All the books I read in 2023

Year number two!

I decided to write this year’s list as I went along, generally updating it at the end of every couple of months, which helped me remember more about each book I read. I also decided to include ratings of (nearly) all the books I read this year. This makes me somewhat uncomfortable, but it seemed worth a shot, if only to help me further solidify my thoughts. With one or two exceptions, the ratings are lines I enjoyed from the books.

For those keeping score, I read 160 books this year (technically 162, but I don’t feel that I actually read two of them; see below for an explanation). It must be said that this wouldn’t be possible without the incredible support my partner so graciously provides. It must also be said that this list is therefore >25,000 words long. As such, I’ve included pictures of the books I read in each given month. My hope is that they can help people decide what they might be interested in checking out.

I also had my own book come out this year, which you can order here. (Support a local bookshop if you can!)

January

Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes, translated by Donald A. Cress (1641/1993) — I resolved to read more nonfiction in the form of philosophy and criticism this year. I figured no better way to hold myself to that than by starting out with some OG thinking. Unfortunately, it wound up being a little bit of thinking and a lot of apologizing, which I suppose is the only way to pretend to be able to prove the existence of God. Apparently, no less eminent a presence than Edmund Husserl only considered the first two Meditations to be of any import, which I have to agree with. And, if nothing else, Descartes gave me a good excuse to eschew meditation when he said “I am; I exist — this is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking; for perhaps it could also come to pass that I were to cease all thinking I would then utterly cease to exist.” 1.5/5 Excuses For The Existence Of God

Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001) — Book two didn’t do much to make me less annoyed. I know that McEwan is a giant of letters, (a couple months later I found out that Hitchens dedicated god is not Great to him) but I found little to like about this (incredibly well-liked!) book. Maybe the conceit of it was more impressive in 2001, and maybe I should give more sympathy to deeply unsympathetic characters, but I simply loathed Briony, didn’t find the fake narrative/twist/faux writerly trick at all compelling, and would rather have Brontë, or Lawrence, or James tell me about an English country-house and its denizens. All that said, Sir Ian did articulate something I find myself wondering about on regular occasion when he wrote “She wondered whether having final responsibility for someone, even a creature like a horse or a dog, was fundamentally opposed to the wild and inward journey of writing.” 1.5/5 Steamy Library Sex Scenes

What is Art? by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1897/1995) — Tolstoy fucking slaps. I suspect the bad mood I was carrying over from Descartes and McEwan helped, but the full-on hater mode that Tolstoy had going for the length of this essay was so much fun. You name it, Tolsty (not a typo) could shit on it, and shit on it elegantly, and with passion. There were a couple of sections where he sounded a little like an old man yelling about his cultural lawn, but for the most part, his criticisms hold up (though, come March, this would be complicated for me by the thoughts of Clement Greenberg). I found his hatred of the church, but love of Jesus to be strangely compelling, even though I’m a fairly virulent atheist. I also came away with a working definition of beauty (“that which pleases us without awakening our lust”) that has come in useful on more than one occasion. 5/5 Angry Old Russians

Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (1878) — Speaking of unsympathetic characters (here’s looking at you, Eustacia). What a wild ride. The scandal this must have caused among good God-fearing Englishpersons back in the day. If you’re in the mood for some good old-fashioned adultery, some semi old-fashioned magical sheep dye peddlers, and some top-notch prose of the most delightfully pretentious order, this is the book for you. We’re talking page one wherein Hardy hits us with “Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour.” Or, “She ascended to her old position at the top, where the red coals of the perishing fire greeted her like living eyes in the corpse of day.” Or, “… and he recoiled at the thought that the quality of finiteness was not foreign to Eden.” 5/5 Illicit Affairs

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (2021) — First book club book of the year. Not a book I think I would ever have picked up on my own, but I am glad to have read of it. Less of a self-help/self-improvement book than a deeply considered think on the nature of time and our relationship to it, Oliver’s long-form meditation had some pretty neat thoughts in it that I hadn’t ever considered (in all likelihood, because I didn’t want to, a fact that Oliver happily points out). He takes pains to warn the reader that he will offer little to no practical advice for how to divvy up your time, and he keeps his promise. If, instead, you want to reconceptualize your relationship with “work” (it’s in quotes for a reason), time, and yes, death, then check this out. If you’re as lucky as I am, you’ll get to have some fun discussions about the nature of (a)telicity. 4.5/5 Confrontations With The Fear Of Death

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859) — I got the 150th anniversary edition that Penguin put out after I tried to reference Darwin in something I was writing, when I realized that I had read almost nothing he had ever written. I certainly didn’t need to read the entirety of this text, but for the most part I’m glad I did, if only because it was fascinating to see just how many of the arguments “against” evolution that are still (still!) being bandied about today were directly addressed by Chuck way back when. There were also a couple of rad lines where our intrepid adventurer showed us his poet side: “Man can hardly select, or only with much difficulty, any deviation of structure excepting such as is externally visible; and indeed he rarely cares for what is internal.” And, “Mountains are islands on the land.” I love me some Muir, and home I must go, but hot damn, islands on the land indeed. 4/5 Missing Links

29 Selected Essays (Franklin Library Edition) by Michel de Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame (late 1500s, 1982) — I started this last year, with the goal/intent of reading an essay a week or so, but I am bad at such things, and so I read maybe the first ten and then the book collected dust on the bottom shelf of my coffee table for months. New year new me, etc. I’m a little reticent to say anything about the good Lord, but suffice it to say reading him was a blast. When I started the book I had just started doing BJJ and learning about pain, and so it seemed like so much of what Montaigne was saying was directly applicable to that. After a break, it was less so, and more applicable to life itself. This collection ended with An Apology for Raymond Sebond, and while I was taken in by the first 50 pages or so, wherein Montaigne systematically eliminates most arguments in defense of speciesism, the rest of it, being an apology for Christianity, was not my jam. Fortunately, I was recently lent/gifted nearly all of his essays, so I’m sure I’ll find plenty more to love. 4.5/5 Peritonsillar Abscesses

Mind the Stop by G.V. Carey (1939) — Purchased and read at the recommendation of my editor at S&S, in no small part due to my overly heavy usage of commas. Delightfully dry. Carey suffers no fools, but doesn’t punch down, and is willing to concede that sometimes the English language changes. I might start calling the Oxford comma the Carey comma for fun, at least in my head. Towards the end of this slim volume Carey offers up an example of the potential intrusiveness of commas when using ‘if’ vs. ‘when’ clauses that really drove the point home for me: “To give a very simple instance, in ‘When I heard the news, I was greatly distressed’ the comma does not intrude, but in ‘I was greatly distressed, when I heard the news’ it does.” 5/5 Full Stops

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (unknown translator) (1862) — I found this copy from the now defunct (I think) publisher Roads Classics at the Biddeford, Maine coffee shop cum book store cum bar, Elements. I have tried fairly hard to find out who translated this version, and I think it’s the Garnett, but I’m not sure. Whoever it was, they were heavy on the commas (and that’s not just recency bias from Carey). That said, the story held up — I find it unlikely that even a gross mistranslation could ruin the appeal of young nihilists raging against everything — and though they’re occasionally a little stilted, many of the lines are inescapably powerful. See: “Are you so disillusioned? queried Bazarov. No, but I am dissatisfied, Madame Odintsov replied.” And perhaps the most relentless interrogation of another soul I’ve ever come across in the form of “What are you preparing yourself for? What future is awaiting you? I mean to say — what object do you want to attain? What are you going forward to? What is in your heart? In short, who are you? What are you?” 4.5/5 Fights With Modernity

Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by C.K. Ogden (1922) — I won’t claim to understand the overall point of this. I still can’t understand truth tables unless I’m reading an explanation. I wrote down a number of lines that I couldn’t parse the meaning of. And yet, likely in no small part due to the weight afforded him, I really enjoyed this. The usage of hierarchical statements helped (forced?) me to slow down and try to figure out what was meant and what I could do with that. At the time of writing this I was reading Hume, which helped (particularly with the usage of the word proposition, and with the relationship(s) between cause and effect). When he said “Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.” I couldn’t help but wonder if all writing (all good writing, anyway) was necessarily philosophy. When he later said that “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I decided that writing must be philosophy. Beyond that I can’t (yet) say anything else. Whereof one and all. 5/5 Occasionally Clear Propositions

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998) — Big book. Fitting, I suppose. Based on the stories I heard growing up from my daughter-of-missionaries mother, Barbara does an excellent job of capturing the experiences she had as a young child in Congo. Her dedication to, and the skill with which she provides each narrating character with their own specific voice that is consistent (but not constrained) from childhood through to later adult life is very impressive. While reading the book I felt that the pacing was a little off, but I now suspect that it was purposeful, in that for all but one of the main characters the time they spent under their despotic father/husband’s thumb would necessarily play an outsized role in their life and memories. I also agree with Michiko Kakutani, who felt that the book could be a bit heavy-handed, though if it hadn’t been, I don’t know that I could have taken it seriously. I imagine Barbara struggled with finding that balance. Besides, if it weren’t so serious, I don’t know that we would have gotten the line “… I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.” And that would be a shame. 3.5/5 Biblical Mistranslations

The Voyeur’s Motel by Gay Talese (2016) — Unbelievable ridiculousness that, at least in part, is unbelievable because it likely isn’t true. I heard about this book a few years ago, and picked it up around the same time I got Fathers and Sons. I vaguely knew that Gay was/is a journalistic juggernaut, and I respect that his devotion to nonfiction hade him wait 25 years to publish this (especially since he was struggling to write a book in the 90’s). But the book itself is in large part simple reproductions of Gerald Foos’s diary. And while the entries are interesting, it’s odd to me that a man who wrote a book about the liberalization of sexual mores in America couldn’t see that at least some of the entries were little more than fantasy. 2.5/5 Attic Peepholes

The Blue and Brown Books by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1965) — Bought at the same time as the Tractatus. To some extent harder to read, as the incredibly complex thoughts aren’t conveniently separated into bullet points. That said, as the “books” are really lectures that he gave at Cambridge, much of it is, for lack of a better word, friendlier than the Tractatus. There was too much to take away from this to write about in such a short review, but towards the end of the book he talked about the “peculiar feeling of pastness [that is] characteristic of images as memory images” and I can’t get over that verbiage. How much of “memory” is just those feelings of pastness in disguise? I can’t say, but it’s interesting to think about. 4/5 Metaphysical Questions

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor (1967/1973) — What wonderful madness. I had no idea what I was getting into when I picked up this book, and had never heard of Bulgakov, I just liked the title and the creepy giant cat on the cover of the edition I have. This has happened a couple of times, where from a book that I greatly enjoyed I only have two notes, and I think in this case it was because I was so engrossed in the story that I didn’t pay enough attention to the individual lines. In my defense, between the rewritten Biblical history, Mephistopheles incarnate, giant talking cats, and the Black Mass, there’s a lot going on, and I just felt that I had to keep reading to make sure I was following what was happening, in the best possible way. 4.75/5 Rainbows Drinking Water From the Moscow River

A Meal In Winter by Hubert Mingarelli, translated by Sam Taylor (2012/2016) — Read in an evening at the recommendation of my friend Blake, this novella is a masterclass in setting and tension. On it’s face it is sparse, and maybe even shouldn’t work, but it does, and it does so very well. I think the less one knows going in, the better, so I’ll leave it at that, other than to provide quotes that I think should convince almost anyone to check this book out. “And the more I suffered for them, the more I hated them.” “Me too, said Emmerich. But if we look beyond tomorrow, we’ll be able to remember that at least we’ve done it once. I can’t look beyond tomorrow, Bauer said.” 4/5 Nonexistent Trams

February

The Trial by Franz Kaka, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (1925/1937) — Almost certainly anything I have to say about Kafka will be cliché, or outright wrong. At the time of reading, my only exposure to him was The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, both of which I enjoyed (insofar as they’re enjoyable) but neither of which blew me away. While reading The Trial I found myself with the same general feeling, but having since had to try and describe the book to someone, I realized how well done it is, and how well Kafka managed to recreate the sense of dread that can be conjured by bureaucracy. I also came to wonder why Kakfa was so very, very good at paranoia, and while I’ve decided on some potential reasons, as I’m no Kafka scholar, I’ll keep them to myself. 3.75/5 Attic Courts

Reading Myself and Others by Phillip Roth (1975) — In an interesting coincidence, Roth had a lot to say about Kafka and specifically about The Trial, in the brief moments when he wasn’t lamenting all the attention he got for Portnoy’s Complaint. I’ve read five other books by Roth and enjoyed them all (albeit to varying extents) but I found this to be mostly an exercise in complaining that people didn’t like him or his writing, despite his being incredibly successful. It’s possible that I don’t have the proper perspective or can’t appreciate what it would have felt like to receive that backlash personally, but I just found so much of this collection of essays to be glorified whining. There was, for me at least, one pearl though: “Fiction is not written to affirm the principles and beliefs that everybody seems to hold, nor does it seek to guarantee the appropriateness of our feelings.” 2/5 Phillip’s Complaints

The Ring is Closed by Knut Hamsun, translated by Robert Ferguson (1936/2010) — Fairly certain I read this at the recommendation of Knausgård. It is a strange book. Almost a self-conscious attempt at stream of consciousness, and certainly an exercise in patience, as the entire point of the main character’s existence is to do as little as possible in life, this is not a book that I would recommend to anyone. My understanding is that Hamsun’s Hunger is a better choice. And yet, he created his moments here: “But time passes and everything shapes itself to time” and “Remarkably capable girl, that Lolla, a lot nicer than she used to be, and her nostrils a lot less frivolous.” and “You might almost think it wasn’t worthwhile wanting to be anybody other than yourself.” 3.5/5 Frivolous Nostrils

Walden or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau (1854) — A classic that I was supposed (and maybe even alleged) to have read in high school. I’m glad I waited until now. If I’d read it then I might agree with some reviewers who find Thoreau ponderous, pompous, and pitiful. Instead, I found him funny (“I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.”), occasionally ponderous, and, far more than occasionally, inspiring (“It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived like a dolphin.”). If only we, or at least I, could look at anything half as well as Thoreau looked at everything. I will say that it is probably best to space out one’s reading of this, as there are certainly parts that can drag, but otherwise, fuck the haters, Walden is a blast. (For a far more eloquent review of him, see this essay by Steve Edwards.) 4/5 Beginnings Of Evil

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson (1997) — Also something I was to have read in high school, but this time read for my book club. I don’t think any of us particularly liked it, and most of us intensely disliked it. I don’t know how he is as a rule, but in this book, Bryson is a pompous, cruel, and hypocritical fool who happens to occasionally be slightly funny, albeit at the expense of others. (He offers up the necessary cracks at himself, but only in the form of thinly veiled compliments about how much he has changed.) He’s a diligent reporter of facts about the Appalachian trail, but so are fourth-graders. I have an idea of why this book is so famous, and it comes from Thoreau: “Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common-sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.” 1/5 Abandoned Thru-Hikes

The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, and Selected Stories by Nikolay Gogol, translated by Ronald Wilks (2006) — The Great Russians are increasingly hit or miss for me. Like my time with Chekhov last year, I didn’t find Gogol’s works that compelling. The Government Inspector was funny, and I suspect it’s even funnier as an actual production, and The Overcoat was a painfully sad exploration of poverty, aspiration, and the inevitable coldness of not only one’s fellow man, but of any institution comprised of many of those fellow men. I will, as with Chekhov, return, and perhaps to a different translation. 2.5/5 Noses Fit For Grabbing

god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens (2007) — A polemic for the ages. A friend of mine and I have long said that organized religion is likely the single evilest, most destructive entity the world has ever known, so it seems to fair to say I was already primed to agree with everything Hitch had to say. But it’s still fun to read his diatribes, and laugh at him and myself and all the other virulent atheists, because it doesn’t matter what we think, or how hard we believe that “All postures of submission and surrender should be part of our prehistory.” Religion, in whatever form it decides to take for the decade (astrology out there making that comeback), will always be here in all of its silly, silly glory. 3.5/5 Snide Minuscules

Oresteia by Aeschylus, translated by Richmond Lattimore (5th century BCE/1953) — I found this tiny paperback in a free library sometime in 2022, and figured I’d dutifully read some ancient Greek plays, find them boring, and not read any others. Reader, I was wrong. Aeschylus is dope, and Lattimore’s introduction (“But dream image is memory image…”) and translation (“Your words escaped my unbelief.”) are incredible. There is something so pure in the plays, and the clarity and intentionality of language is mesmerizing. See: “You killed, and it was wrong. Now suffer wrong.” and “Exiles feed on empty dreams of hope.” I normally find plays very difficult to read, and am not able to take much away from them, but this was a whole other experience, that ultimately led to obtaining (well, being gifted) a lovely edition of the University of Chicago press edition of all the Greek tragedies. Look out for those reviews later this year. 4.5/5 Unbewept Lords

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer (1998/2007) — Two of my best-read friends adore this book, so much so that they have independently obtained tattoos of the same poem in the same place on their bodies. It could have been the weather, or what I’d read recently, or maybe I just don’t “get” it, but I was not as exuberant about the book as a whole. It’s wildly impressive, in the sheer number of characters, each with their own voice, and the chronology, intertextuality, and outright joyful abandon, but I found it dragging at many points. The language of the book though, that never dragged. See: “I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don’t have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.” and “Or he writes in his head; in other words, he hallucinates.” Also, in the endnotes, there’s a quote from Bolaño, that “Reading is more important than writing.” which was a thing I needed and wanted to hear. 3.5/5 Obsidian Livers

The Point, Issue 28—Included here so that more people read this lovely magazine.

March

Testosterone Rex Myths of Sex, Science, and Society by Cordelia Fine (2017) — A very thoroughly researched examination of the role of testosterone in sex and gender roles in society. This reads less like a book than a review/meta-analysis of the existing literature, albeit with a serious agenda. Cordelia’s diligence is impressive, and her calling out of wildly sexist and limited “foundational” studies is a great breath of fresh air. For me, she does run up against the same level of dogmatism of those she is decrying in her assertion that testosterone/sex plays no role in brain development, but perhaps that level of assertiveness is exactly what’s needed to come to a healthy middle ground. If you don’t have much experience reading science, I imagine this might be more of a chapter a week kind of read, but it is generally approachable even if you’re a filthy casual. 3/5 Dead (?) Kings

Lisbon Poets Camões, Cesário, Sá-Carneiro, Florbela, Pessoa, translated by Austen Hyde and Martin D’Evelin (2015) — A lovely bilingual edition of five (or more, depending on how you feel about Pessoa’s alter-egos) of Portugal’s poets gifted to me by dear friends Jess and Joe. With no real knowledge of Portuguese, I’m not qualified to comment on the translation, but comparing a number of the translations to their counter-facing originals, I got the impression that they are faithful, straightforward efforts. It might be reductive, but I felt that each poet had a great sense of passion, a profound need to feel as much as possible, that I enjoyed. Pessoa in his various forms was by far the best part of the collection, with lines that took my breath away, literally. See: “TO THINK ABOUT GOD IS TO DISOBEY GOD/for God desired us not to know him/and thus he hid away from sight…” and “Why did you give me your soul, if I had no notion of what to do with it” 4/5 Corpses Deferred That Procreate

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968) — Was anyone ever so themselves? I am here to tell you that someone was. I’m a little obsessed with the idea of someone’s writing sounding like they’re talking to you, perhaps because my alleged voice is the only thing that might make any of my writing tolerable, but primarily (I like to think) because I believe that all great writing should, at some point, sound like someone is telling you a story. Every essay in this collection reads and sounds and feels as if you’re being told the story of Didion’s life, unvarnished, as if somehow your eyes and ears have been placed in and on her head. It’s an incredible feat, and I finally understand (a little) why Didion has such ardent followers. 4/5 People I Used To Be

all men are liars by Alberto Manguel, translated by Miranda France (2008/2012) — A delightful literary Rashomon. Alberto does little to no hand holding in his telling(s) of the story of a group of acquaintances’ investigation into the death of a man they knew, or thought they knew. He also does not prepare you, or didn’t prepare me, or I didn’t prepare myself, for the switch from a lighthearted whodunit into a commentary on the Argentinian government’s corruption and torture, what it means to create and/or own a work of art, and whether it’s worthwhile to even try to know anyone else. Manguel also throws in more than a few delightful lines, my favorite being, “Every author discovers himself through his adverbs.” 4/5 Facts As Pure Narration

The Analects by Confucius, translated by D.C. Lau (Deeply unclear it turns out/1979) — Picked up in a San Francisco bookstore on the cheap. I’m working on reading more outside of the Western Canon in every genre. Thus, Confucius. D.C. Lau’s introduction is very helpful, if not necessary to understand the context of this slim and dense collection of sayings. I was surprised by how little of the books are things directly said by Confucius, but then I suppose I shouldn’t have been, given how much Jesus did or didn’t say in the Bible, etc. Plenty of the wisdom here is difficult to apply to modernity, but the majority is still relevant. It was also very neat to see the Categorical Imperative stated 1.5 millennia before Kant got around to it “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.” 4/5 Repaid Injuries

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan (2003) — March’s book club book. It’s no fault of Joel’s that I found this a difficult read. He was clear-eyed, direct, and uncompromising in his assessment of the complete immorality that is the modern corporation as we know it. Unfortunately, his message doesn’t appear to have done any good, as corporations today have even more power, are subject to even less actual oversight, and are more than happy to flaunt any and all rules, whether they be made by government or basic human decency, with the supreme confidence that comes with the knowledge that they will pay a paltry fine and keep on fucking keeping on. There is an “Unfortunately Necessary Sequel” that I imagine would feel more relevant to today’s world, but I also don’t know that I need to learn more about how terrible capitalism has become. 3.5/5 Sociopaths Disguised As Companies

Your Republic Is Calling You by Young-Ha Kim, translated by Chi-Young Kim (2006/2010) — For whatever reason, I have it in my mind that I got this recommendation from Knausgård. I do know I didn’t randomly pick it off a shelf, but origin of suggestion is perhaps unclear. The story of a North Korean agent who has all but defected to South Korea, the book alleges to take place in 24 hours, with each chapter detailing the time of day, but there are many flashbacks and explorations of past events and feelings. A psychological novel in the tradition of Dostoevsky, but of such a different sort of psychology as to be, well, novel. Kim also tells you exactly what this character is about on the opening page with the lines, “It’s as if his soul, having lain dormant in his body, woke up, discovered the heavy and authoritative being trapping it, and began pounding on it loudly in protest.” 3.75/5 Pointless Emotions

Confessions of a Heretic by Roger Scruton (2017) — My editor pointed me toward Sir Scruton, and as always, it was a wonderful suggestion. Theoretically, I shouldn’t agree with very much Scruton has to say, what with his being a tried and true conservative of the highest order. And yet, in no small part, I think, thanks to his inimitable style, I found myself a little drunk with his thoughts. From pets, to how long we ought to live, to music and architecture, to what counts as art, he has thoughts — well-formed, beautiful thoughts — on everything. He’s also funny, as evidenced by the following: “The Gershwins are referring, and the music shows this, to a way of ‘being towards others.’ I apologize for using that Heideggerrian expression, since I can imagine no human being more inimical to the idea of dancing than Heidegger.” 4.5/5 Dancing Heideggers

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848) — I’ve had a copy of this for nearly five years, but thankfully my editor, again, came to my rescue and convinced me to stop being lazy and just read the damn thing. Admittedly it’s a lot of book, but I devoured it in a week. It’s just so very human. Becky is a wonderfully complicated (anti?)-heroine, Dobbin is a saint, and Thackeray’s willful addressing of the reader is, for want of a better word, cozy. Plus: “Who was the blundering idiot who said that ‘fine words butter no parsnips?’ Half the parsnips of society are served and rendered palatable with no other sauce.” And, “She wished to give him nothing, but that he should give her all. It is a bargain not unfrequently levied in love.” 4.5/5 Buttered Parsnips

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) — I have not used enough drugs to have read this book. Or perhaps it’s because I thought I knew what I was getting into, some sort of exploration of the potential deadening of society’s emotions a la Infinite Jest, which this most certainly is not. I know that it’s a cliché to compare the two, but I found this far scarier than 1984, insofar as much of it does seem more possible (the genetic engineering, not so much). But I also somehow didn’t find it compelling? Impressive, certainly, especially for its time, but somehow wanting, perhaps because of a feeling of judgment. We’ll see when I re-read it in a few years. 3/5 Unworthy Selves

Art and Culture: Critical Essays by Clement Greenberg (1961) — Found in a coffee shop’s leave-one-take-one library, this was this year’s first serious step toward my aesthetic education. It was perhaps a larger step than I was ready for. The first half of the collection were easy enough to follow, but once Greenberg got into the details of specific artists, even if I looked up the paintings he was discussing, much of the nuance was lost on me. That said, the entire book was worth it just to have read Avant-Garde and Kitsch, which helped me better understand the appeal of much of popular art, but specifically literature, with this line: “The same point can be made with respect to kitsch literature: it provides vicarious experience for the insensitive with far greater immediacy than serious fiction can hope to do.” Greenberg also forced me to reconceptualize my own gate-keeping/hipsterdom when he said that “One cannot condemn tendencies in art; one can only condemn works of art. To be categorically against a current art tendency or style means, in effect, to pronounce on works of art not yet created and not yet seen.” 4/5 Gold Umbilical Cords

Tales of Edgar Allen Poe (Franklin Library Edition, 1979) — Split into Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Tales of Horror and Suspense, and Tales of Ratiocination, this collection showed me a breadth of Poe beyond Casks and Pits that I didn’t know existed. The Arabesque tales were perhaps the most interesting, in that they were clearly just Poe having a good time inventing fantastical stories without any sort of moral (that I could find). The Tales of Ratiocination were also fun, scary little detective stories really. And, of course, Poe was metal in the way only he can be: “And I stood in the morass among the tall lilies, and the rain fell upon my head — and the lilies sighed one unto the other in the solemnity of their desolation.” 3.5/5 Solemn Desolations

The Decameron by Giovanni Bocaccio, translated by G.H. McWilliam (1353/1972) — Yet another book that I started with the intent of reading some of every night, only to let it fall by the wayside. So, as my usual penance, I read fifty pages a day until I finished it. It was abundantly clear how much Chaucer borrowed/adapted/stole from Bocaccio, but I also just have to assume that there are only so many folk stories/themes to write down. Like Chaucer — or maybe Chaucer was just like Bocaccio? — regardless, shit is raunchy. Unlike Chaucer, I wonder if, or how much Bocaccio was influenced by the Shahnameh, given the premise of storytelling that The Decameron has. If, unlike me, you don’t want to read 300 pages a week, you could just do 2 stories a week and finish it in a year. Seems more manageable. 3.5/5 Sexy, Sexy Stories

Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor (1952) — The first of three of O’Connor’s books that I would read in a week, and while it’s a tough call, I think the darkest. There is not a sane character to be found, its representation of the siren song that is religion is painfully (literally) true, and the feeling that there is nothing to be done about any of the sadness and hurt in the world is constant. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it also features an incredibly apt definition of nihilism: “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.” 4/5 Blind Preachers

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor (1960) — Runner up for darkness, winner for favorite (though even this is a strange word for something that leaves such a terrible taste in one’s mouth). Here again, we have O’Connor’s obsession with free will on full display (nasty side effect of Christianity, that). I think because it’s more of a journey of that obsession via the main character, Francis, I found this more welcoming, or easier to follow (as compared to Hazel in Wise Blood who comes to us fully formed in the strength of his (anti)-belief). There are, of course, more incredible lines, see: “He felt himself caught up in her look, held there before the judgment seat of her eyes.” and “I’m here before I knew this here was here.” and, the best of them all, “Children are cursed with believing.” 4.5/5 Crushed Shadows

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor (1965) — A posthumous collection of nine of her short stories, nearly every one of which, despite what O’Connor says (“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.”), are in fact devastatingly brutal. I don’t necessarily like or even believe in happy endings, or appropriate endings, or catering to an audience. But man, the repetition of pain and suffering takes a toll. I suppose these weren’t meant to be read back to back, or quickly, given their publication history before the compilation, so perhaps I’m at fault. I don’t know. Maybe it’s as simple as what O’Connor said in the title story: “Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.” 3.5/5 Views of the Woods

April

Dollar Road by Kjartan Fløgstad, translated by Nadia Christensen (1977/1989) — More patience requiring Norse literature courtesy of Knausgård. It is good, and Kjartan does a brilliant job of bending time and space to his will. (See: “The boy is frightened and wants to be put down! Selmer Hoysand is unwillingly set down, finds firm ground under his feet again, and runs as fast as he can out of the keen, sun-filled childhood memory.”) He also deftly uses the diverging paths of two men in Norway to explore the advent of Norway’s chosen version of modernity. But, all that said, I found this hard to follow, as if I was constantly reading it in a dream state, and couldn’t quite catch hold of it. Perhaps this was by design, but I couldn’t tell, and so it put me off somewhat. 3.5/5 Clothes That Went Well With Their Hair Color

A Writer’s Life by Gay Talese (2006) — Picked up before I’d read The Voyeur’s Motel and because Gay is or was a literary/journalistic giant. I still need, and am willing to give The Kingdom and the Power and Thy Neighbor’s Wife a shot, but only because I have yet to see what exactly is supposed to have made Gay so impressive. This autobiography/memoir is that in name only, and really felt like more of an excuse for Gay to finally publish a number of stories he couldn’t get published the first time around, and to talk about his incredibly arduous writing process. I also made the mistake of reading an interview with him that came across as very “Get off my lawn”-esque, and so… I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not the right audience. 2/5 Bobbitt’s

The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt (2010) — Book club choice #4, and an actual memoir, actually worth reading. Admittedly, I’d already read Postwar and Thinking the Twentieth Century (both of which I should really re-read) and so I was an avid Judt fan, but The Memory Chalet oozed even more of Judt’s charm and intellect. Also, the snark. (See: “This radical disjunction between the uninteresting evidence of your own eyes and ears and the incontrovertible conclusions to be derived from first principles introduced me to a cardinal axiom of French intellectual life.”) I would recommend Thinking the Twentieth Century if you want greater access to Judt’s raw intellect and thinking, but if you want to be entertained, moved, and with any luck, inspired, grab The Memory Chalet. 5/5 Green Lines

White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985) — “Is it possible to have a false perception of an illusion?” Unsurprisingly, Don provides the best words for my feelings about his book. As dreamlike as Dollar Road, but somehow more vivid, likely in no small part due to the shared commercial experiences and vocabulary that Don so kindly provides, White Noise is a wild ride. The book I took the most notes out of since Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, there’s no arguing with Don’s sheer mastery of hitting you with painfully profound thoughts, as often as not in the middle of a conversation about nothing remotely profound. (See: “Murray says it’s possible to be homesick for a place even when you’re there.” and “Are you saying that men have tried throughout history to cure themselves of death by killing others?”) The ending did throw me for a loop, and I was surprised at how meaningless The Airborne Toxic Event wound up being, but then I suspect that’s the point. 4.5/5 Devout Victimhoods

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (1945) — Steinbeck #9 down, only 22 to go. (Kidding, I think). A rollicking good time, more enjoyable than Tortilla Flat, if not meaningfully different in its aimlessness. It is fun to see a number of Steinbeck’s archetypes in their earlier incarnations, and to see him not taking himself and the world so seriously. Plus, I’ll take any excuse to read about Monterey and Pacific Grove. 4/5 Hours of the Pearl

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume (1748) — More of my tiny, probably futile attempts to gain a usable background in Western philosophy. The thing that struck me most was Hume’s incredible anticipation of modern neuroscience. His thoughts on how the brain ought to operate were uncanny, to the point of spookiness. His (like mine, i.e. futile) attempts to reason away religion and miracles were also fun, and his willingness to admit that “the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvelous… can never be thoroughly extirpated from human nature” was something I should probably learn from, but likely won’t. It also turns out that Wittgenstein didn’t like Hume very much, so do with that what you will. 4/5 Absurd Consequences

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818) — I had no idea going in that Frankenstein was a frame story! And epistolary! I’m a sucker for both, so that was fun. I also don’t think I fully knew just how intelligent the “monster” would be, and I certainly didn’t know how persistent in his rage he would be. So many morals, so many lessons, and such two-hundred-year-old devotion to a rational scientific fiction. It did get a little dry at times, in the way that 19th century self-obsession and “hysterics” can get dry, but if nothing else, familiarizing myself with such a fecund ancestor was worth it. And, for my money, the monster had one of the greatest insights into the human condition: “I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death — a state which I feared but did not yet understand.” 4/5 Ice Rafts

Comedies by Moliere, translated by Donald M. Frame (1985 Franklin Library Edition) — More O.G.’s. The humor stands up. Also, perhaps at this point unsurprisingly, much in common with The Decameron. The Misanthrope stood out, and it was nice to get a proper understanding of the term Tartuffian. I found Frame’s translation to be very readable, and though I don’t know the original French, the couplets and rhyming in general were very well done (see: “No, no; a soul that is well constituted cares nothing for esteem so prostituted”). It was also very nice to see that people have been making loner jokes for 400 years. (See: “I’ll sit here apart in this dark corner with my gloomy heart. That’s not good company for any man”) 4/5 Imaginary Invalids

The Castle by Franz Kafka, translated by Mark Harman (1926, 1998) — More Kafka, more struggling. The hardest read of the three I’ve done so far, which makes sense given its completely unfinished state (respect to the translator and publisher for keeping the ending in the middle of a sentence). My understanding from the translator’s note is that this keeps closer to Kafka’s German, which seems fairly true from the evidence offered, and that he keeps MUCH closer to Kafka’s original lack of punctuation, which seems completely true from the entire text. And while it was hard, it had the greatest moments of poignancy and depth, for me anyway. See: “… you were yearning, poor child, for something that was only half-defined, and at moments like that all that was needed was that the right people be posted in the direction you were looking and you were lost to them, you succumbed to the illusion that all of this, which was nothing but moments, ghosts, old memories, mostly your past and constantly receding former life, was still your real life right then” 3.5/5 Melancholy Residents Breaking Through the Roof

The Right To Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan (2021) — Picked up at Blue Hill Books in Blue Hill, Maine, along with Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom. Amia’s arguments throughout the book are lucid and engaging. She asks questions that I suspect many of us have considered, but haven’t been able to articulate nearly as clearly: “A vexed question: when is being sexually or romantically marginalized a facet of oppression, and when is it just a matter of bad luck, one of life’s small tragedies?” When indeed, Amia. She also points out just how fucked (no pun intended) we all are by the existing power structures in the world: “A feminism focused on women’s common oppression leaves untouched the forces that most immiserate most women, instead seeking gender-equal admission to existing structures of inequality.” If nothing else, her writing can help you think about desire, be it yours or anyone else’s, in a profoundly new way. 4/5 Politics of Desire

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966) — This book is WILD. Per Wikipedia, “The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre” which should be sufficiently informative, but somehow isn’t. Rhys was a depressive, and a drunk, and a brilliant writer who riddles you with her words: “It was like that morning when I found the dead horse. Say nothing and it may not be true.” and “For five years. Isn’t it quick to say. And isn’t it long to live.” There are moments throughout the book that are harder to follow than others, though one must anticipate, and of course accept this, when one is reading about the madwoman in the attic. For it’s not like she was born in the garret. Someone put her there. 4.5/5 Blanks In My Mind That Cannot Be Filled Up

Table Talk by William Hazlitt (1821–1822) — If you want to write an essay, or just read some grand ones, after you’ve finished with whatever amount of Montaigne you find sufficient, go and find yourself some Hazlitt. (Ignore any biographical information you may come across until after you’ve read him.) Be forewarned: he’ll tell you he’s going to talk about the Pleasure of Painting, or Indian Jugglers, or Effeminacy of Character, and then he’ll tell you about anything, and therefore everything, else. It will occasionally be tedious and pedantic, and it will always be brilliant. I don’t know that I recommend reading the entire two volumes at once, as I suspect there is much that I missed and lost, but then “Words are the only things that last forever” and so you can always go back to old Hazzy. (If, after having read something of his, instead of trying to decide what else of his admittedly large oeuvre to pursue, here is a grand essay about this complicated person and many of his works.) 4.5/5 Coffeehouse Politicians

May

Rising From the Plains by John McPhee (1986) — Someone got me or I got myself McPhee’s guide to writing longform nonfiction, Draft №4, a couple of years ago, and I read it last February. While I enjoyed it, it felt strange to be taking advice about writing from someone whose non-craft writing I hadn’t read. So when I saw Rising From the Plains at a yard sale I grabbed it for a dollar, and let me tell you, what a steal. Other people have said it before, but McPhee can make anything utterly fascinating. I am perhaps a little biased towards one of the main characters of the book, Wyoming, but even still, his thirst for knowledge and love of people are unavoidably contagious throughout. 4.5/5 Missing Time(s)

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, translated by Samuel Moore (1848/1888) — I told myself I read this a number of years ago, which was a lie, as I only ever opened the book/tract/pamphlet in a late night hypnagogic state, such that I didn’t remember anything of it. It’s not really a book, but I figure reading it twice makes it count as one. I’m glad I did, if only because they made a point that my editor also made in a subsequent conversation, i.e. that “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage laborers.” It also provided me with a direct quote for those who think communism is meant to make us all poor: “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.” And, if nothing else, the pamphlet is a fascinating historical document. 4/5 Haunting Spectres

The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick by Elizabeth Hardwick (2017) — I don’t know the first Hardwick essay I read, but I do know when I first found her genius, in Merve Emre’s NYRB essay about Hardwick. Google is incapable of finding the line anywhere else, as it comes from a series of untranscribed interviews Hardwick gave to the University of Kentucky, wherein, responding to the offense Bostonians might feel at her description of their silly, silly, little town, she laughed and said, “Only fools identify themselves with a place.” I swooned. I am still swooning. This collection is 640 pages, and so to try and summarize it is all but impossible. There are, perhaps, moments that drag, or perhaps more accurately moments that drag one under, as it can be to keep up with Hardwick. But there is always a reward, regardless of whether you know about the topic at hand, e.g. in In Maine, where she tells us that “Here, in Maine, every stone is a skull and you live close to your own death.” One needn’t have lived in this strange place to immediately understand what she means. 5/5 Poor Vessels for Transcendence

Native Son by Richard Wright (1940) — This was the third work of Wright’s that I’ve read. I think what I’ve decided is that he was a great writer, but not necessarily a great novelist. Both The Outsider and Native Son are rife with overly long, overly stylized speeches by characters that are clearly little more than Wright’s thoughts and feelings on various topics. They’re wonderfully crafted and clearly the product of much thought and effort, but I think they would fare better in or as essays. That said, within Native Son there is a fine thriller/chase novel, and while it’s not at all shocking today, reading it with an understanding of how vilified the book was when it came out is an interesting exploration of American hypocrisy and culture. 3/5 Ways to Die Without Shame

Rhetoric by Aristotle, translated by W. Rhys Roberts (4th century BCE/1981) — Mostly an act of completion, in that I had this in a set of Franklin Library books I had, and thought it prudent to read some of the source material behind most of the arguments I’ve ever made in my writing. Interestingly, I didn’t find myself taking much away from the instructions on using rhetoric; all of my notes are pithy or aphoristic statements sprinkled throughout the text. My suspicion is that since the majority of formal and informal education I’ve had on rhetoric and persuasion was likely rooted in this work, it was difficult to appreciate what felt like trite cliches. Or, I suppose, I am one of the people “whom one cannot instruct.” 3/5 Arguments Based On Knowledge

On Poetics by Aristotle, translated by Ingram Bywater (4th century BCE/1981) — I did technically read this, and I know I did, because I have one note from it. But I don’t think I internalized any of it. I don’t know if this is because I’m not well versed in stage drama or lyric poetry, or if I was simply tired and inattentive, or what. It has been added to the list of works that I intend to re-read after some more education. 3/5 Gestures of His Personages

The Immoralist by André Gide, translated by Dorothy Bussy (1902/1954) — There is a plot here, and there are things that happen, but they’re so terribly obfuscated by the stupidity that was 19th/20th century Puritanism that everything “immoral” that the main character Michel does is little more than alluded to. Perhaps reading it at the time one could get a good sense of Michel’s alleged wrongness, but reading it today I just felt like nearly everything that would help me understand his development occurred off stage. I read it months later, but if you want a similar, but better exploration of a disaffected youth’s trespasses against society, go for Oscar Wilde. 2.5/5 Remembrances of Happiness

The Natural by Bernard Malamud (1952) — What a way to start a career. Malamud’s debut novel is, for me, a near perfect instance of the form. There is one scene in ~200 pages that I thought could have been cut or shortened, but otherwise the story is riveting, regardless of one’s affinity for or even familiarity with baseball (I feel confident saying this for I am no fan of the sport). Roy Hobbs is a perfectly and completely realized protagonist, and terribly, all too human. Malamud’s prose is tight, often staccato, but it will carry you forward relentlessly until you find that you’ve suddenly come to the heartbreaking and true ending. 4.75/5 Moons Shedding Light Like Rain

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868/1869) — I found a beautiful Illustrated Junior Library hardcover in a Little Free Library sometime last year. I saw Greta Gerwig’s adaptation in 2019, but I had forgotten many of the plot points and most of the details, and I’m glad I did, for what a wondrous story to discover in real time. There is apparently criticism out there that this is somehow an anti-male text, with allegations about male readers being just like Teddy, an outsider, unable to get into the circle of women. If you are a male reading this review, know that that position is not only ridiculous and self-imposed, but also whatever the opposite of a fait accompli is. Read Little Women, experience joy, and love, and heartache, and fun, and the unadulterated experience that is growing up. 5/5 Tiny Fists Flapping Aimlessly About

We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour, translated by Catherine Porter (1991/1993) — Picked up at a coffeeshop’s free library purely for the title. This is a difficult book, but it is interesting, insofar as Latour makes a very good argument about the silliness that is the Western obsession with being “absolutely different from others!” This involves a goodly amount of pointing out of hypocrisy and sophistry, e.g. “The end of history is followed by history no matter what.” and “They bear this white man’s burden sometimes as an exalting challenge, sometimes as a tragedy, but always as a destiny.” He makes many, many other arguments, but most of them were either beyond me, or on material that I am completely unqualified to weigh in on. If you’re at all interested in sociology, or the impact of science (from Boyle to today!) on how we interact with the world, it’s worth a slow and steady read. 3.5/5 Foundations of the Pacified Collective

A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib (2019) — Hanif is one of my favorite living authors. When I read The Crown Ain’t Worth Much in 2019 it was all I could do to not take notes from every poem in the collection. This provided a similar experience, unsurprisingly. You could, honestly, just read the titles of his poems and find yourself laughing or crying or just generally feeling in a profound and human way that few others can capture (see: “WATCHING A FIGHT AT THE NEW HAVEN DOG PARK, FIRST TWO DOGS AND THEN THEIR OWNERS”). I am, admittedly, particularly drawn to Hanif’s precise observations on violence and the role it must always play in one’s life, but there is so much more to be learned from him, so much more that he can give us all. 5/5 Fists Determining Their Own Destiny

Pain: The Science of Suffering by Patrick Wall (2002) — Patrick Wall was an incredibly talented and prescient neuroscientist; he’s one of the co-discoverers/inventors of the Gate Control Theory of Pain AND TENS units. I bought his book and read it in a few hours after learning about him while doing research for an essay on pain. I don’t always agree with his opinions about the human interpretation of pain, but that is a semantic and philosophic argument, aka not a real one, and so it doesn’t really matter. For the layperson who isn’t an argumentative ass like me, this book is a nice, slim introduction to the scientific understanding of pain (albeit at the time of publication). 3.5/5 Pain(s) Always Accompanied by Emotion and Meaning

Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck (1954) — The significantly less famous sequel to Cannery Row. It’s a fine story, and according to Wikipedia probably a cash grab, which is perfectly reasonable. It’s entertaining, and if nothing else makes you want to know more and more about Doc, which to some extent you can, as he’s based on the real life biologist/ecologist/philosopher Ed Ricketts. There are individual lines that remind us of, even if they predate, other authors as diverse as Tim O’Brien (“There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn’t necessarily a lie even if it didn’t necessarily happen.”) and Zadie Smith (“The delphiniums were like little openings in the sky.”). Perhaps the best line in the entire book is very near the end: “Joe Blaikey looked away. It was his method of paying attention.” 3.5/5 Little Openings in the Sky

June

The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr (1995) June’s book club selection. Mary is, I think inarguably, a talented storyteller; despite the arc of her early life being a story that isn’t much fun to hear, she tells it in a way that you can’t stop listening. And yet, I only took one note from this 300-page book: “I never knew despair could lie.” I don’t think this means there weren’t other good lines, as I’m fairly sure there were, but they didn’t jump out at me. Thinking about this in the time since, I suspect it’s because I draw issue with the verisimilitudic nature of the work; I find it difficult to imagine that someone was able to re-create decades old memories with such accuracy. This isn’t to say that I think Mary is (necessarily) a member of her eponymous club, but it is to say that it somehow pulled me out of the otherwise compelling, if not heartbreaking, story. 3/5

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900) — I am going to contradict myself, somewhat. I only took a few notes (four) from this relatively long book (557 pages per Wikipedia). But here it was because I was being relentlessly driven forward by Dreiser’s story. Admittedly, it may have also had to do with the potential fact that Dreiser was not, on the sentence level, a particularly strong writer. I’m not certain of this, as I haven’t read any other work by him, but it seems likely that his “grammatically and syntactically inaccurate” style carries over to other writings. Who cares though? The story of Carrie, the world that envelops, and tries, with varying degrees of success, to ingest her, and the silly, silly men around her is one of the most humane stories I’ve read since my foray into Sinclair Lewis and his brilliance. Come for the unveiling of American hypocrisy circa 1900, stay for the nuanced and devoted depictions of the human condition. 4.5/5 Vague Shadows of the Volumes We Mean

Infidel: My Life by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2007) — I initially wanted to say that I had much of the same issues with Ayaan’s memoir as I did with Mary Karr’s, but I’ve decided that isn’t true, because it seems to me that the adherence to constructed memory is performed (and it is, certainly, a performance) here with a different intent. I am, for the most part, supportive of that intent, i.e. the exposing of the violence, hypocrisy, and commitment to the complete subjugation of women that is perpetrated by many of today’s practitioners of Islam (as to whether they are Muslims is not for me to say). But Ayaan has so clearly created a work of propaganda here that I find it difficult to take seriously. It doesn’t help that she has become a bit of a heel, comparing BLM to ISIS, joining the AEI, support for DeSantis, etc. This shouldn’t influence my opinion of her writing, and it didn’t, in that I finished reading the book before I knew any of this, but it did confirm a sneaking suspicion I had while reading her memoir. 1.5/5 Senses of Belonging

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey (1905–1923/2000) — I expected Freud to be so much drier, less easy to follow, but it turns out he’s a rather good prose writer. It obviously helps that he was able to amend and addend his thoughts over the nearly twenty year period that he spent editing these essays, but still, it’s well done. I’m sure he’s wrong on things, as everyone is, but at least here, I found many of his points to hold up, e.g. “The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasize its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honor even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.” If anything, this has only gotten worse since Freud’s time. I also found his thoughts on the effects of parental affection to be interesting and am looking forward to reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and its Discontents. 4/5 Roots in Sexual Excitation

The Turn of the Screw and other short novels (1878–1903/1962) by Henry James — Oh, James. How you seduced me with Portrait of a Lady. How these short novels have undone much of that seduction. Perhaps he needs more time to do his psychoanalyzing, to show us the nature of ourselves, or maybe I just wasn’t paying enough attention, but most of these stories did very little for me, including The Beast in the Jungle, a story that multiple sources consider to be very fine, though I don’t know how. Well, that’s not true, but they rely on intense interpretation of James’ symbolism, and that is not something I am much a fan of, or at the very least, good at doing while reading a story/book/play/what have you. There is a wonderful description of friendship to be found in An International Episode, so I can in good conscience recommend that specific story. Otherwise, I have to say my time would have been better spent elsewhere. 2/5 Defenses of One’s God

The Country Life by Rachel Cusk (2000) — I fell in love with Rachel’s writing when I read Outline, and am very much looking forward to finishing that trilogy, as The Country Life only further cemented her brilliance for me. This is a stranger book than Outline was, but its strangeness is blurry, and not just at the edges. I don’t know that anyone in the book is likeable, though a few characters are worthy of our sympathy. Normally that isn’t enough to carry me forward, but Cusk’s humor, obvious erudition (fun fact, she incorporates some nice Freudian thought), and her wonderful writing act are what make this book great, not necessarily any one character. That said, if you want an all too human narrator, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more exasperating person than Stella. 4/5 Solipsistic Cabbage Patches

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, translated by Ralph Parker — Full disclosure, this is not the translation authorized by Solzhenitsyn, which I didn’t know when I picked this copy up. It is easily readable though, and I have to imagine the message of the monstrous mundanity that is the former Soviet Union wasn’t lost. You can easily read this novella in a few hours. Despite the subject matter, or perhaps in spite of it, there are great moments of humor, “Everyone was elated. As elated as a rabbit when it finds it can still terrify a frog.” But the thing that will stick out is the sheer perseverance required to get through one day in the gulag, and how that perseverance has a paradoxical effect on one’s perception of time: “The days rolled by in the camp — they were over before you could say “knife.” But the years, they never rolled by; they never moved by a second.” 4/5 Prayers Returned with Rejected Scrawled Across ‘Em

Howard’s End (1910) by E.M. Forster — I have come to the conclusion that I am generally not a fan of novels about English social conventions, or maybe any social conventions (at the time of writing this Proust is complicating this feeling, perhaps unsurprisingly). I find it incredibly difficult to care about the hypocrisy, stupidity, and outright douchery of the middle class and rich population of a silly, silly little island. As such, the first half of this book, with all of its setup and description/rationalization of the existence of class structures was a bit of a slog for me.

However.

The latter half shines. Maybe I missed the instances of Forster’s brilliance in the first 170 pages, blinded by my own dislike, but I was able to see more of them later in the book, where our brilliant and absurdly omniscient narrator asks us questions that I am still trying to parse: “Is it worthwhile attempting the past when there is this continual flux even in the hearts of men?” and “Are the sexes really races, each with its own code of morality, and their mutual love a mere device of Nature to keep things going?” We also get such wonderful lines as “He went to the window, and saw that the moon was descending through a clear sky. He saw her volcanoes, and the bright expanse that a gracious error has named seas.” Ultimately, a mixed bag, but it apparently inspired Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, which I am very much looking forward to. 3.5/5 Funerals that Aren’t Death

Selected Stories (Franklin Library Edition) by Guy de Maupassant, translated by Roger Colet (1971) — It turns out de Maupassant was a shit human being (thank you, Lauren Groff, for informing me). Artist, art, separation, etc. Now that’s out of the way, I’ll say that I’m glad I read these stories, as I enjoy seeing how different forms in literature have progressed through time. I suspect the problem here is that I’m not the biggest fan of short stories as a form/they have to be truly excellent examples of the form for me to derive much pleasure from them. Or maybe I just need to not read so many by one author in a row. I’m not sure. At least read Boule de Suif, if only because it’s probably his most famous story, and de Maupassant’s obvious distaste for the stupidity of war is refreshing. 2.5/5 Brave Men Who Are Ready to Die for an Ideal

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene (1958) — This madcap “entertainment” (Graham’s classification, not mine) is so patently ridiculous that it shouldn’t have surprised me that it’s based on the true story of a Spanish double agent who duped the German government out of money by selling them disinformation. There’s your plot, where it goes from there I’ll leave for you to discover. It is a strange book, funny in the way that one must be funny when describing a brutal regime backed by the United States government (endless fodder there, I suppose). I’ve only read three of Greene’s works, but this was the weakest for me. Good for a hammock, or maybe even a Caribbean island vacation. 2.5/5 Germs of All Mistrust

The Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin, edited and translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (1934–1941/1981) — 420 or so pages of transcendent brilliance. I will not claim to have followed everything Bakhtin points out, particularly in the last essay (also the longest), Discourse in the Novel. Briefly, I will say that the first essay, Epic and Novel, provides the most convincing argument as to why anyone who wishes to take novels seriously should read Chaucer, Boccacio, Ferdowsi, Shikibu, and other epics, as “the novel’s roots must ultimately be sought in folklore.” The second essay, From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse introduces is to the concept (or at least me to the concept) and importance of polyglossia, and its unique power to “fully free consciousness from the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language.” Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel was for me the meatiest essay, and I could easily write a separate post about it, but I will leave the following paragraph as an attempt to explain why: “If I relate (or write about) an event that has just happened to me, then I as the teller (or writer) of this event am already outside the time and space in which the event occurred. It is just as impossible to forge an identity between myself, my own “I,” and that “I” that is the subject of my stories as it is to lift myself up by my own hair. The represented world, however realistic and truthful, can never be chronotopically identical with the real world it represents, where the author and creator of the literary work is to be found.” Finally, Discourse in the Novel, the most difficult of the four, wherein we are taught about heteroglossia (distinct from polyglossia) among many, many other topics. For those who struggle with dialog in their writing, listen to Bakhtin: “What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own horizon within someone else’s horizon.” 5/5 Exposures of All that is Vulgar and Falsely Stereotyped in Human Relationships

The French Exit by Elisa Gabbert (2010) — It is so often fascinating to read a writer’s earlier works long after having read their more recent ones. I feel like Elisa was somehow manifesting these poems onto the page, not writing or typing them; they often feel not just urgent but somehow instant, in both meanings of the word, e.g. “My desires depend on their being pent, unrealized. My desires are unreal in the future’s eyes.” There is also great fun with words to be had “I can defenestrate anything except for the window.” Perhaps more than anything, there is an utter sense of self that we should all aspire to. 4/5 Clouds that Feel Like Nothing

July

Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus, translated by Justin O’Brien (1957) — I continue to be bad at short stories, particularly at ones as wildly Absurd as these. What’s strange though, is that if I look at a list of the stories and think back on them, I feel that they are very, very good; it’s just that while reading them I often felt like I didn’t know what to do with them. It’s worth noting that there is a recent translation by Carol Cosman that might be, not necessarily better, but easier to keep up with, or to derive the sense of grandiose strangeness that Camus clearly intended. 3.5/5 Ancient Communities of Dream and Fatigue

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927) — I did read this. I also did not read this. I will be re-reading this. Thanks to the poets Kelly Rowe and Jeffrey Harrison for pointing out to me why I have to re-read it. x/x Sponges Sopped Full of Human Emotions

After the Fall Arthur Miller (1964) — I liked, or remember liking Death of a Salesman in high school, so I grabbed this for a couple bucks at a book store. It is a harsh and bleak exploration of a failing relationship (Miller and Marilyn Monroe’s), and no one comes out of it looking good. It didn’t feel to me that Quentin/Miller was maligning Maggie/Marilyn, but it might come off very differently on the stage. I also suspect its non-linear/not necessarily stream of consciousness but very much within Miller’s conscience structure is harder to follow in a theater, but it was fairly straightforward on the page. There are many, many very good one-liners, and I don’t care how melodramatic they are, they work. See “Or maybe I don’t believe that grief is grief unless it kills you.” and “I wanted to step between her and her suffering.” If nothing else, there is also terribly apt thought on what it means to leave someone at the end that is very much worth getting to. 4/5 Gifts that You Didn’t Ask For

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009) — What an incredibly compelling novel. I don’t normally read, let alone enjoy historical fiction, but Mantel did it so very wright. Cromwell is so fully realized a character/person, and the world in which he lives is so wonderfully sleazy that it’s all but impossible to not just read, and read, and read this book. (One must do much reading, as it is pretty long. There were, perhaps, a few moments that invited a feeling of lassitude, but I suspect that isn’t true for everyone, or even for most people who read like a normal human.) It is funny, occasionally hysterically so, (see: “The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it’s so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for “Back off, our prince is fucking this man’s daughter.” He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.”), poignant, often painfully so (see: “He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know.”) and more than anything, incredibly insightful, an exploration of what it means to be a complicated human. 4.5/5 Resonances of the Omitted Thing

Florida by Lauren Groff (2018) — My first choice for book club for this year. Lauren single-handedly made me reconsider my stance on short stories; I suspect I only like modern ones. Or maybe just impeccable ones, which nearly all of those in this collection are. Her sentences are so often nothing less than emotional left hooks, punches you feel in your fucking soul (see: I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.” and “My husband had to be the one to make up for the depths of my lack.”) I suspect it didn’t hurt that I grew up forty-five minutes north of Gainesville, and so am incredibly amenable to Lauren’s “ambivalen[ce] about the place where I live.” 4.5/5 Unsexy Cheetahs

Selected Dialogues by Plato, Franklin Library Edition, translated by Benjamin Lowett (1981) — One more down in the Western canon. One of the more work-like reading endeavors of the year; Socratic dialogue requires a lot of patience (as I suspect Socrates did). There is, of course, great wisdom to be found, be it on the fear of death (“indeed the pretense of wisdom”), or on education (“knowledge acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind”), or on what one ought to be attracted to (the soul, not the body). But none of this made it an overall pleasant reading experience for me. 3/5 Expectations of Evil

Lazarus by André Malraux, translated by Terence Kilmartin (1974/1977) — A literal fever dream, as Malraux wrote this after he was hospitalized for, and nearly died from, a mysterious illness. I am a Malraux Stan, thanks to reading his Anti-Memoirs last year. (I am also now a Kilmartin Stan, as I’m reading his revision of Moncrieff’s version of Proust.) Because Malraux was so painfully intelligent on virtually any topic, it can be difficult to read him. Still, this was an easier version of the Anti-Memoirs, if only because it’s shorter. He will ask you questions, or make statements that invite questions, that can change your view on life if you listen (see: “And what is a past when it is not a life story? An awareness of existing, which is deeper than consciousness, and which I do not regard as cognition?” and “Death is not to be confused with my own demise.”) The book almost certainly requires more than one reading, but even if, like me, you only fully appreciate half of it, you’ll get so much from this brilliant, fascinating man. 4.5/5 Tragedies of Agnosticism

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966) — I’m with those who think this a parody, and I’m with Pynchon himself when he says that he “seem[s] to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up until then.” There’s no point in trying to describe the plot, or any of the characters, because they are all patently ridiculous, and barely make sense within the confines of the book, let alone outside of it. The book is, of course, wildly inventive, strange, funny, brilliant, and ridiculous, but none of that adds up to make it enjoyable, at least not for me. 2.5/5 Dead Who Really Do Persist, Even in a Bottle of Wine

Philosophical Investigations Fourth Edition, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (1953/2009) — “Words are also deeds.” And what a deed old Wittgy has done. It seems somehow vain, or at least dumb of me to try an summarize this, or provide my opinion, but completion wins out. I feel that Wittgenstein is worth the read because of his influence on philosophy on thought, and that’s enough for me. If that’s not enough for you, an equally good reason is his ability to make you reconsider very simple things that you thought you “knew.” What it means to think, or hold thoughts in your head, the meaning of pain and how it affects our relationships, and, in a vague sense, if, like me, you have no formal linguistics background, how language works. Know going in that it will be work, for Wittgenstein tells us what he wants his writing to do: “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.” Also know that the work is worthwhile. 4.75/5 Forms of Being Convinced that Someone Else is in Pain

What Are People For? by Wendell Berry (1990) — Nick Offerman pointed me towards Wendell, I think. I don’t know what Offerman’s views on religion are, but whatever they might be, they’re kinder than mine, or else he wouldn’t be able to love Berry to the extent that he does. That said, there is lovely wisdom to be found in this collection of essays. If you’ve never read anything written by someone who farms, it can be interesting to hear such a person’s thoughts on “the land” and a human’s relationship to it. There are poignant thoughts on much of our cultural hypocrisy: “In a country that puts an absolute premium on labor-saving measures, short workdays, and retirement, why should there be any surprise at permanence of unemployment and welfare dependency? Those are only different names for our national ambitions.” There is also a lot of moralizing. Perhaps I’m simply guilty, and dislike being confronted with my sins, but it is this sense of holier than thou-ness that ultimately turned me off from this particular collection of Wendell’s writings. 3/5 Inexactitudes of Definition

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938) — I greatly suspect that this book is far more enjoyable if you haven’t seen the movie in recent memory. This isn’t to say that I found it bad, but the sense of mystery and the thrilling nature of the story was lost on me, as I already had an expectation of what was going to happen (though I had misremembered a fair number of events within the story). I also didn’t find the writing for writing’s sake to be particularly notable; I have three notes from the ~400 pages. There is one moment of incredible introspection that anyone who considers themselves shy could likely benefit from, but I don’t know that that makes it worth the read. 2.5/5 Webs of Shyness and Reserve

Not Under Forty by Willa Cather (1922) — A collection of essays that Cather said no one under 40 would likely be interested in. Perhaps that was true then, but I can’t see it being true now, if only because her writing is so unapologetically brilliant (much use of Google translate was required for the passages of French strewn throughout), opinionated, and fun. Her thoughts on what it means to read something truly great are wonderfully clear, and have helped me better articulate my feelings on great novels: “It is something one has lived through, not a story one has read; less diverting than a story, perhaps, but more inevitable. One is “left with it,” in the same way that one is left with a weak heart after certain illnesses. A shadow has come into one’s consciousness that will not go out again.” I look forward to re-reading these essays in 5.5 years. 4/5 Shadows in One’s Consciousness

The Comedians by Graham Greene (1966) — Better Greene. Decidedly not an entertainment. If for no other reason than to learn about the terrifying reign of François Duvalier and his secret police, the Tontons Macoutes, this novel is worth the read. There are also reasons beyond that, the explorations of how adult love and lust can and so often do work, what it means to belong, or to want to belong, and to be incapable of belonging, such that you are also incapable of so many of the qualities that roots provide (loyalty, love, self-respect). There are also laughs to be had, no matter how pitch-black the comedy that inspires them: “Cynicism is cheap — you can buy it at any Monoprix store — it’s built into all poor-quality goods.” 3.75/5 Qualities that are Beyond Our Reach

A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib (2021) — More Hanif means more beauty, and sadness, and laughter, and reminders of how important and wonderful music is. There are incredible history lessons here (Bobby Driscoll’s deathbed quote: “I have not found that memories are very useful.”), Hanif’s beautiful poetry (“& some might say that fighting is not about victory but how vigorously one takes to the chaos”), and, of course, his obvious love for and dedication to Black art (his thoughts on Michael Jackson’s death that I won’t quote here because they’re better read in the book that you should buy). The end result is a book that contains, as do all of Hanif’s books, vast multitudes, within each of which is a brilliant and exacting core of humanity. 4.5/5 Tiny Explosions that Never Vanished

August

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973) — It’s so fucking good. 50 years later, Erica’s book is still hysterically funny (“That’s called fidelity. That’s called civilization and its discontents.”), painfully insightful (“All the problems of love are problems of maldistribution, goddamn it.”), and clever beyond belief (“… each of these relationships, each of these relationdinghies, each of these relationliners”). It’s hackneyed, I know, but here we are: read this instead of Portnoy’s Complaint. There’s enough Roth in the world, and in the world’s minds (I like Roth, or at least Roth’s books, to be clear). You could argue that the 20 million copies of Fear of Flying sold mean there’s plenty of Erica in the world, but I don’t think so. If you have ever felt like the things that are supposed to be good for you, the things society has deemed “important” are beyond you, or somehow not for you, Erica will make you realize not just how unalone you are, but what good company you’re in. 4.75/5 Zipless Fucks

A View of the Harbor by Elizabeth Taylor (1947) — Not that Elizabeth Taylor. This one. The writer one. The very underappreciated writer one. Thanks NYRB, for re-issuing this delightful hangout novel. There is very little plot, but who needs plot when you have this much exploration of what it can mean to be a human? Taylor seems to me to have been one of the all-time greats at both looking and seeing, two very different skills. She is also funny, in the way that it sometimes seems only the British can be (see: “Good heavens, no. I loathe poetry. Especially the sort people have written.”) Perhaps it’s only because I read them within a month of each other, or perhaps it’s because they both have waterfront environs, but I can’t help feeling that this is a more enjoyable, and certainly more readable To the Lighthouse. You get the myriad points of view and all the psychic traveling they entail, the close observations, the hard-hitting one liners, but it’s far easier to keep up with them. Forgive me Virginia, but for now, I’ll recommend Elizabeth to more people. 4/5 Cruelties of Omission

Mythologies by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (1957/2012) — I do not recommend trying to read this piecemeal, or while distracted in any way. The length of the essays in the first section, some of which are a mere page or two, can lull one into a false sense of security, such that it seems possible, even advisable, to quickly knock them out. Reader, you will not have a good time. However, if you pay close attention, Barthes’ thoughts can be fascinating, even when they’re still obscure. As for the second portion of the book, it should probably be read first. Even if you don’t fully follow Barthes’ proposed system of semiotics, it seems useful to have been exposed to his framework before reading the other essays. If nothing else, there is this incredible insight into the populism that so quickly becomes fascism: “And this precisely what is sinister in Poujadism: that it has laid claim from the start to a mythological truth and posited culture as a disease, which is the specific symptom of all fascisms.” 3.5/5 Amputated Causalities

Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself by Robert Montgomery Bird (1836) — A Quantum Leap like romp through early 19th century America. The protagonist, Sheppard Lee, gains the ability to move his soul between different physical bodies, and in the process of trying to find a perfect existence, he discovers how few lives are as desirable as they appear to be. No one is safe from Bird’s scathing ridicule, be they politicians (coffee-house or otherwise), dandies, or slaveowners. It is a little long, at 472 pages in the NYRB printing that I have, but it is a quick read with a funny, wholesome, and just shy of maudlin ending that’s worth getting to. 4/5 Inconveniences of Being Drowned

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963/1967/1971) — I knew going in that this was a ludicrously famous work of art, and that (and how) Plath had killed herself, but I didn’t know anything the novel itself, or even that it was (semi)-autobiographical. What a thing to have written, and to have written in one’s late twenties. Of course, that then raises the specter of what it means to have lived the life required (?) to write such a thing. Plath’s insight into people, including herself, is devastating, in every sense of the word (see: “A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.”). The protagonist, Esther Greenwood, knows, to whatever extent a nineteen-year-old can know, what is and isn’t good for her, and she also knows that it doesn’t matter. (See: “My drink was wet and depressing. Each time I took another sip it tasted more and more like dead water.”) As a work of literature The Bell Jar is (obviously) incredible. It also happens to be the best description of depression I’ve yet to read, so if you need to better understand that, or just want to see that someone else lived it, read it. 4.75/5 Skins Shed by a Terrible Animal

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980) — Speaking of things to have written. There is probably not a sentence to be found in Housekeeping that isn’t perfect. I can’t imagine the effort, patience, and sheer intellect that went into creating this strange, beautiful book. Briefly, it is the story of three generations of women in a small town in Idaho, as told by (sort of, more on that in a moment) Ruth, one of two members of the youngest generation. The sort of is because while she isn’t omniscient, Ruth’s narration is (according to Dr. Amy Hungerford, who I will happily defer to) that of Emerson’s transparent eyeball. The result is an uncannily absorptive storyteller who sees everything, without necessarily taking it in (see: “I knew nothing then, and I know nothing now, of the mechanics of such things as attitudes, and if it pleased him to say that I had one, and that it had changed, I would not argue.”) While it isn’t a book that requires re-reading to understand its immensity, it is one that absolutely deserves it, and I look forward to discovering how many other ways Marilynne can blow me away. 5/5 Currents that Pull One’s Dreams After Them

With the Old Breed, At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge (1981/2007) — It might not be as strange as I sometimes think, but I don’t tend to read many war books. However, because my editor kindly (and perhaps over generously) compared my book to Sledge’s, I felt that I ought to give Sledge my time. I’m glad I did. This book is equally as important as All Quiet on the Western Front, equally crushing, and, of course, equally unheeded by all those who send young men and women to war. Sledge is no anti-war propagandist, if anything his memoir is an homage to the incomprehensibly brave men he served with, but if you can come away from his story with any ability to think that wars are worth fighting, well, you were never going to be a good human anyway. Read this book to experience Sledge’s love, his fear, his hatred, and his humanity. Then tell everyone else you know to do the same thing. 5/5 Fruits of the Holocaust

Miracle at St. Anna by James McBride (2002) — A gift from the poet Kelly Rowe. Read in a single morning while lying in a hammock next to a lake in the middle of Maine, this novel is a compulsively readable story about Black soldiers in the Italian campaign of WWII. In a scant 257 pages he brings each character to life, convinces you that miracles do exist (or at least can), and sheds light on a grossly unheralded group of men that fought for their country, despite their country’s hatred of them. 4.25/5 Worlds Too Big to Fit on One Piece of Paper

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1957/2011) — Eighth book club choice for this year. Read Doctor Zhivago. Do not read this translation. Do read Ann Pasternak Slater’s piece in The Guardian explaining why you shouldn’t read it. We should all probably read Nicolas Pasternak Slater’s translation, but it is very expensive, so go with the original Hayward and Harari. I don’t know why Pever and Volokhonsy failed so miserable here, as they have are clearly capable of good translation work, but they did fail, spectacularly at that. It is, admittedly, a complicated book, with a massive cast of characters with multiple names who show up and leave at random times, a plot that relies heavily on coincidence, and jumps in time that can seem arbitrary. But Pasternak knew all this, and he did it on purpose, because he knew that words are magic, and that human stories so rarely make sense in the way we want them to. Unfortunately, the magic that he put into this book is all but eliminated by the ham-fisted, overly literal translation. Zhivago itself: 4/5 Sunsets that Had Gotten Stuck. This translation of Zhivago: 1.5/5 Glooms of Simplification

September

The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy by Stanley Cavell (1979) — My introduction to Cavell came from a great essay in The Point magazine about his inimitable voice and style, and his approach to thinking about philosophy, specifically Wittgenstein. So, having read a fair amount of Wittgenstein, I figured it was time for Cavell. It was, and wasn’t, and probably never will be, but I will return to Cavell, likely for the rest of my life, both to try to learn from him, and for the sheer fun of reading someone so brilliant. While this book is mostly about Wittgenstein, I don’t think you have to have read him to understand, or at least appreciate most of Cavell’s arguments and thoughts on our German friend. Cavell is most interested in thinking of Wittgenstein in a literary sense, Wittgenstein as a writer first, and then a philosopher. Along the way, Cavell thinks about so much of what it means to be human, from our experiences of pain, to how we raise our children, to religion, to what it means for our souls to be connected to one another. This book, if you will let it, can change you and your life. 5/5 Unrestricted Revelation(s) of Our Humanity

An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori, translated by Phillip Boehm (1958/2012) — A fairly strange, very funny, Eastern European story of a semi-modern Don Quixote told through the near omniscient eyes and ears of a group of children in a technically fictional but very much real city somewhere in the remains of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I haven’t read the original German, so I can’t be completely certain, but this translation is probably as perfect a work of art as the novel itself. Rezzori/Boehm’s language shines out at you on nearly every page, be it in the humor (“Besides, please bear in mind that no one with anything to say ever said anything about anybody but himself.”), the pathos (“I can’t really say why, but then you don’t always have to be able to say why it is you love.”), or the devastating insights into human nature (In fact, we never truly love the other, but merely the different world he represents.). 4.5/5 Echoes of Not-Yet-Being

Note: I was worried that reading all of Proust straight through might exhaust me, or somehow make me fail to appreciate him, so I read another book between each volume as a sort of tonic. They were more or less chosen at random, with a focus on shorter titles.

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Montcrief, revised by D.J. Enright (1913/2003) — It seems silly, maybe even futile to offer my thoughts on Proust; there is no world in which I offer any sort of insight into his ridiculousness, his insanity, his brilliance. As such, I have decided that the only way to make this work is to compare the books to one another. Swann’s Way is the second-best volume for me. As an introduction to Proust’s style is automatically a contender for the title of best volume. However — and this is likely anathema to scholars but oh well — it is the novella within that is Swann in Love that somehow detracts for me. I feel that we don’t yet know Proust’s style well enough to fully appreciate it, or perhaps I don’t. I will be re-reading it soon, as I am told it deserves my attention. Come for the thinking about thinking (“being still at the age in which one believes that one gives a thing real existence by giving it a name”), stay for the brilliant descriptions of asparagus and its ability to “transform my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume.” 4.5/5 Puberties of Sorrow

Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic (1976) — I wasn’t surprised when I found out that Ron wrote this book in one month, three weeks, and two days. His story is so very urgent in its telling; you can feel how desperately he had to get it out of him. This is a visceral book, Ron has always known his body, and his injury and subsequent paralysis in the war has only made all the more aware of its wants and needs. His honesty about the horrific conditions of his medical care in the hands of the VA, the disparity between the money and resources used to fight the war in Vietnam and the complete lack thereof to help treat and heal those who did the fighting, should be shouted from the rooftops, should be in textbooks, and should be told to anyone who hopes to join the military. This is a quick read, but it will stay with you long after you’ve closed the back cover. 4.5/5 Men Who had Been Made Cold by This Thing

Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Montcrief, revised by D.J. Enright (1919/2003) — The actual French title, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is both better and much more informative of what you’re getting into in this volume. Spoiler alert, but this is the best volume of In Search of Lost Time. It is a complete, exhaustingly thorough explanation of young love/limerence/infatuation/lust/desire, what it means to actually see works of art, to listen to works of art, and to think about works of art. (There is, of course, more of that to come in the rest of the novel, but that only serves to make the wonder at hand here that much grander.) We also meet one of the three greatest characters of the entire novel, the capricious, brilliant, and tragic M. de Charlus for the first time, who alone could be enough to make the entire series worth reading. I suspect it would be possible to read this volume without having read Swann’s Way and not miss much, so if you’re not up for all of Proust’s madness, just read this. 5/5 Oblivions More or Less Prolonged

The Journey of Ibn Fattouma by Naguib Mahfouz, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies (1983/1992) — A strange travelogue-cum-parable about a young man in an unknown time and nonspecific place, this is a short exploration of Islamic society and the various forms of government that have come to rule it over the centuries. The story is obviously mythical, encompassing multiple decades and thousands of miles in a scant 148 pages, but more than anything it feels mystical, as if there is something life-changing just around the corner (which, for the narrator, there always is). Mahfouz is much more famous for The Cairo Trilogy, and I look forward to further exploring his artistry in those books. 4/5 Punishments of Personal Freedom

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Montcrief, Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright (1920/21/2003) — The third volume of the series, and for me the third best volume overall. There’s more infatuation that the narrator thinks is love and so there is more obsession, but there is also more learning that infatuations can change; the narrator (finally) does some maturing during his hang-outs with Robert Saint-Loup and his military buddies. We learn a more about Saint-Loup during these sessions, but we learn the most of him through his troubled relationship with his mistress. We get 100+ page descriptions of dinner parties which somehow don’t lag, and we get one hell of a cliffhanger, which, if you know the title of the next volume, is not necessarily all that surprising, but it is well done, insofar as you believe the narrator’s angst about it. 4.5/5 Resurrections of the Soul as Phenomena of Memory

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891) — The next book club choice. Worth it for Wilde’s preface alone, but the novel is, of course, also quite good. Wilde manages to get past the annoyances of the typical social novel, despite being unable to go into the lurid detail that is always just out of reach. Dorian is the ultimate antihero, and Lord Henry the perfect decadently dissipated dandy with a penchant for delicious witticisms. We had a great discussion about Wilde’s intent with his writing of this, his only novel. I took him for his word, that he only wanted to write a well written book, which, for the most part, he did. My only complaint would be the not necessarily sudden, but quick ending, but then maybe I didn’t fully appreciate or reckon with what twenty years of living as a true hedonistic heathen might do to someone. 4/5 Luxuries in Self-Reproach

Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, written by himself, Frederick Douglass (1845) — It might be because I spent my adolescence in the South, so for all I know it’s a bigger deal in Yankee land, but it seems to me that this is now an underappreciated and underutilized text (my understanding is that it was very influential in its time). It is brief, effective, and more importantly, true. Why should I have been told to read Things Fall Apart instead of this in high school? (This is no knock on TFA or Achebe, just a curiosity of mine.) Particularly in the American education system, this really ought to be required reading for any American History class. Douglass is adamantly unwilling to concede that any form of slavery might be acceptable, or less bad, or even remotely acceptable. It won’t tell you anything new, assuming you have bothered to learn anything about the horrors of slavery, but it will tell you those things honestly and clearly, and not from the point of view of the slavers, current or former. 4.5/5 Slaveholding Religions of this Land

Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar (2017) — I came across Kaveh’s first poetry collection on an NPR list of best books. (This list, which might also be how I discovered Valeria Luiselli’s phenomenal Tell Me How It Ends, and maybe even Hanif?? It’s a good list). The poems herein are about alcoholism, but also what it means to access language, to have language, and more importantly to not have language, be it your mother tongue or just the words necessary to make your feelings parsable to others. These are complex poems, that require more attention than I gave them on my first read, a side effect of primarily reading poetry at night, before bed. But I also think that, given the liminal spaces and feelings that Kaveh is describing, reading these poems when your mind is more open to falling into his words can better help access the underlying emotions (e.g., I’m becoming more of a vessel of memories than a person). Whether you, too, have been addicted — be it to alcohol, a person, or simply words — these poems will show you what it’s like to lose yourself to something outside you, in the best possible way. 4.5/5 Punishments For Your Lacking

October

Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Montcrief, Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright (1921/22/2003) — The fourth volume, wherein we (surprisingly quickly) are informed of the event that left us hanging at the end of The Guermantes Way: the Baron de Charlus is an invert, aka a homosexual. There is, as usual, a lot of thought about these strange gays, which Proust admittedly does an excellent job of portraying from a hetero POV, given his own antipodean nature. We get the beginnings of the narrator’s insane jealousy towards Albertine (which we will get much, much more of), we get some beautiful meditations on grief, but we also get loads of wonderful time spent with the greatest queen I’ve ever read of, M. de Charlus, who has firmly earned his place as the second-best character of the series. We also get another ending that isn’t quite a cliff-hanger, but it’s surprising/not-at-all-surprising in its impetuosity and grandstanding. Much like the next volume. 4/5 Words that Foreshadow an Imminent Reality

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953/1982) — Chosen because of its brevity, and its outsized place in the American literary canon. Bradbury is uncannily accurate in a number of his predictions of future technologies, and it’s not like he was imagining something that was impossible; book burnings and ideological repression are very real, be it in America or elsewhere. The problem with the book is that much of it is a thinly veiled, or sometimes not even veiled at all, screed against the weakening of the mind that Bradbury sees as an inevitable concomitance with the advent of modernity. There are valid critiques underlying many of Bradbury’s cries: our country’s prioritization of and reliance on cars was and is a terrible decision, it is possible for entertainment in the form of TV to become an intellectual black hole, there can be downsides to enforced egalitarianism. But none of these things are the faits accomplis that Bradbury makes them out to be. In short, his imagination is admirable, his lack of nuance, not so much. Read Brave New World, 1984, and Infinite Jest first. 2.5/5 Noncombustible Data

The Prisoner/The Captive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Montcrief, Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright (1923/2003) — The worst part of the entire novel/series, by far. It may be possible, perhaps even advisable, to read a summary of this and move on to the rest of the story. There are, of course, the wonderful Proustian sentences, the descriptions only he could seemingly do, the unrelenting investigations of the narrator’s mind, but nearly all of them are focused on said narrator’s obsessive jealousy, insecurity, and paranoia surrounding (and boy does it surround) Albertine. Maybe it’s more tolerable when you don’t read all of Proust in a month, or if you can’t see yourself in the portrayal of masculine weakness, but for me this volume was punishing. 3/5 Women as a Transitional Stage Before Another Woman

The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins (2023) — Read in one day, because Nick has written a very readable prediction of what the future of humanity could be. Set in a nearish future where climate change has finally (inevitably?) lead to the collapse of humanity as we know it. It is clear that Nick did abundant research — both lived and academic — for the writing of this book which I suppose falls into the category of speculative fiction, but is, to my mind, not so much speculative as it is informed. The formatting and plotting of the book let us look at the world falling, the world being recreated, and even, just maybe, some of the people who were responsible for all the death and destruction finally being punished. The Great Transition is a fascinating glimpse into what our world will probably look like one day. 3.5/5 Books of Your Life Opened to Your Child

The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Montcrief, Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright (1925/2003) — Finally, a return to Proust’s genius, sans his full crazy. The plot ostensibly revolves around Albertine leaving the city just to get away from the narrator’s monstrous jealousy, but a surprising turn of events early on turns the rest of the book into an investigation of truth, or at least of individual people’s truths, and how and why they might change those truths. We also get some surprisingly self-aware thoughts about the narrator’s jealousy, the nature of love and desire (and how separate those two things can be), and, most importantly, the return of Charlus. We feel, finally, that somehow, someway, the narrator is becoming a real person, if only because he has realized how much of his life he spent making other people unreal. (See: “It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one’s own mind.”) 4/5 Optical Errors in Time

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer (2019) — On page 116 in the copy that I have, Anne wrote: “I would rather write nothing at all than propagandize for the world as it is.” Lest anyone think these were mere words, the assertion of someone who wasn’t in a position to do much propagandizing, let it be known that Anne resigned from The New York Times Magazine over their propaganda filled propping up of Israel. The Undying is probably the best book I read in October, definitely one of the best books I read all year. Technically a memoir, but perhaps more accurately a manifesto, it is a soul crushing journey through Anne’s cancer diagnosis, treatment, and recovery in the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’s ruinous carcinogenosphere.” There is almost too much of note in this book, be it Anne’s engagement with Aelius Aristides, or her painfully accurate takedowns of the modern medical system, but all of it is incredibly worth of our attention. I don’t outright recommend anyone read many books, as I don’t think my opinion is all that valuable, but I can, and I think must tell everyone who will listen to read this book, and then read it again, and then tell everyone you know to read it. 5/5 Beds of Narrowed Answers

Time Regained by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Montcrief, Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright (1927/2003) — It was difficult to go back to Proust after reading Anne. It’s difficult now trying to write about him after remembering The Undying. Somehow it feels almost silly, or unserious, which I don’t expect is often said of Proust. But, read him I did, and the final volume was a great reward for all the hours spent on this book. There’s a lot of thinking about art, in all its forms, throughout the entirety of In Search of Lost Time, but it is here, at the end, where Proust/the narrator explicitly discusses why he embarked on the mad attempt to recapitulate an entire life in words. He anticipates Edith Grossman (see: “The function and task of a writer are those of a translator.”), he anticipates Fosse’s thoughts on his writing, (see: “I had arrived then at the conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature — to discover it.”) and he anticipates Barthes, and as I understand it, Foucault (see: “In order to read with understanding many readers require to read in their own particular fashion, and the author must not be indignant at this; on the contrary, he must leave the reader all possible liberty, saying to him: “Look for yourself, and try whether you see best with this lens or that one or this other one.”) He even anticipates the obsession with turning literature into cinema, and why that’s usually a bad idea. (See: “Some critics now liked to regard the novel as a sort of procession of things upon the screen of a cinematograph. This comparison was absurd. Nothing is further from what we have really perceived than the vision that the cinematograph presents.) And so perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they, or we, are all simply catching up with Proust. 5/5 Fixed Forms Given to Human Truths

On Beauty by Zadie Smith (2005) — And so my love affair with Zadie’s writing was rekindled, and is now an outright conflagration. I still don’t love Howards End, but I do love Zadie’s reimagining of it here. On Beauty is somehow more controlled than White Teeth, perhaps even constrained, certainly not as “hysterical”, though of course still painfully real. Zadie’s examinations of class structures, American or British, academic or community, black or white or in between are still brilliantly close readings of society that very few others are capable of. But it is, of course, the innumerable tongues that she can speak in that we come to Zadie for. I don’t know that anyone writing today understands language in the way that she does (if someone can point out how I’m wrong about that, please do so!), and while there are others who are as capable of generosity towards their characters as Zadie is, it doesn’t seem that any of them are as warm as she is, as genuine in their understanding of the complications of humans. 4.5/5 Places the Truth is Rarely Told

The Graywolf Annual Six: Stories from the Rest of the World (1989) — A collection of explicitly non-European writers in translation, the fourteen short stories here are very strange, or perhaps simply very non Anglicized. None of them have anything approaching a happy ending, or even happy beginnings or middles, but nearly all of them are moving, and serve as great examples of short stories from around the world. 4/5 Clocks that Had Not Discharged All Their Time

Educated by Tara Westover (2018) — Read in an evening. Threw it across the room at some point, not because if was mad at Tara, but because I was filled with an uncontrollable hatred of the life that she managed to escape. My upbringing wasn’t as adventurous as Tara’s, nor as restricted, but I was all too privy to the madness that is the willful ignorance and evil that so often stems from fanatical religion. My feelings about this book are complicated, or perhaps it is more my feelings about its reception. It seems that Tara’s story was heralded as something unique, which, on the one hand, it is — I am not interested in detracting from her inspiring, incredible accomplishments. But the foundation of her story, the one where we as a society continue to allow and monetarily support these outdated fantasies that are predicated on removing access to information, removing women’s rights, and seeing the rest of the world as enemies and infidels? That story is lived by hundreds of millions of people every day. And so while of course we should celebrate Tara, we should also take greater action towards preventing her story from being repeated. 4/5 Patience(s) to Read Things I Could Not Yet Understand

Safe Landing: A family’s journey following the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 by Melody Smith, Kim Jockl, Jim Borchers (2022) — Book club choice for the month. A member of the book club knows the family intimately, and so he recommended this. Come to find out, Safe Landing isn’t really a book, so much as it is a family scrapbook/album/long-form therapy session. It is likely far better appreciated by those who know the family. All that said, it’s worth looking up American Airlines Flight 191, and just how horrifically the company and the government reacted to the families of the 273 people who died in the deadliest aviation accident in American history. No Rating

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, edited by Sylvan Barnet (1592/1969) — Preparation for reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus next year, as well as re-reading (or maybe just actually attentively reading) Goethe’s Faust. It’s a very short play, and four hundred years and countless renditions later, fairly straightforward. There is apparently much intrigue surrounding Marlowe’s atheism, but even in the year of our Lord 2023 the lines “Go, and return an old Franciscan friar: That holy shape becomes a devil best” brought a laugh out of me. Also no rating.

Intimations by Zadie Smith (2020) — After finishing On Beauty I bought most of the rest of Zadie’s oeuvre. I wanted more of her clarity, and her wit, and her generosity, and Intimations provided it. This, too, is a slim volume, a collection of essays Zadie put together during the beginning of Covid. Reading it almost feels like watching her think in real time, the way we were all trying to think, to figure out just how much of what we thought we knew was utter bullshit. Her notes on what we all do to fill and spend and use and generally just disrespect the extreme finitude of our time are both humbling and encouraging, and representative of Zadie’s greatest ability, making you feel not quite so alone in the world. 4.5/5 Bidders Delaying Death

After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys (1930) — I also plan to read all of Rhys, in part because so many people I have read respect her, and in part because, so far, the two books of hers I’ve read have left me with this feeling of wanting more, or that I am so very close to figuring out her writing, to having it all make sense. This is a sad, lonely book, and while I suspect it would be easy to call it angry, it seems more resigned to me. The narrator, Julia, is upset by how shitty people in her life are (men, women, family members), but she also just accepts that this is how life is for someone like her, and while this isn’t the life she would have chosen to live, it is the one that she will, somehow, push her way through. 3.5/5 Extremely Pathetic Remarks

Into Daylight by Jeffrey Harrison (2014) — A gift from the ever brilliant poet Kelly Rowe, who knows that I am wrong about not enjoying Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, and thought of me when reading his poem Listening to Virginia. Jeffrey is a very direct poet. There is little to no need to figure out what he’s talking about, or wonder what the experimental form choices might mean, or really do much beyond read what he has clearly and succinctly put on the page for you. His poems are human, and kind, his sense of rhythm and meter is so well honed that you can easily miss the effort and skill that went into these constructions. 4/5 Small Roofs of Paper and Words

Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature by Iris Murdoch, edited by Peter Conradi (1997) — Life changingly good. Maybe I’ve gotten better (whatever that means) at reading philosophy — I certainly hope I have — but it seems more likely that Murdoch is simply one of the clearest, greatest thinkers and writers of moral philosophy that we have ever been so fortunate as humans to have. It is all but impossible to attempt to describe this collection of essays in anything shy of a thousand words, but it is what the title suggests. It includes the masterpieces On God and Good, The Sovereignty of Good, and The Fire and the Sun, each of which would suffice alone as reason to buy the volume. Whether you want to think about new topics for the first time, or have your heretofore certain beliefs severely challenged, Existentialists and Mystics is a wonderful introduction into Murdoch’s brilliance, and into much moral philosophy in general. 5/5 Immediate Intuitive Inexplicable Understandings of Unique Quasi-Sensible Objects

The Open Road by Jean Giono, translated by Paul Eprile (1951/2021) — A fever dream of an anti-novel, Giono’s tale of an unnamed traveler is a perfect example of a hangout novel. Or is it? Giono is, at least here, an unnervingly sly writer. Each episode of the book feels as if it could stand alone, but they also build upon each other until the reader is teetering on the edge of collapse. The narrator should be an exemplar of nihilism, and he is, except for the part where he’s clearly in love with a complete stranger and is willing to do anything for that love. (And I mean anything; the ending of the book is wild.) I’ve read at least one opinion that the translation fails to capture the original French in all its glory, and that may be true, but the work Eprile has done here is amazing on its own, and amidst all the playful language there are descriptions that rival Proust (in beauty if not length), and philosophizing that rivals Camus (but with some levity, for goodness’ sake). 4/5 Glass-Coated Forests Tinkling Like Crystal.

November

The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock (2021) — A radicalizing book. Admittedly, potentially boring to people who aren’t interested in politics or military machinations, but if you read it like the heist movie it is, where the trust, money, and lives of the American people were the successfully stolen target, this book is a page-turner. I cannot imagine the sheer number of hours Whitlock must have put into this, and the fact that he was able to put together a comprehensible chronological story of the insanity that was the war in Afghanistan is an incredible accomplishment. The book is primarily comprised of interviews that Whitlock obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and the interviews include everyone from average enlisted folk up to the highest levels of command, throughout the entirety of our nation’s time in Afghanistan. If you want to understand at least part of the modern military-industrial complex, this book is a must read. 5/5

Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew (1961) — I read Notes from Underground in undergrad, in my Narrative Medicine class, but I didn’t remember much beyond the opening line, so when I saw this collection at a book store I grabbed it. More Dostoevsky’s never a bad thing. I don’t know that the purpose of this collection was to highlight Dosty’s most obnoxious characters, but it got the job done. There are, of course, the darkest of jokes (“It has been a sad, drizzly day, without relief — just like my future senility.”) and the most pointed of observations about the self (“Why, suffering is the only cause of consciousness.”) or at least the self as imagined by an inveterate gambler and generally not particularly nice human. For my money, his novels are better, but this could serve as an introduction to his style at least. 3.5/5 Voluntary Concessions by the Object of My Love of My Right to Bully It

On War by Carl von Clausewitz, translated by J.J. Graham, introduction by Anatol Rapoport, (1832/1982) — I’d been meaning to read this for a while, but the Israel-Hamas war made it seem much more important to read now. Clausewitz is almost absurdly thorough in his thinking. He occasionally veers towards repetition, but somehow always sprinkles in a new thought that keeps the reader from being bored while reading an admittedly dense text. It’s all but impossible to summarize this text, so just know that this edition contains the portions of Clausewitz’s thoughts that are relevant to a lay citizen (and excludes the bits about specific types of military maneuvers, etc.). Equally importantly, this printing has a 100-page introduction by one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, Anatol Rapoport. Even if you don’t want to read old Clausy, you should read Rapoport’s introduction, and, if you can get your hands on them, his other writings (more on that later). On War and Rapoport’s thoughts on it are inextricably intertwined for me now, so keep that in mind if you use this as a recommendation. 5/5 Guesses At Truth Which We Have to Act Upon.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Ranier Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell (1910/1988) — I did read this. I also did not read this. I took notes of a solid number of truly incredible lines, but I can tell you next to nothing about the book in its entirety. Maybe it was my mood, maybe I was tired, I don’t know. I will be re-reading it in January.

On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, translated by William Ellery Leonard (~50BCE/1950) — Read because of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve. This thing is wild. Lucretius predicted so many major scientific principles (atoms, evolution, entropy) that were only proven in the last few hundred years, merely by denying supernatural nonsense, when we as a human race were still crucifying dudes for claiming to be god. He also got a bunch of stuff wrong, but he got them wrong with style. You could read this for the science, the making fun of belief in gods as a way of actually explaining the real world, or just the poetry, and you wouldn’t go wrong. I would recommend reading it slowly, as there’s a lot to unpack, and at least this translation is very King Jamesy in its style, but it’s fairly short, and worth the effort. 4.5/5 Insatiate Woes

Couplets: A Love Story by Maggie Millner (2023) — There was an excerpt from this in the entirely too short-lived magazine Astra. Maggie is an absolute genius. Her love of language is on display in every page, and probably every couplet, but I was too busy trying to take in more and more and more of her words to notice every perfect line. The title tells you all you need to know going in; this is a love story, but it is almost certainly unlike any love story you’ve ever read, or so many reasons. It is queer, and actually lived, not just imagined, and slutty and sad and funny and lonely and painful and features insights in the form of lines like “the harsh light of causality” that will leave you breathless. Read it, then read it again, then buy it for your friends to read and read again. 5/5 Beautiful Deciduous Sluts of Language

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1940) — Primarily because of Franzen’s proselytizing, though others backed him up. Stead really did create something unique with this bonkers story of a thoroughly fucked up family. I don’t know anything about Franzen’s life beyond what he’s put in his novels, but I have a suspicion that physical abuse and penury weren’t huge parts of his life, or he wouldn’t be able to recommend this book as loudly as he does. I’m not one to shy away from “trauma,” whatever that means, but this book is difficult in its painfully accurate representation of woefully incompetent, harmful, and cruel parents, to the extent that if you had a shit childhood you may find it hard to get through. If that doesn’t apply to you, or if you can get through it, you will get some of the most remarkable descriptions of how children might see — literally, not figuratively see — adults, as well as a look into how a brilliant child might push her way through a pretty abject existence. You will also, of course, read of a terrible, shitty little man who thinks himself god, which perhaps describes entirely too many men who want families, or wanted them when this book was written. I don’t know how much I can say I enjoyed this book, but it is a very good book, and worth reading. 4.5/5 Delicious, Timid, Vacant Admirations of the Inept

Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine’s Unbecoming by Lyle Jeremy Rubin (2022) — Stumbled across while learning about other books similar to mine, or alleged to be similar to mine. It is the unbecoming that matters most here, though of course you can only unbecome what you once became, so the marine part matters too. Lyle is a historian now, and this book is far more an exploration of the development of our modern, male, militarized masculinity than it is a traditional memoir. There is a fair amount of theory, and history, and politics, and thinking about how manhood has come to be defined, and how maybe one day that definition can be changed. I suspect it’s more engaging if you haven’t already thought a lot about what Lyle clearly devoted a lot of time and energy to thinking about — I just found myself nodding along to the leftward strides Lyle made — but if you want a “military memoir” that isn’t quite so battle obsessed, and is an exercise in clarity, pick this up. 3.5/5 Dangerous Heroisms

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1953/1955) — My first Beckett. Certainly not the last. This is a strange play. Were it a novel it would likely be called an anti-novel, I think, but it doesn’t seem possible to have anti-plays, though maybe that’s what a lot of performance art is these days, who knows. Also another case of who the hell am I to say anything about one of the most important works of art of the 20th century, maybe even of all time. My understanding is that Waiting can be whatever you want it to be, the danger of which is if you don’t know what you want it might become nothing. It is, most certainly, funny, and absurd. There’s a 2001 production of it on YouTube that I’ve read is good, and plan on watching this winter, to try and get a better feel for the language. 4/5 Quick Crucifixions

Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis (1991) — The conceit of telling a story in reverse chronology, with completely backward words and even the occasional sentence, and even a sort of cognitive nausea/confusion that the first fifteen or so pages induce is still an impressive conceit, twenty plus years later. Technically, this novel is very good, and it’s cool that someone of Amis’s stature would even bother. But the story itself is, to me, little more than a flashy attempt at thinking through the full implications of Arendt, or maybe even just a lazy indictment of nationalistic fervor and the allegedly unseen but completely predictable consequences thereof. Maybe in 1991 there wasn’t as much usage of the Holocaust for art’s sake, or it was edgy to inhabit the mind of a Nazi, but I can’t put myself in that headspace, so this was ultimately a disappointment for me. He gets an extra half point for the paragraph indicting modern medicine, which I will always approve of. 2/5 Atrocities Necessary to Validate the Atrocities That Came Before

Heroines by Kate Zambreno (2012) — Part memoir, part incredible literary scholarship, part manifesto, probably the best book I read in November (a high bar month, in my opinion). This is a beautifully angry push back against the many, many women writers who were marginalized, medicalized, and institutionalized, all while the silly little men in their lives were doing the same things and being celebrated for them. If Heroines doesn’t make you angry, you aren’t paying attention, so go back and re-read. Kate created something extraordinary here, anticipating Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts by three full years, and laying some incredible groundwork for anyone who wants to write about themselves while thinking seriously. (see: “I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression.”) It is also a love letter to reading (sometimes literally, see: “I read with my hands down the front of my pants — my mode of reading is masturbatory. Sometimes I feel guilty about my lubed fingers all over library books.”) This book will help you/force you to rethink literary history, self-investigation, and scholarship in wonderful ways. Read it. 5/5 Depressives Masquerading as Notetakers

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997) — My dear friend Anna forced me to buy this at a library sale somewhere in the South. She’s a good friend, with good taste. It took me longer than I’d have liked to get into this book, but once I did it was very difficult to not be enamored of Arundhati’s brilliance, at times at the expense of the story itself. She thinks about language in a way that I am increasingly convinced only multi-lingual persons who lived in or have ties to colonialized places can (see: “So there it was then, History and Literature enlisted by commerce. Kurtz and Karl Marx joining palms to greet rich guests as they stepped off the boat.” and the way the main characters read backwards). There is great sadness, great love, and great humor throughout the entire book, and it all comes together to create a portrait of the wildly flawed and corrupt and violent and irrational and painful and awful concatenation that is humanity. 4.5/5 Expressions Growing Back in a Nascent Stubble

Aeschylus edited by David Grene and Richard Lattimore (1959) — Maybe technically not a full read, in that I read the Oresteia separately earlier this year, which led to my wonderful partner buying me a full set of The Complete Greek Tragedies as published by Chicago University Press. But I’m going to count it, and perhaps just take my annual count down by one. The Persians, The Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliant Maidens, and Prometheus Bound were varying levels of good, none on the level of The Oresteia, which the translators and editors are upfront about. The Suppliant Maidens was the least interesting, probably because it’s part of a tetralogy that was otherwise lost. The Persians and Prometheus Bound came closest to the brilliance of The Oresteia for me, and I would recommend them to anyone interested in Greek tragedy. [Note: the rating is for all the plays except The Oresteia, which got its own rating above.] 3/5 Bloody Pastes of This Same Soil

Transit by Rachel Cusk (2016) — The only reason I didn’t read this and Kudos immediately after putting down Outline two years ago was that I didn’t have them; I made the mistake of only buying the first book in this marvelous trilogy, not knowing how brilliant Rachel is, and how all-consuming these strange books are. For anyone unfamiliar, the protagonist of the trilogy is a lightly named English writer and teacher who goes about her life talking to people, or, more accurately, listening to others talk about their lives. But Rachel goes about writing this in such a way that it’s more like watching other people’s lives unfold. No matter how much or how little detail we get about any given storyteller, we get a sense of they truly are as a human being, something, I would argue, we rarely get in the real world or invented ones. Rachel is a master of dialogue, not in the way that Zadie is, as she doesn’t go out of her way to (re)create the specific sounds that different people make, but she does still somehow manage to make every character sound exactly like themselves. All of this is a poor attempt at describing alchemy, which is never a good idea, oh well. 5/5 Animus for a Pre-existing Framework

Kudos by Rachel Cusk (2018) — Picked up within twelve hours of putting down Transit. If I have a problem with this trilogy it is that it is too readable. I am not a good critical reader; I read too fast, I can’t really think “about” something until I’m done with it, and even then I usually require a real life interlocutor. And so I suspect I missed a lot in Kudos — I only took three notes, and am absolutely certain that there are far more than three brilliant lines in the book — and failed to fully appreciate it because it was so good at driving me forward. One of those lines, “perhaps because stories need cruelty in order for them to work”, has had much made of it, has been used to suggest that Rachel is cruel in her writing, in her art, in her creation of beauty. This isn’t always said maliciously (though of course it often is), but I don’t think it’s possible to call someone or even someone’s writing cruel without it being an attack. Rachel’s writing is not cruel, if anything it is generous, and kind, insofar as she bothers to let others exist despite all their flaws and inconsistencies. She could, obviously, readily create anyone she wanted to, but instead she creates real people, which is maybe the kindest thing a writer can do. 4.5/5 Refusals to Tell the Story Any More

Recollections of my Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit (2020) — It would seem that I am on a feminism kick. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. I do know that I found (and continue to find) myself craving the voices of women writers, which could readily be seen as sexist in and of itself. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. I know that Rebecca managed to write an optimistic book, despite many, many reasons to do otherwise. This is a memoir, but within that is (necessarily, in Rebecca’s case) a chronicle of feminism, artistry, and ethics, with an emphasis on feminism (hence the book’s title). Of Rebecca’s works I’ve only read this and Men Explain Things to Me, so I can by no means speak to her work writ large, but at least here her writing is deeply human (and therefore often complicated, like humans tend to be), filled with an appetite for a well-lived life, and perhaps above all, generous. 4.25/5 Stories That Come By Any Means

Swing Time by Zadie Smith (2016) — Good, even great if and when compared to other novels, but maybe my least favorite of Zadie’s works so far. It felt very traditional somehow, which is strange, given that it isn’t. Maybe formulaic is the word, which is also untrue. Perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood for a Bildungsroman, I don’t know. Swing Time is still incredibly readable, and funny, and sweet, and full of the observations of class and society that few people do as well as Zadie does. But there was something missing for me, a sort of complexity I have come to expect from her, a feeling of being a few, or often many, steps behind, such that I am consistently taken aback by a character or plot development. Still, worth reading. 3.5/5 Personal Mysteries I Couldn’t Manufacture

Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure, translated by Wade Baskin (1959) — I have a memory that it was Barthes that made me finally sit down with these lectures/textbook. Saussure’s work is foundational in the field of linguistics, and while I am not (and have never been) a real linguist, I am interested in trying to better understand how language works, so here we are. Saussure wastes no time asserting the rules of the world as he imagines it: “For language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity.” and “The preceding discussion boils down to this: writing obscures language; it is not a guise for language but a disguise.” I would be lying if I said I followed the rest of the book, but I think I understood most of the underlying themes about how languages change (and how they don’t), and gained some new insight into how to think about language, which is all I could really hope for. The editors who collected Saussure’s lectures did a very good job of making a large amount of disparate content coherent, and the book is worth a read if you want an intermediate level introduction into linguistics. 3.75/5 Synchronic Solidarities

December

Ways of Seeing by John Berger, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, Richard Hollis (1972) — What an incredible piece of scholarship and thought. I only wish I had heard of Berger, let alone read him and his colleagues, when I was taking Masterpieces of Western Art as an undergrad. This is a book (and a television series) for the people. Berger is a master of tearing away all the nonsense that gets in the way of both looking at art and appreciating it. He is not interested in all of the pretentious proclamations of provenance that sit beside so many paintings in museums, and all the adulation of brushstrokes and the oh so important history that must be known to understand and appreciate art. Phooey to all that. He is also forthright about his indebtedness to Walter Benjamin’s thoughts in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which he (and I) very much encourages everyone who is interested in art to read. Finally, while we almost certainly would have gotten the concept of the male gaze without Berger et al., it’s hard to say that we would have gotten such a nuanced and kind version of the concept. This can be a quick read, but it can also be a long, thorough one, reader’s choice. Either way it’s grand. 5/5 Mystifications of the Past

Sophocles edited by David Grene and Richard Lattimore (1959) — Volume 2 of the complete Greek Tragedies. It’s funny, we all know of Oedipus, but the story as told by Sophocles is very different from how I envisioned (not a pun, but oh well) it. So much happens off-stage, or in memory; it isn’t until the end of Oedipus the King that we get all the action that I sort of just thought would be there. I now realize that I was imagining Shakespeare, and that this is wrong, but this is why we read primary texts! Antigone was by far the best play in this volume, a fact that senior year of high school me was utterly incapable of believing. It was far and away the most humane, or perhaps most humanity filled play in the book. It doesn’t hurt that it features Antigone saying “Take heart. You live. My life died long ago. And that has made me fit to help the dead.” which is a ridiculous and emo and self-involved thing to say, and I love it all the more for it. Other highlights include The Women of Trachis and Electra. Not quite as good as Aeschylus, but still great. 4/5 Atonements For Many Others

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West (2020) — I think it’s worth going into this book without much (if any) knowledge about its premise, so I’ll just say it is a series of similar if not interconnected stories that heavily feature math and science. This is a book that I know I should have taken notes from, that I somehow failed to underline a single line of. It was, I think, too propellant; I felt that somehow I didn’t have time to take a note, or the energy to interrupt a given paragraph. All of this is a compliment, a testament to Labatut’s ability to craft driving, relentless stories. There is an astonishing amount of research and scholarship involved, and perhaps an even more astonishing amount of imagination. Because I didn’t take any notes this book initially left a hollow taste in my mouth; I felt that clearly something was missing. But now I think Benjamin built this into the work, that the book can truly only be appreciated after the fact, if one thinks back on the intricate web he crafted. Or maybe it’s like The Magic Mountain — an obvious inspiration for a large portion of the book — and you really do have to read it (at least) twice to sort it all out. Will report back next year. 4.25/5 Incomprehensible and Apparently Capricious Gestures

Home by Marilynne Robinson (2008) — I find it hard not to compare the books in a given series, which I know is unfair to the author and to the books, but alas, here we are. Home doesn’t have the sort of heft that Gilead did, which is all but impossible, as the Reverend Ames stands up as one of the greatest narrators in recent fiction. But to say that something isn’t quite as good as Gilead is still high praise, and Home is very good. It can be read on its own, with no knowledge of Gilead, which might actually be better to do, as I found myself anticipating events and ascribing qualities to characters that were incorrect. Marilynne’s prose is inimitable, and her rhythm with dialogue from the period these books take place in is whatever the auditory of mesmerizing is (see: “It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them. That’s where the problem lies. In my case.” and “I am hungry in general. It is the particulars that discourage me.”). It’s hard for me to put in to words how impressive it is that Marilynne and her Calvinism have managed to captivate such a bitter and argumentative atheist as me, so do with that what you will. 4.5/5 Uneasy Mutual Understandings that Almost Obviated Words

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin, translated by Harry Zohn (2019) — The Storyteller Essays were my introduction to Benjamin, and I finished it wanting more, without knowing (or perhaps fully internalizing) that he was one of the greatest literary critics of all time. I’m glad I started there, because Illuminations likely would have been wasted on me at the time, having not read Proust, or Kafka, or some thoughts on art. As it is, the long essay on Baudelaire largely escaped me, as did the short essay on Brecht. But everything else knocked my socks off. If you’re at all interested in translated works, The Task of the Translator is a must read, if only as a theoretical framework, and not necessarily an explicit guide to the art of translation (see: “What can fidelity really do for the rendering of meaning?”). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is also a great read, and has much to say about the widespread and varied impacts that art and its newfound ease of spread has on the world. Harvard University Press has put out a lovely four volume collection of Benjamin’s writings, which I will pony up for, and report back on. 4.5/5 Authorities Borrowed from Death

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021) — Recommended by one of the smartest people I know. This is an incredibly strange, technically inventive (and therefore challenging), many layered investigation of what it means to be, or at least try to be, a human in the age of the internet in general, and more specifically in the age of twitter. The majority of the first half of the book is as scattershot and batshit insane as the internet, and quickly achieves its goal of creating an obviously clever, painfully detached protagonist that isn’t not Patricia (as far as I understand). The rest of the book tries to if not undo, then at least rethink that person in the face of a devastating development in the protagonist’s immediate family. There is great humor throughout, though much of it can be missed if you don’t speak Internet quite as fluently as Patricia (this isn’t a criticism, just an observation; I don’t think authors have any duty to make their work understandable to a general audience). The major problem I experienced with the book as a whole was how quickly it reads, thanks to its fragmented nature, and almost feels like it disincentivizes a close reading, which I am almost certain wasn’t/isn’t Patricia’s intention. Like the Internet, I suspect this is a book best enjoyed via frenzied discussion with others. 3.75/5 Political Educations of Potatoes

Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey (1961) — I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Freud slaps. Whether you agree with his opinions is almost beside the point; he was simply a great writer, a singular thinker, and a gifted storyteller. I suppose it helps that I agree with much of his thoughts on religion, sexuality, and the creation of pleasure amidst the many, many urges that threaten to overtake our day to day lives. I was fairly surprised to discover that even if he wasn’t personally in favor of queerness and non-heteronormative relationship structures, Freud very much acknowledged just how important, even necessary, lives outside of traditional “straight” monogamy is to many (most?) people. Reading Freud has been a wonderful exercise in seeing just how wrong popular representations of many thinkers are, and his insights into humanity are very much worth considering, even if you decide they aren’t quite right for you. 4.5/5 Tormenting Uncertainties and Restless Gropings

The Prolific and the Devourer by W.H. Auden (1976/81) — I grabbed this for cheap at some bookstore, thinking it would be a slim collection of Auden’s poetry, which of course it wasn’t. Instead, it’s a strange collection of aphorisms, thoughts on religion, and unfinished attempts to develop thoughts about our place in the world as humans. Because it’s Auden, nearly every page has some breathtaking statement on it; it took all my will power to not annotate and dog ear the entire book. But I am, for lack of a better word, troubled by his reactionary turn to Christianity in the face of the crisis that was the (at the time of writing) impending second world war. Perhaps I can’t understand what it means to think that humanity is lost the same way Auden did, but I think I’ve got a fair chance, and I just can’t see how trying to justify the Catholic church on the merits of the number of saints it has minted, without acknowledging that those same saints are nothing more than inventions of the church, and awfully close to the dreaded false idols, is the way to go. (See: “In consequence no other organization has its range and variety, and though its political record has been consistently evil, and though its hierarchy is perhaps the most corrupt, none has produced more saints.”) I won’t rate this, as Auden didn’t publish it in his lifetime (likely with good reason), but I will say that it’s an interesting collection of thoughts from one of literature’s sharpest minds.

Collected Poems by W.B. Yeats (1948) — I think it took me more than a year to finish this collection in large part because I don’t do well with older, traditional/rhymed poetry; I somehow don’t have the ear for it. I also don’t think I’ve read enough poetry to be able to appreciate Symbolism, so much, if not most of this volume was wasted on me. There were, of course, many incredible lines; Yeats’ ability to transfigure how he saw nature was nothing short of literary alchemy. Looking back on the lines I chose to highlight (e.g. “No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.), I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to take more away from a re-read, or a read of other Symbolists, or other works by Yeats. 3/5 Beauties Grown Sad With Their Eternities

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated by John Ciardi (2003) — This had been on my list for ages, and for whatever reason a bunch of things I’d been reading kept referencing Dante, so I figured it was high time that I make the journey to heaven. It is a long journey, made longer by Ciardi’s incredibly thorough notes and explanations of the text (how anyone who didn’t live in Dante’s time or isn’t a historian of the era could read it without such notes is beyond me). I struggled greatly to push through the entire Comedy; my antipathy for (nearly) all things the Catholic Church and greater Christianity make it very hard for me to appreciate art, no matter how brilliant, that only exists to glorify that great evil. Still, of course, Dante created something wondrous. We would all be so lucky to have imaginations that can run so rampant, to have so much faith in our belief(s), to love, however misguidedly, so intensely. I suspect that this merits a re-read in the future, perhaps with two copies side by side, to better facilitate reading the references as they come up, instead of after each canto (what I did this time). 3.5/5 Peaks That Rise So High That On Them Thunder Sounds From Below

Rewriting: How to Do Things With Texts by Joseph Harris (2006) — The greatest writing course I have had the privilege and pleasure of taking featured portions of this book, so I figured I should read the whole thing. While this (text)book is almost entirely aimed at the academic essay, it’s still a useful guide to thinking about writing, and more specifically about editing, revising, reworking, and generally improving iterations of one’s writing, and therefore one’s thinking. It’s well laid out, and full of useful ‘projects’ that can help the reader put Harris’ advice into practice. It’s also a great resource for anyone teaching writing. It can be dry at times, is a little dated with respect to Harris’ advice about other forms of media, and may not be of use to someone who’s comfortable with their approach to writing and revisions. Still, it’s short, and worth the read for anyone who wants to revisit their approach rewriting. 3/5 Forceful Nouns and Verbs

Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey (1920/1950) — I found this volume less enthralling, somehow less exciting than Civilization and its Discontents. It is significantly more academic, or maybe just more difficult, which makes sense, given that the majority of the essay is Freud trying to figure out where he went wrong in his thoughts on what drives us. My understanding is that his conclusion, that beyond the pleasure principle lies the death drive are, to say the least, controversial, but it made sense to me while reading his thoughts (as to whether it still makes sense, I’m not sure). Certainly merits re-reading, and will likely benefit from better knowing more of his oeuvre. 4/5 Untiring Impulsions Towards Further Perfection

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001) — Last book club read of the year. I took some perverse pleasure in the power of our random number generator saving my second recommendation for the Christmas season. It’s a classic for a reason; Ehrenreich’s writing is compulsively readable, funny, and generous. For those of us who haven’t worked blue-collar or service jobs, or haven’t done so in a long time, this book can serve as a much-needed reminder to be kind to the many, many people who are over-worked and underpaid in our corporate capitalism world. It’s hard to imagine this, given how much she struggled to make ends meet, but life as a poor person in America has only gotten significantly harder since 2001; Ehrenreich was only dealing with the beginnings of the affordable housing crisis. I happen to live in the part of Maine that she worked in for one section of the book, and the housing situation is no longer only affecting those under the thumb of wage slavery — I know dual income couples with no children who can barely afford to rent shitty old houses here. End of rant. It’s a quick read, there are a million used copies out there. Buy it for your friends and family. 4.25/5 Creole(s) Like French on Testosterone

The Karamazov Brothers by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Ignat Avsey (1880/2008) — Also a strange book to read over Christmas, it turns out. I knew nothing about the plot of this book going in, and found that useful, so I won’t provide much detail here, beyond saying that there is a very solid mystery thriller amidst the 900 or so pages of dense thinking. Otherwise, the book is, in fact, about a number of brothers with the last name Karamazov. It is also, like all of Dosty’s writing (at least all of his writing I’ve read so far) about everything, with a special focus on God, the Church, nihilism, society, sex/lust… oh, and guilt. Definitely a lot in here about guilt. While I haven’t read any other translations, I have to imagine that Avsey’s is one of the best ones out there, as it captures the freneticism of nearly every character, in all of their obsessive, meandering glory. Because I only finished this book yesterday (the 30th), I’m still unsure as to how I feel about it. There’s so much packed into 1000 pages, and even though I (still) hate Christianity and most religion, I have to give Dostoevsky it for his willingness to inhabit the minds of those of us who hate everything he believed in; it’s no small act of metaphysical generosity to create The Grand Inquisitor. And, it must be said, he somehow made a mystical novice monk my favorite character, which is not a sense I thought I would write when discussing anything outside of a video game or fantasy novel. There were, however, many, many parts of the book that dragged, which I think is just part of the territory when it comes to reading about 19th century Russian societal change. Also, Crime and Punishment is better. 4/5 Worlds that I Reject and that I Cannot Agree to Accept

Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (2022) — I couldn’t remember specifically how I came across Olúfẹ́mi’s treatise on identity politics, and was about to chalk it up to my general liberalism, but some googling reminded me that it was, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was thanks to a review in The Point that I was introduced to this elegant manifesto. You would never know that Olúfẹ́mi is an elite philosopher reading this text, and that’s nothing but a compliment to his achievement here. Anyone who is interested could read this book and understand every, or nearly every sentence and idea at play (a rare feat in modern academic/high-level discourse). He clearly and neatly articulates just how elites have co-opted, well, everything (see: “it’s not just that wokeness is too white. It’s that everything is”), but, unlike most of us, he doesn’t stop there, content with having crafted a clever, self-involved argument against modern society. What makes Olúfẹ́mi different, and, I would argue, better, is that he not only asks us to engage in constructive approaches to try and fix what ails us, but he provides examples of how this has been done, arguably by individuals facing far greater obstacles than most of us do. 5/5 Worlds Outside the Room