges and Bill Willingham. This graphic novel is so much more fun than Jack of Fables that it's hard to believe the same authors are responsible for both. The House of Mystery belongs to Cain, but has somehow disappeared from his realm, and become a stopping-off point for people from all realms of the imagination. For them, it is a bar, where they pay for their food and tipple with stories. There are a select few, however, for whom it becomes a prison, and Fig is the most recent of these. She is determined to escape, but the House will not let her; in fact, the House seems to be, in some strange way, in love with her. But the comic is not only about Fig. To the contrary, we are treated to the stories of the patrons of the House. And they are generally very odd stories indeed – fairy tales gone awry, crime stories with strange endings, detective stories that go to the very depths for solutions. I liked it a lot, and am looking forward to future volumes. (House of Mystery Vol. 2: Love Stories For Dead People is due out in June.)

A Writer's Life by Eric Brown. Another small press book, this odd little metafiction is about an author and scholar who discovers a work by an obscure novelist and becomes intent on tracking down everything that novelist has ever written. Then, even more: he must find out everything about the novelist, including where he lived, how he died, who he loved. In particular, he wants to know about the ghost who appears to haunt the house in which the author once lived. But the book is not only about his quest for this strange and reclusive author, about whom there is more to be known than most scholars can ever discover; it is also a love story of sorts. The protagonist starts to learn that love lies in more than the words of love alone -- yes, an old tale, but told here anew in a way that touches the heart. I'm happy I tracked down this PS Publishing title; PS Publishing is a small press that rarely disappoints.

So that's it for my February project. Next up is an ambitious project for the third quarter of 2009: reading books in translation. I already have books by Italo Calvino, Roberto Bolano, Kobo Abe, Orhan Pamuk, Henning Mankell and a number of others set aside. If you have suggestions, I'd love to have them. I'm staying contemporary: don't tell me to read Flaubert or Tolstoy, please. But if you think I should read Max Frei, by all means, let me know! That's what the comments section is for.

In the meantime, I'm going to be reading library books to try to get that pile down to zero (except, of course, for books in translation) and some review copies that have piled up. There is never a shortage of things to read around this house. Indeed, sometimes it starts to feel overwhelming -- especially when I look at the three-foot high stack of copies of the New York Times Book Review or page through my 60-page long list of books I don't yet own and realize how many other books there are as well as the books on my shelves. As they say: so many books, so little time.