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
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
Economy and Society: Selected Writings
Karl Polanyi Polity
The Great Flowing River: A Memoir of China, from Manchuria to Taiwan (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)
Chi Pang-yuan Columbia University Press
A History of Judaism
Martin Goodman Penguin Press
Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
Paul Scharre W. W. Norton & Company
Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s
Eliyahu Stern Yale University Press
Napoleon: The Spirit of the Age: 1805-1810
Michael Broers Pegasus Books
The Open Sea: The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome
J. G. Manning Princeton University Press
Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (The United States in the World)
Daniel Bessner Cornell University Press
From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics
Quentin Skinner Cambridge University Press
Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall Apart (Princeton Studies in Global and Comparative Sociology)
Andreas Wimmer Princeton University Press
Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna
Edith Sheffer W. W. Norton & Company
Consciousness Demystified (The MIT Press)
Todd E. Feinberg MD, Jon M. Mallatt PhD The MIT Press
COMICS
Mort Cinder (Alberto Breccia Library)
Hector German Oesterheld, Alberto Breccia Fantagraphics Books
Garlandia
Lorenzo Mattotti, Jerry Kramsky Fantagraphics Books
The Arab of the Future 3: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1985-1987
Riad Sattouf Metropolitan Books
Hasib & The Queen of Serpents: A Thousand and One Nights Tale
David B. NBM Publishing
Piero
Edmond Baudoin New York Review Comics
Walt Disney Uncle Scrooge And Donald Duck The Don Rosa Library Gift Box Sets: Vols. 9 & 10 Gift Box Set (Vol. 9 & 10) (The Don Rosa Library)
Don Rosa Fantagraphics
The Song Of Aglaia
Anne Simon Fantagraphics Books
Weegee: Serial Photographer
Max de Radiguès Conundrum International
Von Spatz
Anna Haifisch Drawn and Quarterly
About Betty's Boob
Vero Cazot Archaia
The New World: Comics from Mauretania
Chris Reynolds New York Review Comics
Berlin
Jason Lutes Drawn and Quarterly
All The Answers
Michael Kupperman Gallery 13
OF INTEREST
Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal
Eric Rauchway Basic Books
A Nation Like All Others: A Brief History of American Foreign Relations
Warren Cohen Columbia University Press
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South
Radley Balko, Tucker Carrington PublicAffairs
Physics Avoidance: and other essays in conceptual strategy
Mark Wilson Oxford University Press
Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa
Scott MacEachern Oxford University Press
Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North (The Henry L. Stimson Lectures Series)
William R. Polk Yale University Press
Against Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics (The Terry Lectures Series)
Wendy Doniger Yale University Press
The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire
A. Wess Mitchell Princeton University Press
Orphic Tradition and the Birth of the Gods
Dwayne A. Meisner Oxford University Press
The Secret World: A History of Intelligence
Christopher Andrew Yale University Press
The British in India: A Social History of the Raj
David Gilmour Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia's History
Sunil Amrith Basic Books
The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
David Quammen Simon & Schuster