Another year of reading done, another year of reviewing less than 10% of what I read. It was a great year for discovering new authors--over half of my top 10 are people I'd never read before--and new places--I spent a chunk of the year reading and gathering lit from Africa and I'm excited to dive into even more international stories in 2023. Here are some quick stats: 31 books by women, 33 by men, from around 20 different countries, many of which were new to me. 20 POC and a handful of LGBTQ+ authors (room for improvement there). 18 nonfiction, 4 poetry collections, 42 fiction. And as Chris mentioned, the more I read, the more there is to read. So without further ado:
(Many) Honorable Mentions:
Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner
Women only want one thing and it's to trade their soul to Satan for freedom.
The Art of Asking Your Boss For a Raise, Georges Perec
Men only want one thing and it's a raise.
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor
Elderly women only want one thing and it's a flaky twenty-something who'll pretend he's their nephew.
The Silence, Don DeLillo
The modern world only wants one thing and it's silence.
The Doloriad, Missouri Williams
So this is a weird one. I can't say I really enjoyed reading this frankly upsetting post-apocalyptic novel about an incestuous family that's trying to repopulate the world in the most grotesque, squalid way possible but with its dense biblical language, stubborn refusal to perform, and sitcom called Will Someone Get Aquinas In Here, it won me over, kind of.
Before Freedom: When I Just Can Remember, Various, Edited by Belinda Hurmence
This collection of oral freed-slave narratives was as moving as you'd hope, but in addition, the voices themselves were so incredibly rich. Every writer could learn something from the kind of spontaneous poetry on display here.
Too Loud a Solitude, Borumil Hrabal
Book burners only want one thing, and it's to be pulped.
The Cabinet, Kim Un-su
One of the strangest things I read this year, The Cabinet start off as a loosely connected set of stories then turns into a spy novel via X-Files in South Korea.
Multiple Choice, Alejandro Zambra
Can a novel made up of multiple choice questions actually be good?
A. Yes
B. Yes
C. Yes
D. Maybe
The Fifties, David Halberstam
The biggest book I read this year, Halberstam's sprawling survey of one of the most tumultuous decades in American history puts the lie to the Silver Age myth but still manages to be great fun.
Evangelical Anxiety, Charles Marsh
Former evangelicals only want one thing, and it's to write a spiritual memoir as raw, moving, and artful as this one. Guarantee you've never read anything like it.
God's Country, Percival Everett
A farcical western by way of Wodehouse wasn't what I thought I needed, but I was wrong.
Distant Star, Roberto Bolaño
I tried The Savage Detectives a while back and dropped out but this novella about a man who spends his whole life in the wake of a poet/serial killer scratched the fictional literary history itch I didn't know I had (Well, I did know I had it if I'm being honest).
Top 10 Books:
As always, the order of the top 10 (and even what's included) is provisional--if I wrote this tomorrow it would look different.
10. No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood
An idea that sounds both impossible and terrible on paper--let's write a novel about Twitter!--somehow pulls it off with just the right amount of cringe and flair. It helps that Lockwood, a poet, is clearly terminally online, and she writes about the ephemera of the web with just enough gravity to make it both hilarious and, in the novel's second half, moving and meaningful. Truly, a great book that could've gone so wrong but didn't.
9. Open Secrets, Alice Munro
Munro is simply the best short story writer who has ever lived, and this is one of her stronger collections. A semi-connected series of stories about the sad, funny, and mysterious things behind the lives we choose to believe we lead, it is, like all of her work, infinitely better than a blurb makes it sound. No one captures life like her, and no one else (and I do mean no one) can make 10 pages feel like a novel.
8. Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih
Perhaps the best known novel to emerge from Sudan, Salih's searing work manages to cover mythmaking, colonialism, Sudanese culture, gender roles, and almost everything else imaginable in less than 200pp. I really regret not reviewing this one because it's packed full of great stuff. Instead of reading this lousy blurb, read the book.
7. The Mandlebaum Gate, Muriel Spark
Spark, long recognized (by this blog at least) as the queen of the short novel wrote her only lengthy work here, a thriller/philosophical novel set in Israel and circling, though never being consumed by, the conflicts they were roiling (and indeed still roil) in Israel/Palestine. Like all Spark novels, it's funny and moves fast; perhaps less typically it also delves deeply into its characters and their motivations. It's enough to make you wish she'd written at least a couple more long books.
6. When Women Kill, Alia Trabucco Zeran, trans. Sophie Hughes
This book, which tells the true stories of four women convicted of murder in Chile by combining news articles, narrative nonfiction, poetry, and journals by Zeran herself, is like nothing else I've read. More than the true crime book its title promises, it's a book-length meditation on misogyny, male-female violence, feminism, and the ways we interpret and compartmentalize "bad" women. I read it in a day because I literally couldn't put it down.
5. Free Day, Inez Cagnati
The last book I read this year was one of the best. The back cover description makes it sound like a feel-good story of a girl escaping her abusive and limited environment through education and tenacity. In reality, it's a truly crushing book about the darkness that lies behind the triumphant stories we tell, the difficulties of overcoming our past, and the sobering realities of being the "other". But the narrator, a 14 year old Italian immigrant in France, is great company, funny, observant, and sometimes surprisingly naive.
4. Harrow, Joy Williams
There's really no way to summarize this book, certainly the strangest of Williams' novels to date. As times frustratingly opaque, this post-climate-apocalypse novel is tremendously unsettling--I took a break halfway through. If you want to know how humanity is likely to respond when we hit the point of no return, you could do worse than this story about a hotel full of weirdos and a cosmic tribunal.
3. A Ghost in the Throat, Doireann Ni Ghriofa
I don't remember why I picked this up, but Ghriofa's memoir about translating poetry, motherhood, and the messy, slipshod beauty of life is the only book to make me really cry this year. Beautiful prose, unsparing, but I'm so glad to have read it.
2. St. Sebastian's Abyss, Mark Haber
The best surprise of the year, this novella about two art critics who spend their entire lives, first as friends then as rivals, thinking and writing about a postcard-sized painting called St. Sebastian's Abyss feels like it was written especially for me. Full of clever critical satire, invented art history, Borgesian analysis of nonexistent art, and the very human story at the heart of it, reminded me why I love reading so much. And Mark follows me on Twitter now so.
1. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante
I thought Haber would be my #1 book but when I looked at my list, I knew it had to be Ferrante. There's just nothing like the Neapolitan novels--the sense of place they conjure, the indelible characters (even after a 2 year gap since reading the second book I remembered every one of them), and their earthy, brutal storytelling--they're such beautiful, nasty, human pieces of art. This one spends about half of its 600pp talking about labor organizing and it's still the best thing I read this year. I'm excited to finish the story of Lenu and Lila in 2023, but also a little sad--I doubt I'll ever see another series like this.
And that's a wrap!
