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David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Books of the Year 2014

I had less time for reading this year than I would have liked. When I selected Drago Jancar’s haunting and beautiful The Tree with No Name for Slate’s Overlooked Books, it was still with the knowledge that I’d read a lot less fiction than I’d wanted. And Antal Szerb’s excellent, though modest Journey by Moonlight is a bit of a cheat, since I read it (and wrote about it) when Pushkin Press published it all the way back in 2003, rather than when NYRB Classics reissued it this year. It’s stayed with me, though, so I can pick it with more certainty than some of the other choices.

Seeing Richard McGuire’s long-gestating Here finally be published bookends my reading the original 8 page version in RAW when I was 13, when it changed my life. I wrote about the original Here in 2003 too.

And Alonso de Ercilla’s 1569 Spanish-Chilean epic The Araucaniad has been an alluring title to me since I read about it in David Quint’s fascinating Epic and Empire in connection with Lucan’s Civil War. Quint described The Araucaniad as one of those rare epics that takes the side of the losers, and it’s one of those artifacts, like Lucan’s Civil War, that doesn’t fit neatly with any common sense of literary history. Its relevance stems from its own grim variation on a theme that is at the heart of so many great epics and books: in Quint’s words, “that those who have been victimized losers in history somehow have the right to become victimizing winners, in turn.” It deserves a new translation.

As with last year, I haven’t read the entirety of some of the nonfiction selections: Chris Wickham is an excellent historian but I’m not going to deny that some of his Annales-ish wonkery had my eyes skimming. And while the biology and physics books are pretty interesting, I can’t say with much certainty that they’re accurate.

If anyone’s curious as to why some book or other made the list, feel free to ask in the comments. Thanks again for reading my work here or elsewhere.

(As always, I do not make any money from these links; they’re just the easiest way to get the thumbnails.)

Literature

Contemporaries and Snobs (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Price: $33.20

1 used & new available from $33.20

The Tree with No Name (Slovenian Literature)

Price: $14.95

7 used & new available from $7.96

I Am China: A Novel

Price: $13.99

1 used & new available from $13.99

All Our Names

Price: $6.99

1 used & new available from $6.99

Foreign Gods, Inc.

Price: $9.99

1 used & new available from $9.99

A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly

Price: $40.00

23 used & new available from $33.24

Prae, Vol. 1

Price: $38.40

22 used & new available from $31.69

The Time Regulation Institute

Price: $10.99

1 used & new available from $10.99

The Alp (Swiss Literature)

Price: $12.95

17 used & new available from $7.62

The Stories of Jane Gardam

Price: $15.79

67 used & new available from $4.00

Harlequin's Millions: A Novel

Price: $18.00

23 used & new available from $1.98

Journey by Moonlight (NYRB Classics)

Price: $21.15

11 used & new available from $3.87

Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)

Price: $16.10

22 used & new available from $4.49

 

Nonfiction

Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach

Price: $60.00

10 used & new available from $20.00

The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought

Price: $156.95

5 used & new available from $40.00

Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton's Epic

Price: $33.60

23 used & new available from $12.95

Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics At All?

Price: $31.99

18 used & new available from $18.00

A World without Why

Price: $41.36

17 used & new available from $21.58

Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

Price: $21.33

77 used & new available from $0.01

From Akhenaten to Moses: Ancient Egypt and Religious Change

Price: $25.49

5 used & new available from

Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion

Price: $21.00

1 used & new available from $21.00

The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

Price: $27.32

42 used & new available from $2.62

Social Dynamics

Price: $94.66

7 used & new available from $90.68

Absolute Music: The History of an Idea

Price: $26.99

1 used & new available from $26.99

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia

Price: $23.84

6 used & new available from $16.84

Science and Emotions after 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective

Price: $120.00

2 used & new available from $110.01

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

Price: $27.95

27 used & new available from $4.41

July Crisis: The World's Descent into War, Summer 1914

Price: $78.99

11 used & new available from $15.20

The Logical Must: Wittgenstein on Logic

Price: $67.96

12 used & new available from $43.00

After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900

Price: $29.99

6 used & new available from

Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

Price: $38.51

32 used & new available from $1.27

Pay Any Price

Price: $13.02

9 used & new available from $6.00

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous

Price: $26.95

55 used & new available from $2.21

Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge

Price: $38.00

10 used & new available from $24.13

The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon

Price: $42.00

21 used & new available from $31.41

Children into Swans: Fairy Tales and the Pagan Imagination

Price: $29.95

10 used & new available from $13.09

Earth's Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters

Price: $40.62

14 used & new available from $3.65

Forensic Shakespeare (Clarendon Lectures in English)

Price: $24.99

21 used & new available from $10.09

The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution

Price: $90.00

10 used & new available from $45.69

Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame

Price: $46.48

11 used & new available from $42.48

In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence

Price: $172.00

5 used & new available from $172.00

 

Comics

Here

Price: $23.36

88 used & new available from $8.14

Beautiful Darkness

Price: $50.35

32 used & new available from $5.24

Beauty

Price: $55.96

10 used & new available from

Dungeon: Twilight – Vol. 4: The End of Dungeon (4)

Price: $13.74

16 used & new available from $12.25

Sam Zabel And The Magic Pen

Price: $24.95

22 used & new available from $4.50

Incomplete Works

Price: $19.99

10 used & new available from $10.45

The Encyclopedia of Early Earth: A Novel

Price: $15.99

88 used & new available from $2.52

The Encyclopedia of Early Earth: A Novel

Price: $15.99

88 used & new available from $2.52

Perfect Nonsense: The Chaotic Comics and Goofy Games of George Carlson

Price: $49.99

12 used & new available from $21.97

Weapons of Mass Diplomacy

Price: $34.63

15 used & new available from $1.95

1 Comment

  1. Always the most interesting and challenging best of the year list for me, thank you.

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