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)

Blinding
Mircea Cartarescu
(Archipelago)

The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller: Vol. 2
Carol Emshwiller
(NonStop Press)

Dossier K: A Memoir
Imre Kertész
(Melville House)

Mo Said She Was Quirky: A Novel
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 Books)

The Childhood of Jesus
J. M. Coetzee
(Viking)

The Sinistra Zone
Adam Bodor
(New Directions)

The Guy Davenport Reader
Guy Davenport
(Counterpoint)

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)

A Hero of Our Time (Oxford World's Classics)
Mikhail Lermontov, Nicolas Pasternak Slater, Andrew Kahn
(Oxford University Press)

 

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)

Properties as Processes
Johanna Seibt
(Ridgeview Publishing Digital)

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)

Baroque Science
Ofer Gal, Raz Chen-Morris
(University of Chicago Press)

Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield
Jeremy Scahill
(Nation Books)

The Matter and Form of Maimonides' Guide
Josef Stern
(Harvard University Press)

Consciousness and the Social Brain
Michael S. A. Graziano
(Oxford University Press)

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)

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)

Interiorae
Gabriella Giandelli
(Fantagraphics Books)

Barnaby: Volume One HC
Crockett Johnson
(Fantagraphics Books)