In the past year, I read fewer books than usual, but if anything I thought about them more. The year began with a big project: reading Homer's Odyssey chapter by chapter with two other friends, each of us reading a different translation and discussing them online. As the only one of the three readers with any ancient Greek, I was the one who looked up and struggled through passages we wanted to compare. This not only revived my interest in the language but rekindled my desire to go to Greece, which came true at the end of the year. The final book I'm reading, Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven, is a novelistic treatment of the life of Alexander the Great, whose Macedonian birthplace we visited. There were a number of other classical books, or works inspired by them, in the early part of 2018 - specifically several by Seamus Heaney; Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire, a version of Antigone with an immigrant heroine and her brother, a suspected ISIS terrorist; Alice Oswald's Memorial, a poem that lists all the deaths mentioned in the Iliad, and Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey, about teaching the book to a class that included his own father and then going on a trip with him that recreated the ancient voyage.
Besides this focus, books I particularly enjoyed in the past year were William Finnegan's Barbarian Days, an autobiographical book about surfing that held me riveted from the first to the last page; Cesar Aira's bizarre and miraculous Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, Michael Ondaatje's luminous latest novel, Warlight, set in post-WWII London,, and Men Without Women, Haruki Murakami's most recent collection of short stories, many of which appeared first in The New Yorker.
The book that impressed me the most was probably The Diaries of Emilio Renzi, Vol 1: The Formative Years, by Ricardo Piglia, one of the greatest of all Latin American writers. When diagnosed with a terminal illness, he spent the last ten years of his life compiling, revising and editing the huge volume of journal notebooks he had kept throughout it under the name of his alter-ego, Emilio Renzi. They are just now being published in English. The concept is monumental, and the writing extremely compelling; for someone like me who has kept journals off and on all her life (including this blog) it was a mind-bending project. Vol 1 covers the years when he was beginning to want to be a writer, through university, and up to the time his first book was published that brought him acclaim -- so it is the diary of a writer becoming a writer. It was a great contrast to last year's mammoth project (Knausgaard). Volume 2, The Happy Years, came out in November, and I look forward to reading it. I followed Vol 1 with one of Piglia's novels, which was great, but confess I liked the journals better. If you like Bolano, you will appreciate these.
Finally, in the fall, Jonathan and I both read William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, a memoir of the writer's pilgrimage in the footsteps of 6th-century monk John Moschos who visited Orthodox monasteries all over the Byzantine world of his time. Dalrymple's journey begins on Mt Athos, Greece, takes us to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the West Bank, and ends in the Egyptian desert. The book was written in 1997 and chronicled not only where Moschos went, but the lived reality of the same monasteries fourteen centuries later, most of which were, or had been, under attack by other religions and political groups and were currently inhabited by only a handful of monks; his own visits sometimes alerted the authorities and endangered the present monks, who could be accused of harboring a spy. But it was exactly the right book for us to read before our own first trip to see the Byzantine world at closer quarters; I'll be writing about our trip to the ancient monasteries at Meteora, Greece very soon.
As always, I look forward to hearing what you've been reading too, so please post your lists in the comments as well as your reactions to any of what I've said or listed here! And best wishes for happy reading adventures in 2019! I'm anxious to read the next Piglia, as I said, and the new Murakami novel, Killing Commendatore; also on my list is the Alexandria Quartet of Lawrence Durrell, and The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel about Sicily. How about you?
2018 (**=favorites)
Fire from Heaven (Alexander the Great trilogy, Vol 1), Mary Renault
**Men Without Women, Haruki Murakami
A Sort of Life, Graham Greene
**From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, William Dalrymple
Artificial Respiration, Ricardo Piglia
**The Diaries of Emilio Renzi, Vol 1: The Formative Years, Ricardo Piglia
The Sense of Sight, John Berger
Transit, Rachel Cusk
**The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, Cesar Aira
Quarantine, Jim Crace
**Warlight, Michael Ondaatje
Memorial, Alice Oswald
In the Night of Time, Antonio Munez Molina
Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
Unreasonable Behavior, Don McCullin
**Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan
An Odyssey, Daniel Mendelssohn
No Time to Spare, Ursula LeGuin
**Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie
Aeneid Book VI, Seamus Heaney
The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney
The Foliate Head, Marly Youmans
**Burial at Thebes, Seamus Heaney
**The Odyssey, Robert Fagles, translator (rereading with friends, each a different translation)