Books of the Year 2012
So many books, so many books. I consciously tried to expand my reading horizons this year, which has helped to swell my reading list to unmanageable lengths. Sifting out worthy entries in disciplines with which I’m not especially familiar is not at all easy, so sometimes I just have to go on faith that apparent hard work, diligence, and care have resulted in an enlightening end product.
Krasznahorkai’s Satantango is certainly for me the book of the year, though in its way Lucan’s Civil War was as well, and I was very happy to have William Bronk‘s later poetry collected.
I have hardly read all of all of the nonfiction selections–I’ll be lucky if I ever read the Bailyn book cover to cover–but they have all been of note to me at least as reference or inspiration. Some stragglers from 2011 have snuck in as well.
If anyone’s curious as to why some book or other made the list, feel free to ask in the comments. Reviews on a couple are forthcoming.
(As always, I do not make any money from these links–this was just by far the simplest way to get thumbnails and metadata.)
Literature
László Krasznahorkai (New Directions)
The Galley Slave (Slovenian Literature Series)
Drago Jancar (Dalkey Archive Press)
Bursts of Light: The Collected Later Poems
William Bronk, David Clippinger, editor (Talisman House, Publishers)
Lisa Samuels (Shearsman Books)
David Albahari (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Marginalia on Casanova: St. Orpheus Breviary I
Miklós Szentkuthy (Contra Mundum Press)
Alasdair Gray (Canongate UK)
Alta Ifland (Spuyten Duyvil)
An Ermine in Czernopol (New York Review Books Classics)
Gregor von Rezzori (NYRB Classics)
Berlin Stories (New York Review Books Classics)
Robert Walser (NYRB Classics)
Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts
William H Gass (Knopf)
Happy Moscow (New York Review Books Classics)
Andrey Platonov (NYRB Classics)
Lucan (Penguin Classics)
Andrei Bely (Penguin Classics)
Tyrant Banderas (New York Review Books Classics)
Ramon del Valle-Inclan (NYRB Classics)
The Person I Am Volume One (Laura (Riding) Jackson Series)
Laura (Riding) Jackson (Trent Editions)
The Person I Am Volume Two (Laura (Riding) Jackson Series)
Laura (Riding) Jackson (Trent Editions)
Imre Kertesz (Seagull Books)
Minuet for Guitar (Slovenian Literature Series)
Vitomil Zupan (Dalkey Archive Press)
Jacques Roubaud (Dalkey Archive Press)
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
Oksana Zabuzhko (AmazonCrossing)
Comics
David B. (SelfMadeHero)
Ralph Azham: “Why Would You Lie To Someone You Love?” (Vol. 1)
Lewis Trondheim (Fantagraphics)
Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: “Lost in the Andes” (Vol. 7) (The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library)
Carl Barks (Fantagraphics)
Carl Barks (Fantagraphics)
Nonfiction
Oral Literature in Africa (World Oral Literature Series)
Ruth Finnegan (Open Book Publishers)
Michael Levenson (Yale University Press)
Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry: Decoding Facts and Variables (Cultural Sociology)
Richard RichardBiernacki (Palgrave Macmillan)
Apoha: Buddhist Nominalism and Human Cognition
(Columbia University Press)
William M. Reddy (University Of Chicago Press)
Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography
Arnaldo Momigliano (University Of Chicago Press)
Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850
Denise Phillips (University Of Chicago Press)
Memory: Fragments of a Modern History
Alison Winter (University Of Chicago Press)
Davesh Soneji (University Of Chicago Press)
The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition
Gerard Passannante (University Of Chicago Press)
Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition
Sorana Corneanu (University Of Chicago Press)
Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature
Alastair Fowler (Oxford University Press, USA)
German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond
Michael N. Forster (Oxford University Press, USA)
Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century
Frederique Ait-Touati (University Of Chicago Press)
Reality: A Very Short Introduction
Jan Westerhoff (Oxford University Press)
American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University Of Chicago Press)
Augustus: Introduction to the Life of an Emperor
Karl Galinsky (Cambridge University Press)
Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives
Aleida Assmann (Cambridge University Press)
Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination
Jan Assmann (Cambridge University Press)
The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (The Evolution of Modern Philosophy)
A. W. Moore (Cambridge University Press)
Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame
Christopher Boehm (Basic Books)
Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus (Harvard University Press)
More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India
David Shulman (Harvard University Press)
The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction
Eckart Förster (Harvard University Press)
Scholarship, Commerce, Religion: The Learned Book in the Age of Confessions, 1560-1630
Ian Maclean (Harvard University Press)
The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat
Santiago Zabala (Columbia University Press)
David Rothkopf (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Jaak Panksepp, Lucy Biven (W. W. Norton & Company)
Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy 2 Volume Hardback Set
M. F. Burnyeat (Cambridge University Press)
Peter Brown (Princeton University Press)
On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present
Alan Ryan (Liveright)
Governing the World: The History of an Idea
Mark Mazower (Penguin Press HC, The)
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction and Interpretation (This Way Up series)
James O’Shea (Acumen Publishing)
Recent articles
- Is Social Science a Joke?09 May 2013
- Am I a Redundant Human Being?07 Apr 2013
- Portnoy’s Obsolete Complaint13 Mar 2013
- Father Time: Chronos and Kronos13 Feb 2013
- The World as Metaphor in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities30 Jan 2013
Recent comments
- Michael Lynne on Middlemarch and Mary Garth
- Stephanie on The Pale, Quiet, Episcopalian Breast: On a Phrase of Jeffrey Eugenides
- surendran on Cultural Illogic: David Golumbia and The Cultural Logic of Computation
- Kieron on Thersites, the Iliad, and Not Knowing Your Place
- Marc Aramini on Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun
what did you think of Alan Ryan’s On Politics? Was it worth the time?
For me it was, though there were parts I read more closely than others, as tends to be the case with 1000 page books. It’s a seriously synoptic work, which means that it goes quickly and there will always be plenty to disagree with in its summaries. His main goal is to provide a linear account connecting political theory and philosophy to history, and I think he does a pretty good job, especially when he gets onto the French Revolution through to Hegel and Marx.
The general quality of his thought is pretty high and I like much of what he has to say. Still, I would not call it an essential or revelatory book in the way that, say, I found Polanyi’s The Great Transformation to be. The difficulty, as always, is that the historical picture resists any easy summary and so the linkages between politics & practice inevitably seem dubious, especially when read alongside a book like Tim Blanning’s great and more surprising Pursuit of Glory, or Sheldon Wolin’s more incisive Politics and Vision. Ryan is circumspect and charitable in his writing, acknowledging these problems, so that the problems are not with Ryan’s skill and insight, but with the underlying nature of the project. Ryan’s concerted moderation makes him less challenging to one’s preconceived notions than Polanyi, Blanning, and Wolin.
I think that Mark Mazower’s review captures some of Ryan’s strengths and weaknesses, though I think omitting Habermas and Carl Schmitt is no great sin.
You might also be interested in Caligula: A Biography by Aloys Winterling. “He sets the emperor’s story into the context of the political system and the changing relations between the senate and the emperor during Caligula’s time and finds a new rationality explaining his notorious brutality.”
Despite all of the books here that I would like to read or should read or would read if I were doing that instead of this, it strikes me as funny that the only book that we both read this year was the first volume of Carl Barks.
I have been thinking about the Eric Kandel and would enjoy a note or two about it. And the Szentkuthy is good? I figured.
One of these days I will write some epic essay on Carl Barks and the dark, fatalistic conservative mindset at work in those stories. I only found out this year that Barks himself was in dire personal straits during 1947-1951 or so, generally acknowledged to be the peak of his genius.
The Szentkuthy is fascinating, but like Dwight below, I’ve had trouble figuring out what to say about it. It’s defiantly odd.
A great list for me to explore, especially the nonfiction (some of which I read this year as well).
I’ve been meaning to write on the Szentkuthy. I loved it but have had trouble writing anything on it. I’ll correct that next week.
Thanks; I should correct my not following your blog–lots of new writers to investigate there like Mariengof and Galdos. So many books, so many books.
The Person I Am Volume One (Laura (Riding) Jackson Series) — Holy cats, how did you find these!? I’ve seen no reviews, no excerpts, no notices…. Are they more Anarchism Is Not Enough or more Rational Meaning?
I suspect Riding’s reliability as a self-witness, but she can’t be much worse than Graves.
Volume 1 is more Anarchism, Volume 2 is pure Rational Meaning and other late stuff. I found them while searching on LRJ on Amazon, which I do from time to time on the assumption that, indeed, new stuff from her will not be noticed anywhere.
I, too, read the books by Burnyeat, Momigliano, Gass, and Moore.
How did you find the Gass? For me, it was the best volume of essays he has yet produced (though A Temple of Texts is hard to beat for its title essay).
Also, I would love to hear your thoughts on the Ian Mclean book, as I am considering whether to invest the time to read it.
I thought Life Sentences was more inconsistent than Temple and Fiction/Figures…the Kafka essay, for example, didn’t work for me. Gass takes chances and sometimes they pay off, sometimes they don’t. Maybe I’ll feel differently after reading Middle C.
Did you like the Moore? It impressed me, not the least because that sort of book linking contemporary and older philosophy doesn’t seem to get written any longer, at least not with such polemical style. Definitely the best book by a Deleuze fan I’ve read in ages.
The Maclean book is excellent scholarship in the Warburg tradition: exquisitely researched and methodically organized, with absolutely no concessions to trendiness or a broader audience. So it is considerably denser than Andrew Petegree’s The Book in the Renaissance or Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know, but more enlightening to its target audience. The scope is broad but Maclean does not waste space. The period isn’t a particular specialty of mine, so I extracted from it what was useful for me while admiring his general tenacity and focus, but I would not recommend it to someone without *some* background in the period–I’d recommend those other two books first, even though I think Maclean is more impressive piece.
What I most enjoyed about the new Gass volume were actually the more autobiographical essays. Unique and surprising from a writer like Gass. The essay involving his night escapades in the library especially prejudiced me, however. One only has to fantasize about living in a library for a sentence or two to win my deathless interest and appreciation.
Thanks for the advice re: Maclean. I’ve read neither Petegree nor Blair. Perhaps I will begin with them.
As for the Moore, yes, I liked it for the same reason. Nice to read about the history of philosophy as if it weren’t either a bargain-bin for concepts or an alternate reality.