David Auerbach's Books of the Year 2018

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

Kolyma Stories (New York Review Books Classics)
Varlam Shalamov NYRB Classics

Anniversaries (Boxed Set): From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl (New York Review Books Classics)
Uwe Johnson NYRB Classics

INEVITABLE MENTION

Bitwise: A Life in Code
David Auerbach Pantheon

LITERATURE

The Rehearsals (Dedalus Europe)
Vladimir Sharov Dedalus Limited

The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis Liveright

Collected Stories
Bruno Schulz Northwestern University Press

The Novel of Ferrara
Giorgio Bassani W. W. Norton & Company

My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh Penguin Press

Belladonna
Daša Drndic New Directions

Doppelgänger
Daša Drndic Istros Books

The William H. Gass Reader
William H. Gass Knopf

Catastrophe: And Other Stories (Art of the Story)
Dino Buzzati Ecco

The Chandelier
Clarice Lispector New Directions

Cathay: A Critical Edition
Ezra Pound Fordham University Press

Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings
Remedios Varo Wakefield Press

Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane
Gerald Murnane Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A Hundred and One Nights (Library of Arabic Literature)
NYU Press

Doting (New York Review Books Classics)
Henry Green NYRB Classics

Nothing (New York Review Books Classics)
Henry Green NYRB Classics

Phoresis
Greg Egan Subterranean

The Sacerdotal Owl and Three Other Long Tales
Michael Bishop Fairwood Press

HUMANITIES

The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1: The Middle Ages
Jan M Ziolkowski Open Book Publishers

Lions (The German List)
Hans Blumenberg Seagull Books

Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner
Guy Davenport, Hugh Kenner Counterpoint

Keith Rowe: The Room Extended
Brian Olewnick powerHouse Books

Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc.
Galen Strawson New York Review Books

The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy in the First Millennium CE (The Oxford History of Philosophy)
Jan Westerhoff Oxford University Press

Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot
Vera Tobin Harvard University Press

If Not Critical
Eric Griffiths Oxford University Press

The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry
Eric Griffiths OUP Oxford

Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-reality of Creative Music: Interviews and Tour Notes, England 1985
Graham Lock Dover Publications

Nightmare Envy and Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction
George Blaustein Oxford University Press

Radical Skepticism and the Shadow of Doubt: A Philosophical Dialogue
Eli Hirsch Bloomsbury Academic

Knowledge and Truth in Plato: Stepping Past the Shadow of Socrates
Catherine Rowett Oxford University Press

The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling
John H. Zammito University of Chicago Press

Almost Nothing: The 20th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski
Eric Karpeles New York Review Books

Husserl's Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy
Dan Zahavi OUP Oxford

Shakespeare's Theatre: A History
Richard Dutton Wiley-Blackwell

Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life
Krista K. Thomason Oxford University Press

Translating Happiness: A Cross-Cultural Lexicon of Well-Being (The MIT Press)
Tim Lomas The MIT Press

Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality, and Form (Oxford Studies in Music Theory)
Jason Yust Oxford University Press

Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy (Philosophy of History and Culture)
Bo Mou BRILL

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

The Emergence of Dreaming: Mind-Wandering, Embodied Simulation, and the Default Network
G. William Domhoff Oxford University Press

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect
Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie Basic Books

Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars
Deborah G. Mayo Cambridge University Press

The Order of Time
Carlo Rovelli Riverhead Books

The Third Lens: Metaphor and the Creation of Modern Cell Biology
Andrew S. Reynolds University of Chicago Press

The Emotional Foundations of Personality: A Neurobiological and Evolutionary Approach
Kenneth L. Davis, Jaak Panksepp PhD W. W. Norton & Company

You'll see this message when it is too late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches (Information Policy)
Josephine Wolff The MIT Press

The Neuroscience of Emotion: A New Synthesis
Ralph Adolphs, David J. Anderson Princeton University Press

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
Sabine Hossenfelder Basic Books

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge Basic Books

The Philosophy of Quantitative Methods: Understanding Statistics
Brian D. Haig Oxford University Press

Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily Self-Awareness
Frédérique de Vignemont OUP Oxford

The Spontaneous Brain: From the Mind–Body to the World–Brain Problem (The MIT Press)
Georg Northoff The MIT Press

The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind
Michael S. Gazzaniga Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Energy, Entropy, and the Flow of Nature
Thomas F. Sherman Oxford University Press

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press)
Terrence J. Sejnowski The MIT Press

Re-Engineering Humanity
Brett Frischmann, Evan Selinger Cambridge University Press

The Politics of Autism
Bryna Siegel Oxford University Press

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World
Bruce Schneier W. W. Norton & Company

HISTORY AND POLITICS

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity
Kwame Anthony Appiah Liveright

Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942 (New York Review Books)
Jozef Czapski NYRB Classics

Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison
David Wootton Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press

Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century
Konrad H. Jarausch Princeton University Press

The Minard System: The Complete Statistical Graphics of Charles-Joseph Minard
Sandra Rendgen Princeton Architectural Press

Marx and Marxism
Gregory Claeys Bold Type Books

W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America
The W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Princeton Architectural Press