As is the annual tradition, here is the final list of books I completed reading in 2016, in chronological order of completion. And as is the typical practice, I've provided links to posts I've written about those books. Annoyingly, continuing the recent downward trend, there were only four new posts this year. My plan-slash-hope had been to write something short about each book I read - inspired, so I thought, by our friend Clare, I was going to write 100 words about each book. Well, this didn't happen. There are many reasons, excuses, etc, but the fact is I just didn't write much. Some of them didn't inspire any ideas in me at all, but others did, and I simply did not take the time to explore them in writing. Other books I discussed with friends via email, and I didn't take the time to re-organize those thoughts into coherent essays.
In any case, following the list are comments and observations.
1. The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
2. My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante (Ann Goldstein, trans.)
3. White Girls, Hilton Als
4. Otros Valles, Jamie Berrout
5. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, David Graeber
6. Counternarratives, John Keene
7. The Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
8. Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine (re-read)
9. Citizen, Claudia Rankine (re-read)
10. My Struggle, Book Four, Karl Ove Knausgaard (Don Bartlett, trans.)
11. Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales), Rasheedah Phillips
12. Self-Portrait in Green, Marie NDiaye (Jordan Stump, trans.)
13. Faces in the Crowd, Valeria Luiselli (Christina MacSweeney, trans.)
14. The World Is Round, Gertrude Stein (Clement Hurd, illus.)
15. Sassafrass, Cypress, & Indigo, Ntozake Shange
16. Spurious, Lars Iyer (re-read)
17. Dogma, Lars Iyer (re-read)
18. Exodus, Lars Iyer (re-read)
19. Bluets, Maggie Nelson
20. Unto the Last and Other Writings, John Ruskin
21. The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt (re-read)
22. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
23. My Struggle, Book Five, Karl Ove Knausgaard (Don Bartlett, trans.)
24. Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett (re-read)
25. Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera (Lisa Dillman, trans.)
26. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.) (re-read)
27. Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair
28. Ladivine, Marie NDiaye (Jordan Stump, trans.)
29. What Is History?, E.H. Carr
30. No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame, Janet Lansbury
In the first eight years of this blog, I'd included in this space an increasingly detailed statistical breakdown of my year in books. I abandoned the practice last year and don't see any good reason to pick it up again this year. In the event, there's not much to breakdown. This year I read only 30 books, many fewer than in any year I can remember in my adult reading life (well, except for last year: it turns out the facts show I read only 33 last year). Again - a lot of reasons: declining commuting time and attention deficits produced by reduced sleep, children, television, and social media, chief among them.
Of the 30, eight were re-reads of very short books (one exception: The Last Samurai). Of the remaining 22, most were also very short, four were books of essays (one of which - David Graeber's - was half read last year, if memory serves), one was non-fiction proper, and one was a short book about parenting (which was pretty useful, actually). The rest was literature, in one form or another - a few were ostensibly poetry, or poetry/essays, such as Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, I suppose. A few were novels, or short stories, or literary memoir of sorts. Two were volumes of Knausgaard's My Struggle. One was Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren.
A quick re-cap of the re-reads: Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai remains a fantastic novel, just as good now as it was when I read it upon release 15 years ago. Still, I'd forgotten much about it. I'd recommended it happily to several people, some of whom read it and liked it, but when I re-read, I was struck by how little of the experience of it I had remembered, even while pushing it on people. Claudia Rankine's pair of books - Don't Let Me Be Lonely and the widely discussed Citizen - are very much worth reading and re-reading and writing about. I read them both just last year, and I would not be surprised to find myself re-reading them next year - if only because I want to write about them - which I do. Right now all I can think of to say, some months on, is that they are special books. You should read them.
I re-read Lars Iyer's Spurious trilogy because I was in the mood for something smart and funny and easy to read (no offense lol), and they do not disappoint. When I read them the first time, I remember thinking Exodus was a drop-off from the first two, but upon re-read I felt quite the opposite. (Devoted readers will of course recall that I previously wrote about the second book in the trilogy, Dogma.) Beckett's Malone Dies is an obvious classic. I'd re-read Molloy last year, and plan to re-read The Unnamable before too long, maybe this year, maybe not, plus I still have plenty of other Beckett to read for the first time. Anyway, god, Malone Dies is great. Just some amazing, marvelous pages, dammit. My decision to re-read Handke's memoir about his mother who had committed suicide, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, was prompted by noticing a passing reference by someone on Twitter. I think about half of this book is a fascinating meditation on what it means to write about a life, especially someone else's life.
So much for the re-reads. And as a digression, often I include a list of books I read substantial portions of without being able to finish, for whatever reason. I won't do a full accounting this time, just some notes: this year I attempted a few different Henry Green novels - his style would take me for a few pages, but then I'd hit a wall and lose interest in the moment. I read fully 200 pages in Clarice Lispector's massive complete stories collection that New Directions published last year. The stories are easier going than her novels - speaking of which, I read and re-read several times over the first 10-15 pages in her The Passion According to G.H. - I enjoyed reading these pages, but they are difficult and I just could not get moving on the book. I picked up on a whim (at the World Bank bookshop, god help me) a Dalkey-published book called I, The Supreme, by Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos, which purports to be the writings of, and documents about, a 19th century Paraguayan despot. I read about 100 pages of it and got bogged down and frankly annoyed by the despot's referential and hyper-playful language.
Of the books that were new-to-me that I did finish reading... I loved loved loved Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, and managed to write about it. Her Bluets was nice, but did not have quite the same impact. A re-read is in order - and I plan to read other Nelson books too. Carson's famous The Autobiography of Red had pages I loved and pages that baffled me. I'd need to re-visit it, as well, for its own sake, but especially if I wanted to say anything about it. David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules is by turns brilliant and, honestly, stupid, sometimes on the same page. Somehow the stupidity seems to make the brilliance possible. It's hard to figure. Rasheedah Phillips is part of the Metropolarity collective, and her Recurrence Plot collection was frequently invigorating, just the kind of science fiction I'm looking for and I think we need more of. Anything I might say about Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, & Indigo would likely be irrelevant or impertinent, but it's an interesting and unique novel, which is something. Signs Preceding the End of the World was getting a lot of hype, relatively speaking; I thought it was undeserving of it. With Faces in the Crowd, I've now read all three Valeria Luiselli books translated into English so far, and with all three there are pages I love, but I'm not sure they add up to much (again: re-reading may be in order). John Keene's Counternarratives, I felt, did deserve hype it has received, and I had some fleeting ideas for a post about it, yet nothing stuck. (Briefly: its stories each concern, in various different modes, slavery and its aftermath. They are never less than intriguing.)
I may still manage real posts about Dhalgren (nothing like what I expected, whatever that might have been; I'm
very glad to finally have read it. I enjoyed the experience - it warrants a stellar reputation, but it seems to me that the content of its actual reputation is a mismatch for the real book), NDiaye's strange new novel Ladivine, and the John Ruskin Unto the Last collection, as well as a possible re-evaluation of Knausgaard's My Struggle project in light of reading the fourth and fifth books in the series (the fifth book has revived my flagging interest in the project; I liked it a lot more than the third and fourth installments).
If I had to name favorite books of the year - not counting re-reads, which are all great; I'd recommend each of them without reservation - I think it'd have to include:
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
Recurrence Plot by Rasheedah Phillips
Ladivine by Marie NDiaye
Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair
And putting Whiteout at the bottom allows me the opportunity to specifically recommend that book, uncharacteristically the only proper non-fiction book I read this year. It was published in 1998, begins by showing that Gary Webb's reporting about the CIA and drugs was accurate and unfairly attacked and maligned by the big mainstream media outlets - the Washington Post in particular. It's not great prose, but it's packed with a lot of information. And it remains relevant to us today, both by, a, outlining the history of the CIA and US military working with not only drug dealers (honestly, the idea that massive amounts of drugs enter the United States without the US Government specifically allowing it strikes me as silly now), but with literal Nazis after World War II, and, b, the often direct complicity in covering up such activity, or not reporting on it, by newspapers such as The Washington Post, L.A. Times, New York Times, etc. One does wonder how we got in our current mess, doesn't one?
Showing posts with label Completed Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Completed Books. Show all posts
Saturday, December 31, 2016
Tuesday, January 05, 2016
Books Read - 2015
As is the annual tradition, here is the final list of books I completed reading in 2015, in chronological order of completion. As usual, links are to posts in which I've either written about the book or the author, or posted excerpts. This year merely continued the recent trend of fewer and fewer new posts—there were only 9 new entries this year, down from 13 last year (and 25 the year before). Granted, there was an excellent reason for that: our son Malcolm was born smack in the middle of the year. Only two posts date since his birth, and the first of those was already in the works beforehand.
In any case, following the list are comments and observations.
1. The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (John E. Woods, trans.)
2. Capitalism & Slavery, Eric Williams
3. Sidewalks, Valeria Luiselli (Christina MacSweeney, trans.)
4. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson
5. Wittgenstein Jr, Lars Iyer
6. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Manuel De Landa
7. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary
8. The Portable Malcolm X Reader, Manning Marable & Garrett Felber, eds. (also, also)
9. Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, Joe Wood, ed.
10. Lila, Marilynne Robinson
11. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, Stephanie M. H. Camp
12. Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine
13. Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan, Ian Bell
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (re-read)
15. Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine
16. Liberalism: A Counter-History, Domenico Losurdo (Gregory Elliott, trans.)
17. Extinction, Thomas Bernhard (David McLintock, trans.)
18. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, Gerald Horne
19. Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All, David Roediger
20. The Death of the Novel and Other Stories, Ronald Sukenick
21. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Edward E. Baptist
22. Molloy, Samuel Beckett (re-read)
23. The Greatest Threat: The Black Panther Party and COINTELPRO, Eddie Conway
24. Benito Cereno, Herman Melville
25. The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965, , Samuel R. Delaney
26. Patternmaster, Octavia Butler
27. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, Marilynne Robinson (re-read)
28. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
29. Bog-Trotter, Dory Previn
30. Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed
31. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, volume one, Marguerite Young
32. The Story of My Teeth, Valeria Luiselli (Christina MacSweeney, trans.)
33. Hotel Andromeda, Gabriel Josipovici (re-read)
In the past, I've included in this space an increasingly detailed statistical breakdown of my year in books. This year, I find I just can't be bothered. I found those breakdowns alternately amusing, useful, and tedious—and this year, the prospect of assembling the data just filled me with dread, so fuck it.
That said, it remains important for me to keep in mind who writes the books I'm reading, and why. So the lack of stats this year should in no way be interpreted as my no longer caring about (some of) such statistical matters. Besides, not only were there fewer posts than ever, I read fewer books than at any time since I began reading in earnest (just over twenty years ago). This was also in part because the arrival of our son, an ankle injury I sustained three weeks after his birth, and an extended period of atypically extreme busy-ness at work all combined to mean I worked from home more often than not in the second half of 2015. That is to say, I no longer had my regular commute, also known as regular dedicated reading-time.
But still! I read some excellent books!
As the year began, I was wrapping up The Magic Mountain, and honestly it doesn't really fit here, the reading experience belongs more with 2014, but rules are rules. From there I moved right into Eric Williams classic study, the excellent Capitalism & Slavery, continuing my recent focus on American slavery and its aftermath. (Interestingly, it was only a little before reading his book that I learned that Williams had been a person of color. Which only goes to show you how difficult it can be to keep track of such matters.) Three more books explicitly about slavery were to come, ranging from a focus on day-to-day resistance (Stephanie Camp's Closer to Freedom), to a detailed history of what slavery was like and how it helped build American power and capital (Edward Baptist's deservedly widely read The Half Has Never Been Told), to a fascinating if knotty study about what the founders of the United States had really been concerned with in doing so (namely, preserving slavery) (Gerald Horne's The Counter-revolution of 1776; I'd begun reading this in 2014). I also read Seizing Freedom, David Roediger's provocative account, following on from Du Bois's insistence in Black Reconstruction that the enslaved freed themselves, of former slaves' ideas of jubilee in the wake of emancipation, what it meant for them, its influence on other movements (e.g., feminism) (which movements tended to abandon its wider implications), and how it was ultimately betrayed. In addition, Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History, while not explicitly about slavery, by tracing what liberal ideas actually entailed ends up being very much about slavery indeed.
I also continued my reading in more modern and/or recent African American history and black political writing - which, of course, is also part of 'slavery's aftermath', broadly speaking. This included George Jackson's prison letters, which, while frequently fascinating, were in total disappointing. I wish I owned copies of Assata and Angela Davis' autobiography and read the library copy of Jackson's, rather than the other way around, but so it goes. (Though I certainly will be buying those two, to have more readily to hand.) Manning Marable's Malcolm X Reader and an essay collection about Malcolm X, edited by the late Joe Wood, from 20 years ago, were read in the wake of remembrances of his assassination. They are both worthy volumes. I'd half-expected to soon read Marable's biography, but it didn't come to pass, not yet. Eddie Conway's short volume about COINTELPRO and the Black Panther Party - published while he was still in prison - is a pretty good intro to the topics (we'd had the book for a while, but I only got to it this year, somehow; Conway is now out of prison, and semi-regularly attends our Quaker Meeting here in Baltimore). And then later in the year, I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' much-discussed, Between the World and Me. I realize lots of liberal white guy reviewers said it was really good and really important. So forgive me for thinking it excellent.
I read just three 'new' novels this year: Lars Iyer's Wittgenstein Jr (which maybe I didn't like as much as the Spurious threesome, but it's still plenty good enough), Marilynne Robinson's Lila (third book in the sort of trilogy that began with Gilead; I liked it very much, probably more than I did Home, the second book), and Valeria Luiselli's odd and entertaining, The Story of My Teeth.
The rest of the year's fiction reading, not counting three re-reads (Molloy - still great; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - still, uh, meh; and Hotel Andromeda - even better this time round!), and the library copy of Butler's Patternmaster (which I liked well enough, but was not overly thrilled by; this was the only science fiction of the year), was confined to the exciting category of Books I've Had On My Shelves For Years. This was partly because of available finances, and partly because - I mean, I've had these books for years, right? presumably some of them are worth reading? Actually, scanning the list, this didn't amount to too many different books. But, in this vein, I did finally read Bernhard's marvelous final novel, Extinction (leaving me with just one major prose work left, I think - The Lime Works? I'll have to check his bibliography), Ishmael Reed's fascinating and bizarre and confounding Mumbo Jumbo, and Melville's strange Benito Cereno (which dovetailed with the slavery theme). What started this practice off was finding Ronald Sukenik's overtly experimental story collection, The Death of the Novel, in a box in my basement. Totally meant to blog about it too. In any case, as often happens with such collections, it's interesting, entertaining, at times boring. Some of its incidental political content stuck out for me, as, if nothing else, just as suggestive of the creeping literary conservatism of the last 40+ years as the experimental nature of the stories themselves might.
In this last category, but really of necessity standing by itself, is volume one of Marguerite Young's huge novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, the reading of which fairly dominated the second half of my year. It really is an amazing surfeit of words - a strange, frequently beautiful, often exasperating 600+ (so far) pages. I hope to have something more substantive to say about it in a separate post later on, but suffice it to say... haha, as if Young herself would ever have used the expression "suffice it to say".... never mind, then, for now.
That leaves miscellaneous not-fiction - essays (Luiselli's nice little Sidewalks - I mean no condescension at all, and a re-read of Robinson's Absence of Mind - I'd meant a post or two dealing with it and her and possibly some Josipovici compare/contrast, but though something like that may still come, I have to admit her much-shared NYRB conversation with Obama kind of left a bad taste in my mouth, so we'll see) and theory/philosophy (Crary's 24/7 and De Landa's Thousand Years of Nonlinear History - both fantastic books, honestly; the former author of no relation to myself, which makes the fact that he wrote a book I could absolutely see myself writing, were I the kind of person who wrote theory, or books, or ever, rather interesting indeed) (and it's been way too many months since I read the De Landa, but I frankly loved reading that book - it's such a wide-ranging, almost freewheeling, recontexualization of just tons of all kinds of familiar and unfamiliar historical material) and memoir (Delany's and Dory Previn's - both intriguing and excellent reading experiences, in entirely different ways) and biography (the late Ian Bell's completion of his two-volume bio of Dylan, not as good as the first but not bad), and Claudia Rankine's two superb books of... what? essay-poems? prose-poems? I don't know. Citizen is the big one from this year, and it's deserves to be read, but if anything, I think I liked the earlier Don't Let Me Be Lonely even more.
And there it is. Thank you for reading.
In any case, following the list are comments and observations.
1. The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (John E. Woods, trans.)
2. Capitalism & Slavery, Eric Williams
3. Sidewalks, Valeria Luiselli (Christina MacSweeney, trans.)
4. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson
5. Wittgenstein Jr, Lars Iyer
6. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Manuel De Landa
7. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary
8. The Portable Malcolm X Reader, Manning Marable & Garrett Felber, eds. (also, also)
9. Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, Joe Wood, ed.
10. Lila, Marilynne Robinson
11. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, Stephanie M. H. Camp
12. Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine
13. Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan, Ian Bell
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (re-read)
15. Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine
16. Liberalism: A Counter-History, Domenico Losurdo (Gregory Elliott, trans.)
17. Extinction, Thomas Bernhard (David McLintock, trans.)
18. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, Gerald Horne
19. Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All, David Roediger
20. The Death of the Novel and Other Stories, Ronald Sukenick
21. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Edward E. Baptist
22. Molloy, Samuel Beckett (re-read)
23. The Greatest Threat: The Black Panther Party and COINTELPRO, Eddie Conway
24. Benito Cereno, Herman Melville
25. The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965, , Samuel R. Delaney
26. Patternmaster, Octavia Butler
27. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, Marilynne Robinson (re-read)
28. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
29. Bog-Trotter, Dory Previn
30. Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed
31. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, volume one, Marguerite Young
32. The Story of My Teeth, Valeria Luiselli (Christina MacSweeney, trans.)
33. Hotel Andromeda, Gabriel Josipovici (re-read)
In the past, I've included in this space an increasingly detailed statistical breakdown of my year in books. This year, I find I just can't be bothered. I found those breakdowns alternately amusing, useful, and tedious—and this year, the prospect of assembling the data just filled me with dread, so fuck it.
That said, it remains important for me to keep in mind who writes the books I'm reading, and why. So the lack of stats this year should in no way be interpreted as my no longer caring about (some of) such statistical matters. Besides, not only were there fewer posts than ever, I read fewer books than at any time since I began reading in earnest (just over twenty years ago). This was also in part because the arrival of our son, an ankle injury I sustained three weeks after his birth, and an extended period of atypically extreme busy-ness at work all combined to mean I worked from home more often than not in the second half of 2015. That is to say, I no longer had my regular commute, also known as regular dedicated reading-time.
But still! I read some excellent books!
As the year began, I was wrapping up The Magic Mountain, and honestly it doesn't really fit here, the reading experience belongs more with 2014, but rules are rules. From there I moved right into Eric Williams classic study, the excellent Capitalism & Slavery, continuing my recent focus on American slavery and its aftermath. (Interestingly, it was only a little before reading his book that I learned that Williams had been a person of color. Which only goes to show you how difficult it can be to keep track of such matters.) Three more books explicitly about slavery were to come, ranging from a focus on day-to-day resistance (Stephanie Camp's Closer to Freedom), to a detailed history of what slavery was like and how it helped build American power and capital (Edward Baptist's deservedly widely read The Half Has Never Been Told), to a fascinating if knotty study about what the founders of the United States had really been concerned with in doing so (namely, preserving slavery) (Gerald Horne's The Counter-revolution of 1776; I'd begun reading this in 2014). I also read Seizing Freedom, David Roediger's provocative account, following on from Du Bois's insistence in Black Reconstruction that the enslaved freed themselves, of former slaves' ideas of jubilee in the wake of emancipation, what it meant for them, its influence on other movements (e.g., feminism) (which movements tended to abandon its wider implications), and how it was ultimately betrayed. In addition, Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History, while not explicitly about slavery, by tracing what liberal ideas actually entailed ends up being very much about slavery indeed.
I also continued my reading in more modern and/or recent African American history and black political writing - which, of course, is also part of 'slavery's aftermath', broadly speaking. This included George Jackson's prison letters, which, while frequently fascinating, were in total disappointing. I wish I owned copies of Assata and Angela Davis' autobiography and read the library copy of Jackson's, rather than the other way around, but so it goes. (Though I certainly will be buying those two, to have more readily to hand.) Manning Marable's Malcolm X Reader and an essay collection about Malcolm X, edited by the late Joe Wood, from 20 years ago, were read in the wake of remembrances of his assassination. They are both worthy volumes. I'd half-expected to soon read Marable's biography, but it didn't come to pass, not yet. Eddie Conway's short volume about COINTELPRO and the Black Panther Party - published while he was still in prison - is a pretty good intro to the topics (we'd had the book for a while, but I only got to it this year, somehow; Conway is now out of prison, and semi-regularly attends our Quaker Meeting here in Baltimore). And then later in the year, I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' much-discussed, Between the World and Me. I realize lots of liberal white guy reviewers said it was really good and really important. So forgive me for thinking it excellent.
I read just three 'new' novels this year: Lars Iyer's Wittgenstein Jr (which maybe I didn't like as much as the Spurious threesome, but it's still plenty good enough), Marilynne Robinson's Lila (third book in the sort of trilogy that began with Gilead; I liked it very much, probably more than I did Home, the second book), and Valeria Luiselli's odd and entertaining, The Story of My Teeth.
The rest of the year's fiction reading, not counting three re-reads (Molloy - still great; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - still, uh, meh; and Hotel Andromeda - even better this time round!), and the library copy of Butler's Patternmaster (which I liked well enough, but was not overly thrilled by; this was the only science fiction of the year), was confined to the exciting category of Books I've Had On My Shelves For Years. This was partly because of available finances, and partly because - I mean, I've had these books for years, right? presumably some of them are worth reading? Actually, scanning the list, this didn't amount to too many different books. But, in this vein, I did finally read Bernhard's marvelous final novel, Extinction (leaving me with just one major prose work left, I think - The Lime Works? I'll have to check his bibliography), Ishmael Reed's fascinating and bizarre and confounding Mumbo Jumbo, and Melville's strange Benito Cereno (which dovetailed with the slavery theme). What started this practice off was finding Ronald Sukenik's overtly experimental story collection, The Death of the Novel, in a box in my basement. Totally meant to blog about it too. In any case, as often happens with such collections, it's interesting, entertaining, at times boring. Some of its incidental political content stuck out for me, as, if nothing else, just as suggestive of the creeping literary conservatism of the last 40+ years as the experimental nature of the stories themselves might.
In this last category, but really of necessity standing by itself, is volume one of Marguerite Young's huge novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, the reading of which fairly dominated the second half of my year. It really is an amazing surfeit of words - a strange, frequently beautiful, often exasperating 600+ (so far) pages. I hope to have something more substantive to say about it in a separate post later on, but suffice it to say... haha, as if Young herself would ever have used the expression "suffice it to say".... never mind, then, for now.
That leaves miscellaneous not-fiction - essays (Luiselli's nice little Sidewalks - I mean no condescension at all, and a re-read of Robinson's Absence of Mind - I'd meant a post or two dealing with it and her and possibly some Josipovici compare/contrast, but though something like that may still come, I have to admit her much-shared NYRB conversation with Obama kind of left a bad taste in my mouth, so we'll see) and theory/philosophy (Crary's 24/7 and De Landa's Thousand Years of Nonlinear History - both fantastic books, honestly; the former author of no relation to myself, which makes the fact that he wrote a book I could absolutely see myself writing, were I the kind of person who wrote theory, or books, or ever, rather interesting indeed) (and it's been way too many months since I read the De Landa, but I frankly loved reading that book - it's such a wide-ranging, almost freewheeling, recontexualization of just tons of all kinds of familiar and unfamiliar historical material) and memoir (Delany's and Dory Previn's - both intriguing and excellent reading experiences, in entirely different ways) and biography (the late Ian Bell's completion of his two-volume bio of Dylan, not as good as the first but not bad), and Claudia Rankine's two superb books of... what? essay-poems? prose-poems? I don't know. Citizen is the big one from this year, and it's deserves to be read, but if anything, I think I liked the earlier Don't Let Me Be Lonely even more.
And there it is. Thank you for reading.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Books Read - 2014
As is the annual tradition, here is the final list of books I completed reading in 2014, in chronological order of completion. As usual, links are to posts in which I've either written about the book or the author, or posted excerpts—though this year there were very few of either. The whole year featured just 13 posts overall prior to this one (down from only 25 from last year), several of which are only excerpts, or don't reference current reading at all. So it was an exceedingly slow year blogging-wise.
Following the list are comments and observations, plus the always all-important statistical breakdown.
1. The Meaning of Freedom, Angelia Y. Davis
2. Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, & Komozi Woodard, eds.
3. Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, Clinton Heylin
4. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, Catherine Clinton
5. Either/Or, Part I, Søren Kierkegaard (Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong, trans.)
6. Glass, Irony & God, Anne Carson
7. The Black Woman: An Anthology, Toni Cade Bambara, ed.
8. Men In The Off Hours, Anne Carson
9. Plainwater, Anne Carson
10. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs
11. The Beauty of the Husband, Anne Carson
12. The Silent Crossing, Pascal Quignard (Chris Turner, trans.)
13. Highway 61 Revisited, Mark Polizzotti
14. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, W.E.B. Du Bois
15. The Hamlet, William Faulkner
16. The Wave, Evelyn Scott
17. On Strike Against God, Joanna Russ
18. Once Upon A Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan, Ian Bell
19. Gargantua & Pantagruel, Rabelais (J.M. Cohen, trans.)
20. The Childhood of Jesus, J.M. Coetzee
21. Odd Number, Gilbert Sorrentino
22. Blues People, LeRoi Jones
23. The Angela Y. Davis Reader, Joy James, ed.
24. The Einstein Intersection, Samuel R. Delany
25. My Struggle, Book Three, Karl Ove Knausgaard (Don Bartlett, trans.)
26. Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet (Barbara Bray, trans.)
27. "Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, David M. Oshinsky
28. Generosity, Richard Powers
29. Black Feminist Thought (Updated 2nd Edition), Patricia Hill Collins
30. Strangers in the Universe, Clifford D. Simak
31. Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer
32. Authority, Jeff VanderMeer
33. Hotel Andromeda, Gabriel Josipovici
34. Understanding Waldorf Education, Jack Petrash
35. Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Greil Marcus
36. Wars I Have Seen, Gertrude Stein
37. Report From Part One, Gwendolyn Brooks
38. Civil Wars, June Jordan
39. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
40. Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Percival Everett
41. American Desert, Percival Everett
42. Acceptance, Jeff VanderMeer
43. Trouble on Triton, Samuel R. Delany
44. Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union, June Jordan
45. Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
46. Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks (re-read)
47. Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, June Jordan
48. Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston
49. Erasure, Percival Everett
50. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956
(George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, eds.)
51. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
52. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (re-read)
53. Home, Marilynne Robinson (re-read)
54. What Ever Happened To Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici (re-read)
55. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
56. The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller (Ruth Ward, trans.)
Some statistics
Number of which substantial portions were read last year: 3
Number that are re-reads: 4
Number of books that were borrowed from the library: 22
Number of books that were borrowed from friends: 7
Number of books read on the Kindle: 1 (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl)
Number of books written by men: 31
Number of different men represented: 24
Number of books written by women: 25
Number of different women represented: 16 (Note: two books, Want to Start a Revolution? & The Black Woman, are multi-author collections; the former is primarily woman writers, the latter entirely woman writers)
Number of books by American authors: 40
Number of American authors: 25
Number of books by black American authors: 22
Number of black American authors: 13
Number of black American women: 8 (13 books)
Number of black American men: 5 (9 books)
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 9
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 4
Number of non-American, English-language authors of color: 0
Number of books in translation: 7 (including Beckett's Letters)
Number of authors of books in translation: 7
Number of translated books by woman authors: 1 (Miller)
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 4 (German, French, Norwegian, Danish)
Most represented foreign language: French (4: Rabelais, Quignard, Genet, Beckett)
Number of Nobel Prize-winners:3 (Beckett, Coetzee, Faulkner)
Number of books which were acquired via the Big Dalkey Get: 1 (Sorrentino's Odd Number is contained in Pack of Lies)
Number of other Dalkey books: 0
Number of novels: 22
Number of collections of short stories: 1 (Simak)
Number of books of poetry: 4 (to the extent that Carson's books can so easily be thus categorized)
Number that are plays or written for stage: 0
Number that could be categorized as science fiction: 7
Number of science fiction books written by women: 1
Number that are biographies or letters or memoirs: 10
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 1
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 6
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 18
Number about pop music: 4
Number about Bob Dylan: 4
Number about science: 0
Number explicitly feminist or about feminism: 3
Number about parenting or education: 2
Number that are anthropology: 0
Number of books from before 1800: 1 (Rabelais!)
Number of books from 1800 to 1899: 2 (Jacobs, Kierkegaard)
Number of books from 1900 to 1914: 0
Number of books from 1915 to 1940: 4 (Scott, DuBois, Hurston's Their Eyes, Faulkner)
Number of books from 1941 to 1950: 2 (Hurston's Dirt Tracks, Stein)
Number of books from 1951 to 1960: 3
Number of books from 1961 to 1970: 5
Number of books from 1971 to 1980: 4
Number of books from 1981 to 1990: 4
Number of books from 1991 to 1999: 5
Number of books from 2000 to 2010: 16
Number of books from 2011 to 2014: 10
Comments & Observations:
I began this year in media res with two books, Angela Davis' The Meaning of Freedom and the multi-author essay collection, Want to Start a Revolution? The latter I managed to write about, at least a little bit, but I was remiss in not writing about the former, as I was in not writing about so much of my reading this year. Davis' book, which as a collection of speeches and other talks might seem minor when compared to her Autobiography or Women, Race, and Class, is in fact very much worth reading. Some of the questions she raises in her talks, some of the links made, as for example between prisons and slavery, led to my decision to make (American) slavery and its aftermath and legacy (some admittedly very broad ideas that I mean very broadly) a special focus in my reading going forward. In this, history, memoir, slave narrative, biography, and so on, served (and will serve) as my intentional reading choices.
I'd long felt I wanted to, but several of Davis' remarks led me to actually take the time to read DuBois' long but simply essential history, Black Reconstruction. I had so much I thought I'd wanted to say about that book, but never could bring myself to begin a real essay. Suffice it to say here that the current American political situation makes a lot more depressing sense after reading Black Reconstruction than it did before. Alongside this, I was also reading the Davis Reader, which has many excellent essays. Fascinated by what she said in one of them about the convict lease system (and the failure of Frederick Douglass and, to a lesser extent DuBois, to say anything about this post-Reconstruction atrocity), I read David Oshinsky's "Worse Than Slavery". This is a pretty good book, but the title is misleading and I have to think intentionally provocative. The title references what someone said about the convict lease system, but the book itself is not primarily about the convict lease system, rather the convict lease system is one element on the way to what is really the main topic, the Parchman Farm prison labor system (still important and very bad, but no one seemed to confuse it with slavery). Also, the book focuses a little too much on 'colorful characters', and as such gives off a whiff of 'narrative non-fiction', a book written by someone who flits from topic to topic, writing well-written books. Whereas something like the convict lease system, and prison labor in general, I think, would benefit greatly from both the urgency and theoretical base someone like Davis would bring to it.
Beyond Du Bois' history, I read Catherine Clinton's useful biography of Harriet Tubman and, finally, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. The death of Amiri Baraka, embarrassingly, led me to finally read the excellent Blues People (published when he was known as LeRoi Jones, and which I've owned a copy of for probably 20 years without reading), which also dovetailed nicely with one of the Davis Reader essays. This made me want to read more Jones/Baraka, which led me to look for the Reader I thought I had, but I fear that this was one of the books I discarded in my big purge. One of the few regrets on that front, but a regret it is. A reference by Davis to Jean Genet's comments about the Black Panthers in his Prisoner of Love had me digging that book out, not least because I had no memory of the Black Panthers having been in it when I'd read the first half of Prisoner of Love about ten years ago. I'd thought the memoir excellent at that time, yet still never returned to its second half. What I did this time was look up all references to the Black Panthers, read those, then read the rest of the book from where I'd left off. [Relevant update: I should definitely say here that the book is a primarily a memoir of Genet's time spent with Palestinian rebels in the early 1970s.]
Patricia Hill Collins' Black Feminist Thought was unfortunately a bit of a slog for me, which is too bad because I think it's an important book. After that, I read multiple books each by Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, and Zora Neale Hurston. Highlights in this group were Brooks' intriguing sort of memoir Report From Part One, Jordan's fantastic essay collection Civil Wars, and Hurston's classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (it deserves its reputation) and fascinating autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. And I finally had some success with James Baldwin's essays, reading both Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time. About half of Notes, especially, is composed of utterly crucial essays that really every American should read.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is the first fiction I've mentioned in these notes, perhaps surprisingly. In fact, it took four months before I read any fiction at all this year, so it's fitting. While in the midst of Black Reconstruction, I was packing books for a move, and came across Faulkner's The Hamlet, the only Faulkner book I own that I had not yet read. I set it aside to read once I'd finished the Du Bois. Same was true of Evelyn Scott's The Wave. Interestingly, The Hamlet concerns poor whites in Reconstruction Mississippi (or probably just post-Reconstruction), and The Wave is Scott's big 'modernist' (so the back copy says) Civil War novel - and it's in many ways quite brilliant. Reading at that time two novels by Southern white writers about the Civil War period and its aftermath is not how I would have designed it, honestly; this was one of those accidents of history, as it were: I had them on hand, so they moved to the top of the pile.
Prior to said move in April, I'd noticed our then-housemate's copy of Anne Carson's Glass, Irony & God and quickly read it. I loved it. This led to a brief Carson focus, in which I read four of her poetry-cum-essay collections. I'd've read more, probably, but ran through my friend's copies, moved, then got re-focused on other things. I expect to return to Carson at some point, perhaps soon. That was about the only 'poetry' I read in 2014, though as usual, I did sample stray pages from the likes of Wallace Stevens, Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot, etc. This doesn't really belong here, but here it goes: I read another Gertrude Stein book, her strange and wonderful World War II memoir, Wars I Have Seen. Ditto Pascal Quignard's again more or less uncategorizable book The Silent Crossing - uncategorizable except that it's much like his other book, The Roving Shadows, which readers will recall that I read last year. After fully embracing the latter when I read it, I had many reservations about The Silent Crossing. I'd hoped to pull them together for a blog post, and may still. But in brief, I had several problems with the general theme this time round.
Brief interlude to include a list of books I read substantial portions of - or at least began in earnest - without yet completing by the year's end:
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, Gerald Horne
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America, Saidiya Hartman
Not In My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City, Antero Pietila
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (this one just missed the cutoff, alas, and will in short-order be the first book completed for 2015)
Books I'd read substantial portions of in 2013 and had fully expected to return to in 2014 but in fact never did:
Feminisms, Warhol and Price Herndl, editors
Direct Action: An Ethnography, David Graeber
Praeterita, John Ruskin
Selected Prose, 1909-1965, Ezra Pound
Back to fiction, I again read a clutch of science fiction novels, including Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which I liked, two more knotty books from Samuel R. Delany, and Jeff VanderMeer's much ballyhooed 2014 Southern Reach trilogy (Ethan more or less captured how I felt about the latter, despite being generally entertained). Off science fiction, I returned to old friend Gilbert Sorrentino, for his novel Odd Number, the first of what is now the Pack of Lies pseudo-trilogy. I tried to dive right into the second novel, Rose Theatre, but found it more or less unreadable at the time. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus was a strange experience, seeming weirdly inconsequential when placed aside his recent books. A trip to the library for another purpose had me picking up Richard Powers' Generosity. Powers was once my favorite novelist, which seems odd saying now. I used to snap his novels up immediately upon publication, but I'd passed on this one (as well as his new one, Orfeo, as yet). It was an enjoyable read. I'd had some interesting thoughts about it at the time, which have all more or less dissipated. At a separate library visit, my eye caught a recent novel by Percival Everett, a writer I'd long been curious about, but for some reason been somewhat skeptical of. I ended up reading three of his novels, beginning with the one that caught my eye. This one, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, I thought was excellent, so I immediately and eagerly dove into American Desert from 2004, which was quite the opposite. Though it's not without its entertaining moments, I frankly disliked it; it seemed utterly pointless, and the prose perfunctory. It was then with less enthusiasm that I later tried the novel he's best known for, Erasure, but thankfully this one is much better. Moving along, readers will remember my re-reads of Marilynne Robinson's excellent novels Gilead and Home, both of which I managed to blog about.
I shouldn't forget that I finished Gargantua & Pantagruel and read Part I of Either/Or. Thoughts perhaps worthy of sharing on each remain as yet languishing in sketchy draft form. And since Rabelais and Kierkegaard are both at least in part associated in my mind with this blog's patron saint, Gabriel Josipovici, now seems a good place to mention that I read his latest novel Hotel Andromeda, which was up to his usual high standards, and re-read his wonderful What Ever Happened to Modernism? And there was volume III of Knausgaard's My Struggle, known elsewhere as "Boyhood Island". As with the first two volumes, I fairly consumed it, reading it very quickly, and found much to appreciate, but the urgency of the first volume seems to be gone.
Finally, I read four books about the music and/or life of Bob Dylan. First came Clinton Heylin's very informative, and for that useful and interesting, but often obnoxious and overall ploddingly written biography, Behind the Shades Revisited. Mark Polizzotti's enjoyable entry in the 33 1/3 series, about the great album Highway 61 Revisited, is much better. As was the first part of Ian Bell's two-part biography, Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan. Bell can be repetitive, but his approach is much more exploratory and curious than Heylin's, and his ideas more interesting, which makes for a more enjoyable reading experience no less than does his superior prose. All of this, and my ongoing full-blown Dylan obsession, led me to read a book I'd honestly mocked the existence of when it was first published, Greil Marcus' Like a Rolling Stone, which in the event I found to be very much a typical good Greil Marcus book, which is to say generally enjoyable, and by turns fascinating and ridiculous.
[Update: I realized, after posting this earlier, that I didn't really characterize my reading year, nor name specific favorites. I don't need to do either, of course, but I felt I wanted to. If I had to name, say, five favorite books of the year (not including re-reads), I think I'd go with Black Reconstruction; Glass, Irony & God; Civil Wars; The Meaning of Freedom; and about half of Notes of a Native Son (that is, the good stuff in it is so good as to completely outweigh the not as good stuff). Overall it was a bit of a strange year. Looking back, it feels very choppy. I felt primarily focused on black writers and black history and experience, yet the stats don't bear that out. Or at least not in any straightforward way. Throughout the year, there were many marvelous pages in books that were frequently slogs. Not to mention that I was often wading through books in tired circumstances. This is not new either. Or books I found fascinating, or wholly engaging, but that I would have a hard time claiming as personal favorites. I don't know. This paragraph is pointless.]
And with that, I'll close here. Thanks for sticking with me, and thanks for reading. See you next year.
Following the list are comments and observations, plus the always all-important statistical breakdown.
1. The Meaning of Freedom, Angelia Y. Davis
2. Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, & Komozi Woodard, eds.
3. Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, Clinton Heylin
4. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, Catherine Clinton
5. Either/Or, Part I, Søren Kierkegaard (Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong, trans.)
6. Glass, Irony & God, Anne Carson
7. The Black Woman: An Anthology, Toni Cade Bambara, ed.
8. Men In The Off Hours, Anne Carson
9. Plainwater, Anne Carson
10. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs
11. The Beauty of the Husband, Anne Carson
12. The Silent Crossing, Pascal Quignard (Chris Turner, trans.)
13. Highway 61 Revisited, Mark Polizzotti
14. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, W.E.B. Du Bois
15. The Hamlet, William Faulkner
16. The Wave, Evelyn Scott
17. On Strike Against God, Joanna Russ
18. Once Upon A Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan, Ian Bell
19. Gargantua & Pantagruel, Rabelais (J.M. Cohen, trans.)
20. The Childhood of Jesus, J.M. Coetzee
21. Odd Number, Gilbert Sorrentino
22. Blues People, LeRoi Jones
23. The Angela Y. Davis Reader, Joy James, ed.
24. The Einstein Intersection, Samuel R. Delany
25. My Struggle, Book Three, Karl Ove Knausgaard (Don Bartlett, trans.)
26. Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet (Barbara Bray, trans.)
27. "Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, David M. Oshinsky
28. Generosity, Richard Powers
29. Black Feminist Thought (Updated 2nd Edition), Patricia Hill Collins
30. Strangers in the Universe, Clifford D. Simak
31. Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer
32. Authority, Jeff VanderMeer
33. Hotel Andromeda, Gabriel Josipovici
34. Understanding Waldorf Education, Jack Petrash
35. Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Greil Marcus
36. Wars I Have Seen, Gertrude Stein
37. Report From Part One, Gwendolyn Brooks
38. Civil Wars, June Jordan
39. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
40. Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Percival Everett
41. American Desert, Percival Everett
42. Acceptance, Jeff VanderMeer
43. Trouble on Triton, Samuel R. Delany
44. Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union, June Jordan
45. Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
46. Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks (re-read)
47. Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, June Jordan
48. Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston
49. Erasure, Percival Everett
50. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956
(George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, eds.)
51. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
52. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (re-read)
53. Home, Marilynne Robinson (re-read)
54. What Ever Happened To Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici (re-read)
55. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
56. The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller (Ruth Ward, trans.)
Some statistics
Number of which substantial portions were read last year: 3
Number that are re-reads: 4
Number of books that were borrowed from the library: 22
Number of books that were borrowed from friends: 7
Number of books read on the Kindle: 1 (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl)
Number of books written by men: 31
Number of different men represented: 24
Number of books written by women: 25
Number of different women represented: 16 (Note: two books, Want to Start a Revolution? & The Black Woman, are multi-author collections; the former is primarily woman writers, the latter entirely woman writers)
Number of books by American authors: 40
Number of American authors: 25
Number of books by black American authors: 22
Number of black American authors: 13
Number of black American women: 8 (13 books)
Number of black American men: 5 (9 books)
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 9
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 4
Number of non-American, English-language authors of color: 0
Number of books in translation: 7 (including Beckett's Letters)
Number of authors of books in translation: 7
Number of translated books by woman authors: 1 (Miller)
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 4 (German, French, Norwegian, Danish)
Most represented foreign language: French (4: Rabelais, Quignard, Genet, Beckett)
Number of Nobel Prize-winners:3 (Beckett, Coetzee, Faulkner)
Number of books which were acquired via the Big Dalkey Get: 1 (Sorrentino's Odd Number is contained in Pack of Lies)
Number of other Dalkey books: 0
Number of novels: 22
Number of collections of short stories: 1 (Simak)
Number of books of poetry: 4 (to the extent that Carson's books can so easily be thus categorized)
Number that are plays or written for stage: 0
Number that could be categorized as science fiction: 7
Number of science fiction books written by women: 1
Number that are biographies or letters or memoirs: 10
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 1
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 6
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 18
Number about pop music: 4
Number about Bob Dylan: 4
Number about science: 0
Number explicitly feminist or about feminism: 3
Number about parenting or education: 2
Number that are anthropology: 0
Number of books from before 1800: 1 (Rabelais!)
Number of books from 1800 to 1899: 2 (Jacobs, Kierkegaard)
Number of books from 1900 to 1914: 0
Number of books from 1915 to 1940: 4 (Scott, DuBois, Hurston's Their Eyes, Faulkner)
Number of books from 1941 to 1950: 2 (Hurston's Dirt Tracks, Stein)
Number of books from 1951 to 1960: 3
Number of books from 1961 to 1970: 5
Number of books from 1971 to 1980: 4
Number of books from 1981 to 1990: 4
Number of books from 1991 to 1999: 5
Number of books from 2000 to 2010: 16
Number of books from 2011 to 2014: 10
Comments & Observations:
I began this year in media res with two books, Angela Davis' The Meaning of Freedom and the multi-author essay collection, Want to Start a Revolution? The latter I managed to write about, at least a little bit, but I was remiss in not writing about the former, as I was in not writing about so much of my reading this year. Davis' book, which as a collection of speeches and other talks might seem minor when compared to her Autobiography or Women, Race, and Class, is in fact very much worth reading. Some of the questions she raises in her talks, some of the links made, as for example between prisons and slavery, led to my decision to make (American) slavery and its aftermath and legacy (some admittedly very broad ideas that I mean very broadly) a special focus in my reading going forward. In this, history, memoir, slave narrative, biography, and so on, served (and will serve) as my intentional reading choices.
I'd long felt I wanted to, but several of Davis' remarks led me to actually take the time to read DuBois' long but simply essential history, Black Reconstruction. I had so much I thought I'd wanted to say about that book, but never could bring myself to begin a real essay. Suffice it to say here that the current American political situation makes a lot more depressing sense after reading Black Reconstruction than it did before. Alongside this, I was also reading the Davis Reader, which has many excellent essays. Fascinated by what she said in one of them about the convict lease system (and the failure of Frederick Douglass and, to a lesser extent DuBois, to say anything about this post-Reconstruction atrocity), I read David Oshinsky's "Worse Than Slavery". This is a pretty good book, but the title is misleading and I have to think intentionally provocative. The title references what someone said about the convict lease system, but the book itself is not primarily about the convict lease system, rather the convict lease system is one element on the way to what is really the main topic, the Parchman Farm prison labor system (still important and very bad, but no one seemed to confuse it with slavery). Also, the book focuses a little too much on 'colorful characters', and as such gives off a whiff of 'narrative non-fiction', a book written by someone who flits from topic to topic, writing well-written books. Whereas something like the convict lease system, and prison labor in general, I think, would benefit greatly from both the urgency and theoretical base someone like Davis would bring to it.
Beyond Du Bois' history, I read Catherine Clinton's useful biography of Harriet Tubman and, finally, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. The death of Amiri Baraka, embarrassingly, led me to finally read the excellent Blues People (published when he was known as LeRoi Jones, and which I've owned a copy of for probably 20 years without reading), which also dovetailed nicely with one of the Davis Reader essays. This made me want to read more Jones/Baraka, which led me to look for the Reader I thought I had, but I fear that this was one of the books I discarded in my big purge. One of the few regrets on that front, but a regret it is. A reference by Davis to Jean Genet's comments about the Black Panthers in his Prisoner of Love had me digging that book out, not least because I had no memory of the Black Panthers having been in it when I'd read the first half of Prisoner of Love about ten years ago. I'd thought the memoir excellent at that time, yet still never returned to its second half. What I did this time was look up all references to the Black Panthers, read those, then read the rest of the book from where I'd left off. [Relevant update: I should definitely say here that the book is a primarily a memoir of Genet's time spent with Palestinian rebels in the early 1970s.]
Patricia Hill Collins' Black Feminist Thought was unfortunately a bit of a slog for me, which is too bad because I think it's an important book. After that, I read multiple books each by Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, and Zora Neale Hurston. Highlights in this group were Brooks' intriguing sort of memoir Report From Part One, Jordan's fantastic essay collection Civil Wars, and Hurston's classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (it deserves its reputation) and fascinating autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. And I finally had some success with James Baldwin's essays, reading both Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time. About half of Notes, especially, is composed of utterly crucial essays that really every American should read.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is the first fiction I've mentioned in these notes, perhaps surprisingly. In fact, it took four months before I read any fiction at all this year, so it's fitting. While in the midst of Black Reconstruction, I was packing books for a move, and came across Faulkner's The Hamlet, the only Faulkner book I own that I had not yet read. I set it aside to read once I'd finished the Du Bois. Same was true of Evelyn Scott's The Wave. Interestingly, The Hamlet concerns poor whites in Reconstruction Mississippi (or probably just post-Reconstruction), and The Wave is Scott's big 'modernist' (so the back copy says) Civil War novel - and it's in many ways quite brilliant. Reading at that time two novels by Southern white writers about the Civil War period and its aftermath is not how I would have designed it, honestly; this was one of those accidents of history, as it were: I had them on hand, so they moved to the top of the pile.
Prior to said move in April, I'd noticed our then-housemate's copy of Anne Carson's Glass, Irony & God and quickly read it. I loved it. This led to a brief Carson focus, in which I read four of her poetry-cum-essay collections. I'd've read more, probably, but ran through my friend's copies, moved, then got re-focused on other things. I expect to return to Carson at some point, perhaps soon. That was about the only 'poetry' I read in 2014, though as usual, I did sample stray pages from the likes of Wallace Stevens, Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot, etc. This doesn't really belong here, but here it goes: I read another Gertrude Stein book, her strange and wonderful World War II memoir, Wars I Have Seen. Ditto Pascal Quignard's again more or less uncategorizable book The Silent Crossing - uncategorizable except that it's much like his other book, The Roving Shadows, which readers will recall that I read last year. After fully embracing the latter when I read it, I had many reservations about The Silent Crossing. I'd hoped to pull them together for a blog post, and may still. But in brief, I had several problems with the general theme this time round.
Brief interlude to include a list of books I read substantial portions of - or at least began in earnest - without yet completing by the year's end:
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, Gerald Horne
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America, Saidiya Hartman
Not In My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City, Antero Pietila
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (this one just missed the cutoff, alas, and will in short-order be the first book completed for 2015)
Books I'd read substantial portions of in 2013 and had fully expected to return to in 2014 but in fact never did:
Feminisms, Warhol and Price Herndl, editors
Direct Action: An Ethnography, David Graeber
Praeterita, John Ruskin
Selected Prose, 1909-1965, Ezra Pound
Back to fiction, I again read a clutch of science fiction novels, including Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which I liked, two more knotty books from Samuel R. Delany, and Jeff VanderMeer's much ballyhooed 2014 Southern Reach trilogy (Ethan more or less captured how I felt about the latter, despite being generally entertained). Off science fiction, I returned to old friend Gilbert Sorrentino, for his novel Odd Number, the first of what is now the Pack of Lies pseudo-trilogy. I tried to dive right into the second novel, Rose Theatre, but found it more or less unreadable at the time. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus was a strange experience, seeming weirdly inconsequential when placed aside his recent books. A trip to the library for another purpose had me picking up Richard Powers' Generosity. Powers was once my favorite novelist, which seems odd saying now. I used to snap his novels up immediately upon publication, but I'd passed on this one (as well as his new one, Orfeo, as yet). It was an enjoyable read. I'd had some interesting thoughts about it at the time, which have all more or less dissipated. At a separate library visit, my eye caught a recent novel by Percival Everett, a writer I'd long been curious about, but for some reason been somewhat skeptical of. I ended up reading three of his novels, beginning with the one that caught my eye. This one, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, I thought was excellent, so I immediately and eagerly dove into American Desert from 2004, which was quite the opposite. Though it's not without its entertaining moments, I frankly disliked it; it seemed utterly pointless, and the prose perfunctory. It was then with less enthusiasm that I later tried the novel he's best known for, Erasure, but thankfully this one is much better. Moving along, readers will remember my re-reads of Marilynne Robinson's excellent novels Gilead and Home, both of which I managed to blog about.
I shouldn't forget that I finished Gargantua & Pantagruel and read Part I of Either/Or. Thoughts perhaps worthy of sharing on each remain as yet languishing in sketchy draft form. And since Rabelais and Kierkegaard are both at least in part associated in my mind with this blog's patron saint, Gabriel Josipovici, now seems a good place to mention that I read his latest novel Hotel Andromeda, which was up to his usual high standards, and re-read his wonderful What Ever Happened to Modernism? And there was volume III of Knausgaard's My Struggle, known elsewhere as "Boyhood Island". As with the first two volumes, I fairly consumed it, reading it very quickly, and found much to appreciate, but the urgency of the first volume seems to be gone.
Finally, I read four books about the music and/or life of Bob Dylan. First came Clinton Heylin's very informative, and for that useful and interesting, but often obnoxious and overall ploddingly written biography, Behind the Shades Revisited. Mark Polizzotti's enjoyable entry in the 33 1/3 series, about the great album Highway 61 Revisited, is much better. As was the first part of Ian Bell's two-part biography, Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan. Bell can be repetitive, but his approach is much more exploratory and curious than Heylin's, and his ideas more interesting, which makes for a more enjoyable reading experience no less than does his superior prose. All of this, and my ongoing full-blown Dylan obsession, led me to read a book I'd honestly mocked the existence of when it was first published, Greil Marcus' Like a Rolling Stone, which in the event I found to be very much a typical good Greil Marcus book, which is to say generally enjoyable, and by turns fascinating and ridiculous.
[Update: I realized, after posting this earlier, that I didn't really characterize my reading year, nor name specific favorites. I don't need to do either, of course, but I felt I wanted to. If I had to name, say, five favorite books of the year (not including re-reads), I think I'd go with Black Reconstruction; Glass, Irony & God; Civil Wars; The Meaning of Freedom; and about half of Notes of a Native Son (that is, the good stuff in it is so good as to completely outweigh the not as good stuff). Overall it was a bit of a strange year. Looking back, it feels very choppy. I felt primarily focused on black writers and black history and experience, yet the stats don't bear that out. Or at least not in any straightforward way. Throughout the year, there were many marvelous pages in books that were frequently slogs. Not to mention that I was often wading through books in tired circumstances. This is not new either. Or books I found fascinating, or wholly engaging, but that I would have a hard time claiming as personal favorites. I don't know. This paragraph is pointless.]
And with that, I'll close here. Thanks for sticking with me, and thanks for reading. See you next year.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Books Read - 2013
As is the annual tradition, here is the final list of books I completed reading in 2013, in chronological order of completion. As usual, links are to posts in which I've either written about the book or the author, or posted excerpts—though this year there were very few of either. The whole year featured just 25 posts overall prior to this one, and fully 16 of those are excerpts only, including the last 7 in a row, dating back to May; another two posts briefly comment on some current event, but mainly as an excuse to post excerpts from something else; and then one last post was an ancient one excavated from the draft folder—so it's been an exceedingly slow year blogging-wise (two posts - one, two - touch on one reason why).
Following the list are comments and observations, including remarks on my favorite books of the year, plus the always all-important statistical breakdown.
1. The Roving Shadows, Pascal Quignard (Chris Turner, trans.)
2. And Chaos Died, Joanna Russ
3. Berg, Ann Quin
4. Heart's Wings, Gabriel Josipovici
5. Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf
6. Heroines, Kate Zambreno
7. Mathilda, Mary Shelley
8. The Zanzibar Cat, Joanna Russ
9. Exodus, Lars Iyer
10. Endgame, Samuel Beckett
11. All That Fall, Samuel Beckett
12. Pointed Roofs, Pilgrimage vol. 1, Dorothy Miller Richardson
13. On the Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald (Anthea Bell, trans.)
14. A Time for Everything, Karl Ove Knausgaard (James Anderson, trans.) (also)
15. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois
16. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
17. No Longer At Ease, Chinua Achebe
18. Eeeee Eee Eeee, Tao Lin
19. Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks
20. Divorcer, Gary Lutz
21. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde
22. Backwater, Pilgrimage vol. 2, Dorothy Miller Richardson
23. A Choice of Gods, Clifford D. Simak
24. Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
25. Assata: An Autobiography, Assata Shakur
26. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
27. A Paradigm of Earth, Candas Jane Dorsey
28. Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams
29. Mystery Train, Greil Marcus
30. My Struggle, Book Two, Karl Ove Knausgaard (Don Bartlett, trans.)
31. Anti-Systemic Movements, Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein
32. Women, Race & Class, Angela Y. Davis
33. Babel-17, Samuel R. Delany
34. The Middle Mind, Curtis White
35. What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism, Joanna Russ
36. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
37. The Science Delusion, Curtis White
38. Killing Rage: Ending Racism, bell hooks
39. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought, Elizabeth V. Spelman
40. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Ntozake Shange
41. When Rain Clouds Gather, Bessie Head
42. Maru, Bessie Head
43. Quicksand, Nella Larsen
44. Betsey Brown, Ntozake Shange
45. Mathematics: (a novel), Jacques Roubaud (Ian Monk, trans.)
46. Feminism Is For Everybody, bell hooks
47. The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Amos Tutuola
48. On Lynching, Ida B. Wells-Barnett
49. Dylan's Visions of Sin, Christopher Ricks
50. Peru, Gordon Lish
51. White Rat, Gayl Jones
52. Celestial Seraglio, Olive Moore
53. Fugue, Olive Moore
54. ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound
55. Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann (Philip Boehm, trans.)
56. The Dead of the House, Hannah Green
57. Our Beautiful Heroine, Jacques Roubaud (David Kornacker, trans.)
58. We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo
59. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empires, Prison, and Torture, Angela Y. Davis
60. Our Sister Killjoy, Ama Ata Aidoo
61. A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid
62. The Store of a Million Items, Michelle Cliff
Some statistics
Number that are re-reads: 0
Number of books that were borrowed from the library: 30
Number of books that were borrowed from a friend: 3
Number of books read on the Kindle: 1 (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass)
Number of books written by men: 28
Number of different men represented: 25 (actually: 22 distinct men wrote 27 books, and one other book was co-authored by three men)
Number of books written by women: 34
Number of different women represented: 26
Number of books by American authors:
Number of American authors:
Number of books by African-American authors: 16
Number of African-American authors: 13
Number of African-American women: 10 (13 books)
Number of African-American men: 3
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 22
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 17
Number of non-American, English-language authors of color: 7 (9 books)
Number of books in translation: 7
Number of authors of books in translation: 5
Number of translated books by woman authors: 1 (Bachmann)
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 3 (German, French, Norwegian)
Most represented foreign language: French (3: 2 Roubaud, 1 Quignard)
Number of Nobel Prize-winners:1 (Beckett)
Number of books which were acquired via the Big Dalkey Get: 0
Number of other Dalkey books: 2 (both Olive Moore novels read in Dalkey's Collected Writings)
Number of novels: 32
Number of collections of short stories: 5 (Josipovici, Lutz, Jones, Cliff, Russ' The Zanzibar Cat)
Number of books of poetry: 0
Number that are plays or written for stage: 3 (both Becketts, Shange's for colored girls)
Number that could be categorized as science fiction:7
Number of science fiction books written by women: 3
Number that are biographies or letters or memoirs: 5 (Du Bois, Lorde, Shakur, Douglass, also counting Knausgaard's My Struggle here, and as a novel)
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 3
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 6
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 11
Number about pop music: 2
Number about science: 2
Number explicitly feminist or about feminism: 8
Number about parenting or education: 0
Number that are anthropology: 0
Number of books from before 1800: 0
Number of books from 1800 to 1899: 3 (Shelley, Douglass, Wells-Barnett)
Number of books from 1900 to 1914: 0
Number of books from 1915 to 1940: 7 (both Richardsons, both Moores, Larsen, Pound, Woolf)
Number of books from 1941 to 1950: 0
Number of books from 1951 to 1960: 7 (Tutuola, Brooks, Bester, both Beckett, both Achebe)
Number of books from 1961 to 1970: 5 (Quin, Delany, Du Bois, one Bessie Head, one Russ)
Number of books from 1971 to 1980: 9 (Head, Bachmann, Simak, Clarke, Green, Marcus, one Shange, Jones, Aidoo)
Number of books from 1981 to 1990: 11 (Lorde, 1 Russ, 1 Davis, 1 Shange, Williams, Lish, Shakur, Spelman, Kincaid, 1 Roubaud)
Number of books from 1991 to 1999: 4 (1 hooks, 1 Russ, Cliff, Sebald)
Number of books from 2000 to 2010: 8
Number of books from 2011 to 2013: 7
Comments & Observations:
Reading was often difficult for me this year, but I nonetheless did read some excellent books.
I started the year, in sadness, reading Pascal Quignard's uncategorizable (and indeed, not reflected anywhere in the above statistical breakdown, aside from books in translation and books written by men) and apropos book, The Roving Shadows. I finally read Ann Quin's Berg, which I'd had for a few years, and rather liked it (I'd many years ago read and loved her novel Three). Heart's Wings is an excellent introduction to old favorite Gabriel Josipovici's short fiction. I was excited to read Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas essays, given its advance billing as anti-war and feminist, but I have to admit being some let down in the event. On the other hand, I very much enjoyed Kate Zambreno's also more or less uncategorizable, and much discussed, book Heroines. I'd hoped to have something of interest to say about it, but was not able to come up with anything. I dipped back nearly 200 years for Mary Shelley's curious novella, Mathilda. A trip to Philadelphia to see an excellent production of Beckett's Endgame, resulted in a reading of that play, as well as All That Falls, the play that immediately follows it in the "Dramatic Works" volume of my fancy Grove Centenary edition of Beckett's works (this reading was also somewhat inspired by a re-read of portions of Hugh Kenner's very helpful A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett). I began the project of reading Dorothy Miller Richardson's generally forgotten Pilgrimage series of novels. And I read two excellent contemporary European novels: Exodus, the final book - presumably - in Lars Iyers' brilliant and funny Spurious trilogy, and Karl Ove Knausgaard's simply astonishing A Time for Everything.
At this point, my reading year had been exclusively white. I don't remember if I was annoyed by this, or if I was having a hard time following the Knausgaard book with anything worthwhile, but I then ended up reading W.E.B. Du Bois' posthumously published Autobiography, an often fascinating book he'd written in his 90s and which I'd first learned of via Aaron Bady's old blog some years back. Around this time the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe died, and I soon found and read cheap paperbacks of his famous Things Fall Apart, and its related follow-up, No Longer At Ease. I thought the former more or less deserved its reputation; the latter seemed less good.
From here I roamed here and there, following a few personal trends, ebbs and flows in my interest and focus, etc. One major focus, again, was specifically to read books written by women, and in fact, for the second year in the last three, I read more books written by women than I did books written by men. I also tried to focus more on African American women writers, in a variety of modes, as well as other writers of color from around the world. This was well worth the effort, as I read a number of writers I'd never previously heard of, as well as plenty I'd been meaning to read. I'd especially single out the poet Geraldine Brooks' lone novel, Maud Martha; Shirley Anne Williams' novel about the aftermath of a slave revolt, Dessa Rose; Audre Lorde's memoir, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name; and Assata Shakur's Assata: An Autobiography. Ntozake Shange was a completely new name to me this year, which given how important she seems to be to a lot of people, is more than a little embarrassing. Her famous for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf didn't really grab me as a reading experience, despite many striking lines; I expect I'd have appreciated the stage production better. I had better luck with her later novel Betsey Brown, which I gather is at least somewhat autobiographical, following as it does the coming-of-age of the title character in the late 1950s St. Louis, as schools were being integrated there for the first time. The novels Maud Martha and Dessa Rose, I'd like to emphasize, are both formally interesting and unconventional, Dessa Rose in particular, which its shifting points of view and timeline.
I'd read (and blogged about!) two Joanna Russ novels early on; later, I continued the science fiction thread, by mixing in some novels cherry-picked from this list of Ethan's top ten SF books (at least his top ten on that moment in time). I had good luck with all of these, but I especially enjoyed Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (despite some rather glaring and utterly gratuitous sexism) and Clifford D. Simak's Choice of Gods. I bought a copy of Samuel R. Delany's Trouble on Triton (also on Ethan's list) and began reading it, but quickly realized I wasn't in the place for it; I did, however, manage to read Delany's earlier novel, Babel-17, and I liked it quite a bit.
I completed no poetry collection this year, though I did read some Czesław Miłosz poems (thanks BDR!), some Wallace Stevens, again tried some Geoffrey Hill. . . and then of course, there was quite a number of poems included and discussed (well, he sort of discusses them) in Pound's ABC of Reading. Pound, almost despite his best efforts, actually helped.
Brief interlude to include a list of books I read substantial portions of - or at least began in earnest - without yet completing by the year's end:
Prison Nation, Tara Herivel and Paul Wright, editors
The Meaning of Freedom, Angela Y. Davis
Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, Gore, Theoharis, & Woodard, editors
Decolonizing Anarchism, Maia Ramnath
In Letters of Blood and Fire, George Caffentzis
Feminisms, Warhol and Price Herndl, editors
Direct Action: An Ethnography, David Graeber
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais (J.M. Cohen translation; have read first 3 of 5 books)
Blue Pastoral, Gilbert Sorrentino (enjoyed what I read, but will likely be re-starting this one)
Escapes, Joy Williams (read about half of this decidedly meh collection of stories before giving up)
The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956
The Silent Crossing, Pascal Quignard
Praeterita, John Ruskin
Selected Prose, 1909-1965, Ezra Pound
Also in the mix in the middle of the year were explicitly feminist books. More to the point, I became more aware of intersectionality as a concept - one that seemed intuitively accurate to me once it had come to my attention - and so began seeking out texts that seemed to embody that idea (though I've only more recently become fully aware of, for example, the Kimberlé Crenshaw essay called "Mapping the Margins", which introduced the term. CORRECTION: Crenshaw actually introduced the term in her 1989 essay, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics". The other essay is from 1993; it's not clear why I thought it had introduced the term). Angela Davis' classic Women, Race, & Class, first published in 1981, has it right there in the title, in the intersections of gender, race, and class as modes and systems of oppression. Davis' book is fantastic. The only part that gave me pause was her short critique of the Wages for Housework movement. Davis makes some interesting points, but which felt a little dismissive. As far as I can tell, Davis has not returned to this topic, which is too bad; I'd love to know what she'd think of Silvia Federici's more recent modifications of the ideas, as well as her deeper analyses of the politics of care. In this context, I also read Joanna Russ' What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism and Elizabeth V. Spelman's Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Looking back, I find it a bit unfortunate that I read these two, albeit excellent, books by white feminists before certain options by black women, though somewhat mitigated by the fact of reading the Davis first, as well as several bell hooks volumes. In the event, both books are brilliant, though not without some flaws. Russ, for her part, limited herself to texts available at the time she began the book in the early 1980s, though her declining health meant she didn't finally publish it until 1998. Given that, it remains puzzling that she didn't mention Davis' book at all, which is especially unfortunate since Russ' stuff on Wages for Housework is excellent, and seems to me to implicitly address Davis' concerns. It would have been nice to see her tackle Davis' critique, and it seems strange that she did not. In addition, she does not herself write about the racism of some of the white feminists of the 1970s and earlier, but rather quotes extensively from black woman writers exposing and critiquing that racism. This may have been a tactical move - letting black women speak for themselves, as it were - but it seems to me that some explicit lines from Russ herself would have been prudent. Her book also includes a couple of unfortunate-at-best passages reflecting her earlier transphobia (which she apparently recognized as wrong in the years before her too early death). Spelman's book - which is much more philosophical in both focus and pitch - was published in 1988, and while it doesn't have anything rivaling Russ' transphobic remarks, neither does she really address the question of transgender or trans women head on; instead, in a couple of places, she uses a particular trans woman's memoir as useful for illustrating other points. But interestingly, her book makes many arguments which strongly imply a trans-inclusive analysis, were she only able to see it (actually, the same is true to a large extent of Russ' book). Speaking of bell hooks, I also read two more of hers, Killing Rage and Feminism is for Everybody, which both extend the sort of arguments she makes elsewhere, though each has some new things to offer making them worth reading.
Women, Race, & Class and What Are We Fighting For? are both also bibliographical goldmines, which is always very exciting. Davis' book in particular has already led me to finally read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave - not that I didn't know about that classic book, but Davis made it abundantly clear that I needed to read it. But along with memoirs and autobiographies by black women and men, as crucial as those are, I realized I should seek out more essays and histories and critical works by black women and men. I've already read a few of W.E.B. Du Bois' books, and now am firmly committed to reading his enormous study, Black Reconstruction (meanwhile, I've had Eric Foner's book Reconstruction, unread, since college; I hope to read that soon-ish too - but after the Du Bois). Anyway, in this vein, I read - cited by Davis - Ida B. Wells-Barnett's writing on lynching, collected by Patricia Hill Collins as, simply, On Lynching. Following on from this, I've become increasingly interested in prison abolitionism, and have been reading Davis' work on the topic, including the short book of interviews with Eduardo Mendieta called Abolition Democracy - the title a concept borrowed from Du Bois. Of course, her own autobiography, which I read last year, as well as Assata Shakur's structurally similar autobiography, have also helped shape my thinking on this topic.
The last couple of months of the year saw a detour back into some European writers, then a spate of African and Caribbean writers. Olive Moore's Celestial Seraglio and, especially, Fugue, are excellent novels. Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina is indescribable, really. I was by turns entranced, baffled, astonished, distracted . . . then put off when midway through I glanced too long at the afterword, which made me fear I hadn't understood a thing to that point. I read two Jacques Roubaud novels this year: Mathematics:, the third volume in his Great Fire of London sequence (I've only otherwise read the marvelous first volume), which I found fascinating, brilliant, and, hah, at times rather boring - yet I was somehow interested in my boredom, or, rather, I felt compelled to soldier on through it, to experience it, and then it finally lifted before the amazing, and political, final section about the nuclear testing. The other Roubaud was Our Beautiful Heroine, the first of his "Hortense" novels, which I'd been both curious about and wary of, but which in the event I found simply delightful. Of the African and Caribbean writers, I'd especially like to mention as outstanding Our Sister Killjoy, a novel by Ama Ata Aidoo, from Ghana.
Ok, time to bring things to a wrap here. I've not said anything about the two Curtis White books, Middle Mind and the newer The Science Delusion. Both are worth a look, though the latter is the far superior book. I'd like to say more about them, but time is short. Perhaps actual blog posts are in order! Who knows? I'd also like to make a quick mention of Christopher Ricks' Dylan's Visions of Sin. I love Bob Dylan's music, and I loved Christopher Ricks' book about Samuel Beckett, Beckett's Dying Words, yet I'd long resisted this particular book. But this year, since about July, my love of and interest in Dylan has broadened and deepened to the point of obsession, and I came across the book at a used shop while I was standing around listening on headphones to a used copy of Esther Phillips' excellent LP Black-Eyed Blues, leafed through it and was hooked. And I can only say, if you like Bob Dylan's music, you're probably going to want to read the book, but especially if you already like Christopher Ricks as a literary critic. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.
And with that, I'll close here. Thanks for sticking with me, and thanks for reading. See you next year.
Following the list are comments and observations, including remarks on my favorite books of the year, plus the always all-important statistical breakdown.
1. The Roving Shadows, Pascal Quignard (Chris Turner, trans.)
2. And Chaos Died, Joanna Russ
3. Berg, Ann Quin
4. Heart's Wings, Gabriel Josipovici
5. Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf
6. Heroines, Kate Zambreno
7. Mathilda, Mary Shelley
8. The Zanzibar Cat, Joanna Russ
9. Exodus, Lars Iyer
10. Endgame, Samuel Beckett
11. All That Fall, Samuel Beckett
12. Pointed Roofs, Pilgrimage vol. 1, Dorothy Miller Richardson
13. On the Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald (Anthea Bell, trans.)
14. A Time for Everything, Karl Ove Knausgaard (James Anderson, trans.) (also)
15. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois
16. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
17. No Longer At Ease, Chinua Achebe
18. Eeeee Eee Eeee, Tao Lin
19. Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks
20. Divorcer, Gary Lutz
21. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde
22. Backwater, Pilgrimage vol. 2, Dorothy Miller Richardson
23. A Choice of Gods, Clifford D. Simak
24. Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
25. Assata: An Autobiography, Assata Shakur
26. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
27. A Paradigm of Earth, Candas Jane Dorsey
28. Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams
29. Mystery Train, Greil Marcus
30. My Struggle, Book Two, Karl Ove Knausgaard (Don Bartlett, trans.)
31. Anti-Systemic Movements, Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein
32. Women, Race & Class, Angela Y. Davis
33. Babel-17, Samuel R. Delany
34. The Middle Mind, Curtis White
35. What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism, Joanna Russ
36. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
37. The Science Delusion, Curtis White
38. Killing Rage: Ending Racism, bell hooks
39. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought, Elizabeth V. Spelman
40. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Ntozake Shange
41. When Rain Clouds Gather, Bessie Head
42. Maru, Bessie Head
43. Quicksand, Nella Larsen
44. Betsey Brown, Ntozake Shange
45. Mathematics: (a novel), Jacques Roubaud (Ian Monk, trans.)
46. Feminism Is For Everybody, bell hooks
47. The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Amos Tutuola
48. On Lynching, Ida B. Wells-Barnett
49. Dylan's Visions of Sin, Christopher Ricks
50. Peru, Gordon Lish
51. White Rat, Gayl Jones
52. Celestial Seraglio, Olive Moore
53. Fugue, Olive Moore
54. ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound
55. Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann (Philip Boehm, trans.)
56. The Dead of the House, Hannah Green
57. Our Beautiful Heroine, Jacques Roubaud (David Kornacker, trans.)
58. We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo
59. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empires, Prison, and Torture, Angela Y. Davis
60. Our Sister Killjoy, Ama Ata Aidoo
61. A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid
62. The Store of a Million Items, Michelle Cliff
Some statistics
Number that are re-reads: 0
Number of books that were borrowed from the library: 30
Number of books that were borrowed from a friend: 3
Number of books read on the Kindle: 1 (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass)
Number of books written by men: 28
Number of different men represented: 25 (actually: 22 distinct men wrote 27 books, and one other book was co-authored by three men)
Number of books written by women: 34
Number of different women represented: 26
Number of books by American authors:
Number of American authors:
Number of books by African-American authors: 16
Number of African-American authors: 13
Number of African-American women: 10 (13 books)
Number of African-American men: 3
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 22
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 17
Number of non-American, English-language authors of color: 7 (9 books)
Number of books in translation: 7
Number of authors of books in translation: 5
Number of translated books by woman authors: 1 (Bachmann)
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 3 (German, French, Norwegian)
Most represented foreign language: French (3: 2 Roubaud, 1 Quignard)
Number of Nobel Prize-winners:1 (Beckett)
Number of books which were acquired via the Big Dalkey Get: 0
Number of other Dalkey books: 2 (both Olive Moore novels read in Dalkey's Collected Writings)
Number of novels: 32
Number of collections of short stories: 5 (Josipovici, Lutz, Jones, Cliff, Russ' The Zanzibar Cat)
Number of books of poetry: 0
Number that are plays or written for stage: 3 (both Becketts, Shange's for colored girls)
Number that could be categorized as science fiction:7
Number of science fiction books written by women: 3
Number that are biographies or letters or memoirs: 5 (Du Bois, Lorde, Shakur, Douglass, also counting Knausgaard's My Struggle here, and as a novel)
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 3
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 6
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 11
Number about pop music: 2
Number about science: 2
Number explicitly feminist or about feminism: 8
Number about parenting or education: 0
Number that are anthropology: 0
Number of books from before 1800: 0
Number of books from 1800 to 1899: 3 (Shelley, Douglass, Wells-Barnett)
Number of books from 1900 to 1914: 0
Number of books from 1915 to 1940: 7 (both Richardsons, both Moores, Larsen, Pound, Woolf)
Number of books from 1941 to 1950: 0
Number of books from 1951 to 1960: 7 (Tutuola, Brooks, Bester, both Beckett, both Achebe)
Number of books from 1961 to 1970: 5 (Quin, Delany, Du Bois, one Bessie Head, one Russ)
Number of books from 1971 to 1980: 9 (Head, Bachmann, Simak, Clarke, Green, Marcus, one Shange, Jones, Aidoo)
Number of books from 1981 to 1990: 11 (Lorde, 1 Russ, 1 Davis, 1 Shange, Williams, Lish, Shakur, Spelman, Kincaid, 1 Roubaud)
Number of books from 1991 to 1999: 4 (1 hooks, 1 Russ, Cliff, Sebald)
Number of books from 2000 to 2010: 8
Number of books from 2011 to 2013: 7
Comments & Observations:
Reading was often difficult for me this year, but I nonetheless did read some excellent books.
I started the year, in sadness, reading Pascal Quignard's uncategorizable (and indeed, not reflected anywhere in the above statistical breakdown, aside from books in translation and books written by men) and apropos book, The Roving Shadows. I finally read Ann Quin's Berg, which I'd had for a few years, and rather liked it (I'd many years ago read and loved her novel Three). Heart's Wings is an excellent introduction to old favorite Gabriel Josipovici's short fiction. I was excited to read Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas essays, given its advance billing as anti-war and feminist, but I have to admit being some let down in the event. On the other hand, I very much enjoyed Kate Zambreno's also more or less uncategorizable, and much discussed, book Heroines. I'd hoped to have something of interest to say about it, but was not able to come up with anything. I dipped back nearly 200 years for Mary Shelley's curious novella, Mathilda. A trip to Philadelphia to see an excellent production of Beckett's Endgame, resulted in a reading of that play, as well as All That Falls, the play that immediately follows it in the "Dramatic Works" volume of my fancy Grove Centenary edition of Beckett's works (this reading was also somewhat inspired by a re-read of portions of Hugh Kenner's very helpful A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett). I began the project of reading Dorothy Miller Richardson's generally forgotten Pilgrimage series of novels. And I read two excellent contemporary European novels: Exodus, the final book - presumably - in Lars Iyers' brilliant and funny Spurious trilogy, and Karl Ove Knausgaard's simply astonishing A Time for Everything.
At this point, my reading year had been exclusively white. I don't remember if I was annoyed by this, or if I was having a hard time following the Knausgaard book with anything worthwhile, but I then ended up reading W.E.B. Du Bois' posthumously published Autobiography, an often fascinating book he'd written in his 90s and which I'd first learned of via Aaron Bady's old blog some years back. Around this time the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe died, and I soon found and read cheap paperbacks of his famous Things Fall Apart, and its related follow-up, No Longer At Ease. I thought the former more or less deserved its reputation; the latter seemed less good.
From here I roamed here and there, following a few personal trends, ebbs and flows in my interest and focus, etc. One major focus, again, was specifically to read books written by women, and in fact, for the second year in the last three, I read more books written by women than I did books written by men. I also tried to focus more on African American women writers, in a variety of modes, as well as other writers of color from around the world. This was well worth the effort, as I read a number of writers I'd never previously heard of, as well as plenty I'd been meaning to read. I'd especially single out the poet Geraldine Brooks' lone novel, Maud Martha; Shirley Anne Williams' novel about the aftermath of a slave revolt, Dessa Rose; Audre Lorde's memoir, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name; and Assata Shakur's Assata: An Autobiography. Ntozake Shange was a completely new name to me this year, which given how important she seems to be to a lot of people, is more than a little embarrassing. Her famous for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf didn't really grab me as a reading experience, despite many striking lines; I expect I'd have appreciated the stage production better. I had better luck with her later novel Betsey Brown, which I gather is at least somewhat autobiographical, following as it does the coming-of-age of the title character in the late 1950s St. Louis, as schools were being integrated there for the first time. The novels Maud Martha and Dessa Rose, I'd like to emphasize, are both formally interesting and unconventional, Dessa Rose in particular, which its shifting points of view and timeline.
I'd read (and blogged about!) two Joanna Russ novels early on; later, I continued the science fiction thread, by mixing in some novels cherry-picked from this list of Ethan's top ten SF books (at least his top ten on that moment in time). I had good luck with all of these, but I especially enjoyed Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (despite some rather glaring and utterly gratuitous sexism) and Clifford D. Simak's Choice of Gods. I bought a copy of Samuel R. Delany's Trouble on Triton (also on Ethan's list) and began reading it, but quickly realized I wasn't in the place for it; I did, however, manage to read Delany's earlier novel, Babel-17, and I liked it quite a bit.
I completed no poetry collection this year, though I did read some Czesław Miłosz poems (thanks BDR!), some Wallace Stevens, again tried some Geoffrey Hill. . . and then of course, there was quite a number of poems included and discussed (well, he sort of discusses them) in Pound's ABC of Reading. Pound, almost despite his best efforts, actually helped.
Brief interlude to include a list of books I read substantial portions of - or at least began in earnest - without yet completing by the year's end:
Prison Nation, Tara Herivel and Paul Wright, editors
The Meaning of Freedom, Angela Y. Davis
Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, Gore, Theoharis, & Woodard, editors
Decolonizing Anarchism, Maia Ramnath
In Letters of Blood and Fire, George Caffentzis
Feminisms, Warhol and Price Herndl, editors
Direct Action: An Ethnography, David Graeber
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais (J.M. Cohen translation; have read first 3 of 5 books)
Blue Pastoral, Gilbert Sorrentino (enjoyed what I read, but will likely be re-starting this one)
Escapes, Joy Williams (read about half of this decidedly meh collection of stories before giving up)
The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956
The Silent Crossing, Pascal Quignard
Praeterita, John Ruskin
Selected Prose, 1909-1965, Ezra Pound
Also in the mix in the middle of the year were explicitly feminist books. More to the point, I became more aware of intersectionality as a concept - one that seemed intuitively accurate to me once it had come to my attention - and so began seeking out texts that seemed to embody that idea (though I've only more recently become fully aware of, for example, the Kimberlé Crenshaw essay called "Mapping the Margins", which introduced the term. CORRECTION: Crenshaw actually introduced the term in her 1989 essay, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics". The other essay is from 1993; it's not clear why I thought it had introduced the term). Angela Davis' classic Women, Race, & Class, first published in 1981, has it right there in the title, in the intersections of gender, race, and class as modes and systems of oppression. Davis' book is fantastic. The only part that gave me pause was her short critique of the Wages for Housework movement. Davis makes some interesting points, but which felt a little dismissive. As far as I can tell, Davis has not returned to this topic, which is too bad; I'd love to know what she'd think of Silvia Federici's more recent modifications of the ideas, as well as her deeper analyses of the politics of care. In this context, I also read Joanna Russ' What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism and Elizabeth V. Spelman's Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Looking back, I find it a bit unfortunate that I read these two, albeit excellent, books by white feminists before certain options by black women, though somewhat mitigated by the fact of reading the Davis first, as well as several bell hooks volumes. In the event, both books are brilliant, though not without some flaws. Russ, for her part, limited herself to texts available at the time she began the book in the early 1980s, though her declining health meant she didn't finally publish it until 1998. Given that, it remains puzzling that she didn't mention Davis' book at all, which is especially unfortunate since Russ' stuff on Wages for Housework is excellent, and seems to me to implicitly address Davis' concerns. It would have been nice to see her tackle Davis' critique, and it seems strange that she did not. In addition, she does not herself write about the racism of some of the white feminists of the 1970s and earlier, but rather quotes extensively from black woman writers exposing and critiquing that racism. This may have been a tactical move - letting black women speak for themselves, as it were - but it seems to me that some explicit lines from Russ herself would have been prudent. Her book also includes a couple of unfortunate-at-best passages reflecting her earlier transphobia (which she apparently recognized as wrong in the years before her too early death). Spelman's book - which is much more philosophical in both focus and pitch - was published in 1988, and while it doesn't have anything rivaling Russ' transphobic remarks, neither does she really address the question of transgender or trans women head on; instead, in a couple of places, she uses a particular trans woman's memoir as useful for illustrating other points. But interestingly, her book makes many arguments which strongly imply a trans-inclusive analysis, were she only able to see it (actually, the same is true to a large extent of Russ' book). Speaking of bell hooks, I also read two more of hers, Killing Rage and Feminism is for Everybody, which both extend the sort of arguments she makes elsewhere, though each has some new things to offer making them worth reading.
Women, Race, & Class and What Are We Fighting For? are both also bibliographical goldmines, which is always very exciting. Davis' book in particular has already led me to finally read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave - not that I didn't know about that classic book, but Davis made it abundantly clear that I needed to read it. But along with memoirs and autobiographies by black women and men, as crucial as those are, I realized I should seek out more essays and histories and critical works by black women and men. I've already read a few of W.E.B. Du Bois' books, and now am firmly committed to reading his enormous study, Black Reconstruction (meanwhile, I've had Eric Foner's book Reconstruction, unread, since college; I hope to read that soon-ish too - but after the Du Bois). Anyway, in this vein, I read - cited by Davis - Ida B. Wells-Barnett's writing on lynching, collected by Patricia Hill Collins as, simply, On Lynching. Following on from this, I've become increasingly interested in prison abolitionism, and have been reading Davis' work on the topic, including the short book of interviews with Eduardo Mendieta called Abolition Democracy - the title a concept borrowed from Du Bois. Of course, her own autobiography, which I read last year, as well as Assata Shakur's structurally similar autobiography, have also helped shape my thinking on this topic.
The last couple of months of the year saw a detour back into some European writers, then a spate of African and Caribbean writers. Olive Moore's Celestial Seraglio and, especially, Fugue, are excellent novels. Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina is indescribable, really. I was by turns entranced, baffled, astonished, distracted . . . then put off when midway through I glanced too long at the afterword, which made me fear I hadn't understood a thing to that point. I read two Jacques Roubaud novels this year: Mathematics:, the third volume in his Great Fire of London sequence (I've only otherwise read the marvelous first volume), which I found fascinating, brilliant, and, hah, at times rather boring - yet I was somehow interested in my boredom, or, rather, I felt compelled to soldier on through it, to experience it, and then it finally lifted before the amazing, and political, final section about the nuclear testing. The other Roubaud was Our Beautiful Heroine, the first of his "Hortense" novels, which I'd been both curious about and wary of, but which in the event I found simply delightful. Of the African and Caribbean writers, I'd especially like to mention as outstanding Our Sister Killjoy, a novel by Ama Ata Aidoo, from Ghana.
Ok, time to bring things to a wrap here. I've not said anything about the two Curtis White books, Middle Mind and the newer The Science Delusion. Both are worth a look, though the latter is the far superior book. I'd like to say more about them, but time is short. Perhaps actual blog posts are in order! Who knows? I'd also like to make a quick mention of Christopher Ricks' Dylan's Visions of Sin. I love Bob Dylan's music, and I loved Christopher Ricks' book about Samuel Beckett, Beckett's Dying Words, yet I'd long resisted this particular book. But this year, since about July, my love of and interest in Dylan has broadened and deepened to the point of obsession, and I came across the book at a used shop while I was standing around listening on headphones to a used copy of Esther Phillips' excellent LP Black-Eyed Blues, leafed through it and was hooked. And I can only say, if you like Bob Dylan's music, you're probably going to want to read the book, but especially if you already like Christopher Ricks as a literary critic. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.
And with that, I'll close here. Thanks for sticking with me, and thanks for reading. See you next year.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Books Read - 2012
As is the annual tradition, here is the final list of books I completed reading in 2012, in chronological order of completion; links are to posts in which I've either written about the book or the author, or posted excerpts.
Following the list would normally be detailed comments and observations, including remarks on my favorite books of the year, plus a statistical breakdown, but for private reasons the stats will be heavily truncated and comments non-existent (links are also somewhat incomplete), unless the urge to update this post hits me at some later date.
1. Lightning Rods, Helen DeWitt
2. Feminist Theory: from margin to center, bell hooks
3. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, James C. Scott
4. Zone, Mathias Énard (Charlotte Mandell, trans.)
5. Liquidation, Imre Kertész (Tim Wilkinson, trans.)
6. Stoner, John Williams
7. Dreaming of Dead People, Rosalind Belben
8. Mavis Belfrage, Alasdair Gray
9. Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and self-recovery, bell hooks
10. I., Stephen Dixon
11. End of I., Stephen Dixon
12. Slowness, Milan Kundera (Linda Asher, trans.)
13. Meyer, Stephen Dixon
14. Now that you're back, A.L. Kennedy
15. Dogma, Lars Iyer
16. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Timothy Mitchell (also)
17. Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde
18. An Autobiography, Angela Davis
19. Eva's Man, Gayl Jones
20. Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, James and Grace Lee Boggs (also)
21. The Notebook, Agota Kristof (Alan Sheridan, trans.)
22. The Proof, Agota Kristof (David Watson, trans.)
23. The Third Lie, Agota Kristof (Marc Romano, trans.)
24. The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, James Boggs
25. Open City, Teju Cole
26. My Happy Life, Lydia Millet
27. On With the Story, John Barth
28. Territorial Rights, Muriel Spark
29. Making Things Better, Anita Brookner
30. The Rules of Engagement, Anita Brookner
31. A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
32. Mao II, Don DeLillo (re-read)
33. The Magic Barrel, Bernard Malamud
34. The Quiet American, Graham Greene
35. Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide, Barbara Trepagnier
36. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David Graeber
37. Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life, Vivian Gornick
38. Introduction to Modernity, Henri Lefebvre (John Moore, trans.)
39. My Struggle, Book One, Karl Ove Knausgaard (Don Bartlett, trans.)
40. Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, Harold Bloom
41. Near to the Wild Heart, Clarice Lispector (Alison Entrekin, trans.)
42. Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas (Rosalind Harvey & Anne McLean, trans.)
43. Barley Patch, Gerald Murnane
44. The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s, Immanuel Wallerstein
45. The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914, Immanuel Wallerstein
46. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, Emily Martin
47. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant
48. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
49. Garnethill, Denise Mina
50. Exile, Denise Mina
51. Resolution, Denise Mina
52. Ripley Under Ground, Patricia Highsmith
53. Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant, Edmond Caldwell
54. Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy
55. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Silvia Federici
56. The Gift, Lewis Hyde
57. Stories in the Worst Way, Gary Lutz
58. Infinity: The Story of a Moment, Gabriel Josipovici
59. Prosperous Friends, Christine Schutt
60. Time is the Simplest Thing, Clifford D. Simak
61. Steelwork, Gilbert Sorrentino
62. The Passion Artist, John Hawkes
63. Why Call Them Back From Heaven?, Clifford D. Simak
64. Red the Fiend, Gilbert Sorrentino
65. The Lime Twig, John Hawkes (re-read)
66. Aberration of Starlight, Gilbert Sorrentino (re-read)
67. City, Clifford D. Simak
68. Florida, Christine Schutt (re-read)
Some statistics
Number of books written by men: 38.5
Number of books written by women: 29.5
Number of books which were acquired via the Big Dalkey Get: 0
Number of other Dalkey books: 4
Number of books in translation: 10
Number of books by writers known primarily to me through their blogs: 2 (Lars Iyer, Edmond Caldwell)
Number of books that were borrowed from the library: 7
Number of books read on the Kindle: 0
Fiction or Poetry (or sufficiently literary memoir):
Number of books: 49
Number that are poetry: 0
Number that are memoirs: 1 (possibly Knausgaard's My Struggle here)
Number that are re-reads: 4 (not counting two novels I read twice this year, but according to my arbitrary rules only counted once: Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant and Infinity)
Number of authors represented: 15
Number of books by woman authors: 20
Number of woman authors: 7
Number of books by American authors: 11
Number of American authors:
Number of books by African-American authors: 0
Number of African-American authors: 0
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 13
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 10
Number of books in translation: 9
Number of authors of books in translation: 7
Number of translated books by woman authors: 4
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 4 (French, Hungarian, Spanish, Norwegian)
Most represented foreign language: French (5: 3 Kristof, 1 Kundera, 1 Énard)
Number of Nobel Prize-winners: 2 (Kertész, Naipaul)
Number that could be categorized as science fiction: 4
Number of science fiction books written by women: 1
Number that could be categorized as crime fiction: 5
Number written by women: 5
Non-Fiction:
Number of non-fiction books: 19
Number of books by woman authors: 9.5
Number of books in translation: 1 (Lefebvre, from the French)
Number that are biographies or letters or memoirs: 2 (Gornick's of Emma Goldman; Davis's auto-bio)
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 2 (Lefebvre, Merchant)
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 3
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 13
Number about pop music: 0
Number about science: 2 (Martin, Merchant)
Number about feminism: 6
Number about racism or history of slavery or African American experience: 5
Number about parenting or education: 0
Number that are anthropology: 4 (Scott, Martin, Graeber, Hyde sort of)
Comments & Observations:
Possibly to come. Or not. See this post for passing remarks on many of the novels listed above, especially in the second half of the list, including favorite novels of the year.
Following the list would normally be detailed comments and observations, including remarks on my favorite books of the year, plus a statistical breakdown, but for private reasons the stats will be heavily truncated and comments non-existent (links are also somewhat incomplete), unless the urge to update this post hits me at some later date.
1. Lightning Rods, Helen DeWitt
2. Feminist Theory: from margin to center, bell hooks
3. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, James C. Scott
4. Zone, Mathias Énard (Charlotte Mandell, trans.)
5. Liquidation, Imre Kertész (Tim Wilkinson, trans.)
6. Stoner, John Williams
7. Dreaming of Dead People, Rosalind Belben
8. Mavis Belfrage, Alasdair Gray
9. Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and self-recovery, bell hooks
10. I., Stephen Dixon
11. End of I., Stephen Dixon
12. Slowness, Milan Kundera (Linda Asher, trans.)
13. Meyer, Stephen Dixon
14. Now that you're back, A.L. Kennedy
15. Dogma, Lars Iyer
16. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Timothy Mitchell (also)
17. Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde
18. An Autobiography, Angela Davis
19. Eva's Man, Gayl Jones
20. Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, James and Grace Lee Boggs (also)
21. The Notebook, Agota Kristof (Alan Sheridan, trans.)
22. The Proof, Agota Kristof (David Watson, trans.)
23. The Third Lie, Agota Kristof (Marc Romano, trans.)
24. The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, James Boggs
25. Open City, Teju Cole
26. My Happy Life, Lydia Millet
27. On With the Story, John Barth
28. Territorial Rights, Muriel Spark
29. Making Things Better, Anita Brookner
30. The Rules of Engagement, Anita Brookner
31. A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
32. Mao II, Don DeLillo (re-read)
33. The Magic Barrel, Bernard Malamud
34. The Quiet American, Graham Greene
35. Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide, Barbara Trepagnier
36. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David Graeber
37. Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life, Vivian Gornick
38. Introduction to Modernity, Henri Lefebvre (John Moore, trans.)
39. My Struggle, Book One, Karl Ove Knausgaard (Don Bartlett, trans.)
40. Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, Harold Bloom
41. Near to the Wild Heart, Clarice Lispector (Alison Entrekin, trans.)
42. Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas (Rosalind Harvey & Anne McLean, trans.)
43. Barley Patch, Gerald Murnane
44. The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s, Immanuel Wallerstein
45. The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914, Immanuel Wallerstein
46. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, Emily Martin
47. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant
48. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
49. Garnethill, Denise Mina
50. Exile, Denise Mina
51. Resolution, Denise Mina
52. Ripley Under Ground, Patricia Highsmith
53. Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant, Edmond Caldwell
54. Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy
55. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Silvia Federici
56. The Gift, Lewis Hyde
57. Stories in the Worst Way, Gary Lutz
58. Infinity: The Story of a Moment, Gabriel Josipovici
59. Prosperous Friends, Christine Schutt
60. Time is the Simplest Thing, Clifford D. Simak
61. Steelwork, Gilbert Sorrentino
62. The Passion Artist, John Hawkes
63. Why Call Them Back From Heaven?, Clifford D. Simak
64. Red the Fiend, Gilbert Sorrentino
65. The Lime Twig, John Hawkes (re-read)
66. Aberration of Starlight, Gilbert Sorrentino (re-read)
67. City, Clifford D. Simak
68. Florida, Christine Schutt (re-read)
Some statistics
Number of books written by men: 38.5
Number of books written by women: 29.5
Number of books which were acquired via the Big Dalkey Get: 0
Number of other Dalkey books: 4
Number of books in translation: 10
Number of books by writers known primarily to me through their blogs: 2 (Lars Iyer, Edmond Caldwell)
Number of books that were borrowed from the library: 7
Number of books read on the Kindle: 0
Fiction or Poetry (or sufficiently literary memoir):
Number of books: 49
Number that are poetry: 0
Number that are memoirs: 1 (possibly Knausgaard's My Struggle here)
Number that are re-reads: 4 (not counting two novels I read twice this year, but according to my arbitrary rules only counted once: Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant and Infinity)
Number of authors represented: 15
Number of books by woman authors: 20
Number of woman authors: 7
Number of books by American authors: 11
Number of American authors:
Number of books by African-American authors: 0
Number of African-American authors: 0
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 13
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 10
Number of books in translation: 9
Number of authors of books in translation: 7
Number of translated books by woman authors: 4
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 4 (French, Hungarian, Spanish, Norwegian)
Most represented foreign language: French (5: 3 Kristof, 1 Kundera, 1 Énard)
Number of Nobel Prize-winners: 2 (Kertész, Naipaul)
Number that could be categorized as science fiction: 4
Number of science fiction books written by women: 1
Number that could be categorized as crime fiction: 5
Number written by women: 5
Non-Fiction:
Number of non-fiction books: 19
Number of books by woman authors: 9.5
Number of books in translation: 1 (Lefebvre, from the French)
Number that are biographies or letters or memoirs: 2 (Gornick's of Emma Goldman; Davis's auto-bio)
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 2 (Lefebvre, Merchant)
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 3
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 13
Number about pop music: 0
Number about science: 2 (Martin, Merchant)
Number about feminism: 6
Number about racism or history of slavery or African American experience: 5
Number about parenting or education: 0
Number that are anthropology: 4 (Scott, Martin, Graeber, Hyde sort of)
Comments & Observations:
Possibly to come. Or not. See this post for passing remarks on many of the novels listed above, especially in the second half of the list, including favorite novels of the year.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Books Read - 2011
As is the annual tradition, here is the final list of books I completed reading in 2011, in chronological order of completion; links are to posts in which I've either written about the book or the author, or posted excerpts; following the list are comments and observations, including remarks on my favorite books of the year, plus the always all-important statistical breakdown.
1. A Language Older Than Words, Derrick Jensen
2. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Immanuel Wallerstein
3. The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, Marilynne Robinson
4. Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson
5. Prose, Thomas Bernhard (Martin Chalmers, trans.)
6. My Prizes: An Accounting, Thomas Bernhard (Carol Brown Janeway, trans.)
7. Wittgenstein's Nephew, Thomas Bernhard (David McLintock, trans.)
8. Concrete, Thomas Bernhard (David McLintock, trans.) (re-read)
9. Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard (David McLintock, trans.)
10. The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald (Michael Hulse, trans.)
11. Yes, Thomas Bernhard (Ewald Osers, trans.)
12. In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness, Chris Mercogliano
13. The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead
14. Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought From Antiquity to the Middle Ages, Ellen Meiksins Wood
15. Sex & War, Stan Goff
16. A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play, Vivian Gussin Paley
17. The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
18. Spurious, Lars Iyer
19. Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography, Rebecca Wisnant & Christine Stark, eds. (excerpt from Andrea Dworkin; from D.A. Clarke)
20. Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag
21. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv
22. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker
23. Death Sentence, Maurice Blanchot (Lydia Davis, trans.) (re-read)
24. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, Sara Ruddick
25. The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell (Charlotte Mandell, trans.)
26. The Last Novel, David Markson
27. The Tyranny of Science, Paul Feyerabend
28. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Silvia Federici (re-read) (also, also, also)
29. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Susan Bordo
30. The Words and the Land: Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth, Shlomo Sand (Ames Hodges, trans.)
31. The Man of Reason: "Male" & "Female" in Western Philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd
32. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich
33. Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child, Alice Miller (Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum, trans.)
34. Ubik, Philip K. Dick
35. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
36. The Female Man, Joanna Russ
37. The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
38. Tell Me A Riddle, Tillie Olsen
39. The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
40. We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Shirley Jackson
41. Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century, Catherine Lutz
42. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, Vandana Shiva
43. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism & Culture, Susan Bordo
44. The Village and the World: My Life, Our Times, Maria Mies (Madeline Ferretti-Theilig, trans.)
45. The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, Peter Linebaugh
46. The Vegetarian Myth: food, justice, and sustainability, Lierre Keith
47. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley
48. Reflections on Gender and Science, Evelyn Fox Keller
49. The Science Question in Feminism, Sandra Harding
50. The Work of Love: Unpaid Housework, Poverty and Sexual Violence at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa (Enda Brophy, trans.)
51. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, David R. Roediger
52. Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil, W.E.B. Du Bois
53. Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black, bell hooks (re-read)
54. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, bell hooks
55. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
56. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, Immanuel Wallerstein
57. We Who Are About To..., Joanna Russ
58. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
59. The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750, Immanuel Wallerstein
60. The Eye, Vladimir Nabokov (Dmitri & Vladimir Nabokov, trans.)
61. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward An Autobiography of A Race Concept, W.E.B. Du Bois
62. Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber
63. The Boy Who Would Be A Helicopter: The Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom, Vivian Gussin Paley
Some statistics
Number of books written by men: 30
Number of books written by women: 33
Number of books which were acquired via the Big Dalkey Get: 0
Number of other Dalkey books: 0
Number of books in translation: 14
Number of books by writers known primarily to me through their blogs: 2 (Lars Iyer, Stan Goff)
Number of books that were borrowed from the library: 12
Number of books read on the Kindle: 5
Fiction or Poetry (or sufficiently literary memoir):
Number of books: 24
Number that are poetry: 0
Number that are memoirs:1 (I'm arbitrarily counting Bernhard's My Prizes here)
Number that are re-reads: 1
Number of authors represented: 15
Number of books by female authors: 10
Number of female authors: 7
Number of books by American authors: 11
Number of American authors:
Number of books by African-American authors: 0
Number of African-American authors: 0
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 3
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 3 (Stead, Iyer, Shelley)
Number of books in translation:10
Number of authors of books in translation: 5
Number of translated books by female authors: 0
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 3 (German, French, Russian)
Most represented foreign language: German (7: 6 Bernhard (plus a 6th non-fiction-ish Bernhard), 1 Sebald)
Number of Nobel Prize-winners: 0
Number that could be categorized as science fiction: 6
Number of science fiction books written by women: 4
Number of books from before 1800: 0
Number of books from 1800 to 1899: 1
Number of books from 1900 to 1914: 0
Number of books from 1915-1944: 3 (Gilman, Nabokov, Stead)
Number of books from 1945 to 1970: 8 (all 3 Sh. Jackson, both PKD, Olsen, Blanchot, one Bernhard)
Number of books from 1971-1989: 7 (Le Guin, both Joann Russ novels, 4 Bernhard)
Number of books from 1990 to 1999: 1 (Sebald)
Number of books from 2000 to 2010: 3 (Markson, Littell, Bernhard's My Prizes)
Number of books from 2011: 1 (Iyer)
Non-Fiction:
Number of non-fiction books: 39
Number of books by female authors: 23
Number of books in translation: 4
Number that are biographies or letters or memoirs: 3
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 7
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 2
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 13
Number about pop music: 0
Number about science: 3
Number about feminism: 14
Number about parenting or education: 5
Number that are anthropology: 2
Comments & Observations:
This turned out to be a good reading year, all things considered, though you wouldn't know it from reading this blog. The skimpy number of links to posts in the list above is but one measure of the blog's extreme slowdown. Still, the reading itself was fruitful.
Overall, I completed quite a few more books this year than last, though not coming anywhere close to previous years. The numbers were heavily skewed towards various kinds of non-fiction. In addition, not only did I succeed in finally reading more women writers, but in fact for the first time I read more books written by women than by men. Weirdly, my sense was of the women heavily out-numbering the men, but it was really only by 3 books. No doubt this is an indicator in itself of male privilege. (How does the story go? When women number as little as 25% of any group, men tend to report that it was "dominated" by women? I could look that up, but you get the idea.)
I began the year finishing up Derrick Jensen's inimitable Language Older Than Words, which I actually did succeed in writing about. Soon I was reading Marilynne Robinson's two related collections of essays. I'd meant to write about those (they're worth writing about; I may yet write something drawing on them after all) but never got around to it. They're the closest things I read this year to literary criticism; I'm not convinced that's what they are. Then came the several Bernhard books, including a re-read of the excellent Concrete, which long ago was the first Bernhard novel I ever read. I also loved Woodcutters and Wittgenstein's Nephew, both of which I rate very highly, if perhaps just under the brilliant trio of Concrete, The Loser, and Old Masters (Extinction remains as yet un-read). I did not much care for Yes. Looking at it in context, it seems to point away from the heavier early novels and towards the lighter later ones that I prefer. But it felt off, and awkward, all the way through. Mixed in among these was Sebald's The Emigrants, which is probably my favorite of his novels. I finally waded my way through to the end of The Man Who Loved Children; the novel's many stretches of beauty may not have made up for the title character, who is perhaps the most unreadably annoying and obnoxious major character in literary history. Part of me wants to never again pick up another Christina Stead novel, going against my informal rule to give authors more than one shot; another part of me figures, well, at least that fucker won't be in the rest of them. (Right?) Besides, I already have Letty: Her Luck sitting there waiting for me. Gah. I spent a goodly amount of time with Jonathan Littell's remarkable novel, The Kindly Ones. It was on my mind for weeks, and I can still recall several scenes vividly. And yet, it shocked me a little to see it there on the list. I read that this year? Seems ages ago. Spurious was the only novel originally published in 2011 that I completed, but at least it was a good one.
For most of the year, I frankly had a hard time reading fiction. The characters and plots felt like impositions. So, the rest of the year was fairly dominated by non-fiction, except for a stretch during our summer trip, when I read my first two Philip K. Dick novels (I liked them just fine, especially Ubik), three Shirley Jackson books (all of which I thoroughly enjoyed, especially the novel We Have Always Lived In The Castle), the Tillie Olsen collection (the first story of which is devastatingly moving; the rest of which didn't work for me at all; I could barely make my way through them), and Joanna Russ' The Female Man. Later on I read Russ' We Who Are About To... I tend to forget she was a student of Nabokov's. One wonders what he would have thought of her fiction. In any event, I appreciated them and, as I've noted previously, I expect Russ to figure in this blog's future. Finally, I should mention The Dispossessed, my first Ursula Le Guin novel, and likely not my last.
I read no poetry this year, other than stray attempts at some Geoffrey Hill, and a few poems from Kay Ryan's Best Of It collection.
Brief interlude to include a list of books I read substantial portions of without yet completing by the year's end:
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction
bell hooks, Feminist Theory: from margin to center
Kolya Abramsky, ed. Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution
Rosalind Belben, Is Beauty Good
Mathias Énard, Zone
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents
Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Early in the year, I got the brilliant idea that I'd get a Kindle and use it to read pdfs, including pdfs of various books I'd come across (this was around the time of the February events in Egypt, when I really wanted to read Rule of Experts by Timothy Mitchell, and had acquired an e-copy of it; I still want to read it, but not on the Kindle). Well so, I got a secondhand-ish Kindle, and set about converting pdfs and. . . it didn't really work out. It's annoying; all too often, the books get all mangled in the conversion process. I did, however, discover that Amazon has all these free public domain books, so I downloaded several. Which is how I finally read, after all these years, W.E.B. DuBois' masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk. Later in the year, I read his second sort of memoir, Darkwater, also on the Kindle, then Dusk of Dawn, not on the Kindle. I expect to be reading more DuBois, especially his monumental study, Black Reconstruction. The Kindle experience is not one I relish. It's nice having easy access to several books at once, but frankly I don't enjoy the interface. No doubt more recent iterations, or something like the iPad, would change my opinion of e-reading somewhat, but on balance if I'm going to use the Kindle, I do not want the book to be long. (God, the last thing I'd want to do is read Proust on it. Ugh.)
In my brief Kindle-pdf experiment, I did read one full book, Stan Goff's Sex & War. Goff's book is a personal exploration of the links between militarism, misogyny, and sex from a feminist perspective. This led directly to the multi-author Not for Sale collection and really initiated one of the two great non-fiction threads of the year: feminism. I've already written about the Ruddick and Russ books and their role in this, as well as my re-read of Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch. I read a lot about feminism and science (cf. Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding) and feminism and philosophy (Susan Bordo). Federici led me to Dalla Costa, and also recommended Maria Mies' memoir (which, alas, I didn't think was very good, as a book, though she says many interesting and important things in it). My prior knowledge of Mies' classic Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale had led me to Vandana Shiva's work. All very helpful, fascinating, important. Ruddick's Maternal Thinking and Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born are, as noted, bibliographical goldmines.
In the midst of all this, I attended an excellent panel discussion on race, here in Baltimore, held at 2640. David Roediger was scheduled to be there, but was a no-show (some travel complication), but his famous study of the white working class, The Wages of Whiteness, was available for sale there. I snapped it up and read it immediately. A great book, to be sure, which saddened me deeply, but which also reminded me of my longstanding interest in the American history of race, which had been my focus in college and for the first few years after college (and which is why it was so weird I'd never read DuBois). It further brought to mind that the first feminist I'd ever read was, in fact, bell hooks. So I re-read the hooks I had (Talking Back), realized that I'd long since internalized her basic critiques of liberal white feminism, wondered if this wasn't why I'd not spent any time pursuing feminism as an area of study until very recently, even as events in my personal life helped radicalize my own feminism (though not necessarily in ways that would be familiar to the so-called (white) "radical feminists"). Then I took hooks' first book, Ain't I a Woman, out of the library, and in short order consumed it. And it, too, is a bibliographical goldmine. So now, in the coming year, I have a huge, interesting list of women writers to read, which crucially includes many women of color.
The other great non-fiction reading thread, which of course I see as related, was furthering my reading in the history and workings of capitalism. Last year's big deal was volume one of Capital itself. This year meant world-system analysis and anthropology, along with Marxist histories from the likes of Peter Linebaugh, as well as Federici's book, and the Italian Wages for Housework feminists she was originally linked with. The Long Twentieth Century, by the late Giovanni Arrighi, had been my only previous encounter with world-system analysis, but I'd found that book so fascinating, and so surprising and yet persuasive, in particular how it flew in the face of Marxist accounts of the origins of capitalism, that I wanted to know more. I came across Immanuel Wallerstein's brief introduction to world-system analysis, which is a delightful sort of historical overview of both the world-system itself, and the analysis. Late in the year, I saw Wallerstein speak (also at 2640). I picked up and read the first two volumes of his monumental study, The Modern World-System. I'll have more to say about these works in separate blog posts (really!), but suffice it to say that many things make a lot more sense to this reader after reading these books than they did before. Then, just before the end of the year, I read David Graeber's utterly engrossing book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and more and more things started to fall together. I see Debt as a perfect complement to the books by Wallerstein, Arrighi, Mies, Federici, Linebaugh & Rediker, etc. But again, separate blog posts are in order to explore the book itself and its relation to those others.
Before closing, I'd like to say a brief word about the small clutch of books about children and parenting and education. Many such books touch on a lot of important things, but seem of limited value insofar as the authors do not seem aware of the implications (political and cultural) of the problems they raise, and the types of solutions they seem to favor. Chris Mercogliano's In Defense of Childhood and Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods fit in this category. Vivian Gussin Paley's books manage to escape this problem by being more focused on day-to-day practical matters involving the play of young children in schools. I've written a little bit about her work before, but I'd like to emphasize how inspiring I find her work. Again, though, the political implications of what she writes about are incredibly vast (and part of me would love to know what Josipovici would make of it!). I hope to revisit her work in future blog posts as well. Finally, Alice Miller's book, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware is utterly fascinating and a necessary corrective to Freudian nonsense about sex drives and Oedipal complexes. Incidentally, Miller was not a feminist herself, but in the afterward to the edition of the book I have, she did highlight the work of feminists in bringing to light various poisonous parenting practices.
Ok, that wraps up another year of reading. Thank you.
1. A Language Older Than Words, Derrick Jensen
2. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Immanuel Wallerstein
3. The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, Marilynne Robinson
4. Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson
5. Prose, Thomas Bernhard (Martin Chalmers, trans.)
6. My Prizes: An Accounting, Thomas Bernhard (Carol Brown Janeway, trans.)
7. Wittgenstein's Nephew, Thomas Bernhard (David McLintock, trans.)
8. Concrete, Thomas Bernhard (David McLintock, trans.) (re-read)
9. Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard (David McLintock, trans.)
10. The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald (Michael Hulse, trans.)
11. Yes, Thomas Bernhard (Ewald Osers, trans.)
12. In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness, Chris Mercogliano
13. The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead
14. Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought From Antiquity to the Middle Ages, Ellen Meiksins Wood
15. Sex & War, Stan Goff
16. A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play, Vivian Gussin Paley
17. The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
18. Spurious, Lars Iyer
19. Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography, Rebecca Wisnant & Christine Stark, eds. (excerpt from Andrea Dworkin; from D.A. Clarke)
20. Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag
21. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv
22. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker
23. Death Sentence, Maurice Blanchot (Lydia Davis, trans.) (re-read)
24. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, Sara Ruddick
25. The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell (Charlotte Mandell, trans.)
26. The Last Novel, David Markson
27. The Tyranny of Science, Paul Feyerabend
28. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Silvia Federici (re-read) (also, also, also)
29. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Susan Bordo
30. The Words and the Land: Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth, Shlomo Sand (Ames Hodges, trans.)
31. The Man of Reason: "Male" & "Female" in Western Philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd
32. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich
33. Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child, Alice Miller (Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum, trans.)
34. Ubik, Philip K. Dick
35. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
36. The Female Man, Joanna Russ
37. The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
38. Tell Me A Riddle, Tillie Olsen
39. The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
40. We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Shirley Jackson
41. Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century, Catherine Lutz
42. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, Vandana Shiva
43. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism & Culture, Susan Bordo
44. The Village and the World: My Life, Our Times, Maria Mies (Madeline Ferretti-Theilig, trans.)
45. The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, Peter Linebaugh
46. The Vegetarian Myth: food, justice, and sustainability, Lierre Keith
47. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley
48. Reflections on Gender and Science, Evelyn Fox Keller
49. The Science Question in Feminism, Sandra Harding
50. The Work of Love: Unpaid Housework, Poverty and Sexual Violence at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa (Enda Brophy, trans.)
51. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, David R. Roediger
52. Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil, W.E.B. Du Bois
53. Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black, bell hooks (re-read)
54. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, bell hooks
55. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
56. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, Immanuel Wallerstein
57. We Who Are About To..., Joanna Russ
58. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
59. The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750, Immanuel Wallerstein
60. The Eye, Vladimir Nabokov (Dmitri & Vladimir Nabokov, trans.)
61. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward An Autobiography of A Race Concept, W.E.B. Du Bois
62. Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber
63. The Boy Who Would Be A Helicopter: The Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom, Vivian Gussin Paley
Some statistics
Number of books written by men: 30
Number of books written by women: 33
Number of books which were acquired via the Big Dalkey Get: 0
Number of other Dalkey books: 0
Number of books in translation: 14
Number of books by writers known primarily to me through their blogs: 2 (Lars Iyer, Stan Goff)
Number of books that were borrowed from the library: 12
Number of books read on the Kindle: 5
Fiction or Poetry (or sufficiently literary memoir):
Number of books: 24
Number that are poetry: 0
Number that are memoirs:1 (I'm arbitrarily counting Bernhard's My Prizes here)
Number that are re-reads: 1
Number of authors represented: 15
Number of books by female authors: 10
Number of female authors: 7
Number of books by American authors: 11
Number of American authors:
Number of books by African-American authors: 0
Number of African-American authors: 0
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 3
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 3 (Stead, Iyer, Shelley)
Number of books in translation:10
Number of authors of books in translation: 5
Number of translated books by female authors: 0
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 3 (German, French, Russian)
Most represented foreign language: German (7: 6 Bernhard (plus a 6th non-fiction-ish Bernhard), 1 Sebald)
Number of Nobel Prize-winners: 0
Number that could be categorized as science fiction: 6
Number of science fiction books written by women: 4
Number of books from before 1800: 0
Number of books from 1800 to 1899: 1
Number of books from 1900 to 1914: 0
Number of books from 1915-1944: 3 (Gilman, Nabokov, Stead)
Number of books from 1945 to 1970: 8 (all 3 Sh. Jackson, both PKD, Olsen, Blanchot, one Bernhard)
Number of books from 1971-1989: 7 (Le Guin, both Joann Russ novels, 4 Bernhard)
Number of books from 1990 to 1999: 1 (Sebald)
Number of books from 2000 to 2010: 3 (Markson, Littell, Bernhard's My Prizes)
Number of books from 2011: 1 (Iyer)
Non-Fiction:
Number of non-fiction books: 39
Number of books by female authors: 23
Number of books in translation: 4
Number that are biographies or letters or memoirs: 3
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 7
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 2
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 13
Number about pop music: 0
Number about science: 3
Number about feminism: 14
Number about parenting or education: 5
Number that are anthropology: 2
Comments & Observations:
This turned out to be a good reading year, all things considered, though you wouldn't know it from reading this blog. The skimpy number of links to posts in the list above is but one measure of the blog's extreme slowdown. Still, the reading itself was fruitful.
Overall, I completed quite a few more books this year than last, though not coming anywhere close to previous years. The numbers were heavily skewed towards various kinds of non-fiction. In addition, not only did I succeed in finally reading more women writers, but in fact for the first time I read more books written by women than by men. Weirdly, my sense was of the women heavily out-numbering the men, but it was really only by 3 books. No doubt this is an indicator in itself of male privilege. (How does the story go? When women number as little as 25% of any group, men tend to report that it was "dominated" by women? I could look that up, but you get the idea.)
I began the year finishing up Derrick Jensen's inimitable Language Older Than Words, which I actually did succeed in writing about. Soon I was reading Marilynne Robinson's two related collections of essays. I'd meant to write about those (they're worth writing about; I may yet write something drawing on them after all) but never got around to it. They're the closest things I read this year to literary criticism; I'm not convinced that's what they are. Then came the several Bernhard books, including a re-read of the excellent Concrete, which long ago was the first Bernhard novel I ever read. I also loved Woodcutters and Wittgenstein's Nephew, both of which I rate very highly, if perhaps just under the brilliant trio of Concrete, The Loser, and Old Masters (Extinction remains as yet un-read). I did not much care for Yes. Looking at it in context, it seems to point away from the heavier early novels and towards the lighter later ones that I prefer. But it felt off, and awkward, all the way through. Mixed in among these was Sebald's The Emigrants, which is probably my favorite of his novels. I finally waded my way through to the end of The Man Who Loved Children; the novel's many stretches of beauty may not have made up for the title character, who is perhaps the most unreadably annoying and obnoxious major character in literary history. Part of me wants to never again pick up another Christina Stead novel, going against my informal rule to give authors more than one shot; another part of me figures, well, at least that fucker won't be in the rest of them. (Right?) Besides, I already have Letty: Her Luck sitting there waiting for me. Gah. I spent a goodly amount of time with Jonathan Littell's remarkable novel, The Kindly Ones. It was on my mind for weeks, and I can still recall several scenes vividly. And yet, it shocked me a little to see it there on the list. I read that this year? Seems ages ago. Spurious was the only novel originally published in 2011 that I completed, but at least it was a good one.
For most of the year, I frankly had a hard time reading fiction. The characters and plots felt like impositions. So, the rest of the year was fairly dominated by non-fiction, except for a stretch during our summer trip, when I read my first two Philip K. Dick novels (I liked them just fine, especially Ubik), three Shirley Jackson books (all of which I thoroughly enjoyed, especially the novel We Have Always Lived In The Castle), the Tillie Olsen collection (the first story of which is devastatingly moving; the rest of which didn't work for me at all; I could barely make my way through them), and Joanna Russ' The Female Man. Later on I read Russ' We Who Are About To... I tend to forget she was a student of Nabokov's. One wonders what he would have thought of her fiction. In any event, I appreciated them and, as I've noted previously, I expect Russ to figure in this blog's future. Finally, I should mention The Dispossessed, my first Ursula Le Guin novel, and likely not my last.
I read no poetry this year, other than stray attempts at some Geoffrey Hill, and a few poems from Kay Ryan's Best Of It collection.
Brief interlude to include a list of books I read substantial portions of without yet completing by the year's end:
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction
bell hooks, Feminist Theory: from margin to center
Kolya Abramsky, ed. Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution
Rosalind Belben, Is Beauty Good
Mathias Énard, Zone
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents
Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Early in the year, I got the brilliant idea that I'd get a Kindle and use it to read pdfs, including pdfs of various books I'd come across (this was around the time of the February events in Egypt, when I really wanted to read Rule of Experts by Timothy Mitchell, and had acquired an e-copy of it; I still want to read it, but not on the Kindle). Well so, I got a secondhand-ish Kindle, and set about converting pdfs and. . . it didn't really work out. It's annoying; all too often, the books get all mangled in the conversion process. I did, however, discover that Amazon has all these free public domain books, so I downloaded several. Which is how I finally read, after all these years, W.E.B. DuBois' masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk. Later in the year, I read his second sort of memoir, Darkwater, also on the Kindle, then Dusk of Dawn, not on the Kindle. I expect to be reading more DuBois, especially his monumental study, Black Reconstruction. The Kindle experience is not one I relish. It's nice having easy access to several books at once, but frankly I don't enjoy the interface. No doubt more recent iterations, or something like the iPad, would change my opinion of e-reading somewhat, but on balance if I'm going to use the Kindle, I do not want the book to be long. (God, the last thing I'd want to do is read Proust on it. Ugh.)
In my brief Kindle-pdf experiment, I did read one full book, Stan Goff's Sex & War. Goff's book is a personal exploration of the links between militarism, misogyny, and sex from a feminist perspective. This led directly to the multi-author Not for Sale collection and really initiated one of the two great non-fiction threads of the year: feminism. I've already written about the Ruddick and Russ books and their role in this, as well as my re-read of Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch. I read a lot about feminism and science (cf. Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding) and feminism and philosophy (Susan Bordo). Federici led me to Dalla Costa, and also recommended Maria Mies' memoir (which, alas, I didn't think was very good, as a book, though she says many interesting and important things in it). My prior knowledge of Mies' classic Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale had led me to Vandana Shiva's work. All very helpful, fascinating, important. Ruddick's Maternal Thinking and Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born are, as noted, bibliographical goldmines.
In the midst of all this, I attended an excellent panel discussion on race, here in Baltimore, held at 2640. David Roediger was scheduled to be there, but was a no-show (some travel complication), but his famous study of the white working class, The Wages of Whiteness, was available for sale there. I snapped it up and read it immediately. A great book, to be sure, which saddened me deeply, but which also reminded me of my longstanding interest in the American history of race, which had been my focus in college and for the first few years after college (and which is why it was so weird I'd never read DuBois). It further brought to mind that the first feminist I'd ever read was, in fact, bell hooks. So I re-read the hooks I had (Talking Back), realized that I'd long since internalized her basic critiques of liberal white feminism, wondered if this wasn't why I'd not spent any time pursuing feminism as an area of study until very recently, even as events in my personal life helped radicalize my own feminism (though not necessarily in ways that would be familiar to the so-called (white) "radical feminists"). Then I took hooks' first book, Ain't I a Woman, out of the library, and in short order consumed it. And it, too, is a bibliographical goldmine. So now, in the coming year, I have a huge, interesting list of women writers to read, which crucially includes many women of color.
The other great non-fiction reading thread, which of course I see as related, was furthering my reading in the history and workings of capitalism. Last year's big deal was volume one of Capital itself. This year meant world-system analysis and anthropology, along with Marxist histories from the likes of Peter Linebaugh, as well as Federici's book, and the Italian Wages for Housework feminists she was originally linked with. The Long Twentieth Century, by the late Giovanni Arrighi, had been my only previous encounter with world-system analysis, but I'd found that book so fascinating, and so surprising and yet persuasive, in particular how it flew in the face of Marxist accounts of the origins of capitalism, that I wanted to know more. I came across Immanuel Wallerstein's brief introduction to world-system analysis, which is a delightful sort of historical overview of both the world-system itself, and the analysis. Late in the year, I saw Wallerstein speak (also at 2640). I picked up and read the first two volumes of his monumental study, The Modern World-System. I'll have more to say about these works in separate blog posts (really!), but suffice it to say that many things make a lot more sense to this reader after reading these books than they did before. Then, just before the end of the year, I read David Graeber's utterly engrossing book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and more and more things started to fall together. I see Debt as a perfect complement to the books by Wallerstein, Arrighi, Mies, Federici, Linebaugh & Rediker, etc. But again, separate blog posts are in order to explore the book itself and its relation to those others.
Before closing, I'd like to say a brief word about the small clutch of books about children and parenting and education. Many such books touch on a lot of important things, but seem of limited value insofar as the authors do not seem aware of the implications (political and cultural) of the problems they raise, and the types of solutions they seem to favor. Chris Mercogliano's In Defense of Childhood and Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods fit in this category. Vivian Gussin Paley's books manage to escape this problem by being more focused on day-to-day practical matters involving the play of young children in schools. I've written a little bit about her work before, but I'd like to emphasize how inspiring I find her work. Again, though, the political implications of what she writes about are incredibly vast (and part of me would love to know what Josipovici would make of it!). I hope to revisit her work in future blog posts as well. Finally, Alice Miller's book, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware is utterly fascinating and a necessary corrective to Freudian nonsense about sex drives and Oedipal complexes. Incidentally, Miller was not a feminist herself, but in the afterward to the edition of the book I have, she did highlight the work of feminists in bringing to light various poisonous parenting practices.
Ok, that wraps up another year of reading. Thank you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)