Thoughts about the year in reading, 2009:
The Dawn of the Reformation, Heiko Oberman
More information about nominalism than I required.
An Exorcist Tells His Story, Gabriele Amorth
Chiefly, in this book, I was surprised at the amount of paperwork it takes to be an exorcist.
Essay on the Principles of Population, Thomas Malthus
One of those books—like Atlas Shrugged or Left Behind—that you read to verify that it’s really as vile as you think it is. It is. They are.
A Reply to Mr. Malthus’s Essay, William Hazlitt
Had me laughing and cheering out loud and wondering why one hears so little about this once-canonical Romantic-era essayist.
Marx and Engels on Malthus
I noticed something here that I intend to test in future readings of this venerable German-English law firm: the sections attributed solely to Engels seemed more humane, less abstract, and less anti-religious than those attributed to Marx. Hmmm.
Henry VI Tetralogy, Shakespeare
No, I hadn’t read any of these plays before. No, I wasn’t especially enthralled; these characters are all far too easily read as sketches for Macbeth and Iago, et. al.
Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, Heiko Oberman
Really a rich and fascinating biography, painstakingly sensitive to Luther’s theology, and plainly intended for a more popular audience than Item 1 above.
The Politics of the Reformation in Germany, Thomas A. Brady
Obviously, this was for a class, and I can’t remember a damn thing about it except something like “There used to be these things called Imperial Cities, and they were, like, really important for the Reformation and stuff,” which is no memory at all.
Man in the Dark, Paul Auster
Oracle Night, Paul Auster
I keep reading Auster novels and thinking “Well, that was almost as good as The Book of Illusions…”
The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin
This’ll never catch on.
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Samuel Delany
Surprisingly boring, for Delany, until the final third, which contains a moving and involving portrayal of sudden bereavement. (Also, space-dragon hunting.)
The World of Catholic Renewal, 1530-1770, R. Po-Chia Hsia
Again: All I remember is something like “There was a lot more to Reformation-era Catholics than hot irons and Counter-Reforming, y’know.”
Trent and All That, John O’Malley
Same as Item 12 above, although O’Malley’s a much more engaging writer than most of the historians I sampled this semester.
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
So, so great.
The Flight of Icarus, Raymond Queneau
This is a novel about a writer whose characters keep up-and-quitting his novel and going to live off generous Parisian prostitutes and getting virtuous jobs as mechanics. The execution is approximately as awesome as the conception.
The Blue Guide To Indiana, Michael Martone
And this is a novel-in-the-form-of-fake-travel-guide, wherein we learn of such Midwestern landmarks as The Site of Wendell Wilkie’s Ascension Into Heaven and The Transcontinental Mayonnaise Pipline. Martone is more than a humorist; his books begin in parody but end someplace richer altogether.
Pensees: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, Michael Martone
Wonderful for all the same reasons as The Blue Guide. Martone evokes the slackjawed idiocy of a Dan Quayle so hilariously that you wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d stuck to that for the duration of this (very short) book. Had he done so we’d have ended up with something like those funny, angry pastiches that George Saunders does so well for The New Yorker. But instead he gives Dan Quayle, of all people, a consciousness that is not less interesting for being Dan Quayle’s, and he deepens and enriches the reader’s sense of what goes on in any human head when its mind wanders. That is both more aesthetically satisfying and, on a deep level, liberal than satire could ever be.
Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley
A fascinating argument that links fundamentalist Darwinism to, of all things, Rawlsian accounts of justice, and argues that both are based on a too-narrow conception of ethical responsibility.
A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers, Hugh Kenner
I almost understood Zukofsky for about two minutes after reading this book. Kenner’s writing is always wonderfully epigrammatic, and his take on The Great Gatsby was especially fascinating.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber
Weber writes well, for a sociologist (he’s good at evocative noun phrases like “iron cages” or, well, “spirit of capitalism” that seem to explain a lot while actually existing nowhere except in the realm of poetry). That may explain some of his influence. But proving a case about Calvinism (which was an international movement, like Modernism) by quoting a bunch of English Puritans, most of them 50-100 years after Calvin and raised in a culture that had been blaming, monitoring and hating the poor with pathological vigor for centuries before Luther … well, that’s not exactly airtight reasoning.
L’Assommoir, Emile Zola
Boring. But if I just read one more Zola novel I bet I’ll see why he’s so important.
Isle of the Dead, Roger Zelazny
I tried Zelazny because people kept insisting that he is a science fiction writer who can also craft a memorable sentence. This book didn’t blow me away, but it more or less lived up to that promise.
La Curee, Emile Zola
Still boring, but I just know there’s got to be something here. We can’t cut and run. The next four to six months are crucial.
Lowboy, John Wray
I was impressed with this novel’s ability to give emotional heft to the problem of global warming (the full scope of which is so far outside the traditional timescale of novels). James Wood makes some fair points, though, about Wray’s addiction to detective-novel clichés.
The Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz
Seemed like a defensible thesis to me: Reagan’s importance to the Right came from his ability to phrase essentially grasping, me-first ideas as if they were utopian.
La Terre, Emile Zola
Still boring. But we cannot lose face. Our national resolve will not waver. We will conquer Mt. Naturalism! We will … aw, fuck it.
As an interesting side note, the translations of L’Assommoir and La Terre that I read were by the once-noted fin-de-siecle poets Arthur Symons and Ernest “I Was Faithful To Thee, Cynara, In My Fashion” Dowson, respectively (and Dowson’s translation gets incredibly lazy toward the end, he starts taking the very frequent French epithet “En effet” as “In effect” even in sentences where that construal makes no sense whatsoever, and you can just hear him thinking “No one will ever finish this Godawful novel anyway. Let’s get these last 300 pages done so I can cash my paycheck and get messed up on cheap read wine!”). Both were part of a specially-printed series that was aimed at rich book collectors—as this was, in the 1890s, the only way to publish Zola in English without getting busted on porn charges. The other English Zola translator of the era had gone to jail on precisely such charges, because his books had been marketed to a mass audience—he translated Pot-Bouille as Piping-Hot!, which makes it sound like one of those showgirl revues Bertie Wooster is always backing. The whole story is told here, and it’s rather more fascinating than Zola’s novels tend to be.
Hearing God, Dallas Willard
Willard is a bit close to fundamentalism for my taste, but this was an incredibly helpful book. No lie.
Stories in the Worst Way, Gary Lutz
My thoughts, such as they are, are here.
Ideas of Good and Evil, W. B. Yeats
The Cutting of an Agate, W. B. Yeats
Every five pages, some totally arresting and brilliant idea. Then pages of silly and dangerous proto-Fascist mumbo-jumbo. A mixed experience.
The Story of the Stone, Volume I: The Golden Days, Cao Xueqin
The Story of the Stone, Volume II: The Crab-Flower Club, Cao Xueqin
The Story of the Stone, last part, Cao Xuexin
An extraordinary book (supposedly one of the five great classics of the Chinese novel) that takes an extraordinarily long time to read. I finally wimped out after the second volume and finished the story in the form of an abridgment, but I promised myself that, sometime in retirement, I’d get around to the whole thing.
The Amalgamation Polka, Stephen Wright
The first half of this book satisfied and impressed me in ways that the second half didn’t even seem to be trying to do. After a totally destabilizing Civil War battle scene the book seems to lose its focus up to its brilliantly Gothic ending, in a ruined Southern mansion where a maniac is trying to come up with the chemical solution that will turn black people white.
Short Eyes, Miguel Pinero
Tough to read but extremely well-constructed play about a child molester’s experiences in jail. (Except, as we later learn, he may not even be guilty …?)
The Secret Rose, W.B. Yeats
Irish mythology just doesn’t do it for me, I guess.
Going Native, Stephen Wright
Wright seems to have a thing for episodically-constructed journey novels. In this case a man leaves his wife to become a sort of amoral, Natural Born Killers-like figure. The writing is disturbing and exact.
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
Question: When a European writer achieves “contrarianism” by depicting Jews as foolish and backward people who can’t accept a little polytheism among friends, why exactly isn’t that anti-Semitic?
Contemporary Writers, Virginia Woolf
This book is made up of essays that Woolf’s executors thought weren’t good enough for her “Collected Essays.” To the person who has read Contemporary Writers, that is a terrifying thought indeed.
Eternal Enemies, Adam Zagajewski
I remember liking these poems but not why I liked them. Something about reading Zagajewski reminded me of listening to the Go-Betweens.
Negative Blue, Charles Wright
I seem to have a terrible memory for poetry this year.
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh
I had always heard what a sexist, chain-smoking, snobby old drunk Evelyn Waugh was supposed to be. In this novel, the only one of his that I’ve read, he seems to turn all his satirical irritation against himself, for being the dyspeptic person he was. The effect is oddly moving.
Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess
I was impressed at the time by the way Burgess managed to hook so much twentieth-century experience into a single character’s life, but this book began fading from my memory the instant I finished it: always a bad sign.
Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe: The stick with which upper-middle-class liberals beat themselves. I enjoyed one or two of the essays on science in this book, but the novella, Ambush at Fort Bragg, was absolutely Ayn Randian in its overdeterminedness, its cartoonish characterizations, and its affection for thuggish behavior. Wolfe’s thesis seems to be that journalists don’t understand what a hardship it was for America’s military to go and protect us from the Great Vietnamese/Nicarguan/Iraqi/Somalian Menace—whether such protection is necessary never troubles Wolfe’s dandified little head—and, thus, we should be sympathetic and patient when a soldier has to murder a homosexual or two in order to blow off a little steam. What’re those people trying to do in the Army, anyway? It’s a sick little book.
The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald
Made me curious about Fitzgerald’s other novels but more so about Novalis, the German Romantic poet who is the subject of this one.
Loving, Henry Green
Good enough to make me want to read more Green.
White Noise, Don DeLillo
As a series of essays and setpieces, this was impressive. As a novel I didn’t think it held together as well as did Libra, which is the other DeLillo I’ve read.
Selected Stories, Checkhov
You can tell that through these months I was preparing for MFA Comps; I read a lot of amazing writers for the first time, people I should’ve gotten to a decade ago, and wasn’t able to give any of them the attention they deserved.
Loitering With Intent, Muriel Spark
See previous entry, but this book was totally hilarious.
Excitability, Diane Williams
I did not figure out what Williams was up to in these stories. I’ll try again, sooner or later, but this book defeated me.
Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain
The best way to read this book is in bits and pieces, as if it were a magazine, not straight through; either way it’s one of the greatest pieces of travel writing I’ve ever read.
Short Stories of Gogol, Gogol
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
See Item 50 above, but I have to say: Conrad’s prose is a little purple sometimes for my taste, and this book seemed to be so indebted to colonialist thought-habits that I’m not sure it can even exist, for readers, in the same way that it once did. That is to say, any classic is going to be full of social-philosophical assumptions that a modern audience will find repugnant; for most of these we can make silent corrections, adjustments, reservations. (Don Quixote is brave in the context of his society; it’s actually not a good thing to go around killing people who don’t admit your lady is the prettiest, though. Still, the bravery is left over.) I’m not sure how much of Heart of Darkness remains once we make those reservations. He doesn’t seem to question the essential premise of colonialism, that there are these dark silly people who won’t get anywhere till they’re subjugated; as with Apocalypse Now, which I found to be a shallowly racist movie, the only question is whether We Civilized People can truly accomplish our Civilizing Mission without Sinking To Their Level.
The Devil’s Delusion, David Berlinski
Infinite Ascent, David Berlinski
David Berlinski writes better about modern mathematics for a popular audience than anyone I’ve encountered. Unfortunately, as a snobbish Paris-dwelling Commentary contributor, he always attempts to spice up his material with little “jokes” that are almost always at the expense of women, and which make him sound, in a few cases, like someone you’d rather your sister not have to work for. It’s kind of like discovering the greatest cookbook in the world, but every twenty pages or so, the author writes, “… At this point you will have a small pool of reusable olive oil. And by the way, I really hate n*gg*rs. And f*gg*ts. And women who think they have the capacity for abstract thought required to become mathematicians. Why should they worry their curvy little bottoms over such things? Decant the leftover oil into a frying pan …”
Gilgamesh, David Ferry
I’ve read a couple Gilgameshes; this was the one that got me emotionally involved.
Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon
Finally a Thomas Pynchon novel that I was completely sold on, from very early on. The things that he showed he could do in Gravity’s Rainbow are done here, but a) based on better ideas (GR seemed entirely built on Max Weber’s thesis, and see Item 20 above for my problems with that), and b) more importantly, I could actually imagine caring about the adventures and fates of these characters.
Atlantis: Three Tales, Samuel Delany
My admiration for this book was beyond expression.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007
A Study in Scarlet, A. Conan Doyle
Things I Did Not Know About Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: 1) Mormons really freaked him out. 2) He was prone to stuffing his novels with 80-page-long flashbacks right at the point where they start to get good.
The Bible and the Ancient Near East, Gordon and Rendsburg
Why do I so often end up finding the work of biblical archeologists more helpful in actually making sense out of the Hebrew Bible than I do the work of Biblical Studies scholar?
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Sanctimonious, didactic, melodramatic, and ending on a sour note of counter-prejudice-as-cultural-homeopathy. Yes, it was emotionally involving (I was gratified when Celie and the narrator finally got down to it); there were sentences that showed a truly skilled writer at work (“… two veterans of love”). Still, I’ve got better things to do than be told, as punishment for centuries of white straight male hegemony, to hate myself.
The Nine Commandments, David Noel Freedman
Another reading of the Bible that makes a lot of sense if you ignore a bunch of stuff.
Reckless Eyeballing, Ishmael Reed
Writin’ is Fightin’, Ishmael Reed
Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed
Ishmael Reed represents one of those limit cases: how fundamentally and articulately can I disagree with an author’s basic assumptions and still enjoy him or her? In Reed’s case, quite a lot. His whole take on monotheism as “Atonism” strikes me as brilliant-but-dumb—sort of like how one feels about Freud or Wilhelm Reich, or conspiracy theorists—but the books he gets out of it are fascinatingly playful and ingenious. (Reckless Eyeballing is the weakest of these three books; its satirical attacks on Alice Walker are hilarious—one character writes a famous play called Wrong-Headed Man which is then adapted into an Oscar-winning tearjerker by a famously racist white liberal director—but there’s not much to the book beyond them.)
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
I have nothing to say (about this book at least) that hasn’t been better said by Marilynne Robinson.
Corregidora, Gayl Jones
Not a pleasant book, but an extremely accomplished one. (“She looked fifteen and older than fifteen” is a memorably dead-on sentence.) Both this and The Color Purple forced me to confront my own male privilege in an uncomfortable way, but because the portrayal of men in this book is so much more nuanced—Walker’s men are extraordinarily bad, then good after a conversion experience; or they stay bad; or (in one instance) they are good ab initio, while Jones’s men cross and recross those borders constantly—I was infinitely more unsettled and impressed by Jones.
What Are Intellectuals Good For, George Scialabba
My thoughts will soon be posted here.
Elbow Room, James Alan MacPherson
This guy doesn’t get read enough. I thought the title story was especially impressive.
The World of Biblical Literature, Robert Alter
The Five Books of Moses, Robert Alter
The David Story, Robert Alter
I used to hate reading the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible. This is a strange way for a devout Christian to feel, but there it is—and I think it has something to do with the fundamentalist habit of treating the Bible as a lease agreement between humans and God, made up not of chapters or poems or stories but verses, with the main purpose of verses being to police oneself and other people. (“No, it says here in Colossians 2:3 that you can’t think that!”) It never occurred to me that the authors of the Bible might have felt human and emotional interest in the authoritative stories they were trying to communicate. Robert Alter fixed all that for me. He is the best English translator the Hebrew Bible has ever seen.
This time through it struck me that, for all that Saul is the villain I-II Samuel, there are few sadder moments in the Ancient Near Eastern or Classical literature I’ve read sadder than when he sinks to his knees before Samuel, accidentally tearing the latter’s garments. All the pathos of Shakespeare’s Richard II was clearly stolen from the Samuel author’s portraiture.
Indispensable Enemies, Walter Karp
An interesting thesis that Karp drives into the ground: that the best explanation of both Republican- and Democratic-party behavior is not the need to win elections (which is always what the fecklessness of, say, a Harry Reid is blamed on), but the need to establish and consolidate the fundraising power and, well, financial stability of party operatives. I learned some fascinating history from this book, took away some sad premonitions about how the Obama presidency might play out, and heard—for the first time ever—a left-wing case against the power of labor unions. Definitely worth reading, with a grain of salt.
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, Vladimir Nabokov
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Vladimir Nabokov
Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, Vladimir Nabokov
King, Queen, Knave, Vladimir Nabokov
It’s heartening to know that, even if he perfected the smoothness of his prose style very early on (as some of these stories show), early Nabokov can be pretty bad. King, Queen, Knave is shallow and predictable. Some of the stories are fantastic, but a good number are fairly pedestrian. It gives one hope.
If You See an Adjective, Kill It, Ben Yagoda
Yagoda’s books are good bedtime reading for people interested in language. They’re superficial, quote-ridden, and fun.
Whores for Gloria, William T. Vollmann
There is much more to this book than Vollmann’s obsession with prostitutes. That said, you really have to dig for it, and I didn’t find the experience pleasant.
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
I found this not to be overrated at all. Even the best Southern white novelists, though (and Percy is one of the best), seem to buy into the idea of a fine-old-traditional-culture-that-modernity-eats-away-at, and I keep wanting to scream, “Slavery, you shitheads! What about slavery?!” This reaction has only intensified as a result of living in South Carolina, where the racist, I mean “confederate”, flag still flies over the statehouse and the most popular restaurant in town dispenses white supremacist propaganda.
The Sign of Four, A. Conan Doyle
Better than A Study in Scarlet, but I’d say Doyle discovers his true voice in the first sentence of “A Scandal in Bohemia” (“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman”), and not an instant before.
Paradise, Toni Morrison
I don’t know why I found this book richer than some of Morrison’s better-known novels, including Beloved, but I was obsessively involved from the first few pages on.
