I feel like I read a lot in the last year, but there weren’t as many books as usual on my list, mainly because several were very big ones. The two monsters were The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick, both read with my book group, and Orhan Pamuk's Nights of Plague was also a long read. If you have never read Moby Dick, as I somehow had not, I encourage you to do so - it really does deserve its reputation as one of the greatest novels of all time.
It took me 75 or 100 pages to warm up to Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob, which is written in an unusual style that eschews detailed dialogue or description of the characters' thoughts or feelings, but instead relies on description of events. We found that challenging, because we just didn't have the normal ways of entering the characters' heads, but by sticking with it, the reader is rewarded with immersion in their world -- in this case, Jewish communities in eastern Poland/western Ukraine in the mid-to-late 1700s. At that time, a self-proclaimed "Messiah" named Jacob Frank appeared, and gained an ardent following. Of all the books our group read this year, this one probably created the most lively and wide-ranging weekly discussions.
Other books that stood out for our group were Lalla Romano's A Shared Silence, an intense novel about two couples in the Italian resistance, and Pamuk's Nights of Plague, an epic about a made-up Mediterranean island dealing with an outbreak of plague, and the politics and human behaviors that result.
I was thrilled about the publication of Teju Cole's Tremor, his first novel since Open City. Readers here will know that he and I are long-time friends, and I was privileged to be one of the first readers of the manuscript, so I don't feel that I can "review" the book objectively. I will say that it is beautifully written and conceived, as we have come to expect from Teju; it is timely, dealing with subjects from marriage to racism, from the ownership of art objects to the complexities of academic life, from friendship to, perhaps most importantly, death. It is also experimental, pushing the structure of the novel in new directions, and involving the reader in a reading experience that is not entirely linear. So, of course, I recommend it highly.
Greek Lessons, by the Korean writer Han Kang, intrigued me because of its title and also because of its knockout cover, and I was not disappointed. This book also pushes the form of the novel, and tells a poignant story of two people who use the study of language to address their own difficulties in communication. It's probably the most unusual novel I read this year. I plan to write a full-length review of it later.
While we're speaking of highly original writing, I was extremely impressed by Nay Saysourinho's The Capture of Krao Farini. This short, chapbook-length work defies categorization as to genre; it is listed by the publisher, Ugly Ducking Press, as poetry, and could be called a narrative prose poem of sorts; it also includes illustrations that are integral to the text. It is a work of art that cuts to the heart of what human beings are capable to doing to each other; it's the most original thing I've read this year and I found it brilliant, deeply disturbing, haunting.
Recently, our book group has begun John Berger's trilogy, "Into Their Labours", about the lives of peasants in the French Alps near Berger's home in the second half of his life. As V., one of our book group members, said when we were deciding what to read next, "I’m attracted to Berger right now because of his deep humanity," and she was right; these are books that get to the essence of what is human, what constitutes survival, what we need most, and what is unnecessary. They are antidotes to capitalism, consumerism and fads, social media and modern conformity; like Roy Jacobsen’s “Barrøy Chronicles,” a family chronicle about a remote island off the coast of Norway, they speak of a way of life that continued in spite of world events. They're not without violence, but it tends to be the violence of raising and slaughtering your own animals for food, or the rough feuds of local people.
Likewise, Patrick Leigh Fermor's Roumeli speaks of Greece before mass tourism, when wandering tribes of herders still moved through the remote mountains, speaking dialects that were already in danger of being lost, and mountain-top monasteries were still inaccessible except by horseback or donkey. Having visited some of these remote places myself, his words were more meaningful now than when I first read the book some years ago, and I find myself feeling grateful to both him and Berger for writing down what they observed, and what came to matter deeply to them. This encourages me as a writer, too -- that the daily lives of ordinary people do matter, and it is in our hands as writers to preserve the truths of their existence.
I should also mention that I do a lot of online reading of shorter fiction and essays (in places like The New Yorker, Emergence Magazine, Beshara, The Guardian long reads, quite a few individual Substacks) and I'm a regular subscriber to Brick, a very fine Canadian literary journal which doesn't confine itself to solely Canadian authors, and publishes a lot of work by people of color, indigenous writers, and immigrants, and (I think) as many female as male writers. Do check it out; it's a good journal to support.
Please, as always, do share your own reading lists or highlights from this year! Here's my full list:
2023
The Abyss, Marguerite Yourcenar (in progress)
Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor (rereading)
The Capture of Krao Farini, Nay Saysourinho
Pig Earth, John Berger #
Tremor, Teju Cole
A Recipe for Daphne, Nektaria Anastasiadou
Greek Lessons, Han Kang
Moby Dick, Herman Melville #
The War that Killed Achilles, Caroline Alexander
The Tentmaker, Michelle Blake
Three Short Works, Gustav Flaubert #
A Shared Silence, Lalla Romano #
The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr #
Just a Mother, Roy Jacobsen (Barrøy Chronicles 4) #
Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk #
Woman at Point Zero, Nahwal el Saadawi
House of Names, Colm Toibin
District and Circle, Seamus Heaney
Amsterdam, Ian McEwan
Night Train to Lisbon, Pascal Mercier #
The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk#
The Other Side of the Mountain, Journals of Thomas Merton Vol 7., Fr. Thomas Merton
Enduring Love, Ian McEwan
The Innocent, Ian McEwan
( #indicates books read with my book group)
Pig Earth is now on my shortlist (four books ahead of it on the waitlist, including Tremor). Then comes The Books of Jacob. Thanks for the recommendations. I'm into struggling as a reader if something (or someone whose opinion I value) tells me that the struggle is worth it. Dangerous times require new perspectives, I guess. The old forms sometimes need to be broken to repurpose their pieces.
Walter Benjamin, of course, also broke the molds. I'm reading his One-Way Street (mostly written as feuilleton at the bottom of newspapers' front pages between 1924 and 1926) off and on as a political devotional, and its first installment discusses the kind of publications his times require: "Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book—in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment." I like his criteria: what can nourish active communities? I love your accounts of your book group.
Anyway, I hope Substack may become one of those "inconspicuous forms" for me.
Despite Benjamin's typically categorical and almost hyperbolic remark, I read my share of books this year. Here are the ones that I think are influencing me the most:
Walter Brueggmann, God Neighbor, Empire: The Excess of Divine Fidelity and the Command of the Common Good (2016)
Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (2020)
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016)
Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)