All the books I read this year
your quite useless wrapped
Hi friends,
I don’t generally give much credence to year-end book lists, which I’ve come to think convey more about book publicists than the books themselves, but I am perennially interested in what authors I admire are reading. If you’re into this sort of thing, too—and, as a subscriber to a newsletter that promises precisely nothing, I’d hope an admirer of my work—this edition may be of interest. If not, I can offer up last year’s guide to luxury bathrobes instead, with tidings for a splendid holiday season.
My year got off to a primo start with Elif Batuman’s first book The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Love Them, which I wrote a bit about here, and Dorothy Baker’s 1962 depressive gem Cassandra at the Wedding, which apparently everyone else read, too.
A quartet of debut novels followed. I read The Latinist by Mark Prins because Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne graces its cover. Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind, meanwhile, ironically provided a searing reminder that, unless they are by Ottessa Moshfegh, novels with extensive descriptions of bodily fluids are simply “not for me.”
I read Vladimir by Julia May Jonas when it came out in February, found it exceptional in every way, and desperately wish I was in New York right now to see her new play, Your Own Personal Exegesis. Vladimir is as Nabokovian as you might hope, but also new—timeless and temporal and a veritable masterclass in what high-style first person can do. I devoured it, as greedy for the text as the narrator is for Vlad. I think it’s one of the best novels of the last decade, and will be giving it to people as a Christmas present.
Micah Nemerever’s These Violent Delights, a psychological thriller with a clever, chess-y ending, rounded out the quartet before a whirlwind literary love affair with real-life psychologist Paul Bloom. This included both 2016’s Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion and his latest, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.
In April I finished Swann’s Way (original, contemporaneous Moncrieff translation), which I both enjoyed as much as René Girard made me think I would and took even more focused mental capacity. I’ve learned that I really need to be in the right, extremely studious frame of mind to read Proust with the attention he deserves—that is, all of it—and this is unfortunately not a frame of mind I have access to with great frequency these days. While I am thus still Within A Budding Grove, do not be fooled by my pace; it reflects sheer reverence.
I read Nancy Mitford’s absurdly charming The Pursuit of Love with every intention of watching the new adaptation, but then heard it failed to do the novel justice and never did. Instead, I picked up, at long last, The Talented Mr. Ripley, which turned into a hot summer obsession (adaptation included) and I wrote about here. I read the next two “Ripliad” novels in quick succession, Ripley Under Ground and Ripley’s Game, pausing only to inhale Batuman’s latest, Either/Or, the minute it arrived.
A couple other novels I picked up this summer around the time of their publication: Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress and NSFW by Isabel Kaplan, two debuts I thoroughly enjoyed and recommend. (And if you haven’t read Isabel’s recent viral essay about her writerly breakup, you must!)
On the beach I read an ARC of Josh Riedel’s excellent forthcoming novel Please Report Your Bug Here, which is out in January. Josh was Instagram’s first employee, and his debut is written with the sort of first-hand credibility that it is very difficult to fake, even (especially?) in fiction.
I beta-read Maddalena and the Dark, Julia Fine’s third novel, also forthcoming, for violin-related accuracy while it was still in Microsoft Word. This was an honor, and at points felt like she’d written it specifically for me. Imagine Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette but with virtuosic girls playing Vivaldi. Yeah. It’s lush and opulent and as dark as suggested, and drops June 2023.
An editor from New Directions sent me Yesterday by Juan Emar after reading my high horse response piece in Lit Hub, and I read it almost immediately. As billed, this novel is true art for art’s sake, thoroughly of the quite useless school. Great cover, too.
I read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which was almost as fascinating as Erik Hoel’s review of it, “The gossip trap.” (Erik recently left his professorship at Tufts to write full time on Substack, and The Intrinsic Perspective is, more broadly, probably the most impressive I’ve seen in the game.)
After Annie Ernaux’s Nobel win launched my first (very chic!) viral tweet, I obviously had to read Simple Passion. I see why she won.
My cousin recommended I pick up A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders. I enjoyed it less for its critical commentary than the wholesale inclusion of the stories themselves, only half of which I’d read previously. Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” struck me with especially memorable force.
I read Allie Rowbottom’s debut novel, Aesthetica, a new icon of deep superficiality, and re-read Salome, Beardsley and Wilde’s older icon of it. My reacquaintance with the latter is thanks to a forthcoming piece, one that also occasioned an extremely opulent early Christmas gift from my parents: Linda Gertner Zatlin’s stunning Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonné. No one publishes more beautiful art history books than Yale University Press, and this two-volume wonder is no exception. It is probably the most gorgeous—and certainly the most decadent—set I own.
Finally, I just finished Katie Kitamura’s 2017 novel A Separation, and loved it as much as last year’s deservedly-hyped Intimacies.
If you’ve made it this far and have consequent recommendations for 2023, please share them!
Happiest holidays and best wishes for the new year,
Natasha
No need to apologise, it's an interesting and clearly personal list with not a trace of influencer hype. But it also provides an opportunity to say that among all the essays I read this year, your "high horse response piece in Lit Hub" was one of my favourites - and the one I most shared with people I thought needed to read it. There was a review / essay in the LRB, Dec 1 issue that effectively explores the roots of literary moralism in academic literature studies, worth reading if you have LRB access - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n23/stefan-collini/exaggerated-ambitions