Boxing Day. Traditionally, this has been a day of curling up on the couch with a new Christmas book, but for the first time I can remember, I didn't receive a single one! I wonder if this is a trend among readers of this blog too. We don't buy or receive as many physical books, and maybe our friends and families are less likely to give them to us. I wonder, and, as a publisher, I worry. No matter -- trends haven't affected my reading patterns very much, except for the change to reading e-books borrowed from the Overdrive service at my library, or purchased on Kindle. I read almost exclusively on my phone, unless I've borrowed a physical book from the library. And though I did buy myself a couple of books about Greece that haven't arrived yet, I'm trying not to acquire too many these days -- the shelves are already overburdened. But read, I do.
I don't have a great deal to say about the books I read this year... there's a definite focus on Portuguese literature, because of traveling there and trying to write about it subsequently (a still-unfinished project). As usual, there are some classics from both ancient literature and the 19th and 20th centuries. After a debate with a friend about "the greatest novels" I decided to reread some of the candidates. Middlemarch was a first-timer for me, and I liked it. War and Peace was a re-reading, but while I had remembered the characters and basic plot, the book affected and impressed me much more now than when I read it before as a much younger person with so much less experience of life -- I think it deserves its status as one of the greatest novels ever written. I finally made it through Ulysses a few years ago, and don't plan to re-read The Brothers Karmazov, Anna Karenina, or Madame Bovary any time soon; other candidates are lined up for re-reading next year: The Magic Mountain, Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury. But I find I'm more interested in continuing to read books in translation from world literatures that are less known to me. In addition to War and Peace, the "biggest read" was Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, about the city where my mother-in-law spent her youth after leaving Armenia -- a city whose history is virtually disappearing.
Particular favorites this year were Compass by Mathias Enard, and two books by friends: Immigrant, Montana, by Amitava Kumar, and Human Archipelago, by Fazal Skeikh and Teju Cole. Among the Lisbon books, I especially loved For Isabel: A Mandala, and Requiem: An Hallucination, both by Antonio Tabucchi, and A History of the Siege of Lisbon, by Jose Saramago. Helen Vendler's Seamus Heaney is brilliant and illuminating. I didn't think Pachinko was incredibly well-written, but it was such a great window into a diaspora I knew little about (Koreans living in Japan). Likewise, there's always a Murakami on my list: I liked Killing Commendatore a lot, but didn't think it was in the same league as, say, 1Q84. The Frolic of the Beasts, by Yukio Mishima, is an excellent, extremely disturbing novel by the great Japanese writer.
It might be worth mentioning (since I don't think I have before) that I also regularly read and highly recommend the Canadian (but international) literary magazine Brick. I'd love to have a piece in there someday -- I came close with one this year, according to a kind letter I received from one of their editors, and will try to submit something again in 2020.
Right now I've started Flights by Olga Tokarczuk -- original, unsettling and intriguing so far. I enjoyed Greek to Me, a love letter to Greece and the Greek language by New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris, especially because since our recent trip I've been studying modern Greek - half an hour each morning, along with half an hour of French in the afternoon. In her book, Norris mentions visiting the home of the late great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in Kardamyli, Greece, on the Mani peninsula. We were nearby and fascinated by the stoic ruggedness and remoteness of that region, so I've ordered a couple of Fermor's books -- one about the Mani, and the other about northern Greece -- so that will be how 2020 is likely to start out.
Finally, it was a great pleasure to hear and meet one of my literary heroes, Michael Ondaatje, this year at a reading he gave in Montreal.
What about you? Please share your favorites, or entire book list if you keep one, in the comments! I always love hearing from fellow readers at this time of year, and wish you all a happy year of reading ahead!
Book List, 2019
Greek to Me, Mary Norris
Electric Light, Seamus Heaney
The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Jose Saramago
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Jose Saramago (rereading)
The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester (audiobook, dnf)
For Isabel: A Mandala, Antonio Tabucchi
The Lives of Things, Jose Saramago
Helen, Euripedes
The Women of Troy, Euripedes
Ion, Euripedes
Falling Upward, Richard Rohr
The Proper Study of Mankind, Isaiah Berlin (bits and pieces, mainly the essay on Tolstoy "The Hedgehog and the Fox")
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (rereading)
Human Archipelago, Fazal Skeikh and Teju Cole
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
The Frolic of the Beasts, Yukio Mishima
O Sing Unto the Lord: A History of English Church Music, Andrew Gant
4 3 2 1, Paul Auster (DNF)
Pereira Maintains, Antonio Tabucchi
Warlight, Michael Ondaatje (second reading, for book club)
Requiem: an Hallucination, Antonio Tabucchi
What is Not Yours is Not Yours, Helen Oyeyemi
The Tiny Journalist, Naomi Shihab Nye
The Lisbon Poets (anthology)
Five-Minute Sketching: Architecture, Liz Steel
The Book of the Red King, Marly Youmans
Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler
The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (3rd and 4th books, Mountolive, Clea)
Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami
The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (First two books: Justine, Balthazar)
The Relic Master, Christopher Buckley (DNF)
Immigrant, Montana, Amitava Kumar
Compass, Mathias Enard