It was a pretty good year, especially for fiction. I stand no chance of ever catching up on my backlog of books to read, so these are less “Books of the Year” than “Books of My Year,” ones which happened to be published in 2013 (or late 2012). A boom in non-Waggish writing resulted in me not having time to write up some of these books, which I really do regret. I spent a month rereading old Pynchon novels alongside Bleeding Edge, which was blessedly worthwhile, but did not help my productivity. Reading list longa, vita brevis.
The order is fairly random though I have tried to put my favorites toward the top of each section. Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo was probably foreordained to be at the top, while the final appearance of Lem’s Summa Technologiae in English was a major event for me. (See my review here.) As with War and War when I first read it, I don’t have a lot to say about Seiobo right now. Maybe in ten years.
As with last year, I haven’t read the entirety of some of the nonfiction selections: Judith Herrin’s two volumes of essays will take some time, while the Maimonides book had me flagging on several topics that just aren’t my thing.
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
Seiobo There Below (Ndp; 1280)
László Krasznahorkai
New Directions
Towards the One and Only Metaphor
Miklos Szentkuthy
Contra Mundum Press
Tapestry
Philip Terry
Reality Street
The Black Spider (New York Review Books Classics)
Jeremias Gotthelf
NYRB Classics
Anti M
Lisa Samuels
Chax Press
Phaedra: with New Year’s Letter and Other Long Poems
Marina Tsvetaeva
Angel Books
Blinding
Mircea Cartarescu
Archipelago
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller: Vol. 2
Carol Emshwiller
NonStop Press
Dossier K: A Memoir
Imre Kertész
Melville House
The Enchanted Wanderer: and Other Stories
Nikolai Leskov
Knopf
Mo Said She Was Quirky
James Kelman
Other Press
When the Time Comes
Josef Winkler
Contra Mundum Press
The Forbidden Kingdom (Pushkin Collection)
Jan Jacob Slauerhoff
Pushkin Collection
Cannonball
Joseph McElroy
Dzanc Books
Bleeding Edge
Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Press
Middle C (Vintage International)
William H. Gass
Vintage
All That Is
James Salter
Knopf
His Wife Leaves Him
Stephen Dixon
Fantagraphics
The Childhood of Jesus
J. M. Coetzee
Viking
The Sinistra Zone
Adam Bodor
New Directions
The Guy Davenport Reader
Guy Davenport
Counterpoint
Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach (Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures)
Philip Kitcher
Columbia University Press
The Adjacent
Christopher Priest
Gollancz
The Book of Monelle
Marcel Schwob
Wakefield Press
Georges Perec and the Oulipo: Winter Journeys (Atlas Anti-Classics)
Georges Perec, Michèle Audin, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Bens, Paul Braffort
Atlas Press
Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics)
Penguin Classics
A Hero of Our Time (Oxford World’s Classics)
Mikhail Lermontov, Nicolas Pasternak Slater, Andrew Kahn
Oxford University Press
Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB/Poets)
Alexander Vvedensky
NYRB Poets
Nonfiction
Summa Technologiae (Electronic Mediations)
Stanislaw Lem
Univ Of Minnesota Press
Nagarjuna’s Middle Way: Mulamadhyamakakarika (Classics of Indian Buddhism)
Mark Siderits, Shoryu Katsura
Wisdom Publications
Being, Humanity, and Understanding
G. E. R. Lloyd
Oxford University Press
Savage Energies: Lessons of Myth and Ritual in Ancient Greece
Walter Burkert
University Of Chicago Press
The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000
Peter Brown
Wiley-Blackwell
Properties as Processes
Johanna Seibt
Ridgeview Publishing Digital
The Nonlinear World: Conceptual Analysis and Phenomenology (Springer Series in Synergetics)
Yoshitsugu Oono
Springer
The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance
Jonardon Ganeri
Oxford University Press
Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind
John Miles Foley
University of Illinois Press
Foundations of Modern International Thought
David Armitage
Cambridge University Press
The Circle of Socrates: Readings in the First-Generation Socratics
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Baroque Science
Ofer Gal, Raz Chen-Morris
University Of Chicago Press
Language, Truth, and Literature: A Defence of Literary Humanism
Richard Gaskin
Oxford University Press
Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield
Jeremy Scahill
Nation Books
The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide
Josef Stern
Harvard University Press
The Mind within the Brain: How We Make Decisions and How those Decisions Go Wrong
A. David Redish
Oxford University Press
Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory
Robert J. Richards
University Of Chicago Press
Consciousness and the Social Brain
Michael S. A. Graziano
Oxford University Press
The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease
Daniel Lieberman
Pantheon
Trade and Romance
Michael Murrin
University Of Chicago Press
Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium
Judith Herrin
Princeton University Press
Margins and Metropolis: Authority across the Byzantine Empire
Judith Herrin
Princeton University Press
Complexity and the Arrow of Time
Cambridge University Press
The Engine of Complexity: Evolution as Computation
John Mayfield
Columbia University Press
How Did Poetry Survive?: The Making of Modern American Verse
John Timberman Newcomb
University of Illinois Press
Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
Mark Blyth
Oxford University Press
The Essential Hirschman
Albert O. Hirschman
Princeton University Press
Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman
Jeremy Adelman
Princeton University Press
The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us (MIT Press)
Noson S. Yanofsky
The MIT Press
Quantum Computing since Democritus
Scott Aaronson
Cambridge University Press
Comics
Incidents in the Night: Volume 1
David B.
Uncivilized Books
Black Paths
David B.
SelfMadeHero
The Amazing, Enlightening And Absolutely True Adventures of Katherine Whaley
Kim Deitch
Fantagraphics
Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
Allie Brosh
Touchstone Books
Interiorae
Gabriella Giandelli
Fantagraphics
Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: “Christmas On Bear Mountain” (The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library)
Carl Barks
Fantagraphics
Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: The Old Castle’s Secret
Carl Barks
Fantagraphics
Barnaby (Vol. 1) (Barnaby)
Crockett Johnson
Fantagraphics
Hand-Drying in America: And Other Stories (Pantheon Graphic Novels)
Ben Katchor
Pantheon