2016 Reading

About a quarter of my reading this year was nonfiction. A J. Liebling’s The Road Back to Paris (1944) gave me a view of the beginning of the war in Europe by a writer whose style I’ve always liked; my friend Chris Buckley’s book of memoir/essays Holy Days of Obligation (2014) told me much about him I hadn’t known. I very much enjoyed a collection of Max Beerbohm’s essays called The Prince of Minor Writers (2015), selected and with a fine introduction by Phillip Lopate. Beerbohm is the funny, urbane, self-deprecating writer Virginia Woolf, no slouch at the form herself, called the prince of essayists. Not so much fun was Bruce Chatwin’s quirky travel book In Patagonia (1977). The worst book I read his year was Charles Fernyhough’s The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves (2016), which does not deliver on either of its subtitle’s promises. I was in search of something helpful toward an essay I’m writing about talking to myself, and Fernyhough was a disappointment.

            I finally finished Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations in the 1968 edition introduced by Hannah Arendt. I had read the essay on art and mechanical reproduction years ago, and also the essays on Baudelaire, and “Unpacking My Library,” but some of the other pieces were new to me. In an odd deconstruction of Proust’s mémoire involontaire Benjamin asks whether it is not closer to an art of forgetting than remembering. The two Kafka essays were also “illuminating.” Like David Foster Wallace, Benjamin highlights Kafka’s way of literalizing metaphors in his stories, though Benjamin doesn’t see this as a source of humor the way Wallace does.

            One of the year’s pleasant impulse reads was Witold Rybczynski’s entertaining, well-illustrated history of the chair, Now I Sit Me Down (2016). And after rereading E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1965) last year, I went on to read again two other, very different art books: Erwin Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology (1939) and Joshua Taylor’s Learning to Look (1957).

            I also reread two modernist books on the novel: Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921) and E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927). I looked at them partly because I read this year, for the first time, some of the novels they talk about: Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1833), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830), and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880). I’ve decided despite being blown away by all these and, in the past, by War and Peace (1869) and Crime and Punishment (1866), that my favorite Russian novels are Anna Karenina and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862).

            Other books that I’d put off reading in the past that I got around to reading with pleasure this year: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and an Alice Munro collection called Too Much Happiness (2009). They all pleased me as they had already done for so many others. Do you find that the books you’re reading always justify their reputations?

            Beloved raised a question in my mind right away about the ghost. Am I comfortable reading about ghosts? I guess the question for me is really an aesthetic one rather than a metaphysical one: what do you do with your ghosts? The Christian tradition divides into those on the Roman Catholic side, who’ve always believed that the dead continue to have an interest in the living, and the Reformation/Protestant side who thought they didn’t. If you think spirits abide then ghosts can’t be utterly foreign to you; even the hyperconservative Samuel Johnson had an open mind on the subject. I don’t believe spirits abide, but I believe in fiction.

            The most unusual books I read this year were the Rybczynski book on the history of chairs, Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881)—which is a satiric, anti-Romantic novel narrated by a dead man—and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1833). Onegin is a novel in verse, but not just any verse; it’s written in patent imitation of Byron’s comic novel in verse, Don Juan (1821), though its matter is a tragic look at the honor code that leads Onegin to kill his best friend Lensky in a duel, and it treats cynically the sheltered Russian class from which its characters come. Also out of the ordinary in this year’s reading was Wild Apple (2015), a book of poems by HeeDuk Ra, sent to me by my friend and former student Daniel Parker, who translated the poems with his wife YoungShil Ji. They live in Daegu, South Korea, and Daniel teaches at Keimyung University. The poems range in reference from the southwestern United States, which inspired the title poem, to Ra’s homeland of South Korea and feature, among much nature description, pig’s heads for sale in the market, the female clam divers of the southern islands, and public baths. I was grateful for Daniel and Shil’s clear notes about Ra as well as about Korean language and culture.

            For balance and mental hygiene I also read this year a couple of Pogo collections and eight P. G. Wodehouse books.