To be a true reader or writer today is to exist primarily in a state of longing and loneliness (sehnsucht, in the German term), because the vast majority of one’s closest associates are dead. Over the course of the 20th century the world of letters separated rather violently from the world of consequence, and so loving writing as writing requires either myopic self-delusion or an absurd appreciation for the spiritual residue of artistic impact. I don’t have the former in me, so it is the latter that drives me.
A remarkable amount of excellent archival issues came out this year, particularly in fiction and literature. The two placed in the pole position are not necessarily more deserving than many others. Rather, I chose them because they seemed to be most resonant with this year, despite being written decades ago. Both are very unorthodox Cold War retrospectives, both vaguely “documentary”-like, and yet animated by almost opposite sensibilities.
Ironically, I found Anniversaries to be a gloomier tale than Kolyma Stories, in the same way that gray is a gloomier color than black, or Faith is more enervating than Closer. Likewise, Johnson’s self-appearance in Anniversaries is more despairing than Shalamov’s varied appearances in Kolyma, because there is a certain abdication of moral authority Johnson took on in writing Anniversaries that is either disingenuous or terrifying. I think it’s the latter.
I have retained last year’s subcategories for nonfiction. They remain approximate. They are there to break the lists down into more manageable chunks. The books that posed the biggest dilemma were those on mind and cognition, which got divided between Humanities and Science depending on whether the bent was more theoretical or empirical.
Special notice must go to Jan Ziolkowski for choosing to publish the six volumes of The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity under Creative Commons and free for all to download. Like Adrian Piper’s Kantian study Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Ziolkowski’s book is a good deal closer to what academic work should be–visionary, monumental, singular–than most of what gets published by academic presses, and I hope that their publishing choice will help spread their work further.
You will notice one hell of a ringer after the top picks. After debating repeatedly, I decided to include my own book because I did spend more time with it than any other, and so it deserves to be called a book of my year. I could say more but I think I have already said it all here.
Books under “Of Interest” are there due to one or more of the following caveats: (1) I lack sufficient domain knowledge to feel comfortable recommending them, (2) I have sufficient reservations about their content but feel they are too significant to ignore, or (3) I just haven’t read enough of them.
The picture above is by the wonderful Ella Baron.
Be well, read much, take care.
BOOKS OF MY YEAR
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INEVITABLE MENTION
LITERATURE
A Hundred and One Nights (Library of Arabic Literature, 10)
Price: $15.00
28 used & new available from $5.97
HUMANITIES
The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1: The Middle Ages
Price: $34.99
11 used & new available from $34.99
Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner
Price: $62.18
15 used & new available from $55.71
Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc.
Price: $14.61
33 used & new available from $6.03
Price: $31.20
12 used & new available from $28.39
Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot
Price: $36.00
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Price: $9.99
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Nightmare Envy and Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction
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8 used & new available from $29.62
Radical Skepticism and the Shadow of Doubt: A Philosophical Dialogue
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Knowledge and Truth in Plato: Stepping Past the Shadow of Socrates
Price: $72.00
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The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling
Price: $42.75
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Almost Nothing: The 20th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski
Price: $13.39
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Husserl's Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy
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Translating Happiness: A Cross-Cultural Lexicon of Well-Being (The MIT Press)
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Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality, and Form (Oxford Studies in Music Theory)
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Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy (Philosophy of History and Culture)
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
The Emergence of Dreaming: Mind-Wandering, Embodied Simulation, and the Default Network
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The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect
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Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars
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The Third Lens: Metaphor and the Creation of Modern Cell Biology
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The Emotional Foundations of Personality: A Neurobiological and Evolutionary Approach
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The Philosophy of Quantitative Methods: Understanding Statistics
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The Spontaneous Brain: From the Mind-Body to the World-Brain Problem (The MIT Press)
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The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind
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Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World
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HISTORY AND POLITICS
Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942 (New York Review Books)
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Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison
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Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century
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The Minard System: The Complete Statistical Graphics of Charles-Joseph Minard
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W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America
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54 used & new available from $16.14
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Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
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Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s
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29 used & new available from $23.78
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From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics
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Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna
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COMICS
The Arab of the Future 3: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1985-1987
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Hasib & The Queen of Serpents: A Thousand and One Nights Tale
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4 used & new available from $40.24
OF INTEREST
Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal
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29 used & new available from $10.27
A Nation Like All Others: A Brief History of American Foreign Relations
Price: $35.00
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The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South
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Physics Avoidance: and other essays in conceptual strategy
Price: $85.00
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Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa
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18 used & new available from $24.00
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Price: $6.95
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The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (Henry L. Stimson Lectures)
Price: $40.00
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Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia's History
Price: $22.99
55 used & new available from $6.28
21 December 2018 at 22:04
These are great. I’m so glad you put both Vera and Eli on your list!
15 December 2019 at 20:58
Wow. What a great list! I hope you do one for this year, too.