I do a history podcast (some other episodes too) so I have mostly read history books. There have been some great reads but maybe my favourite was The Lion House by Christopher de Bellaigue. It tells the story of the early years of Suleiman the Magnificent’s reign. Narrated in the present tense (a bit like Wolf Hall) Bellaigue told me the aim was to have a narrator that knew everything except the future. The effect is a real immediacy you associate with fiction. I’m not sure I want too much of this style but it works brilliantly here.
Anyway here is the episode and there are lots of other good ones!
I read "The Colony" on your advice, and thought it was absolutely excellent (also, I'm learning Irish at the moment). I just finished "Arboreality" by Rebecca Campbell, which recently won the Ursula K Le Guin Prize for fiction.
Best book read this year for me was ‘The Goldfinch’ by Donna Tartt, such good writing and a story which kept me gripped throughout its 700+ pages. High in my top ten would also be ‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro, and ‘Embassytown’ by China Miéville.
The new fiction (not re-reads of favorites) I read this year that I liked very much were:
The Guest by Emma Cline
A Calling For Charlie Barnes by Joshua Ferris
The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St.John Mandel
The Portrait of a Mirror by A. Natasha Joukowsky (a fellow Substack writer)
These are the books that, while I was reading them, life was better because I always had something to look forward to. And when I finished them, life was a bit worse, because there was no more.
I've got Zadie Smith's 'The Fraud' lined up for reading in the quiet days after Christmas. I've always liked the cut of Smith's jib (in interviews and shorter articles) but for some reason have never read her novels. Looking forward to it.
Books I enjoyed this year: 'Hamnet', Ophelia Field's 'The Favourite'. Anna Keay's 'Restless Republic' was absolutely brilliant; I didn't think there was much new to be said about Cromwell's Republic but I was extremely wrong. Failed to finish Barbara Tuchman's 'A Distant Mirror' for about the fourth time - just feels a bit too much like an encyclopaedia, not enough of a narrative through-line for me.
On Beauty is really splendid if you want another ZS after that. I have the same problem with Distant Mirror. More of a book to consult than to read through, unlike the Zimmerman Telegram which reads like a thriller.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one. Haven't read Zimmerman, will add to the list, but Guns of August is almost literally unputdownable so it's a bit baffling that Distant Mirror is so excessively fibrous. Thanks for the ZS rec - I'm excited to get stuck in.
I’m midway through Tobias Wolf’s Old School which is pretty special and also contains some wonderful and credible cameos from a few literary figures (Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, Hemingway) as well. This was also the year I discovered Penelope Fitzgerald after all your evangelising, so thank you!
(Please, take the inclusion of Ayn Rand as a ‘literary figure’ alongside Frost and Hemingway as due to brevity, rather than an aesthetic or political judgement.....)
I haven’t read any of them yet but the probability of doing so after this novel is in the 99% confidence interval! On PF I loved the beginning of Spring and Blue Flower, and will now gradually work my way through the rest of her work. Hat tip to you sir.
I always like to start the year laying down my earnest reading intentions for the new year after the flimflam of the holiday period. This year it was War & Peace. A joy, but the pure length at times made it feel a slog. As an avid reader of history, I particularly enjoyed the digression chapters where the Tolstoy voice seeks to dismiss the Great Man Theory. This led me to my own digression by dipping into The Fox and the Hedgehog essay on just this subject by Isiah Berlin which is a great companion read to Tolstoy’s epic. Next year’s opening earnest read will be Middlemarch, which I couldn’t help having an early dip into and the first few chapters have me excited for Christmas to be over already.
I tend to be a thematic reader and, following Tolstoy, I plucked up the courage to undertake a long planned reading journey from the French Revolution up to the post-war era, accompanying some 20 historians or so on the ride. I began last year with Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution, chosen to get a specifically leftist interpretation of both the French and Industrial Revolutions. Fascinating, very readable and this determined that the rest of his “Age Of” series will be stations on this journey. To fully prepare myself, I also dipped into a few essay books on the nature of history: Tuchman’s Practicing History, E H Carr’s What is History, and Will Durrant’s The Lessons of History. All were fascinating, sweeping introductions of how to approach reading and understanding history.
I like to have some lighter reading going on alongside the more challenging and following the Napoleonic theme of W & P, I read the first of the Hornblower books and enjoyed it so much that I read all eleven. A welcome vacation from the battle with W&P and the 11 books took a fraction of the time committed to the Tolstoy.
In the lighter reading category I also got great pleasure from Bradbury’s Dandelion Days (not sci-fi but a nostalgic dip into small town America in the early-ish c20…just wonderful to consume outside on a summer’s day), and the last of the Delderfield’s that I have not read, in The Avenue Series, again a great vision of a C20 world that now feels almost ancient and increasingly beyond reach.
In a similar vein to the Delderfield, I read one of the books in the 24 book series, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight by Henry Williamson, which I do every year and recommend them wholeheartedly. One of my English teacher’s used to read Tarka as poetry and have the class learn sections by heart and the love of his language and joy in nature has stuck. He is largely now only known for Tarka which is a sin. Anthony Burgess included the Sunlight Chronicle in his book list 99 Novels The Best of English since 1939, alongside luminaries such as Orwell, Baldwin, Barth, Bellow etc etc and I feel we should not dispute the great man.
Other literary works that left a great mark during the year were Golding’s The Inheritors,( a re-read and has lost none of its power), Dostoevsky’s Notes of the Underground ( mind expanding stuff), as was Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow which I absolutely loved, if at times 20 or so pages could go past where I was somewhat lost and would perhaps establish he had left the inner thoughts of one character, and jumped to another without the grace to have informed me…but ultimately his obvious genius led me to forgive him this oversight.
In brief, other great reads included: Mary Renault - Fire in Heaven, Stephen Greenblatt – The Swerve, E M Forster – A Passage to India (great but not Howard’s End), Cormac McCarthy – Suttree, Ursula LeGuin – The Word for World is Forest, Herbert’s – Dune (again a re-read and even better than when I read it as a teenager…of course).
There were a number of other reads that were good but not worthy of note here but a couple of disappointments are worth mentioning: Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life (amazing achievements in the face of the worst of disabilities but no insight into how this was achieved or the trials and tribulations of the journey), and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Her views on the environment are uplifting and ahead of her time but the references and focus of concerns felt too outdated to make this worth the while for the modern reader).
But….I saved the best for last. T E Lawrence – The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Why is this not better known or thought of? I know some accuse him of exaggerating his own involvement and importance but who cares when he writes so lyrically and with such literary precision and learning. I beg you all to dig in and read this autobiographical segment of th life of a legend of the middle east, which provides historical, geographical and historical insights about a somewhat forgotten theatre of the first world war and the formation of the modern middle east, alongside the inner thoughts of a complex and intriguing character.
Dec 14, 2023·edited Dec 14, 2023Liked by Henry Oliver
Lots of great reading for our 19th Century book club!
Outside of that, some books I read this year and loved:
- Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse & various essays
- Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
- Henry James: The Aspern Papers
- Katherine Rundell: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
- Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, and The T-shirts I Love (which can be read in a single sitting
- Toni Morrison: Beloved
- Ross Douthat: The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery
- Jeffrey Toobin: American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst - has some good Stochastic Resonance for today's world (in Alan Jacobs' sense of the term https://blog.ayjay.org/stochastic-resonance-in-reading/ )
- Don Norman: The Design of Everyday Things
- Patrick O'Brian: Master and Commander
- Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda
- Denis Johnson: Jesus' Son
- Bill Watterson and John Kascht: The Mysteries
There's a category of reading that I do a lot of but I never know how to deal with it in this kind of list: books that spend time with but don't read cover to cover. Essay collections, poetry collections, big art books, anything that you can dip in and out of without the same need for continuity and momentum. Some of the best books in that category that I spent time with, which this year skewed towards cinema:
- Molly Haskell: Holding My Own in No Man's Land: Women and Men and Film and Feminists
- Tadao Satō: Currents in Japanese Cinema: Essays
- John Kisch: Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art
- Hans Helmut Prinzler: Sirens & Sinners: A Visual History of Weimar Film, 1918-1933
- Mark A. Vieira: George Hurrell's Hollywood: Glamour Portraits 1925-1992
- Emily King: A Century of Movie Posters: From Silent to Art House
- Abbas Kiarostami: In the Shadow of Trees: The Collected Poetry of Abbas Kiarostami
- Claude McKay: Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay (I discovered McKay from Hollis Robbin's excellent book Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition)
- Emily Dickinson's poetry (supplemented by commentaries from Camille Paglia, Helen Vendler, and Marta McDowell's book Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Iconic Poet)
- Stephan Koja: Gustav Klimt: Landscapes (which includes lovely paintings of the Attersee, where my wife and I honeymooned)
For what it's worth, I enjoyed both hard boiled universe at the end of the world and Norwegian wood more than wind up bird chronicle. I haven't found the initiative to dive into 1Q84
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle frustrated me. I haven't tried another Murakami since and fear I may never, as it's thought to be his masterpiece. I thought it a postmodern trainwreck sprinkled with amusing characters, rather like a David Lynch film, Kafkaesque even. The length made it quite the slog read of my 2023.
Isn't Forms of Contention great? I also recommend tracking down Hollis Robbins' essay on Dracula and the time, if you haven't read it.
From Dickinson, I quite like The Soul selects her own Society, Safe in their Alabaster Chambers, We dream—it is good we are dreaming—, and A Light exists in Spring. But I have much to discover and explore in her work! I started reading a beautiful, thick volume called Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them earlier this year and quickly was quickly overwhelmed by how many plants there are. So many specific flowers and grasses and trees which I'm sure are associated with specific seasons and meanings! I discovered Marta McDowell's book by trying to look for whether anyone could help me tackle that side of her. I haven't read it all, but I look forward to digging in!
I haven't read much Murakami, but what I have read is excellent! I liked Wind-Up Bird more than Kafka. It was interesting reading them back to back - there are a lot of similarities between them: aimless young men being pulled into mysteries and passing into strange liminal spaces. The way he achieves certain effects reminds me a bit of David Lynch - especially Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway.
I loved The Restless Republic - brilliantly written and structured. The classic I finally read this year was Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal which I found very powerful- it felt particularly resonant in these uncertain times. I've also enjoyed discovering the novels of Elizabeth Taylor, especially A View of the Harbour.
I have read Mrs Palfrey, it's a wonderful book though I have to say I found it almost unbearably sad. MacNeice is indeed underrated - I love his shorter poems but have always found longer narrative poems a bit daunting. Autumn Journal though reads more like, well, a journal, albeit a beautifully meditative and insightful one.
This year I read Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich, which was some of the best poetry I've read in my entire life. Also marked down Kindred, All the Light We Cannot See, and East of Eden among my favorites. Currently reading The Good Wife of Bath by Karen Brooks- historical fiction based off off the Canterbury Tale.
Reading Auden's A Christmas Oratorio. About halfway through Middlemarch too. Origin of the Species still has me under a spell so I've peppered in some Stephen Jay Gould and other related content. Hark the Harold Bloom seems to always be within arm's reach...
My family is making a trip to Dublin this coming June if anyone has anything to recommend for Ireland
Dec 13, 2023·edited Dec 13, 2023Liked by Henry Oliver
I just finished "A Heart So White" from Javier Marías, and it is such a beautiful book that I just started another one from his, "The Infatuations". I highly recommend the former, Marías died just last year and he was (and is) considered one of the best Spanish writers from the last century.
Also, planning to start Stuart Mill's autobiography (you sold it so well) and Chesterton's Orthodoxy
I read Flaubert in Italian, all others, but one, are in English. I would say Israelophobia is very useful for these days. Then as universal reading the two books regarding Orwell. We never know enough of him. Again in times when freedom of speech is in peril reading Orwell is always relevant.
I loved two Booker award winners: Paul Beatty's "The Sellout" and D. B. P. Pierre's "Vernon God Little".
Liked another Booker shortlist, Percival Everett's "The Trees", especially the first half (so good, so funny), but the second half went sideways with a "full woke" resolution unbecoming a brilliant start.
If you're from the southern USA, "Vernon God Little" is a must read - so very funny. The dialogue is pure south Texas.
This was a year of Discovering, I think. Discovering Martha Gellhorn's work was probably my personal highlight of 2023. She has a keen-edged handling of words and people, combined with such a vivid thirst for living life fully that comes through in her work. I'm nearly done with Caroline Morehead's Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, which has added wonderful depth to my appreciation of her work.
Anthony Trollope was another author I fell in love with, and I made it through a few of his Barsetshire books over the course of the year. I particularly enjoyed his clear-sighted approach to community and friendship and all that goes on between our conscious intention and the received action.
This year I started the Bradbury Challenge, and began reading from poetry, essays and short stories before bed each night. That has involved some pleasant discoveries, such as the fact that I have matured enough to revel in Leaves of Grass, a book that I have often visited but never appreciated enough to stick with. Now every line finds an echo within myself.
Marilynne Robinson's essays have been timely, humbling and world-expanding. I've enjoyed them so much that reading her fiction will need to be a key part of my 2024 reading.
I had not read any Robert Sheckley before, but his short stories frequently left me with a surprised grin. I'd avoided Edgar Allan Poe for most of my life, but I am at last in a place where I can revel in his beautiful way with words.
My Year Long Piece was War and Peace, and I am so glad to have finally read this. Such an incomparable work! Tolstoy reminded me of Trollope in his ability to see on through his characters to their true motivations, but as an author he sees the world quite differently tham Trollope does and that showed in his work.
For 2024, I want to read Josef Pieper and Plutarch's Lives, but my fiction reading goals will involve The Expanse, more Sir Walter Scott and some Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope.
One book that I struggled through was The Sword of Truth, by Terry Goodkind. It has been frequently recommended to me by those who discover I am a fan of Robert Jordan, but I am frustrated by the incompatibility of the "wisdom" offered vs the behaviours. It seems to me that the big point of the book was that everything you hear could be wrong and shouldn't be accepted at face value, and yet the characters spent the whole book acting as if what they had heard most recently was true. Information was not confirmed l, beyond the hearing if it, before being acted upon. The Seeker claimed to mistrust the knowledge of others, yet did not distrust himself even though his own knowledge was coming from others. It was quite strange, and I'm not sure how committed to the rest of the series I am. If I had hope that Me. Goodkind realized this blindness of his characters and was walking them out of this, I would keep going. But nothing about his writing so far has led me to believe that he is even aware of these inconsistencies.
Currently reading The Offing by Benjamin Myers, a new to me author. Enjoyed Pod by Laline Paull. Salvage The Bones by Jesmyn Ward was good. I plan to read Let Us Descend by the same author. Jesmyn Ward is coming to my city in 2024 and I will be in the audience. Another book queued up for 2024 is The Future by Naomi Alderman.
I do a history podcast (some other episodes too) so I have mostly read history books. There have been some great reads but maybe my favourite was The Lion House by Christopher de Bellaigue. It tells the story of the early years of Suleiman the Magnificent’s reign. Narrated in the present tense (a bit like Wolf Hall) Bellaigue told me the aim was to have a narrator that knew everything except the future. The effect is a real immediacy you associate with fiction. I’m not sure I want too much of this style but it works brilliantly here.
Anyway here is the episode and there are lots of other good ones!
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/12232452
Interesting, I shall have a look at that.
I read "The Colony" on your advice, and thought it was absolutely excellent (also, I'm learning Irish at the moment). I just finished "Arboreality" by Rebecca Campbell, which recently won the Ursula K Le Guin Prize for fiction.
There are several novels titled The Colony, but I suppose you mean The Colony by Audrey Magee re: learning Irish. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.
That's the one!
I read The Colony also! Oh my goodness... so good, wow.
Nice. I'll check that out. I liked the dialogue in 'The Colony' a lot.
Best book read this year for me was ‘The Goldfinch’ by Donna Tartt, such good writing and a story which kept me gripped throughout its 700+ pages. High in my top ten would also be ‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro, and ‘Embassytown’ by China Miéville.
I enjoyed how much that book reminded me of dickens
The new fiction (not re-reads of favorites) I read this year that I liked very much were:
The Guest by Emma Cline
A Calling For Charlie Barnes by Joshua Ferris
The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St.John Mandel
The Portrait of a Mirror by A. Natasha Joukowsky (a fellow Substack writer)
These are the books that, while I was reading them, life was better because I always had something to look forward to. And when I finished them, life was a bit worse, because there was no more.
I haven’t read those but will look at them
I've got Zadie Smith's 'The Fraud' lined up for reading in the quiet days after Christmas. I've always liked the cut of Smith's jib (in interviews and shorter articles) but for some reason have never read her novels. Looking forward to it.
Books I enjoyed this year: 'Hamnet', Ophelia Field's 'The Favourite'. Anna Keay's 'Restless Republic' was absolutely brilliant; I didn't think there was much new to be said about Cromwell's Republic but I was extremely wrong. Failed to finish Barbara Tuchman's 'A Distant Mirror' for about the fourth time - just feels a bit too much like an encyclopaedia, not enough of a narrative through-line for me.
On Beauty is really splendid if you want another ZS after that. I have the same problem with Distant Mirror. More of a book to consult than to read through, unlike the Zimmerman Telegram which reads like a thriller.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one. Haven't read Zimmerman, will add to the list, but Guns of August is almost literally unputdownable so it's a bit baffling that Distant Mirror is so excessively fibrous. Thanks for the ZS rec - I'm excited to get stuck in.
I’m midway through Tobias Wolf’s Old School which is pretty special and also contains some wonderful and credible cameos from a few literary figures (Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, Hemingway) as well. This was also the year I discovered Penelope Fitzgerald after all your evangelising, so thank you!
(Please, take the inclusion of Ayn Rand as a ‘literary figure’ alongside Frost and Hemingway as due to brevity, rather than an aesthetic or political judgement.....)
sure, she's a literary figure!
What a great book. Have you read his short stories? And tell us which PF!
I haven’t read any of them yet but the probability of doing so after this novel is in the 99% confidence interval! On PF I loved the beginning of Spring and Blue Flower, and will now gradually work my way through the rest of her work. Hat tip to you sir.
Offshore is great and The Bookshop. Gate of Angels a quiet stunner, too.
I always like to start the year laying down my earnest reading intentions for the new year after the flimflam of the holiday period. This year it was War & Peace. A joy, but the pure length at times made it feel a slog. As an avid reader of history, I particularly enjoyed the digression chapters where the Tolstoy voice seeks to dismiss the Great Man Theory. This led me to my own digression by dipping into The Fox and the Hedgehog essay on just this subject by Isiah Berlin which is a great companion read to Tolstoy’s epic. Next year’s opening earnest read will be Middlemarch, which I couldn’t help having an early dip into and the first few chapters have me excited for Christmas to be over already.
I tend to be a thematic reader and, following Tolstoy, I plucked up the courage to undertake a long planned reading journey from the French Revolution up to the post-war era, accompanying some 20 historians or so on the ride. I began last year with Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution, chosen to get a specifically leftist interpretation of both the French and Industrial Revolutions. Fascinating, very readable and this determined that the rest of his “Age Of” series will be stations on this journey. To fully prepare myself, I also dipped into a few essay books on the nature of history: Tuchman’s Practicing History, E H Carr’s What is History, and Will Durrant’s The Lessons of History. All were fascinating, sweeping introductions of how to approach reading and understanding history.
I like to have some lighter reading going on alongside the more challenging and following the Napoleonic theme of W & P, I read the first of the Hornblower books and enjoyed it so much that I read all eleven. A welcome vacation from the battle with W&P and the 11 books took a fraction of the time committed to the Tolstoy.
In the lighter reading category I also got great pleasure from Bradbury’s Dandelion Days (not sci-fi but a nostalgic dip into small town America in the early-ish c20…just wonderful to consume outside on a summer’s day), and the last of the Delderfield’s that I have not read, in The Avenue Series, again a great vision of a C20 world that now feels almost ancient and increasingly beyond reach.
In a similar vein to the Delderfield, I read one of the books in the 24 book series, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight by Henry Williamson, which I do every year and recommend them wholeheartedly. One of my English teacher’s used to read Tarka as poetry and have the class learn sections by heart and the love of his language and joy in nature has stuck. He is largely now only known for Tarka which is a sin. Anthony Burgess included the Sunlight Chronicle in his book list 99 Novels The Best of English since 1939, alongside luminaries such as Orwell, Baldwin, Barth, Bellow etc etc and I feel we should not dispute the great man.
Other literary works that left a great mark during the year were Golding’s The Inheritors,( a re-read and has lost none of its power), Dostoevsky’s Notes of the Underground ( mind expanding stuff), as was Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow which I absolutely loved, if at times 20 or so pages could go past where I was somewhat lost and would perhaps establish he had left the inner thoughts of one character, and jumped to another without the grace to have informed me…but ultimately his obvious genius led me to forgive him this oversight.
In brief, other great reads included: Mary Renault - Fire in Heaven, Stephen Greenblatt – The Swerve, E M Forster – A Passage to India (great but not Howard’s End), Cormac McCarthy – Suttree, Ursula LeGuin – The Word for World is Forest, Herbert’s – Dune (again a re-read and even better than when I read it as a teenager…of course).
There were a number of other reads that were good but not worthy of note here but a couple of disappointments are worth mentioning: Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life (amazing achievements in the face of the worst of disabilities but no insight into how this was achieved or the trials and tribulations of the journey), and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Her views on the environment are uplifting and ahead of her time but the references and focus of concerns felt too outdated to make this worth the while for the modern reader).
But….I saved the best for last. T E Lawrence – The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Why is this not better known or thought of? I know some accuse him of exaggerating his own involvement and importance but who cares when he writes so lyrically and with such literary precision and learning. I beg you all to dig in and read this autobiographical segment of th life of a legend of the middle east, which provides historical, geographical and historical insights about a somewhat forgotten theatre of the first world war and the formation of the modern middle east, alongside the inner thoughts of a complex and intriguing character.
Glad to see you’re a golding fan, I’m an admirer of the inheritors too
Lots of great reading for our 19th Century book club!
Outside of that, some books I read this year and loved:
- Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse & various essays
- Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
- Henry James: The Aspern Papers
- Katherine Rundell: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
- Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, and The T-shirts I Love (which can be read in a single sitting
- Toni Morrison: Beloved
- Ross Douthat: The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery
- Jeffrey Toobin: American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst - has some good Stochastic Resonance for today's world (in Alan Jacobs' sense of the term https://blog.ayjay.org/stochastic-resonance-in-reading/ )
- Don Norman: The Design of Everyday Things
- Patrick O'Brian: Master and Commander
- Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda
- Denis Johnson: Jesus' Son
- Bill Watterson and John Kascht: The Mysteries
There's a category of reading that I do a lot of but I never know how to deal with it in this kind of list: books that spend time with but don't read cover to cover. Essay collections, poetry collections, big art books, anything that you can dip in and out of without the same need for continuity and momentum. Some of the best books in that category that I spent time with, which this year skewed towards cinema:
- Molly Haskell: Holding My Own in No Man's Land: Women and Men and Film and Feminists
- Tadao Satō: Currents in Japanese Cinema: Essays
- John Kisch: Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art
- Hans Helmut Prinzler: Sirens & Sinners: A Visual History of Weimar Film, 1918-1933
- Mark A. Vieira: George Hurrell's Hollywood: Glamour Portraits 1925-1992
- Emily King: A Century of Movie Posters: From Silent to Art House
- Abbas Kiarostami: In the Shadow of Trees: The Collected Poetry of Abbas Kiarostami
- Claude McKay: Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay (I discovered McKay from Hollis Robbin's excellent book Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition)
- Emily Dickinson's poetry (supplemented by commentaries from Camille Paglia, Helen Vendler, and Marta McDowell's book Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Iconic Poet)
- Stephan Koja: Gustav Klimt: Landscapes (which includes lovely paintings of the Attersee, where my wife and I honeymooned)
Great list! What did you think of Murakami? And what are you favourite Dickinson poems? And I am so glad to hear you read Hollis Robbins's book!
For what it's worth, I enjoyed both hard boiled universe at the end of the world and Norwegian wood more than wind up bird chronicle. I haven't found the initiative to dive into 1Q84
And if you have any interest at all in classical music, you must read murakamis conversations with Ozawa. Truly brilliant!
ooh yes, do you have a link?
https://www.harukimurakami.com/book/absolutely-on-music
Enjoy!!
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle frustrated me. I haven't tried another Murakami since and fear I may never, as it's thought to be his masterpiece. I thought it a postmodern trainwreck sprinkled with amusing characters, rather like a David Lynch film, Kafkaesque even. The length made it quite the slog read of my 2023.
Isn't Forms of Contention great? I also recommend tracking down Hollis Robbins' essay on Dracula and the time, if you haven't read it.
From Dickinson, I quite like The Soul selects her own Society, Safe in their Alabaster Chambers, We dream—it is good we are dreaming—, and A Light exists in Spring. But I have much to discover and explore in her work! I started reading a beautiful, thick volume called Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them earlier this year and quickly was quickly overwhelmed by how many plants there are. So many specific flowers and grasses and trees which I'm sure are associated with specific seasons and meanings! I discovered Marta McDowell's book by trying to look for whether anyone could help me tackle that side of her. I haven't read it all, but I look forward to digging in!
I haven't read much Murakami, but what I have read is excellent! I liked Wind-Up Bird more than Kafka. It was interesting reading them back to back - there are a lot of similarities between them: aimless young men being pulled into mysteries and passing into strange liminal spaces. The way he achieves certain effects reminds me a bit of David Lynch - especially Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway.
I loved The Restless Republic - brilliantly written and structured. The classic I finally read this year was Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal which I found very powerful- it felt particularly resonant in these uncertain times. I've also enjoyed discovering the novels of Elizabeth Taylor, especially A View of the Harbour.
Taylor is great, have you read Mrs Palfrey? Macneice underrated!
I have read Mrs Palfrey, it's a wonderful book though I have to say I found it almost unbearably sad. MacNeice is indeed underrated - I love his shorter poems but have always found longer narrative poems a bit daunting. Autumn Journal though reads more like, well, a journal, albeit a beautifully meditative and insightful one.
This year I read Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich, which was some of the best poetry I've read in my entire life. Also marked down Kindred, All the Light We Cannot See, and East of Eden among my favorites. Currently reading The Good Wife of Bath by Karen Brooks- historical fiction based off off the Canterbury Tale.
Reading Auden's A Christmas Oratorio. About halfway through Middlemarch too. Origin of the Species still has me under a spell so I've peppered in some Stephen Jay Gould and other related content. Hark the Harold Bloom seems to always be within arm's reach...
My family is making a trip to Dublin this coming June if anyone has anything to recommend for Ireland
I just finished "A Heart So White" from Javier Marías, and it is such a beautiful book that I just started another one from his, "The Infatuations". I highly recommend the former, Marías died just last year and he was (and is) considered one of the best Spanish writers from the last century.
Also, planning to start Stuart Mill's autobiography (you sold it so well) and Chesterton's Orthodoxy
I must read Marías. Do let me know what you think of Mill.
Books I read in the last months:
Madame Bovary by Flaubert
The lion and the Dragon by Lawrence James
Nomonhan 1939 by Stuart Goldman
Orwell: Life and art by Jeffrey Meyers
2+2=5 Orwell and Russia by Masha Karp
Reading now:
Israelophgobia by Jake Wallis Simons
in the queue :
The pathetic symphony by Klaus Mann
Sparks by Ian Johnson
The Weimar Years by Frank McDonough
This is it for now.
Which do you recommend? And which Flaubert translation?
Haven't read much fiction this year but one I did read and will highly recommend is Orbital by Samantha Harvey.
I'm reading Baudolino by Umberto Eco at the moment and really enjoying it
I read Flaubert in Italian, all others, but one, are in English. I would say Israelophobia is very useful for these days. Then as universal reading the two books regarding Orwell. We never know enough of him. Again in times when freedom of speech is in peril reading Orwell is always relevant.
I loved two Booker award winners: Paul Beatty's "The Sellout" and D. B. P. Pierre's "Vernon God Little".
Liked another Booker shortlist, Percival Everett's "The Trees", especially the first half (so good, so funny), but the second half went sideways with a "full woke" resolution unbecoming a brilliant start.
If you're from the southern USA, "Vernon God Little" is a must read - so very funny. The dialogue is pure south Texas.
This was a year of Discovering, I think. Discovering Martha Gellhorn's work was probably my personal highlight of 2023. She has a keen-edged handling of words and people, combined with such a vivid thirst for living life fully that comes through in her work. I'm nearly done with Caroline Morehead's Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, which has added wonderful depth to my appreciation of her work.
Anthony Trollope was another author I fell in love with, and I made it through a few of his Barsetshire books over the course of the year. I particularly enjoyed his clear-sighted approach to community and friendship and all that goes on between our conscious intention and the received action.
This year I started the Bradbury Challenge, and began reading from poetry, essays and short stories before bed each night. That has involved some pleasant discoveries, such as the fact that I have matured enough to revel in Leaves of Grass, a book that I have often visited but never appreciated enough to stick with. Now every line finds an echo within myself.
Marilynne Robinson's essays have been timely, humbling and world-expanding. I've enjoyed them so much that reading her fiction will need to be a key part of my 2024 reading.
I had not read any Robert Sheckley before, but his short stories frequently left me with a surprised grin. I'd avoided Edgar Allan Poe for most of my life, but I am at last in a place where I can revel in his beautiful way with words.
My Year Long Piece was War and Peace, and I am so glad to have finally read this. Such an incomparable work! Tolstoy reminded me of Trollope in his ability to see on through his characters to their true motivations, but as an author he sees the world quite differently tham Trollope does and that showed in his work.
For 2024, I want to read Josef Pieper and Plutarch's Lives, but my fiction reading goals will involve The Expanse, more Sir Walter Scott and some Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope.
One book that I struggled through was The Sword of Truth, by Terry Goodkind. It has been frequently recommended to me by those who discover I am a fan of Robert Jordan, but I am frustrated by the incompatibility of the "wisdom" offered vs the behaviours. It seems to me that the big point of the book was that everything you hear could be wrong and shouldn't be accepted at face value, and yet the characters spent the whole book acting as if what they had heard most recently was true. Information was not confirmed l, beyond the hearing if it, before being acted upon. The Seeker claimed to mistrust the knowledge of others, yet did not distrust himself even though his own knowledge was coming from others. It was quite strange, and I'm not sure how committed to the rest of the series I am. If I had hope that Me. Goodkind realized this blindness of his characters and was walking them out of this, I would keep going. But nothing about his writing so far has led me to believe that he is even aware of these inconsistencies.
Currently reading The Offing by Benjamin Myers, a new to me author. Enjoyed Pod by Laline Paull. Salvage The Bones by Jesmyn Ward was good. I plan to read Let Us Descend by the same author. Jesmyn Ward is coming to my city in 2024 and I will be in the audience. Another book queued up for 2024 is The Future by Naomi Alderman.