Book List, 2022

The list of books I read in the past year is the shortest in memory, partly because of all the things that happened this year to disrupt my reading time, but also because it contains three very long titles. Most of my reading was connected with my zoom book group, and we began the year reading Tolstoy's War and Peace. That occupied us during most of the cold months last winter, appropriately enough. It was my third time through, and I feel like I got even more out of it, especially by virtue of the close reading with astute friends. Among us, we read several different translations, and this also added to the depth of our discussions. I was the one who had pushed us to read it, and so it was a delight to watch the group engage with and, at length, fall in love with the book and its characters, and appreciate Tolstoy's tremendous gifts as a novelist. The biggest gratification for all of us came at the end when several members who had been reluctant at first, or who had tried previously and never gotten through it, expressed their feeling of accomplishment and happiness at having met this monument of literature, which everybody agreed really does deserve its rating as one of the greatest novels of all time.

We then drew a deep breath, and decided to read a number of short works, of which the two by César Aira stand out particularly, along with Aristophanes' comic play The Birds.

During the summer and early fall, we read the three volumes of the Barrøy Chronicles by the Norwegian author Roy Jacobsen, and I cannot recommend them highly enough; the books follow a woman, Ingrid Barrøy, from her childhood to early middle age, as she grows up and then takes responsibility for a small island off the northwestern coast of Norway; the books spans the years from the early 1920s to around 1950. What may have originally started as a descriptive narrative of the extremely difficult life of the isolated islanders and their precarious existence due to extreme weather, poverty, and unpredictability, it becomes a human story of one astonishing woman whose remote life is intruded upon by world events. There is a fourth volume coming, and we await it anxiously!

In November I read Color Creates Light, a book that presents the teachings and life of Hans Hofmann, considered by many to be the father of abstract expressionism (one of his drawings, a view of Provincetown, is below). While this is not explicitly where I expect my art to go, the book was extremely helpful and eye-opening for me, and it's one I'll be going back to frequently for inspiration and insight. Hofmann carried on from Cezanne, who had moved on from impressionism to develop a new way of depicting nature by using planes of color that solidified the forms and locked the picture plane together.

Cubism developed out of this, along with the further innovations of Picasso and Matisse, which then gave rise to what we think of as 20th century modern art. Hofmann analyzed and understood exactly what Cezanne had done, but took it into the realm of pure color and abstraction. He is considered the most influential teacher of the new generation of painters who became known as abstract expressionists. I had always been curious about this lineage and how it came about, but found the bits of Hofmann's teaching I had read quite obscure and hard to follow (others, even his students, agree -- it was partly a problem of language issues between German and English.) So this book, by a former student, clarified a great deal and opened a lot of possibilities and challenges for me in my own work.

Finally, we've recently begun Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk's massive novel, The Books of Jacob, which immerses us in the Jewish world of eastern Poland (near Ukraine) in 1750, a time and place where many cultures collided through travel, trade, and migration, and where a young man, Jacob Frank, was hailed and followed as the Messiah. It's fascinating, often bizarre, written in a somewhat fragmentary style that (like the place itself, perhaps) presents different threads and seemingly-unrelated people until they begin to come together into the story of Jacob himself. We're only about 1/3 of the way through the 900-odd pages so far, so I can't say much more than that; this remarkable book will continue to occupy us for several months.

As always, I'm anxious to hear what you've read this year, what stood out for you, what disappointed you, and what you're looking forward to reading in 2023!

2022 Book List

The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk#  (in progress)

Enduring Love, Ian McEwan

Color Creates Light: Studies with Hans Hofmann, Tina Dickey

The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100 - 480 BC, Jeffrey M. Hurwit

The Eye of the Rigal, Roy Jacobsen (Barrøy Chronicles 3) #

White Shadow, Roy Jacobsen (Barrøy Chronicles 2)#

The Unseen, Roy Jacobsen (Barrøy Chronicles 1)#

A Time of Gifts: on Foot to Constantinople (Book 1 of a trilogy), Patrick Leigh Fermor

How I Became a Nun, Cesar Aira #

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Cesar Aira (rereading) #

Several short stories, Borges #

The Reluctant Gaucho, Roberto Bolaño #

Babylon Revisited, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Recitatif, Toni Morrison #

The Birds, Aristophanes #

Intimacies, Katie Kitamura

Feline Philosophy, John Grey

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (rereading with my book group) #

The Journey to the East, Hermann Hesse

Hamnet & Judith, Maggie O'Farrell

# indicates a book read with my book group

Comments

[Sharyn Ekbergh]

I am going to buy Feline Philosophy!
I have read War and Peace, I loved it.
My reading is much more lightweight than yours. We loved Lincoln Highway and Demon Copperhead. Both excellent and I recommend them to you.

[Huw]

Dear Beth,

Happy New Year, and thanks again for sharing your always interesting reading list. I read far fewer books in 2022 than for many years, mostly due to work pressures and looking after my aging mother. There's a fair amount of filler on there ('The Practice of the Presence of God' and 'The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die' were an amusing contrast, and entirely useless! I never seem to learn that variants on self-help are rarely anything other than ultimately dispiriting) but also some standouts: 'Zone' by Matthias Enard, and Murdoch's 'The Sacred and Profane Love Machine' were meaty novels that sated. 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' is also highly recommended. Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey was read over breakfast, six pages each morning, which was just the right rhythm. This translation was new to me and I look forward to her version of The Iliad. Annie Dillard was Annie Dillard in all the best ways. The most interesting 'new' book (and maybe there's a lesson there that most of the good books were not new!) was Michael Easter's 'The Comfort Crisis' which I did not expect, and often think on.

Beginnings and Endings, Maggi Dawn
Shelf Life, Simon Parke
Zone, Matthias Enard
Slow Rise, Robert Penn
A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
Playing God, Andy Crouch
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
The Kids, Hannah Lowe
The This, Adam Roberts
Lunch Poems, Frank O’Hara
The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry
Metaphysical Animals, Clare MacCumahail & Rachael Wiseman
The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence
The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die, John Izzo
Square Peg, Round Ball, Ned Boulting
The Life We’re Looking For, Andy Crouch
The Genesee Diaries, Henri J. M. Nouwen
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Iris Murdoch
Flatland, Edwin A. Abbott
Red Sauce Brown Sauce, Felicity Cloake
The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter
Hello, Stranger, Will Buckingham
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
A Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter M. Miller
The Shepherd’s Life, James Rebanks
The Same Sea, Amos Oz
Morning, Allan Jenkins
Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman
We Still Have the Telephone, Erica Van Horn
Zen and How to Get Out of Your Mind, Cameron Self
Life is Hard, Kieran Setiya
Underland, Robert Macfarlane
By the Pricking of Her Thumb, Adam Roberts
All We Want, Michael Harris
Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard
The Odyssey, Homer (trans. Emily Wilson)
Off the Clock, Laura Vanderkam
We Can’t Run Away from This, Damian Hall

Best wishes,
Huw

PS I LOVE 'A Time of Gifts'

[Roderick Robinson]

I cringe with shame, having read only two titles (PLF and Tolstoy) out of your impressive list. In my own defence I can say I've read W&P several times and as a pleasure not a duty. Embarking on it for the second time while living in Stoke Newington, a north-eastern suburb of London, I had the good luck to pluck a virgin copy from the shelves of the local library. And to find that it came with a book-marker, proper names on one side, patronymics on the other. You moved it along as you read; no wearisome flicking back to a fixed printed page. I was careful to replace the marker, reflecting sadly that it was almost certainly destined to get lost and subsequent first-time readers might well struggle with those -itch endings.

[Ann Misir]

Hi Beth, I'm enjoying your blog, especially your artwork and this list of what you read last year. I've tried several times with W&P, think I may need a reading group to help me, as I did w/ Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, such a satisfying few months. I agree that Tolstoy is such a wonderful story teller; I remember pausing while reading Anna Karenina to savor some passages.
I've read Bolaño's The Insufferable Gaucho, loved its connection with Borges, one of my favorite authors. I read his 2666 several years ago, with such a well-constructed, creative design.
We read Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead in 2021 in my book club during the second pandemic winter. The novel took place in a cold, remote and rural landscape that chillingly evoked the need for sunlight in my home as well as the subject matter of the book. I was so pleased when the author won the Nobel Prize and spoke of the impact translation has for readers and authors like herself who write in languages other than English. I found the film (Spoor) based on the novel on hoopla.
Another book I really liked this year was Pereira Maintains, by Antonio Tabucchi, with allusions to the dangers of creeping fascism within a comfortable, sometimes humorous framework and a likable protagonist. I'd like to see the film w/ Marcello Mastroianni.
Cheers to a happy & healthy 2023!

Ann