The book newsletter is back, baby. At least for my annual Reading Round-up, which will come in four installments in the weeks to come. I’ve also decreed 2023 my year of making comics, so I hope to send some of these on as well, but for those protective of their inbox (as I am), I don’t believe there’s any risk of this newsletter coming too frequently…
There’s often a disconnect between the kind of reader a person is and the kind of reader they think they are, or would like to be. I often see book people waxing rapturous about literature in translation, or poetry, or short stories, for example, but I wonder if you had secret access to their actual reading habits whether you would find many books in any of those categories. Which is fine, but it’s better to be honest, to understand what we’re actually hungry to read and what our book diet provides, or doesn’t provide.
Setting reading goals helps bridge the gap between the reader you are and the reader you want to be, but I resist these, because I’m afraid it will make reading into a chore that I avoid. It’s interesting to look back, then, to see what shape my interests and obsessions took in a given year. It’s also why I strive to be honest in these round-ups, presenting the Reader I Am rather than the Reader I Hope to Be. As always, I’m happy to hear about others’ reading habits (which is one of my major reasons for sharing these book opinions), so please do comment if you’d like to share thoughts on any of the titles below, or your 2022 reading generally.
The 2022 Reading Round-Up
I read 26 books in 2022, less than usual, in part because I made an international move (from the Netherlands back to the U.S.), which made it difficult to focus on much else. Once back in the U.S., in a fit of excitement about accessing English-language media in print, I subscribed to too many publications (NY Magazine, The Economist, The Atlantic, the weekend NY Times), so there’s been a lot of other stuff to read, too!
The obsessive stats
Genre: The mix of genres has held steady through a few years: 40% nonfiction, 40% fiction, 20% poetry. Strangely, this isn’t through any conscious effort. Nonfiction usually means a mix of memoir and essays, with sometimes the odd biography, history or science book. In 2022 I read just one book in the comics genre and no short story collections. The Reader I Would Like to Be reads short story collections.
Gender: Also a fairly steady breakdown over the years - authors were about 70% women, 30% men. After many years of reading mostly women, I still feel a real hunger for what women think and what women have to say, including women of the past.
Nationality: Out of 25 writers, about 70% (17) were from the USA, a higher percentage than usual. The rest were from France (3), Chile (1), Germany (1), Italy (1), Sweden (1) and the United Kingdom (1). I usually read more British writers.
Language: Very lazy about keeping up my other languages last year. All the books I read were in English, although 5 (20%) were books in translation.
Cool presses: 30% of the books I read were published by independent, often small, presses. Namely: Catapult, Europa Editions, Graywolf Press, Melville House, Ortac Press, Persea Press, Ten Speed Press, Wave Books.
Publication date: 60% of what I read was published in the past 5 years. The oldest book I read was first published in 1944.
One unrated title
Flower Factory: A Fairy Tale, by Richard Foster (Ortac Press, 2022)
This is a novel published my friend Richard, an Englishman living in Holland, who is a post-punk scholar and connoisseur of the Rotterdam music scene, a hilarious storyteller, a multifarious and deep reader, generous soul and a good man all around. It would be inappropriate and weird to rank my friend’s book in an arbitrary list of books I happened to read last year, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say something about it here. Flower Factory is an episodic, funny account of the seasonal workers who populated the flower fields of Holland in the late 90s. Never quite at home in any one place, the English narrator offers an anthropological take on both the tidy Dutch society of the time and the freewheeling subcultures working the fields (ravers, neo-hippies, working class stalwarts), mostly hailing from the British Isles. There are stops in Amsterdam and Leiden, vivid accounts of the physical and mental toll of manual labour (including a lack of control over the pop music playing repetitively in the background), and old school debauched pub crawls.
Fiction and Nonfiction
This is the bottom third of the list, thus the books I had mixed feelings about. Presented with the usual caveat that they’re ranked (countdown style) in order of how much I enjoyed the book, how much of it stuck with me, how likely I am to recommend it, how likely I am to return to it. That is, not necessarily in order of literary greatness, societal importance or other such greater category.
21. Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski (Canongate, 2008, first published 1982)
This is considered one of Bukowski’s best novels, but the willful nihilism annoyed me by the end (no belief or aim is actually meaningful, the narrator stands outside all of it). It’s absoluteness seemed dishonest. However, I should say that Dan, whose judgment I trust, found this funnier than I did, so it’s also possible I was taking the nihilism too seriously. I do think it’s a great title!
Aside on the fixation on autobiography in fiction: Every review or article I read on this book treated it like autobiography and made it about Bukowski himself. While there’s no doubt he based this book on his youth, it’s important to note that he published it as fiction. This is a perpetual critical impulse that bothers me so much. Of course it’s natural to be curious about how much of a book is “true,” but this is a separate matter from the book’s existence as a piece of fiction. It’s much easier to talk about what actually happened to the author as a human being than engaging with what the work is saying on its own terms, through the tools of fiction.
20. Atomic Habits by James Clear (Random House Business, 2018)'
I seem to read one self-help-ish book a year to try to become more disciplined about writing. This is a hugely popular tome on developing productive habits. I can’t review it fairly in terms of saying whether it “works,” as I didn’t do the full program (i.e. follow the exercises, make the lists, create the worksheets, etc. proposed by the author). It seemed like it could have been a short workbook that was bloated into airport-book length, but I did take away some basic ideas about the cumulative nature of habit. There’s also an encouraging bit about how you always hit a wall when establishing a new habit (i.e. get bored of it, want to quit, skip it, feel too tired, etc. after the initial push of energy), but that if you manage to get past this point, you cement the habit and achieve hitherto unknown levels of success…
19. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Knopf, 2021)
This memoir, Zauner’s account of her relationship with her mother, including her illness and death, and Zauner’s subsequent search to reconnect with her Korean heritage, was a long-running bestseller. The opening chapter, based on an essay originally published in The New Yorker, is a stunner, evoking the connections between food, memory, and grief. I’m a contrarian on this one, but I think that essay accomplished what this book sets out to do without need of more. Zauner seems too close to the material yet when she tells the story of her life with her mother, depicting herself as a villain for having been a difficult teenager and, sanctifying her mother, who could do no wrong. She’s strangely blind to how her parents’ abusive treatment of her could have led to her depression and acting out. While I do love reading about food, given the repetitive nature of the passages on food and their sometimes odd placement, I would wager $100 that an editor asked the author for another pass to insert Korean food details to make the memoir more marketable from the foodie angle.
18. Girl by Camille Laurens, translated by Adriana Hunter (Other Press 2022, first published 2020)
I reviewed this novel for the Chicago Review of Books, so my full thoughts on this novel are here. (I address the terrible cover, which is not normally book review territory, but was relevant to the content in this case.) The short version is that this was a highly literary exploration of how misogyny manifests in large and small ways, from how language is used to how pregnant women are treated, but it didn’t necessarily tread new ground, I wanted it to push further.
17. Lullaby (UK title) [The Perfect Nanny in the U.S.], by Leila Slimani, translated by Sam Taylor (Faber & Faber, 2018, first published 2016)
This novel opens with a grisly scene, where a Parisian nanny has killed the baby under her charge. The rest of the narrative seemingly seeks to uncover what led to the crime. Slimani has openly admitted to lifting the premise from the headlines, basing the key event on the terrible case of the Krim family in Manhattan, whose children were killed by their nanny in 2012. It’s an act that raises the same horrified and curious questions from everyone: How could someone do such a thing? What would lead someone to do such a thing? But these are not the questions the book answers, or that Slimani is particularly interested in. The strength of this novel is in its nuanced depictions of class and race tensions, and the difficult intimacy implicit in having an employee in a family home, in a caregiving role. The horrifyingly riveting nature of the crime felt like a bit of a trick to lure readers, when Slimani can clearly manage more subtle material with insight and care. (I’m also a contrarian on this one - this novel won the big French book prize, the Prix Goncourt.)
16. Jack Kirby: the Epic Life of the King of Comics by Tom Scioli (2020)
A graphic biography of Jack Kirby, the genius, under-credited creator of the majority of the familiar heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe back in the comics of the 20th century. The author clearly has an agenda - Stan Lee comes off as devoid of talent, opportunistic and exploitative, while Kirby is the creative fountain and tireless worker. There were definite moments where I felt a little dizzy secondhand rage at how little credit and compensation he received, while so many others many fortunes. Kirby’s internal and personal life is left mostly unexplored, aside from his experiences in WWII and subsequent post-traumatic stress. The author made a bizarre decision to depict Kirby with giant, childlike eyes and all other characters in a more realistic style, which was distracting.
15. Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler (Catapult, 2021)
An ambitious novel about being terminally online as a young woman (on the dating apps, addicted to Twitter, compulsively doomscrolling, self-obsessed, fixated on random strangers). I was delighted and thrilled with the first 100 pages or so as Oyler is incredibly smart and very funny at times. However, my enthusiasm went downhill fast. Oyler’s narrator is never not in an emotionally defensive crouch, protected by a crust of cool-girl nihilism that never breaks. The fact that both Oyler and the narrator would both readily admit this and characterize it as a necessary position for our time/a literary device that reflects the aims of the book doesn’t make it any more palatable. The characters start to feel like simple devices for the author to voice opinions, complaints, and stuff that happened to her. I can’t say I would pass this book on to a friend, though I will likely read whatever Oyler publishes next. (She is also notorious for her unvarnished, often scathing book reviews, which made this an anticipated novel last year.)
14. Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (One World, 2021)
This was a recent buzzy book, in part because it’s the first novel by a trans woman to really break into the mainstream. (It was on Carrie Bradshaw’s nightstand in the cringey Sex & the City reboot show.) There was also a lot of media coverage when it was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and there was predictable pushback by those upset that a book by a trans woman was nominated.
I had a very similar response to this novel as to Fake Accounts. Peters’ is a smart and witty writer, and the book is full of voluble, wide-ranging opinions on pop culture, sex and sexuality, and relationships. I don’t think I’ve read such explicit sex scenes in fiction before - not explicit in the physical sense, but in an intensely psychological and emotional sense. Peters was also bold and clearly out to provoke all types of readers, including both trans and cis women, by including a character who has detransitioned as well as characters opining extensively on womanhood, the specific quandaries of white trans women, neighborhoods of New York City and other divisive topics. (I include myself among the provoked, particularly by one trans character’s disquisition on how victimhood is an intrinsic and essential component of womanhood.)
As a piece of fiction I felt it faltered in its second half. The deeper the narrative delved into the premise, the less I was convinced by the characters and plotting. (The premise: a detransitioned trans woman who is living as a man, Ames, is in a relationship with his boss, a cis woman, Katrina, who becomes accidentally pregnant. The only way Ames can conceive of raising a child is by forming an alternative family that will include his ex, a trans woman, Reese, as a second mother. Katrina tentatively agrees.) Contrary to the marketing around this book I would say it is not substantively about motherhood or alternative families. The plot does not advance beyond Katrina’s pregnancy. Peters’ real themes are public and private identity, and romantic and sexual relationships. I clearly had complicated feelings about the novel, but would say it’s worth a read, and again would be interested in whatever else Torrey Peters gets up to.
Partially read books
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick: Enjoyable, but heady and thus only readable in small burst. It slipped under a pile of other bedside books. It’s also a doorstopper, so a bit daunting to finish.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore: I was reading this before the move and didn’t want to get battered on the plane. I’ve only just been reunited with it as my books have finally arrived.
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin: I love James Baldwin, but his fiction is written in a florid style I wasn’t in the right mood for. For some reason I picked this up thinking it was fictionalized account of his experience of being a Black American expat in Paris, but it’s not at all that. Perhaps to return to at a later date.
The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert and White Girls by Hilton Als: Two essay collections I didn’t finish out of library avidness/greed/reading hubris - I checked these out along with several other books and ran out of time as I only get one renewal. I was partway through both when they came due. I will definitely return to White Girls, which had an absolutely astonishing opening essay (with thanks to Mark V. for the recommendation!).
Thank you for reading! Please comment if you have alternate takes on any of the above titles.
If you think someone would enjoy this newsletter, please:
***
The Year in Reading, Part I
Oooh! I always love your recaps, and I did a short recap of my own this year, too (I can post below if interested. Some thoughts about these books first though. 1) I find Hot Water Music to be much more compelling than Ham on Rye, if you're looking for more Bukowski. I will say that Bukowski spoke a lot to me as an active alcoholic and drug addict (sorry if that's a bit of an overshare...) but since I have been in recovery it is less compelling. I could see how, if you do not have personal experience with addiction, some of his writing would lose its luster.
Always the best, love to read even the books you don’t like. My reading wishlist is ready for some new additions in parts 3-4.
I never got as enamored w Bukowski as other reading dudes during the years when swear words and self-destructive excess was attractive. He’s like Vonnegut (or maybe, after seeing the awful White Noise adaptation, DeLillo) as authors that get latched onto hardest when they’re found 18-25. I didn’t like Ham on Rye either, but it’s interesting to hear about your revisit in adulthood. I didn’t hate it like I hated Women (or as much as Bukowski hated women). The only thing of his I ever connected with was some of the poetry in Burning In Water, Drowning In Flame.