Regular readers will know that for the last several years I’ve solicited Year in Reading reflections from friends and trusted readers. Here, belatedly, is the last entry in this series. It comes from friend of the blog and reader extraordinaire, Scott Walters. The tardiness is all mine: I’ve been sitting on this, unconscionably, for months. I think you will agree, though, that some things are worth the wait. Scott, whose piece here is his fifth, launched the much-lamented blog seraillon in 2010, and expects to return to it one of these days. He largely follows Primo Levi’s model of “occasional and erratic reading, reading out of curiosity, impulse or vice, and not by profession.” He lives with his partner in San Francisco.
Nan Goldin, Self-Portrait in Blue Bathroom, London (1980)
Though I’m becoming increasingly picky about my reading choices, that didn’t stop me in 2025 from mostly following my nose – and allowing for books to choose me rather than the other way around. I made no concrete plans but still managed to read some books that had long been on my list and some marvelous new surprises. Highlights and more below.
Three Big Books
Three fat tomes structured my reading year. First was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924, trans. John E. Woods), the tale of the young Hans Castorp, whose brief visit to a tubercular relative in a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps turns into a long-term stay when he is trapped there after his own diagnosis. To read this book is to go on a long journey, arduous at times and tested by low oxygen, but offering spectacular views, inner alpenglow, and snowy literary heights nothing short of thrilling (okay, okay, enough of that). It is a deeply strange book, which Mann refers to it in his preface as a kind of fairy tale, and also a great one, borrowing freely from other models but prescient regarding both history and literary form. The near linear narrative, obsessed with time, teeters on boring the reader, breaks into a few background chapters, devotes 200 pages to three weeks, takes 500 to speed through the next seven years, then abruptly leap-frogs more years, indulges in dialectical (even trialectical) philosophical conversations, and near the end keeps introducing important characters into this European antechamber on the eve of World War I. An unnamed omniscient narrator occasionally interrupts to use the royal “we” and reference his own anxieties, which readers may share, Mann’s anticipatory novel serving as a kind of measuring stick between its time and our own. [Ed. – Yes, it is a truly great book.]
Little of the Dickens I had read prepared me for Bleak House (1853). This grand conception, capacious and constantly surprising, forming an indignant portrait of a city and country, roars for something to be done about poverty and injustice, pleads for beginning the world anew. Bleak House also seems a kind of spring, irrigating the literature that would follow it, anticipating modernism and some of the later movements of 20th century literature (the influence on Joyce, for example, is clear). [Ed. – Say more!] Even the often dismissed-as-novelty instance of human combustion, near the exact center of the book, comes across as exploding the hinges. To the right and left are human splatter, the human stain and residue, presented in a gem of literary black comedy. Joining a friend’s book club when I learned that Bleak House was on the menu, I was dismayed to find some who viewed Esther Summerson as merely a saccharine goody two-shoes. Is she not one of the great characters in literature? [Ed. – She is.]
A reader acquaintance in town for an evening mentioned Jon Fosse’s Septology (2019-2021, trans. Damion Searls). I’d read one Fosse work and had no intention of reading more, but Septology had other ideas: from a box of books I spied on the sidewalk the following morning, a pristine copy offered itself up, and I quickly found myself needing to read it each evening. Septology’s three novels form a triptych, the three sections of the central book flanked by two sections in each in the first and third novels. “The Other Name” in the first novel’s title is the same as the first name, Asle, held by both the narrator, a painter, and another Asle, a despondent alcoholic, both living alone near Bergen, one with his paintings and memories and the other with his bottles and memories. One scarcely knows where one Asle ends and the other begins, these doppelgängers, manifestations perhaps of divergent and not-so-divergent paths in the same life. It’s a nifty narrative device: the reader wanders in and about the one and/or two Asles and even more variations on the name, including Ales, the painter’s late wife, and Asleik, his neighbor. Past and present mingle. The discursive repetitions of Asle’s narrative seemed like the looping curlicues in a Cy Twombly painting: thoughts turn back on themselves, run on the same tracks for pages, return like waves, new and familiar. The frequent absence of page and paragraph breaks and the total absence of periods further a narrative relentlessness, as though we’re listening to an extended monologue, even when two people speak. [Ed. – Gotta say, that sounds dismayingly hard!] Ruminations range freely, from quotidian minutiae to explorations of art and faith, from meditations on social responsibility to the virtues and vices of solitude. A Nordic coldness blows through Fosse, but I came away from Septology knowing I’d encountered something new, unforgettable, and, in another iteration of hazy identities, now a part of me.
Playing with History
I was surprised to find so much historical fiction—not a genre I often deliberately seek out—among my standout works from 2025. Here they are, each approaching history in its own inimitable way.
Manuel Mujica-Lainez’s Mysterieuse Buenos Aires (1950, French trans. Catherine Ballestero) uses 42 fictional vignettes, in chronological order, to relate the history of Argentina’s largest city. A well-known translator from Spanish to English once said Mujica-Lainez was the author whose works they most wanted to see in English, and as a fan of Bomarzo (recently republished by New York Review Books for the first time since it appeared in English in 1969), I was thrilled to find another of his works, even if in French. Mujica-Lainez daringly pushes borders by fusing fact and fantasy, relying largely on figures from history’s margins, never passing up the opportunity to make a scene flourish in a dense riot of glorious language. The book opens in 1536 with a Boschian hellscape of famine and guerilla ambushes as the native population greets the Spanish invaders and continues through to 1904. I especially loved the longest tale, an “autobiography” by a tattered edition of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s roman à l’eau de rose, Paul et Virginie, as it gets passed along from Europe to the New World.
Anja Wilner’s 2024 Year in Reading post sent me to Christoph Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (1984, trans. John E. Woods), in which fiction and historical documents relating to an ill-fated 1872 Arctic expedition [Ed. – is there any other kind?] merge into an obsessive account of explorers confronting the elements. A parallel narrative follows the story of a young Italian fixated enough on the 1872 effort to book passage on an Arctic research ship in 1981, only to vanish mysteriously once back on Spitzbergen. The unnamed narrator is himself obsessed with the Italian’s disappearance. Various texts propel the narrative – logs, letters, lists, diary excerpts, tales of other expeditions, failures, vanishings – accompanied by black & white images. The overall effect is bewitching, as Ransmayr uses the explorers’ own words to probe their motivations, as shifting as the ice: a try for the pole, discovery of new lands, fame for the homeland, a promised payout. But the terrors of ice and darkness surge forth everywhere. Frostbitten-hands-down the most affecting work I’ve ever read on polar exploration.
A past Year in Reading post by Brad Bigelow led me to Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March (1948), as superb as Brad had promised, standing above most contemporary American novels in its densely researched, inventive treatment of historical material that expands the epistolary form to incorporate everything from mandates by Caesar to clandestine notes passed between conspirators to graffiti on a Roman wall.
Adam and Eve in Paradise, by Eça de Queiros (1897). What a treasure, this 55-page novella by the wonderful de Queiros, translated into English for the first time by the wonderful Margaret Jull Costa. De Queiros’s take on Genesis has ape-like Adam sliding down from a branch “on the twenty-eighth day of October at two o’clock in the afternoon,” and had me laughing throughout, astonished that no one else seems to have approached such an absurd creation myth in such an inside-out, satirical manner. I gave out copies to friends like candy.
My Italian discovery of the year was Sicilian writer Annie Messina in The Myrtle and the Rose (1982, trans. Jessie Bright)and Le Palmier de Rusafa (1989, French trans. Jocelyne Sephord, unavailable in English), two of three novels Messina wrote, all towards the end of her long life (the third remains untranslated). Though the characters and locales differ, the novels tell similar tales of a Middle Eastern warlord developing an intense relationship with a rescued slave boy. The rather spare Myrtle seems almost a draft, sowing seeds that in Rusafa blossom into an extravagantly exotic baroque masterpiece. This is extraordinary, riveting fiction, fiercely red in tooth and claw and shrinking from nothing. [Ed. – Intriguing!]
Other Italian Journeys
You, Bleeding Childhood, by Michele Mari (2009, trans. Brian Moore) left me embarrassed that I’d never before heard of Mari, apparently among Italy’s living literary treasures. The 13 tales here center on characters who encounter literature at a young age. In “The Black Arrow,” the narrator steals his father’s copy of Stevenson’s novel of the same name, then is thrust into a moral conundrum when his father returns from a trip bearing another copy of the book as a gift. The child’s discovery of textual differences due to the gift being a different translation opens a world. In “Eight Writers,” the child’s obsession with sea adventures by eight famous authors encounters a case of mal-de-mer when he begins to mark their stylistic and thematic differences. In a favorite piece, “The Covers of Urantia,” Mari considers the impact of cover art, as his young reader reminisces on the covers of a popular series of horror magazines. Never let it be said that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Terrific stuff.
L’Île des âmes (The Island of Souls), by Piergiorgio Pulixi (2019, French trans. Anatole Pons-Reumaux):a mystery of the “Sardinian Giallo” genre, concerning the reopening of a couple of cold cases involving ritualistic murders of two women following the more recent disappearance of another. The twist is that the cases are now being investigated by two women detectives, seemingly as an effort to sideline them. One might suspect the author of trying to be Sardinia’s answer to Sicily’s Andrea Camillieri, but Pulixi seems after something different: I was transfixed by his panorama of Sardinian culture, geography, and centuries-old mysteries – a great introduction to the island as well as the first novel in a series.
Other Italian gems: Behind Closed Doors: Her Father’s House and Other Stories of Sicily, by Maria Messina (Annie’s aunt) (1909-1928, trans. Elise Magistro), memorable tales of the rough lives of Sicilian village women in the early 20th century; Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara (1933, trans. William Weaver) featuring impoverished villagers wrestling defiantly with a Fascist landowner diverting their water for his own uses; a timely reread of Silone’s The School for Dictators (1939, trans. William Weaver), a quasi-novel/political treatise in which an American Presidential aspirant travels to Mussolini’s Italy to learn how to import fascism to the U.S.; Vincenzo Latronico’s bestseller Perfection (2022, trans. Sophie Hughes), a biting treatment of today’s digital nomads which, as a portrayal of work culture, brought to mind Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; the first volume of self-described “leader of strange dolts” Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone (The Big Sheep, 1378, trans. W. H. Waters), a Boccaccio impersonation with infectiously fun tales stitched together by the dopiest of framing stories: two young lovers meet each day, tell one another a story, then slink off after this literary foreplay; the metafictional delights of Giorgio Manganelli’s To Those Gods Beyond (1989, trans. Marvin McLaughlin), from which I learned that while fiction is a prison, one can always invent a horse to make one’s escape; and finally Daniele del Giudice’s A Fictional Inquiry (1983, trans. Anne Appel), which I discovered the day after dreaming about an earlier del Giudice novel I’d read years ago only to find this one later in the day in a bookshop. [Ed. — !] To my further astonishment, A Fictional Inquiry pursues Italian critic Roberto Bazlen in a clever exploration of how one might have an outsized influence on literature without ever having published a thing.
“American” Literature
After all these decades I finally got to another Wilder in addition to Thornton above: Laura Ingalls, in Little House on the Prairie (1935). [Ed. – Genuinely curious how you managed to miss them in childhood, Scott!] I admired Wilder’s knack for creating limpid scenes using only the briefest descriptive sentences, as when the family reaches the grassland and young Laura sees that “In a perfect circle, the sky curved down to the level land, and the wagon was in the circle’s exact middle.” For all the mockery generated by the related TV series, Little House struck me as practical and even “woke” to an extent that a lot of reactionary parents might miss (to the benefit of their bookworm children). [Ed. – Now read Eula Biss’s essay “No Man’s Land.”]
U.S.A., A Dramatic Review, by Paul Shyre and John Dos Passos (1960): I read John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy decades ago, completely oblivious to the existence of this stage adaptation that compresses 1,000 pages into a mere 75. This small marvel of theatrical writing nonetheless manages to convey the sound and sense of the trilogy, including newsreel footage in the performance, and features several striking scenes, in particular a magnificent monologue by Isabella Duncan.
Thanks to Alta magazine’s assessment of 25 great works of California fiction, I read two that were new to me. Mecca, by Susan Straight (2022) was an especially welcome discovery, its entwined stories linking diverse communities of Southern California around the nexus where Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties meet. The Alta piece also prompted me to take down from the shelf an unread copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990), discovering only after finishing that it had inspired One Battle After Another. It’s easy to see why this narrative would resonate today; Vineland’s outlandish tale of a young woman coming to terms with her vanished mother, a radical activist from the 1960s, takes a long view of the competing tensions between American democracy and the forces of reaction taking aim at it. I also enjoyed Christopher Tradowsky’s Midnight in the Cinema Palace (2025), a solid contribution to literature about San Francisco in its glimpse into the culture of the Castro neighborhood in the 1990’s.
Passing, by Nella Larsen (1929): How had I missed the boat on this unexpected window into the world of Black women able to “pass” for white? Reading it made me feel a gaping hole in my knowledge of American literature had begun to be filled. Indispensable. Thanks, Dorian! [Ed. – Another satisfied customer!]
The most compelling American fiction I read last year was, um, British: Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford (2023). Spufford’s stunning conception is the star in this speculative allo-historical thriller in which First Nations people govern a semi-autonomous U.S. state located around the city of Cahokia, today ruins of what was once the largest city in North America, but in Spufford’s vision an important 20th-century metropolis eclipsing the tiny village of St. Louis across the river. The book brilliantly uses a popular genre to explore race, religion, and the construction of history, and adds to an expanding list of great works about the United States not written by U.S. authors. Thanks again, Dorian! Iksho Itala! [Ed. – A pleasure!]
Odds and Ends
Aside from scattered poems, Raymond Radiguet’s two novels, Le Bal de Comte Orgel and Le Diable au corps, comprise his entire literary output. But what an output! His death at 20 drew thousands to his funeral; his patron, Jean Cocteau, was said to be inconsolable for years. These two tales, each involving a transgressive love affair between an adolescent boy and a married woman, burn with life, wit, insight, and defiant assertion of youth. Le Diable au corps, with its betrayed husband a French soldier, so affronted French nationalists after World War I that even a film version of it appearing decades later was met with indignation.
Someone here last year mentioned Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, so I picked it up and read this class-conscious dissection of an affair with admiration of her keen ability to needle in under people’s rationalizations and excuses and – like her occasionally self-mutilating narrator Frances – get under the skin and draw blood. [Ed. – Good description!]
The Prague Coup (2018), by Jean-Luc Fromenthal and Miles Hyman (trans. Lara Vergnaud), the only graphic novel on my list, recounts the story of Graham Greene’s trip to Vienna in 1948, ostensibly to consult on Carol Reed’s film The Third Man. Fromenthal unveils the story of Greene’s involvement in intelligence work and reframes The Third Man in its intelligence context as in part a coded message from Greene to double-agent Kim Philby. Bonus: the end pages sent me down a deep rabbit hole to learn about fascinating figure Elizabeth Montagu, Greene’s guide in Vienna, and to the remarkable film Four Men in a Jeep, shot in a Vienna still under rotating command by the U.S., U.K., France and the Soviet Union. [Ed. – This sounds great! First time I’m hearing of it.]
Perhaps my most moving re-read of last year was of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, this time in the magnificent Peter Carson translation (Carson died a mere two days after finishing it).
Vivian Maier, Jul, 1953
Odder Odds and Ends
I’m not sure where I draw the line between books I consider odd and those I don’t. I read the first book of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (2020, trans. Barbara J. Haveland), about a woman trapped in a single day that endlessly repeats, and did not think to put it in this category. But Quebecoise writer Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba’s feminist eco-thriller Sauvagines (2022, available in English translation as Feral) swept me up into discomfiting aspects of an otherwise straightforward tale of a young woman serving a season as game warden in remote Kamouraska and finding herself squared off against a vicious, likely murderous, poacher. [Ed. – Ordering now!]
The Gardener Who Saw God, by Edward James (1937), stuck out no doubt because its author did. This too-hefty work by one of the patrons of Surrealism, a British lord who ended up in the jungles of Michoacan where he built his own surreal folly garden, Las Pozas [Ed. – This sentence has already contained many improbable things—where will it go next?], may not be stellar as literature, but it contains at least two major attractions: a fictionally-tweaked glimpse into the early world of Surrealism (Magritte, Dalí and others were guests at James’s estate), and a stunning spiritual conversion scene with the force of a Blake painting. I learned of the novel’s existence from Eve Babitz, perhaps one reason the book proved nearly impossible to find.
More solidly in the oddities category, Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) had trailed me since university, when those who had read it seemed dismissive. My expectations were not high, but I ended up deliriously checking off the oddities of this bizarre, messy tale of a ship stowaway’s adventures. One lengthy passage takes place entirely in the dark of a ship’s hold (I kept trying to imagine it on a stage). There is a magnificent description of water that evokes all the magic water can evoke. But with its frequent alterations of black and white seeming to anticipate Melville’s Moby Dick and a disturbing set of scenes pitting the ship’s crew against “savages,” the novel’s treatment of race makes it one of the strangest literary artifacts of American slavery and racial phobia.
Perhaps the oddest book I’ve ever encountered [Ed. — !], David Lindsey’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) begins in sordid circumstances on Earth and moves to other such circumstances on Terra, a planet orbiting the binary system of Arcturus. In a confusing sort of pilgrimage, its louche main character sets out across the planet in search of illumination (think: the quest in Mount Analogue meets the ghastliness of M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud), encountering surprising planetscapes, a plethora of strange beings, several impossible colors to which Lindsey gives names, and even a population of creatures who use gender-neutral pronouns. The violence of the book, however, came as a shock; I could not help but think of it as an oblique reaction to World War I. [Ed. – Readers, this is the kind of content you don’t get just anywhere.]
Good Trouble
Several works resonated more directly with the challenges of our times and served to ground and put into perspective whatever else I read.
Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows(unfinished, last worked on in 1964, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler), concerning Stalin’s purges and the incarceration of millions, may be less powerful than his two-volume World War II magnum opus, Stalingrad and Life and Fate, but incisively depicts the paranoid totalitarian state that resulted in informers and victims, seen through the lens of one such victim upon his release after 30 years in the gulag.
Étienne de la Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontière (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude – 1548), a brief disquisition on why human beings voluntarily surrender agency to accept the tyrants who oppress them, seemed as timely as ever. Moreover, it contains some of the most lucid prose I have read in French, especially impressive given that de la Boétie, bosom friend of Michel de Montaigne, wrote it between the ages of 16 and 18.
Finally, Crooked Cross (1934) by British writer Sally Carson, who lived in Germany during the beginning of the Third Reich, unfurls as though in real time. Carson zooms in on the Kluger family of Kranach, an alpine village above Munich, the novel playing out like a granular study of how quickly and corrosively Nazi fanaticism took hold: the novel takes place entirely within the six months following Hitler’s assumption of power. Popular upon its publication, the book vanished until the recent discovery of a single extant copy. Thanks to Persephone Books, Carson’s novel contrasting acquiescence and resistance to totalitarianism has been revived – and at the right moment. [Ed. – I have dallied so long in putting up this post that Persephone’s reissue of the sequel is now available…]
August Sander, Small-Town Women (ca. 1913)
Thank you for reading, safe passage and felicitous literary adventures to all in 2026. [Ed. – Thank you, Scott! So many riches here.]
Today’s reflection on a year in reading, poetic and stormy, is by Isaac Zisman. Isaac is a writer and editor based in Oakland, CA. Find him on all socials @octopus_grigori and at http://isaaczisman.com.
Ori Sherman, from The Creation (1986)
I confess to having a reticent memory. I keep few records. I should be more organized. Twenty-twenty-two was a year of reading—haven’t they all been? as well as I can recall—and yet I’m not sure it was a year of overmuch finishing. The year began in an overheated apartment in Manhattan. It could’ve been storming. Maybe lightning struck the tall building that everyone knows, everyone sees, the most witnessed building in history, perhaps, but whose name I here elide. A website I’ve never come across before says it was 55 degrees and raining at noon. It says nothing about thunder. I had Covid then, which meant I was on the couch under an old blanket. My partner prepared a small bite of caviar on toast the night before and I remember it only as texture.
I type in “books” into my phone’s camera roll and 534 images pop up. I add “2022” and the number drops to 136. Tapping “see all” brings them up in chronological order and so I can see I began the year with a small stack, my hand gripping the three books together above the sloping parquet of the apartment’s floor.
The first is I am writing you from afar: a novel graphic, by moyna pam dick, a gift from my friend Jared Fagen, a writer and the publisher of Black Sun Lit, the press who released the novel. My favorite page was one of four artful squiggles that appear to have been drawn with a weak Bic pen. Next in my hand is the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. I don’t think I made it past Father Zosima this go around. My copy of Crime and Punishment, ibid. trans. etc., sits next to it on the shelf now and I recall that in high school I thought it was a minor victory to take to the cover with a sharpie in order to change FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY into ODOR TOE. [Ed. – Big D would have been proud.] Thank god I left the spine clean. The third book is Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives, in which a post-it note roughly lodged suggests I didn’t progress very far at all. [Ed. – Shame, it’s terrific!] I have the faint impression of a war between critics for mantle of Freud’s inheritance. I remember laughing at that.
Scrolling forward, my phone offers up mostly domestic scenes in which books appear. My partner eating soup at our little table next to the bookcase; the dog sprawled out beneath the same, his toys arranged on top of him in what was probably my idea of a joke; a giant pile of nachos at a friend’s apartment next to an edition of the Hokusai Manga, the astonishing book of figuration, expression, and Edo period garments by the painter of “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.” In the background, the Los Angeles Rams square off against the Cincinnati Bengals, projected to nearly life size on the far wall. [Ed. – Ah, sportsball!]
On Feburary 2nd, I took a photo of single page of Ulysses (p. 489 in the Gabler edition, I discover, pulling down the book now from a high shelf). I’ve highlighted a name: “Isaac Butt.” [Ed. – Heh.]
Two weeks later I took a picture of String of Beginnings, the memoir of Michael Hamburger, translator of Paul Celan and basis of the character Michael Hamburger in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn—for no representation can claim more than resemblance. I strikes me that I could steal the title for this little essay.
In March, friends online directed me to Guy Davenport—I’m sure you know these friends, perhaps you can count yourself among them. I picked up a copy of the guy davenport reader, primarily for the story “The Aeroplanes at Bescia,” a glorious assemblage of the fictional lives of Franz Kafka, the brothers Otto and Max Brod, and an atmospherically distant Ludwig Wittgenstein. For some reason, my hardback copy came wrapped in four identical dust jackets. I read around in Questioning Minds, Davenport’s lifetime of correspondence with the critic Hugh Kenner. My used edition of Apples and Pears, purchased later,contains a clipping—the author’s obituary in the Washington Post.
Late May found me in a strange version of a doctor’s office, a sort of wellness situation that goes beyond the purview of this text that I am writing now. The walls are adorned in a garish wallpaper and in my hand is a copy of the Zohar, though I can’t read Hebrew beyond sounding out the letters. I remember we spoke of being and becoming and that the doctor gave an impression of someone coming to poetry for the first time, his mind rigid with math and chemistry suddenly loosened at the core by the concept of metaphor. He liked to imagine beneficent angels, he told me.
On June 5th I bought another bookcase and took the stacks off the floor.
On June 10th I received a copy of Gordon Lish’s Peru from a seller on eBay. It smelled so rank I couldn’t bear to open it.
On June 16th I took a photo of an epigraph. “The first memory is of memory itself” –GIORGIO AGAMBEN. I have no idea to which book this quote attends.
In late June, we spent a week at a rental, a house on the New York State historic registry as it was once the home of Lincoln Barnett, a science journalist and editor for Life Magazine and the first to write a popular account of Einstein’s relativity for an American audience. It is possible that the great man, Einstein himself may have sat in this house, I thought as I leaned, head in hands at the old desk with its view of Lake Champlain and the sweet mildew smell of old books. Next to me sat my stack of Romanians—Mihail Sebastian, Dumitru Tsepeneag, Norman Manea, translations by Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Alistair Ian Blyth, Linda Coverdale. I composed half a chapter of my own book, adrift down a Dâmbovița of the mind.
By August I was reading Fosse again, this time Morning and Evening, trans. Damion Searls. I could not yet return to the Septology, also via Searls, the first volume of which had been my companion in the first weeks of the pandemic. If for Merve Emre reading Jon Fosse’s Septology was “the closest I have come to feeling the presence of God here on earth,” for me it was something different. The particular had exploded into the particulate. I have only been able to open it again now, but that is a reflection for next year. I am reminded, too, of the great Jewish mystic painter Ori Sherman and his series The Creation which depicts the seven days of Genesis. The last image is of the verdancy of the world, fecundity in potentia. God is at rest and emerging from the algal depths, from the swirling mass of green and blue signifying life and growth and wildness and all that is to come, ascends a radiant sphere. But it is neither the sun, nor the light of the world, nor of God, nor the gnostic light of secret knowledge. It is a crowned sphere inchoate, a virus. [Ed. — !]
Finding myself one of the few remaining residents at the end of a writing conference later that month, I laid claim to a stack of books abandoned by the side of a path. One of the novels was The Hundred YearHouse by Rebecca Makkai, who taught at the conference. At that moment, I saw her boarding a van to the airport and rushed over to greet her. I asked for an inscription, something I’ve rarely done. “To Isaac,” she obliged, “who stole this book!”
I returned to Lincoln Barnett’s house on the lake where I read Samantha Hunt’s mysterious essay collection, The Unwritten Book: An Investigation. Two days later, a cyclone descended, its epicenter the little spit of rock and soil on which the house perches above the lake. The windows blew in off their frames. Trees fell. Power lines draped across the road. The event lasted less than a minute, but we were trapped for days. We played scrabble and drank whisky and ate grilled hot dogs, the dented Weber, which the storm had flung across the yard and tipped to the edge of the small cliff at the far edge of the property, being our only method for cooking. I read Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojurn and dreamed of Berlin.
September was spent reading apartment listings. The Covid deals were gone. Rents had doubled, tripled. Our building had sold and was to become condos. We left Manhattan under a brilliant sky and headed back to California. In my backpack came a copy of Javier Marías’s A Heart So White, trans. Margaret Jull Costa, and as we drove toward the west, the smell of wildfire and dry grass, terrible and familiar, returned.
We arrived back in Oakland at the beginning of October, to the place where we’d lived before moving to New York, to the plague house of the first of the Covid years, and, before that, to nearly a decade of our lives. I returned to Bolaño and he carried me through the fall.
Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (1994)
There were other things read, I’m sure, though the question of when exactly eludes me. I know, for instance, that I loved Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, Sublunary Edition’s magisterial edition of Marguerite Young’s Collected Poems. That I reread swaths of Hans Magnus Enzenberger’s Tumult, trans. Mike Mitchell, after his passing. That I read a long-travelled copy of Grimmish by Michael Winkler, sat enthralled by Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds, trans. Margaret B. Carson, inhaled December by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter, translation by Martin Chalmers. That I read the fictions of friends, sworn to secrecy until their much deserving publication. That I read essays and poems, criticism, lists of albums, cookbooks, articles, manuals, comics, menus, books of photography, road signs. The work of my new, online companions—how good it feels to have such talented peers. [Ed. – heart emoji] I see the silvered spines of the New Directions Storybook editions on the shelf beside me, I see the bookmark wedged somewhere in the first third of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid, trans. Sean Cotter—the image of twine emerging from the narrator’s belly button producing a shudder once again. On my desk the piles begin to grow once more—the books I pulled off the shelf to remember, the two translations of Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, Giovanni Pontiero and Benjamin Moser, respectively, the copy of Annie Ernaux’s Happening, trans. Tanye Leslie, that I read breathless in a single sitting as December closed. And the Septology, arriving again to start anew. It was a messy year, but edifying. What emerges next, I’m not sure.
I still hope to write up my reflections on my 2022 reading year. (Though look how well that worked last year…) In the meantime, I’ve solicited guest posts from friends and fellow book lovers about their own literary highlights. First up is James Morrison, an Australian reader and editor (sadly, not of books) who tweets at @unwise_trousers and blogs (increasingly infrequently) at http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com. His novel Gibbons, Or One Bloody Thing After Another will be published later this year by Orbis Tertius Press
Look for more reflections from a wonderful assortment of readers in the days to come. And remember, you can always add your thoughts to the comments.
Woman committing suicide by jumping off of a bridge – George Cruikshank [1848]
First, a bit of throat-clearing. When I started to try to work out what my favourite books that I had read in 2022 were, I had a list 84 books long, out of nearly 300 read. This is obviously insane, possibly even psychopathic, so I have winnowed it down a bit. Secondly, I have now learned that two of my favourite books were also on Barack Obama’s list, which means after this I presumably need to become a boring centrist and do some war crimes. In any case, I’ve tried to force things into various fairly elastic categories in order to give this article the illusion of clarity.
[Audience: Get on with it!]
THE BIG BASTARDS
I finally joined the people-who-have-read-James-Joyce’s-Ulysses club this year, something which was ridiculously overdue. And what can I usefully say about this astonishing, hilarious, brilliant, occasionally tedious (hello, ‘Oxen of the Sun’) and quietly heartbreaking book? “It’s great!” I could tell you, unhelpfully, but you already knew that. It’s also one of the most amazing evocations of being embodied, of living a human fleshy existence with all its joys and ills and excrescences, that has ever been written. I also read Terence Killeen’s Ulysses Unbound, and found it to be a hugely welcoming, informative, and wise companion.
Another massive tome was Jon Fosse’s Septology (translated by Damion Searls), which the publishers and many reviews will tell you is really seven short novels, which is, in turn, a lie (though one which makes tackling such a big book seem much more approachable). It’s more accurately described as seven periods of minutely annotated consciousness, from waking to prayerful drowsiness, full of repetitions and art and small acts of kindness and weirdly commingling parallel universes and a (frankly bonkers) girlfriend. I didn’t find it to be the transformative work of art that many others did, but I did enjoy it tremendously.
The third giant was Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village, by Marit Kapla (translated by Peter Graves), a polyphonic oral history in prose-poem form of a dying Swedish village, drawn from interviews with every inhabitant. It’s a book that takes a simple idea that somehow has never been had before, and applies it perfectly.
GINZBURG & CO.
More than any other writer, Natalia Ginzburg was the one I kept returning to this year. She is just phenomenal, and I devoured a bunch of her shorter books like popcorn. The Road to the City (translated by Frances Frenaye), Voices in the Evening (translated by DM Low), Valentino and Sagittarius (both translated by Avril Bardoni) are all near-as-damnit perfect novellas, mostly about Italy during or just after World War II, full of frustrating families, political activism and romantic fuck-ups.
Two other writers I read multiple books by were Maylis de Kerangal and Gwendoline Riley. De Kerangal’s Birth of a Bridge is something like an Arthur Hailey blockbuster condensed to 300 pages and written by a genius [Ed. – sold!]: an exploration of all the people and organisations and objects involved in the construction of a massive bridge project, while Eastbound is a compact novella about a fraught encounter between a Russian fleeing conscription and a French tourist on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Both these books were translated by Jessica Moore. Riley’s most recent novels, First Love and My Phantoms, are perfect, hilarious [Ed. – uh that is uh weird, James] examinations of the awfulness of families and relationships.
Self Portrait on Statue, Gouges – Polly Penrose [2020]
MY BODY BETRAYED ME
Anna Deforest’s A History of the Present Illness is a startling novel about grief and the terrible things that can happen to a human body, told from the point of view of a student doctor. Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery (due this coming March) is a fine addition to the ‘new mothers who may be losing their minds’ library. What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez is a brilliant, telegraphic novel about helping and failing to help a dying friend have a good death. Imogen Binnie’s Nevada is a simultaneously hilarious and dispiriting book about gender dysphoria and about being a well-meaning but really terrible wise elder trying to help someone else deal with their trans-ness. Abi Palmer’s Sanatorium is a fascinating diary/essay about her experiences dealing with physical rehab in both a Budapest thermal bath and a crappy inflatable pool in London
And then there’s Naben Ruthnum’s Helpmeet. If Edith Wharton had started one of her excellent wintry ghost stories, but then been overcome by the body-horror vibes of a time-travelling David Cronenberg without losing any of her prose style or piercing insights, this is the novella she might have written. [Ed. – Hell to the yeah!] Strange but true.
IMAGINED WORLDS, FUCKED-UP PHYSICS
Writing a high-concept science-fiction airport thriller is not something you expect a President of the Oulipo group to do, but that’s exactly what we have in The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier (translated by Adriana Hunter). And it’s really good! A passenger jet survives a storm and lands safely. Then, months later, the exact same jet (and all its passengers) lands safely again, introducing hundreds of duplicate people to the world. The weirdness spirals from there, but Le Tellier plays it dead straight.
Simon (or S. J.) Morden is a British science-fiction writer quietly producing a fascinating body of work. His newest novel, The Flight of the Aphrodite, is an excellent dark tale of an exploratory ship crew going to pieces in the face of the possibility of First Contact, and an older book, Bright Morning Star, is a moving novel about an autonomous alien AI drone landing in the middle of a Ukraine forest as Russians invade [Ed. — !].
I was predisposed to ignore the work of ‘qntm’ because, let’s face it, that pseudonym is extremely irritating. Annoyingly, I have to report that There Is No Antimemetics Division is kind of brilliant: a group of specialists are charged with stopping malignant alien antimemes, which are ideas and concepts and things which by their very nature cannot be communicated or remembered.
Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea is a scary, absorbing story of loving someone who is going through a very horrible change after suffering an accident on an exploratory deep-sea dive. Humidly, damply intense. And finally, there’s Audrey Schulman’s The Dolphin House, which is fiction about science being done, rather than science-fiction, and both completely convincing and compelling.
THE TUMOUR AT THE HEART OF HUMAN HISTORY
The Investigation: Oratorio in Eleven Cantos by Peter Weiss (translated by Alexander Gross) is a play based on the testimony Weiss observed at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the mid-1960s. Riveting and horrifying and an excellent one-book summary should you ever need to rustle up evidence for use in damning the entire human race. Ernst Weiss’s The Eyewitness (translated by Ella R. W. McKee) is a posthumous novel about a psychiatrist called in to treat a young Austrian ex-soldier, initials A.H., which seems to have been based on Hitler’s actual psychiatric reports, which Weiss had brief access to.
James Kestrel’s Five Decembers is, despite its pulpy cover, an unexpected and thoughtful crime novel about regret and missed opportunities, through the prism of the attacks by and on Japan during World War Two. Clouds Over Paris by Felix Hartlaub (translated by Simon Beattie) is perhaps the most self-effacing diary ever, as well as being beautifully written. Hartlaub was a reluctant and mildly embarrassed Nazi stationed in newly Occupied Paris. He was still a Nazi, though, despite the prose quality, so let’s shed no tears over his death and disappearance in 1945.
Lacertilia [Lizards] – Ernst Haeckel [1904]
[Audience: He does fucking go on, doesn’t he?]
GRAPHIC!
The fact that several of the best graphic novels I read this year were about adolescents having much more interesting times than I ever did should not be taken as an indicator that I am having a mid-life crisis or am extremely boring. [Ed. – Ah good that you said that, because I was thinking _exactly* that…] Skim by Gillian and Mariko Tamaki is about a Japanese-Canadian Goth failing to fit in at a Catholic School. Giulia Sagramola’s Summer Fires (translated by Brahm Revel) is about a group of teenagers connected to a pair of fractious sisters in a Spanish summer where the landscape keeps bursting into flames. And Andi Watson and Simon Gane’s Sunburn perfectly captures being old enough to be involved in adult’s relationship game-playing, but not old enough to know what the hell you’re doing.
Sara Del Giudice’s Behind the Curtain (translated by M.B. Valente) is a gorgeously rendered story, all pale colours and intricate fabric textures, about Jewish sisters in Paris as the Nazis take over, with a nasty kick in the guts at the end. And last of all there’s Ducks by Kate Beaton, her big, funny and moving memoir of working in the Canadian oil sands, with all the awful sexual pressure and violence that involved.
From ‘A.C.2020’ – Mirko Ilic [2020]
POEMS THAT MOSTLY DON’T RHYME
Verse novels, baby, that’s where it’s at with the cool kids these days! If you want to fit in at the top table, why not read Sickle by Ruth Lillegraven (translated by May-Brit Akerholt), a tiny family saga about inheritance, books and change set in nineteenth-century Norway. Or for something far more depressing [Ed. – pretty rich, given this list so far], let me recommend Greg McLaren’s Camping Underground, in which a former undercover political provocateur gives her fragmented testimony about the terrible things that have reduced a future Australia into a scavenger-economy wasteland. It has some really good jokes!
Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal is a prose-poem-novel-something about a woman who wakes up one day to find she’s the author of Baudelaire’s collected works. Body Braille by Beth Gylys is a beautiful collection about how bloody hard it is to live in a body, with sections for each of the senses.
And then there’s The Lascaux Notebooks, ostensibly by Jean-Luc Champerret and translated by Philip Terry, which claim to be a series of translations of Lascaux cave paintings into poetry. It’s mad and clever and fun and I fell for it for much longer than I should have.
TINY WEE HUNGARIANS [Ed. – That’s nice, isn’t it? They don’t get much, the wee Hungarians.]
The three best books from the literary wonderland that is Hungary that I read this year were all tiny. Agota Kristof’s The Illiterate (translated by Nina Bogin) is a compressed, bleak and reliably brilliant memoir of moving from Hungary to France and trying to learn a new and unrelated language. The Manhattan Project (translated by John Batki) is a slender but oversized thing of beauty, full of photos by Ornan Rotem, in which László Krasznahorkai meanders through the work and worlds of Melville, Lowry, and Lebbeus Woods. And In a Bucolic Land by Szilárd Borbély (translated by Ottilie Mulzet) is a brilliant and autobiographical posthumous collection of poems describing the author’s childhood as part of a despised family, being raised by parents who would later be violently murdered.
MEDIUMN-SIZED JAPANESE
The book I was looking forward to most in 2022 was Woman Running in the Mountainsby Yūko Tsushima (translated by Geraldine Harcourt), which takes the Tsushima constants (young single Japanese mother, awful mother, vanished father, deadbeat ex) and yet again spins them into gold. Her ability to get infinite artistic variety from the same initial ingredients remains amazing.
Mieko Kawakami continues her series of novels about Japanese misfits with All the Lovers in the Night (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd), which manages the rare feat of making the story of a withdrawn person with an uneventful life absolutely compelling.
[Audience: Sweet fancy Moses, shut up!]
(REACHING DESPERATELY) UM, BOOKS WITH PLANES ON THE COVER [Ed. – Oh come on!]
Gertrude Trevelyan is one of those nearly lost writers I had never read before, but on the basis of Two Thousand Million Man-Power I am now seeking out the rest of her work: this novel is told in an experimental/modernist-yet-highly-readable voice, swooping from the frenetic global to the low-key personal, sometimes multiple times a sentence, with vertiginous ease. And Elleston Trevor’s Squadron Airborne is a quietly impressive and downbeat novel about the RAF in WW2, a spiritual forerunner to the work of the still-alive but still-neglected Derek Robinson. No Churchillian Imperialistic bullshit to be found here.
The Doll Man – Jean Veber [1896]
WON’T FIT INTO ANY ARBITRARY CATEGORY WITH EACH OTHER [Ed. – At least that’s honest.]
Squarely in the Olivia Manning/Elizabeth Jane Howard sweet spot is the Good Daughters trilogy by Mary Hocking (Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes, Welcome Strangers), following three sisters from the 1930s to the years after WW2. They’re basically Platonic ideal books for people like me who reflexively buy the old green-spined Virago Modern Classics on sight.
The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault was delightful: a wonderful 1930s summery sexy atmosphere, beautifully written, and nobody was punished by the plot for being gay. (In fact, someone wrecked their life by not being gay enough.) [Ed. — *nodding sagely * seen it happen many a time.]
Keith Ridgway’s A Shock is brilliant and sui generis; a sporadically sinister set of linked stories in multiple styles—a worthy follow-up to his Hawthorn & Child, though shooting out in completely different directions.
Awake by Harald Voetmann (translated by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen) is fragmented, which I have seen some people complain about, saying it doesn’t add up to a story. I guess that’s true, but I really didn’t care. A novel about Pliny the Elder, his nephew, and his slave, it’s great on the sentence level, and so interesting. And deeply, deeply horrible.
Hagar Olsson’s Chitambo (translated by Sarah Death) deserves to be much better known: a modernist Finnish masterpiece about a young girl whose life is wrecked by a father who is at first her ally in an imaginative world, and who then loses interest in her as he moves on to other, madder utopian schemes.
[Audience: GET HIM OFF! GET HIM OFF!]
The Trouble with Happiness is a collection of short stories by Tove Ditlevsen (translated by Michael Favala Goldman), and is as good as you’d hope from the author of the Copenhagen Trilogy. The Devastation of Silence by João Reis (translated by Adrian Minckley) is an exemplary example of one of my favourite genres of novel—the mildly unhinged monologue from a monomaniacal narrator, in this case a Portuguese POW in a German camp in WW1. Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool is a really funny novella of subverted expectations. And Ed Yong’s An Immense World is a brilliantly and subtly written survey of the latest science in animal perception, including senses that humans cannot even begin to rival. OK, OK, I’m going, what is that thing, a crook, you do know they don’t actually use them to haul people off the stage anym–
[Ed. — Don’t tell James, but I could have read even more from him!]
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau 