Another year of reading done & it was a good one. Some highlights:
First Time Reads
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
'Glorious Exploits' comes up on a lot of peoples lists. I actually have a copy, so maybe I'll read it this year?
ReplyDeleteIt's a good one.
DeleteI'm already watching for his next. Supposed to be set in the Middle Ages.
I reread Huck Finn before I reread James before a book club discussion. It had been a long time between reads of HF---maybe since seventh grade.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what I would think of The Magic Mountain. I have it on my list to read one day.
I first read Huck Finn in high school, but I had reread it once or twice since then.
DeleteThe Magic Mountain is more readable than you might think! (If that's not a ringing endorsement, I don't know what is... ;-) )
That is just what James did to me, sent me after a bunch of his other books, every one of which I thought was better than James. Although I had read one before, so maybe Dr. No set the spark.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Of the ones I read, there was nothing I disliked, but I did feel that Trees was the sort of novel Monk Ellison was trying to avoid writing, and as for Erasure itself, the parody was given too much space. Both of those I found inferior to James. In some ways his bigger concept books try a little too hard, but James worked for me.
Delete