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: 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
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
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
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 Books
Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
Allie Brosh Touchstone Books
Interiorae
Gabriella Giandelli Fantagraphics Books
Walt Disney's Donald Duck: The Old Castle's Secret
Carl Barks Fantagraphics Books
Barnaby: Volume One HC
Crockett Johnson Fantagraphics Books
Hand-Drying in America: And Other Stories (Pantheon Graphic Library)
Ben Katchor Pantheon