The Rarebit Fiend's Year in Review, Part Two

What I read

Random stack of books I haven’t actually read yet.

What follows is a list of the books I read (or reread) in 2022, with brief commentary where I felt moved to provide it. I’m sure that I missed a few titles. They are presented in no particular order, and as far as I can tell, follow no particular theme.

Books I Reread

Patrick O’Brian, The Mauritius Command (1977)
—, Desolation Island (1978)
—, The Fortune of War (1979)
—, The Surgeon's Mate (1980)
—, The Ionian Mission (1981)
—, Treason's Harbour (1983)
—, The Far Side of the World (1984)
—, The Reverse of the Medal (1986)
—, The Letter of Marque (1988)
—, The Thirteen-Gun Salute (1989)
—, The Nutmeg of Consolation (1991)
—, The Truelove/Clarissa Oakes (1992)
—, The Wine-Dark Sea (1993)
—, The Commodore (1995)
Listing them like this, I’m struck anew by the sheer duration of the writing and publishing of the novels—the span of time between the publication of Master in Commander in 1970 (the year I was born) and the 1999 publication of the last full-length novel, Blue at the Mizzen. As it happens, I didn’t start reading the novels until 1999 or 2000, when I was living in the Bay Area and pursuing a Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford; my beginning was their end. I can still picture the spot on the shelves at Kepler’s Bookstore where the novels were shelved as pastel-colored paperbacks. I was a militant avant-gardist in those days who spent most of his time reading and trying to write modernist epic poems, and there was something very nearly furtive in my enjoyment of such old-fashioned storytelling. Only three novels to go, plus 21, and then I’ll have written about them all. Maybe I’ll try and turn the collected essays into some sort of book.

Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion (2013). The final poetry collection of one of the most lushly gorgeous poets I know of, a true celebrant of the language; I was moved to pick it up again when I encountered one of her poems online; it might have been this one. I wish I still had the answering machine tape of Lucie offering me a spot in the MFA program at NYU back in 1997. (I didn’t go.)

Michael Palmer, Notes for Echo Lake (1981). I always preferred the lyrical fellow travelers of the Language poets to the canonical poets themselves, and of those travelers Leslie Scalapino and Michael Palmer have meant the most to me. Michael was something of a mentor, albeit an elusive one; I attended the Breadloaf Writers Conference to study with him for a week or two in the summer of 2000; we were both, aesthetically speaking, wildly out of place. He gave my deconstructed sonnet project Severance Songs a huge boost when he selected about twenty of them to appear in an issue of Conjunctions devoted to emerging poets. (What am I now? A submerged poet, maybe.) Like its title, Notes for Echo Lake is cool, magisterial, and enigmatic. I reread it sitting by Lake Michigan.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965). I’m not sure why I picked this up again, but I enjoyed the hell of it. The best of the epic “systems novels” under 200 pages—or 600, for that matter.

James Herriot, All Creatures Great and Small (1972). I remember reading Herriot’s memoirs when I was a kid—battered mass-market paperbacks checked out of the Morristown Public Library. The new BBC series got my family through last winter.

Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn (1968). I brought the tattered Dell paperback that I read and reread in my bunkbed when I was twelve to Chicon in vague hopes that Beagle might sign it, but when I was in the presence of the man himself, I turned shy. On the train home I read it again.

Gregory Mcdonald, Fletch’s Fortune (1978)
—, Fletch and the Widow Bradley (1980)
—, Fletch’s Moxie (1982)
—, Fletch and the Man Who (1983)
There’s been very little written about the Fletch series, at least according to my casual investigations (there’s probably a Reddit or two). These little mysteries are as lithe and witty as their protagonist (who nothing resembles Chevy Chase, or Jon Hamm for that matter). They are funny as hell and not as dated as I expected. A decent candidate for a new essay series.

Books I Read for the First Time

Lily King, Writers and Lovers (2020). I’m a sucker for novels about writers.

Pete Dexter, Deadwood (1986)
—, Paris Trout (1988)
Western and Southern gothic, respectively.

Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence (1985). Bleakly funny, funnily bleak.

Ian Rankin, In a House of Lies (2018). John Rebus is always good company, even if I can’t for the life of me remember what this one was about.

Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World (2020)

Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015). I will be thinking for a long time about Snyder’s incisive analysis of Hitlerian ideology and the terrifying paradox of atavistic thinking harnessed to modern technology.

Kevin Barry, City of Bohane (2011)
—, Night Boat to Tangier (2019)
Colm Tóbín, The Heather Blazing (1992)
Roddy Doyle, Love (2020)
Grouping these to register my ongoing fascination with Irish fiction. I am still thinking about Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018) which I read a couple years back. Sentence for sentence Kevin Barry is one of the best writers going. And count me one of those who finds the sheer quietness of Colm Tóbín’s writing to be absolutely mesmerizing. He counts on the reader, in this novel especially, to bring a certain knowledge of and sensitivity to Irish history without explaining any of it; I flatter myself I understand enough to get it. As for Doyle’s Love, it hits the perennial target of the mysteries of male middle-aged intimacy; it’s also a climate-change novel. I guess they all are now.

Glen Cook, The Black Company (1984). Disappointing.

Emmanuel Carrère, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (2016)

W.C. Heinz, The Professional (1958)
Jonathan Eig, Ali: A Life (2017)
Norman Mailer, The Fight (1975)
Three books about boxing (two of them about Ali) that jab at its mystique without dealing a decisive blow, though Heinz comes the closest with his devastatingly anticlimactic conclusion.

Gilbert Sorrentino, Splendide-Hotel (1973)

Tina Fey, Bossypants (2011)
Julia Child, My Life in France (2006)
The memoirs of women who made great TV. I found Julia’s relationship with her husband Paul to be wonderfully touching.

Andrew Zawacki, Unsun (2019)
Maureen N. McLane, More Anon: Selected Poems (2022)
John Freeman, Wind, Trees (2022)
Czeslaw Milosz, The Land of Ulro (1977)
Tracking my poetry consumption is tricky because nowadays I rarely read individual collections cover to cover, preferring to dip into them or to read around in someone’s collected poems. Milosz was my poet of the year; I spent a lot of time with his New and Collected Poems but didn’t read it cover to cover and probably never will. I loved the strange project of The Land of Ulro, a kind of intellectual biography that referenced a zillion Polish poets I’m unfamiliar with. It reads like a highbrow blog and moved me for its sense of exile, which translated for me, in 2022, to the enervation I sometimes feel as a literary creature trapped a universe of screens. I dipped into Seamus Heaney for the first time in awhile, and I’m perpetually rereading James Schuyler. Zawacki’s book stayed with me for its thorny range and beauty, including the physical beauty of the book itself. McLane is a mercurial delight, Frank O’Hara in Sappho drag, or maybe it’s the other way around. It was my first time reading John Freeman; I liked his blend of simplicity and sophistication. There were other poets that I’ve forgotten. I’m sorry, poets!

Robert McKee, Story (1998)

Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972)
Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation (2014)
—, Authority (2014)
—, Acceptance (2014)
Surely I read more science fiction than this in 2022? But if I did I can’t remember it. These were terrific.

Sterling Hayden, Wanderer (1963)
Elif Batuman, Either/Or (2022)
These books have little in common beyond being first-person narratives that move from naivete to worldliness, but I happened to be reading them at the same time and wrote about them. So there.

Anthony Trollope, The Warden (1855)
—, Barchester Towers (1857)
—, Doctor Thorne (1858)
I’ve never been into Trollope; he seems to fall between two stools, as he would put it: he’s Dickens but without the prolific invention of his prose or his indelible caricatures; he’s Eliot but without her depth of insight or moral range. But this fall I started reading him and I got really into it. The Barchester novels are pastorals conjured by an author with a cold eye for money and a remarkable skepticism toward institutions like the Church or the aristocracy, along with a counter-skepticism toward the real god of the Victorians, Progress. He’s generous to his characters, many of whom are recognizably human beings, especially the women. And, although Henry James deplored it, I quite enjoy his winks and nudges to the reader, as when in Barchester Towers he quips that one of his characters could easily clear up her quandary: “But then where would have been my novel?”

Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog (1997). If Trollope wrote novels about time travel this is exactly what you’d get.

John Higgs, William Blake vs the World (2021)

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble (2019). Better than the show.

Fanny Howe, Bronte Wilde (1976). Discovered in a used bookshop in the basement of a former mental hospital, and it reads exactly like you’d expect.

Susan Howe, Spontaneous Particulars (2014)

Brian Dillon, Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction (2017)

Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021)

Kate Atkinson, Life after Life (2013)

Lydia Davis, Essays One (2019). Excellent company for a writer.

A list like this will always feel incomplete; as soon as I post this I’ll start remembering other books I read that ought to be on it. Maybe the only theme is reading what I damn well please without a lot of regard for what’s new or trendy; just three of the books on the list were new. That said, I’d like to read a bit more SFF in the coming year—Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series has caught my eye—and more Irish fiction, and poetry of the more eccentric sort. Know a book you think I’d like? Why not tell me about it in a comment?

In the meantime, I wish all my readers the happiest of New Years. Read more books! Toast more cheese!