Books of 2023

I feel like I read a lot in the last year, but there aren't that many books on my list, mainly because several were very big ones. The two largest were The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick, both read with my book group, but Orhan Pamuk's Nights of Plague was also a long read. If you have never read Moby Dick, as I somehow had not, I encourage you to do so - it really does deserve its reputation as one of the greatest novels of all time.

It took me 75 or 100 pages to warm up to Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob, which is written in an unusual style that eschews detailed dialogue or description of the characters' thoughts or feelings, but instead relies on description of events. We found that challenging, because we just didn't have the normal ways of entering the characters' heads, but by sticking with it, the reader is rewarded with immersion in their world -- in this case, Jewish communities in eastern Poland/western Ukraine in the mid-to-late 1700s. At that time, a self-proclaimed "Messiah" named Jacob Frank appeared, and gained an ardent following. Of all the books our group read this year, this one probably created the most lively and wide-ranging weekly discussions.

Other books that stood out for our group were Lalla Romano's A Shared Silence, an intense novel about two couples in the Italian resistance, and Pamuk's Nights of Plague, an epic about a made-up Mediterranean island dealing with an outbreak of plague, and the politics and human behaviors that result.

I was thrilled about the publication of Teju Cole's Tremor, his first novel since Open City. Readers here will know that he and I are long-time friends, and I was privileged to be one of the first readers of the manuscript, so I don't feel that I can "review" the book objectively. I will say that it is beautifully written and conceived, as we have come to expect from Teju; it is timely, dealing with subjects from marriage to racism, from the ownership of art objects to the complexities of academic life, from friendship to, perhaps most importantly, death. It is also experimental, pushing the structure of the novel in new directions, and involving the reader in a reading experience that is not entirely linear. So, of course, I recommend it highly.

Greek Lessons, by the Korean writer Han Kang, intrigued me because of its title and also because of its knockout cover, and I was not disappointed. This book, also, pushes the form of the novel, and tells a poignant story of two people who use the study of language to address their own difficulties in communication. It's probably the most unusual novel I read this year. I plan to write a full-length review of it later.

While we're speaking of highly original writing, I was extremely impressed by Nay Saysourinho's The Capture of Krao Farini. This short, chapbook-length work defies categorization as to genre; it is listed by the publisher, Ugly Ducking Press, as poetry, and could be called a narrative prose poem of sorts; it includes illustrations that are integral to the text. It is a work of art that cuts to the heart of what human beings are capable to doing to each other; it's the most original thing I've read this year and I found it brilliant, deeply disturbing, and haunting.

More recently, our book group has begun John Berger's trilogy, "Into Their Labours", about the lives of peasants in the French Alps near Berger's home in the second half of his life. As V., one of our book group members, said, "I am attracted to Berger right now because of his deep humanity," and she was right; these are books that get to the essence of what is human, what constitutes survival, what we need most, and what is unnecessary. They are antidotes to capitalism, consumerism and fads, social media and modern conformity; they're not without violence, but it tends to be the violence of raising and slaughtering your own animals for food, or the rough feuds of local people. Likewise, Patrick Leigh Fermor's Roumeli speaks of Greece before mass tourism, when wandering tribes of herders still moved through the remote mountains, speaking dialects that were already in danger of being lost, and mountain-top monasteries were still inaccessible except by horseback or donkey. Having visited some of these remote places myself, his words were more meaningful now than when I first read the book some years ago, and I find myself feeling grateful to both him and Berger for writing down what they observed, and what came to matter deeply to them. This encourages me as a writer, too -- that the daily lives of ordinary people do matter, and it is in our hands as writers to preserve the truths of their existence.

I should also mention that I do a lot of online reading of shorter fiction and essays (in places like The New Yorker, Emergence Magazine, Beshara, The Guardian long reads, quite a few individual Substacks) and I'm a regular subscriber to Brick, a very fine Canadian literary journal which doesn't confine itself to solely Canadian authors, and publishes a lot of work by people of color, indigenous writers, and immigrants, and (I think) as many female as male writers. Do check it out; it's a good journal to support.

Please, as always, do share your own reading lists or highlights from this year! Here's my full list:

2023

The Abyss, Marguerite Yourcenar (in progress)

Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor (rereading)

The Capture of Krao Farini, Nay Saysourinho

Pig Earth, John Berger #

Tremor, Teju Cole

A Recipe for Daphne, Nektaria Anastasiadou

*Greek Lessons, Han Kang

*Moby Dick, Herman Melville #

The War that Killed Achilles, Caroline Alexander

The Tentmaker, Michelle Blake

Three Short Works, Gustav Flaubert #

*A Shared Silence, Lalla Romano  #

The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr #

Just a Mother, Roy Jacobsen (Barroy Chronicles 4) #

Nights of Plague, Orhan Pamuk #

Woman at Point Zero, Nahwal el Saadawi

House of Names, Colm Toibin

District and Circle, Seamus Heaney

Amsterdam, Ian McEwan

Night Train to Lisbon, Pascal Mercier #

*The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk#

The Other Side of the Mountain, Journals of Thomas Merton Vol 7., Fr. Thomas Merton

Enduring Love, Ian McEwan

The Innocent, Ian McEwan

Comments

[Huw]

Dear Beth,

I'm glad you enjoyed 'Moby Dick'; I distinctly remember starting it in June 1998, on a slow ferry from Jersey to Southampton, and it consuming my summer. Our only common read this year is 'Tremor' which I enjoyed immensely: Teju has such control of tone and imagery that I will go anywhere he takes me.

Otherwise, reviewing my list, I've had a very satisfying year of reading. The New Testament was my daily read after last year's 'The Odyssey' and gave me a better sense of the book as a whole, rather than in parts as we often encounter it. Chekhov's short stories were the first of his writing I'd encountered directly and were astonishing (better to be late to the party than never arrive!?). 'Being a Human' by Charles Foster was something else; Neil King Jr's 'American Ramble' wise and humane and delightful; Murdoch ludicrous and irresistible, as always; and Armstrong's 'A History of God' thought-provoking and dislocating.

Best wishes for 2024 to you and all your readers.

Regards,
Huw

Bloodchild, Octavia Butler
Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, John Kaag
From the Wall to the Water, William Han
My Border Collie Doesn’t Stretch, Nigel Crompton
The New Testament
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Katherine Randell
The Complete Short Novels, Anton Chekhov
Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel
Loud-In-The-Mist, Hope Mirrless
What is This?, Stephen & Martine Batchelor
American Ramble, Neil King Jr.
The Midas Rain, Adam Roberts
Time Surfing, Paul Loomans
Being a Human, Charles Foster
Ellis Island and other Stories, Mark Helprin
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
The Sacred Journey, Charles Foster
The Snow Goose, Paul Gallic
The Wind and the Rain, Anthony Wilson
Histories, Sam Guglani
The English Understand Wool, Helen DeWitt
When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut
Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, Alan Lightman
Stealing for the Sky, Adam Roberts
A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Iris Murdoch
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, Agatha Christie
What You are Looking for is in the Library, Michiko Aoyama
Carnation Lily Lily Rose, Jane McKie
Scarcity Brain, Michael Easter
A History of God, Karen Armstrong
Teju Cole, Tremor
The Oceans and the Stars, Mark Helprin
Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot

[Marly]

Always interesting to see what you are reading... This year's read that I've thought the most about and that has consistently come to mind at odd moments is Ananda Coomaraswamy's "Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art." Current reads: just finished Revelation with a group yesterday, and am reading Shepherd of Hermas with my patristics study group. Planning on finishing up promised blurbs and then reading Liam Guilar's long poems next, and I need to order your new book, as I didn't get all the books on my wish list last year!