Non-Fiction November: My Year (so far)

 

Time to look over my year in non-fiction! It's hosted by Based on a True Story. My non-fiction reading was about 20% of what I've read, which is a fairly normal number for me, maybe a little on the high side.

Themes and Highlights

Mostly books about books, which is pretty common for me. Some standouts:

 

Brian Dillon. Dillon is a contemporary Irish writer. I read two by him this year: Objects in This Mirror and Affinities. Affinities is his most recent (2023); Objects in This Mirror is from ten years ago. Dillon, in addition to writing about books, was the editor at an art magazine, and both these books have a lot of art criticism.

 

Guy Davenport. Davenport was a poet and classicist who died in 2005. His book The Geography of the Imagination, which first came out in 1981, was reissued earlier this year with an introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan. It was pretty great.

Carlo Levi. An Italian writer and painter. Christ Stopped at Eboli is his memoir of internal exile during the Fascist era. After protesting against Mussolini, he was sent to live among the peasants in Basilicata. I read it just before going to Italy in the spring. (Yay!)

Konstantin Stanislavski. My Life in Art is the autobiography of the great Russian theatre director from 1924. It was my spin book for the first Classics Club spin of the year.

Mary Wisniewski. Algren: A Life is a biography of the great (but depressing!) Chicago writer best known for The Man With a Golden Arm, made into a movie with Frank Sinatra in the title role. A well-done biography.

 

A link to all the non-fiction that made it on to the blog this year.

Upcoming

Well, I have several books from the library which I hope to read soon, but the next non-fiction book will be Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make, which I managed to find while on a recent trip to Chicago. It's also novella-length. 😉

Which look fun to you?

My Year in Non-Fiction

One of the great November challenges is November Nonfiction:

This week's prompt, My Year in Nonfiction, is hosted by Heather.

Past

Readers, let me tell you, the state of our Non-Fiction reading is sound. 😉 I seem to have hit a fairly high (for me) 20% of my reading this year as non-fiction. Some highlights (in the chronological order I read them):

Brigitta Olubas/Shirley Hazzard

This new biography (2022) of Shirley Hazzard was the first book of the year for me. It was a superb literary biography, but I didn't manage to blog about it. I'm a big fan of Shirley Hazzard's novels (The Transit of Venus especially, of course) and when I saw this came out and was getting glowing reviews I had to read it. If you care at all about Shirley Hazzard you will want to read it. (If you haven't already.)

Michael Hingston/Try to be Strange

A history of the notional Kingdom of Redonda, which is a literary in-joke. It didn't get a full review, but it did get a somewhat substantial mention in a Sunday Salon post here. This led to a bit of a reading project, which also included:

Javier Marias/Dark Back of Time

Pretty great, though I am rather a Marias fan. Another book I didn't manage to blog about. It's Marias writing about the reception of his novel All Souls, his history with John Gawsworth, the king of Redonda somewhat before Marias was, and a bunch of other things... I trust some of it was fictional, but I couldn't quite tell you what. The novel A Heart So White remains Marias' masterpiece, but this is one of his better ones.

Victor Gruen/Shopping Town

An autobiography by the Jewish Austrian emigré architect who designed the first shopping mall (outside Detroit). Pretty fascinating. It got a full review here.

James Baldwin/Notes of a Native Son

His first volume of non-fiction. It came out in 1955, and reprints essays he'd written over the previous ten years or so. Fascinating. Literary criticism, what it meant to be Black in the U.S., life in Paris in the 50s. From my Classics Club list, it deserved (and got) a full review.

Anna Comnena/The Alexiad

Anna Comnena's history of her father's reign in Byzantium from 1081 to 1118. A primary source for the place and period, but also, I was a bit surprised to discover, a pretty great read.

Harvey Sachs/Schoenberg: Why He Matters

Another new release. This one's about the 20th Century composer Arnold Schoenberg. There was a review in the New York Times that made me want to read it. The review suggests it's pretty readable and so it was, no technical knowledge of music required. I'm not especially knowledgeable about serious music--my interest in this was because of Schoenberg's importance to Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. But I did go off afterwards and listen to a bunch of Schoenberg's pieces on YouTube and actually enjoyed them.

There were others, some quite fascinating, that also got blogged about, listed here.

Future

So what's to come for the rest of the year? I couldn't provide a picture of a stack of all those books (because who doesn't want that?) since almost all of those came from the library. But I can provide a picture of the non-fiction books likeliest to get read in the near future (and one ringer...)

Once again it's Chuck and a stack of books!

The library has provided Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses, and I'm a fan of hers. One great essayist engaging with another.

Tilar Mazzeo's The Widow Clicquot. She took over the champagne house after her husband died and now it's named for her. I've been interested since I saw the movie. 

Will Hermes' new biography Lou Reed: The King of New York. This is the one that will have to be returned the soonest.

Robin Lane Fox' Homer and His Iliad. Lane Fox is a serious classical scholar and an emeritus professor. (At least I think he's emeritus. He's getting up there.) This volume came out earlier this year and is supposed to be for a fairly general audience. I was a classics major, I'm rusty now, but I do try to keep up a bit.

And then the ringer in the pile: Emily Wilson's new translation of The Iliad.  I loved her translation of The Odyssey that came out a few years ago, and I've been looking forward to this one. We'll call it the ringer, because I assume it's basically fiction--though Heinrich Schliemann managed to find the original location of Troy by assuming it was true. But I hope to read both the Fox and the Wilson by the week where the prompt is to pair up a non-fiction book with a fiction book.

There are a few other things from the library around here as well...Plus, well maybe, I could read a book I already own...

Present

I'm currently in the middle of a translation of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's commentary on Hogarth's series of prints Marriage A-la-Mode. Will I blog about it? Maybe! Lichtenberg was a professor of physics at Göttingen in Germany, roughly contemporaneous with (and friends with) Goethe. Lichtenberg is better-known as an author of epigrams, like La Rouchefoucauld, and that was what I more interested in, but this was what my library could produce on short notice.

Which look good to you? Are you taking part in November Nonfiction?

#NonFicNov - My year in Non-Fiction

 

The opening week prompt is:

Your year in nonfiction: take a look back at your year of nonfiction and reflect on the following questions - What was your favorite nonfiction read of the year? Do you have a particular topic you've been attracted to more this year? What nonfiction book have you recommended the most? What are you hoping to get out of participating in nonfiction November?

Definitely the two best nonfiction reads for me were books I reread: (so I must like them, right?)

Brian Dillon's Essayism & 

Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael

Both of those are works of literary criticism, though Essayism has some memoir blended in. Without intending it, this does seem to have been a year reading literary criticism. Part of that was because of the Moby-Dick readalong. I blogged about The Cambridge Introduction to Melville which was also in that category. I read Delbanco's biography of Herman Melville at the very end of last year.

Two other works of literary criticism I didn't blog about but I do recommend: 

James Huneker's Egoists: A Book of Supermen. Huneker was a newspaperman, first in Philadelphia and then in New York, who died in 1921. He covered cultural issues: music, theater, literature. This volume is about writers of the time. The essay about Stendhal, whose diaries were just being published, I thought especially good. He also looks at Baudelaire, Huysmans, Ibsen, others. And, as the title might suggest, Nietzsche.

Vivian Gornick's The End of The Novel of Love. A collection of essays that had previously appeared, I assume, but I hadn't read any of them before. Good on individuals as different as Clover Adams and Grace Paley. She closes her essay on Willa Cather, "Today Jean Rhys seems dated, Virginia Woolf important, and Willa Cather wise." Which, though I'm not sure about Jean Rhys, otherwise struck me. The title essay was also very good.

A related, but not identical, category: author's memoirs. I read and blogged about Isaac Bashevis Singer's book on his early years in Poland, In My Father's Court. I thought it was very good. I also read his memoir of his first years in New York City, Love and Exile. I liked it, but I didn't find it quite as interesting.

I also read Huneker's autobiography, Steeplejack. Definitely read his criticism first. 

Two classic works on women's issues:

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own

Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women

Not much history this year, which surprised me. I read Daisy Dunn's joint biography of the two Plinys, Shadow of Vesuvius. It was good, but I didn't blog about it. Some other classical history, as well.

I mostly avoided contemporary issues at book length--I couldn't much bear it. I did read Zadie Smith's short book of Covid essays, Intimations,  because I read pretty much everything of hers, but my favorite essay in the collection was the one that had the least to do with what's going on now. I also read Sarah Burns' book The Central Park Five. Not a brilliant book, but a good introduction to the facts. What a miscarriage of justice. Though the man in the White House (as of today, but hopefully not much longer) still doesn't acknowledge it, or his part in it.

The complete collection of my nonfiction posts for this year can be found here.

Nonfiction November: My year (so far) in Nonfiction

While it's still October by my calendar...but it's the first week of Nonfiction in November, and I've decided to almost, but not quite, belatedly join in. Each week has a different host, and this week's host is Sophisticated Dorkiness (what an awesome title for a book blog) who offers the following prompt questions:

1.) Take a look back at your year of nonfiction:

Well, I find I've read 20 books of nonfiction, eight of which got a post. They can be found here. It feels like a somewhat slighter year for nonfiction for me, and comparing to this time in 2017 that seems true.

2.) What was your favorite nonfiction read of the year?

Has to be Frederick Douglass' first version of his autobiography, Narrative of the Life. The other really great book of nonfiction I read was Brian Dillon's Essayism, which I didn't write a post for. Maybe I'll revisit that.

3.) Do you have a particular topic you've been attracted to this year?

The last couple of years I've been interested in the origins of World War I. Why (in heck) did they do it? Why did they seem so enthused? That lead to my reading Romain Rolland, one of the great opponents of the war. That meant his novel Jean-Christophe, but I also read his book of essays about the war that came out in 1915 (and made him persona non grata in France) and Stefan Zweig's biography of Rolland. I'm still contemplating a post about those books. Earlier books I read on the theme were Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and Christopher Clark's Sleepwalkers.

4.) What nonfiction book have you recommended the most?

I've mostly touted Brian Dillon's Essayism, which is brand new and not as well known as it should be.

5.) What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

More books to read! Not that I need more books to read...ah, who am I kidding...of course I want (though maybe not need) more books to read.