2023 in Reading

A bit of an odd reading year. Productive, but with most books occupying an uncomfortable middle place between research and pleasure (novels picked up for pleasure flagged as they were read; research works less relevant than I once thought as the manuscript moved along), maybe the inevitable result of being in the middle of a draft. The books I wound up enjoying the most, I think, were those that stood reassuringly in one camp or the other. Some old, others just published or about to be. I don’t have too much time to say much about them here.

Top 10

• Septology — Jon Fosse, tr. Damion Searls

• The Haunting of Hill House — Shirley Jackson (re-read)

• My Death — Lisa Tuttle

• The Necessity of Art — Ernst Fischer

• The Last Samurai — Helen DeWitt (re-read)

• Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature — Dan Sinkyin

• Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America — Allan Greer

• The Ghostly Tales of Henry James — Henry James, ed. Leon Edel

• Disgrace — J.M. Coetzee (re-read)

• City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles — Mike Davis

Reading for pleasure, or non-manuscript research (in order)

• City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles — Mike Davis

• Dune — Frank Herbert

• On the Marble Cliffs — Ernst Jünger, tr. Tess Lewis

• Julian — Gore Vidal

• Crossing to Safety — Wallace Stegner

• Dune Messiah — Frank Herbert

• Northanger Abbey — Jane Austen

• Orlando: A Biography — Virginia Woolf

• Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape — Cal Flyn

• Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages — Matthew Green

• The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics — Martin J. Sklar

• The Ambassadors — Henry James

• Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West — Cormac McCarthy

• Children of Dune — Frank Herbert

• Hell Bent —Leigh Bardugo

• Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy — Timothy Shenk

• God Emperor of Dune — Frank Herbert

• The Necessity of Art — Ernst Fischer

• Disgrace — J.M. Coetzee

• The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare — John Lisle

• On the Aesthetic Education of Man — Friedrich Schiller, tr. Keith Tribe

• The New Negro Aesthetic — Alain Locke

• Black Skin, White Masks — Frantz Fanon

• Macunaíma: The Hero With No Character — Mario de Andrade, tr. Katrina Dodson

• MIND MGMT Comprehensive Report 1 of 3 — Matt Kindt

• MIND MGMT Comprehensive Report 2 of 3 — Matt Kindt

• The Berlin Stories — Christopher Isherwood

• Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair — Sarah Schulman

• MIND MGMT Comprehensive Report 3 of 3 — Matt Kindt

• Blood on the Forge — William Attaway

• The Fortune of the Rougons — Émile Zola, tr. Brian Nelson

• Notes — Gauraa Shekhar

• The Last Samurai — Helen DeWitt

• Spelunky — Derek Yu

• The Ghostly Tales of Henry James — Henry James, ed. Leon Edel

• From Doon With Death — Ruth Rendell

• Negations: Essays in Critical Theory — Herbert Marcuse, tr. Jeremy J. Shapiro

• The Fellowship of the Ring — J.R.R. Tolkien

• Everything the Darkness Eats — Eric LaRocca

• Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination — Adam Shatz

• Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature — Erich Auerbach, tr. Willard R. Trask

• The Twin Towers — J.R.R. Tolkien

• Life and Fate — Vasily Grossman, tr. Robert Chandler

• The Return of the King — J.R.R. Tolkien

• Septology — Jon Fosse, tr. Damion Searls

• Laura from the Valley — Mark Gregory Lopez

• In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories — William Gass

• How High We Go in the Dark — Sequoia Nagamatsu

• The Ministry for the Future — Kim Stanley Robinson

• North Woods — Daniel Mason

• Old Masters: A Comedy — Thomas Bernhard, tr. Ewald Osers

• Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature — Dan Sinkyin

• Main Currents of Marxism, 1–The Founders — Leszek Kolakowski, tr. P.S. Falla

• Shah of Shahs — Ryszard Kapuscinski, tr. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand

• Foe — J.M. Coetzee

• The Haunting of Hill House — Shirley Jackson

• Main Currents of Marxism, 2–The Golden Age — Leszek Kolakowski, tr. P.S. Falla

• Haifa Republic — Omri Boehm

• Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory — Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

• On the Natural History of Destruction — W.G. Sebald, tr. Anthea Bell

• Hell House — Richard Matheson

• The Sun King — Nancy Mitford

• My Death — Lisa Tuttle

• The Storyteller Essays — Walter Benjamin, tr. Tess Lewis

• Stay, Illusion — Lucie Brock-Broido

• The Master Letters — Lucie Brock-Broido

• Ulysses — James Joyce

• The Princess Casamassima — Henry James

• Illuminations: Essays and Reflections — Walter Benjamin, tr. Harry Zohn

• The Alienist — Caleb Carr

• The Temptation of St. Antony — Gustave Flaubert, tr. Kitty Mrosovsky

• Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship — Gershom Scholem

Correction: prior version excluded mention of Children of Dune. Credit to Joe for the notice.

A selection of manuscript research (in order, those that I dug through more or less completely)

• The Spanish Frontier in North America — David J. Weber

• Tejano Legacy: Ranchers and Settlers in South Texas, 1734–1900 — Armando C. Alonzo

• Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empire and Land in Early Modern North America — Allan Greer

• Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire & Revolution in the Borderlands — Kelly Lytle Hernández

• A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America — Michael E. McGerr

• Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 — William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb

• Bandits — Eric Hobsbawm

• Primitive Rebels — Eric Hobsbawm

• The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture — Neil Foley

• The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas — Monica Muñoz Martinez

• Progressive and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era — Lewis L. Gould

• Imperial Texas: An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography — D.W. Meinig

• Lone Star Lawmen: The Second Century of the Texas Rangers — Robert M. Utley

• Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas — Jerry Thompson

• Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 — C. Vann Woodward

• The War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities — ed. Arnold de León

• Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution — John Mason Hart

• Boss Rule in South Texas — Evan Anders

• Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy — Miguel Antonio Levario

• Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1936 — David Montejano

• Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans — Benjamin Heber Johnson

• The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution —Friedrich Katz

• Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen —Christopher Capozzola

• The Great Plains — Walter Webb

• Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution — Christina Heatherton

• A Critical Theory of Police Power — Mark Neocleous

• The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph — Albert O. Hirschman

Bonus: Favorite Movies

• Mississippi Masala (1991) — Mira Nair

• The Long Goodbye (1973) — Robert Altman

• Topsy-Turvy (1999) — Mike Leigh

• The Age of Innocence (1993) — Martin Scorsese

• Anatomy of a Fall (2023) — Justine Triet

• Talk to Me (2023) — Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou

• Showing Up (2022) — Kelly Reichardt

• Nashville (1975) — Robert Altman

• Eve’s Bayou (1997) — Kasi Lemmons

• EO (2022) — Jerzy Skolimowski