Another year of reading done & it was a good one. Some highlights:
First Time Reads
Percival Everett/
James (2024)
I hadn't read much Everett before and really the thing I knew the best about him was the film American Fiction. But I suspected I would like this, reread Huck Finn in advance to prepare, and I was not disappointed. While I had some quibbles about the reveal at the end of the book (but no spoilers!) it still sent me off to read a half dozen other Everetts this year. Assumption was probably my second favorite, but So Much Blue was also awfully good.
Ferdia Lennon/Glorious Exploits (2024)
Lennon's an Irish writer, but this, his debut, is a historical novel set in Sicily after the Athenian campaign to conquer Syracuse fails (413 BC) during the Peloponnesian War. The captured survivors from the Athenian army are thrown into a quarry with the intent of enslaving them; instead they're left to starve. Lampo and Gelon, two lower-class Syracusans are thrilled that Athenians have been defeated, but they're fans of Euripides and maybe some of these Athenians know the plays? A sad, but also funny, tribute to the power of art.
Stuart Dybek/I Sailed With Magellan (2003)
I'd long known of Dybek, a Chicago writer, but had never read anything by him--I'm not sure why. A mistake. This is a collection of linked stories about Perry Katzik's coming of age on the South Side of Chicago. Think a male, urban Del Jordan (of Lives of Girls and Women). A friend from Chicago and I then drove each other on to read most of Dybek. I think he preferred The Coast of Chicago--also a very good story collection--but I stuck with this as my favorite.
Rudiger Safranski/Goethe: Life as a Work of Art (2017)
A recent German biography of Goethe, superbly translated into English by David Dollenmayer. It gets the facts--of course, you would hope that--but it's also well-structured and sensitively done.
The one on this list that actually got a post!
Gerald Howard/The Insider (2025)
Subtitled "Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature"--and that's a good overview. It's a model literary biography, and Cowley's fairly obscure these days so he needed one. Howard doesn't soft-pedal the bad things Cowley did, and there were some, but definitely reminds us how important Cowley was to the rising status of American literature during the 20th century.
The last book I read of the year, and I'm thinking it's going to get its own post soon.
First Book of the 2026
Why, as it turns out, it was a reread of Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return, which Howard says, and I agree, is Cowley's masterpiece. Look for that post.
Some Exceptional Rereads
Mark Twain/Huck Finn
Thomas Mann/The Magic Mountain - I reread this before reading Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium. The Tokarczuk was fun--two of her books have ended up on best of year lists for me before--but not this time. The Magic Mountain is a great novel.
Susanna Clarke/Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - There was a new Clarke out early last year The Wood At Midwinter. It was fine; my primary complaint is that it was too short. So, of course, I had to reread her first. My third time and just as good as the first two.
Number of Slender Mysteries
19
Number of Chunksters
11.
Percentage of Non-Fiction Books
30%. That includes three graphic non-fiction books, and seven (!) books of aphorisms, if one counts those as non-fiction...
Percentage of Books Written by Women
16%. Hmm. Not very good.
Percentage of Books from the Toronto Public Library
47% (Hooray for the TPL!)
Percentage of Books in Translation
24% - original languages were German, French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Czech.
Plans
What me plan? I signed up for the
European Reading Challenge again this year. I'm going to try to write more blog posts--to which end maybe I'll sign up for a few more challenges.
A good reading year. Happy New Year to you and may your new reading year be good, too!
