2023 Reading Log

My 18 notable books of 2023 are listed first, followed by all of the other books I read that year in alphabetical order by author.

Dionne Brand. The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. A captivating book-length poem in the form of a dialogue between the poet and her clerk (ostensibly the clerk on a Caribbean wharf) about a wide range of topics, including writing, poetry, memory, and art. Utterly wonderful.

Octavia E. Butler. Parable of the Sower. 1993. In the environmentally-ruined dystopian future—2024!—most of America has gone to the dogs and violence rules the streets. People live in small walled-off clusters, hoping to defend themselves against robbers and drug-fueled crazies who crave to set things and people on fire. After her tight little neighborhood is robbed and burnt and many of its residents murdered, young Lauren Olamina and two others set out from Southern California and head north, hoping to find a better place to live. For better or worse, Lauren, who is Black, has the ability to feel the pain of others. She is also trying to establish, first in her mind, then among the handful of people who join her on her northward trip, a vision of a better way of life which she calls Earthseed. But to establish it, she and her band of friends must withstand terrible challenges. I’ve been circling Butler for a long time and finding this on my library’s $2 resale shelf did the trick. It’s powerful, but painful reading. And it’s striking that the first date in Lauren’s notebooks is July 20, 2024.

Danielle Dutton. Sprawl. Seattle: Wave Books, 2018. I tried and failed to read this when it first came out. But this time around I found myself astounded at the writing and the haunting vision of the world that she creates, a suburbia that is claustrophobic and beautiful, pristine and pornographic, a bit like a neighborhood trapped underneath a bell jar. The book is a beautiful object, too, as is always the case with Wave Books. I wrote a longer piece about the book here.

James Elkins. Weak In Comparison to Dreams. Los Angeles: The Unnamed Press, 2023. A hugely ambitious novel about failure, empathy, and loneliness. But it’s also about finding peace in the arts, in this case in music. To write this book, which is apparently only one volume of a planned five-volume novel, Elkins seems to have mastered several scientific disciplines, advanced mathematics, and contemporary music. But he has harnessed these disciplines for a theme that is deeply human. The book is stuffed with b&w photographs (some which have lines drawn on them), charts, graphs, mathematical equations, line drawings, reproductions of old woodcuts, at least one map, and pages containing sections of musical scores. I wrote at length about the novel here.

Dorothee Elmiger. Shift Sleepers. London: Seagull Books, 2019. Translated from the 2014 German original by Megan Ewing. A handful of voices representing an apparently random group of people located in Europe and America come and go during a book-length conversation on a variety of topics, including immigration, police brutality, sleep, and how several members of the group met each other. One never reads Elmiger expecting answers. I wrote more about the book here.

Jenny Erpenbeck. Kairos. NY: New Directions, 2023. Translated from the 2021 German original by Michael Hofmann. On the surface this is a love story between two East Germans, Katharina, a young theater design student and Hans, a married novelist who is thirty-four years her senior. But it’s also a metaphor for the love/hate relationship between the people of East Germany (officially the Deutsche Demokratische Republik) and the DDR itself. It’s a rich, powerful, and entertaining novel. I wrote a longer review of it here back in July, but forgot to list it here in my Reading Log.

Percival Everett. Once Seen. Los Angeles: Hat & Beard Press, 2021. This is Percival Everett at his slyest. In 2021, he had an exhibition of his mostly abstract paintings in West Hollywood at the Show Gallery. Rather than do a traditional catalog, Everett decided to reproduce his paintings within the context of a 100-year old issue of The Crisis, the magazine founded by W.E.B. DuBois for the NAACP. The February 1921 issue dealt with the subject of lynching and contained several articles and photographs. Everett had reproductions of his paintings placed where ads would have been in the magazine and had several pages added onto the end to serve as the actual catalog. Subversively brilliant, but gruesome.

Laura Freeman. Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists. London: Jonathan Cape, 2023. Kettle’s Yard was the art-filled Cambridge home of Jim and Helen Ede and is now a house museum, left much as if the two still live there. It’s one of the great art/museum experiences I’ve ever had and Laura Freeman does a wonderful job giving us the essential life stories for the couple, focusing on Jim, who was a Curator at the Tate for a while. The Edes supported artists when they could, bought art when they could, and lived with art all their adult lives. Once they started living in Kettle’s Yard in 1958, they would open the house afternoons regularly to students and passers-by for tours of the art and objects they had collected. Despite the title, this is more or less a biography of Jim and Helen, who lived quite exciting lives for many years before settling into Kettle’s Yard. I wrote more about the book here.

Julien Gracq. The Peninsula. Copenhagen: Green Integer, 2011. Translated from the 1970 French original by Elizabeth Deshays. In this astonishingly beautiful little book (117 pages), very little “happens.” Simon drives to the small railroad station in Brittany where he is to meet his girlfriend, but she has missed the afternoon train. The allows him to drive around and explore the region where he grew up, until hours later, when the evening train arrives. Nearly the entire book consists of descriptions of the landscapes and tiny villages that Simon passes through, descriptions that are utterly original and captivating. I have read and written about in Vertigo just about everything that Gracq wrote, all of which is prose of the highest order, and I think The Peninsula is among the two or three best books he wrote.

Mieko Kanai. Mild Vertigo. NY: New Directions, 2023. Translated from the 2002 Japanese original by Polly Barton. Mild Vertigo is, at times, deliberately prosaic, describing page after page the routine thoughts of a Japanese housewife as she rides the underground, shops in the grocery store, gossips with neighbors, and talks with her husband. This is life in endless Tokyo suburbia—repressed, petty, boring, and yet, beneath the surface there is divorce, suicide, gossip about a housewife prostitution ring, and bitter jealousy. Kanai’s prose is as smooth and quiet as the suburban lifestyle is meant to be; it’s up to the reader to stay alert for the irony and the hidden gems. This is a real dark horse of a novel. I wrote more about the book here.

Robin Coste Lewis. To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness. NY: Knopf, 2022. This is a monster book—380 pages—of powerful poetry and an amazing collection of photographs that Lewis’ grandmother left behind in a suitcase beneath her bed when she died twenty-five years ago. The poems deal with Lewis’ grandmother’s generation, the Great Migration north, family, and Black life. The photographs depict Black people and Black life across the first half of the 20th century. The phrase “perfect helplessness” comes from Matthew Henson, a Black explorer (1866-1955) who went with Robert Peary on seven trips to the Arctic and is believed to have been the first of Peary’s men to reach what they believed to be the North Pole. (It probably wasn’t.) Parts of several poems in the book refer to Henson’s experiences. This is a rare book in which the poetry and the photographs interact in sophisticated, often unexpected ways.

Laurent Mauvignier. The Birthday Party. Transit Books, 2023. Translated from the 2020 French original by Daniel Levin Becker. In a remote village in France, a middle-aged couple, their young daughter, and their neighbor, who is a painter, are ready for a 40th birthday party for the mother, when three strange brothers stage a violent home invasion. The Birthday Party is a long, slow, captivating book about quickly evolving events, and the reader is alternately taken deep within the minds of the various characters. One of Mauvignier’s interests is in the ways the people damage each other and how they respond to that damage. Another is how people respond when deeply buried secrets about their loved ones are revealed. This book feels more like a potential movie than any book I have read in a long time, and yet so much would be lost in the film version.

Patrick Modiano. Such Fine Boys. Yale University Press, 2017. Translated from the 1982 French original by Mark Polizzotti. In his Foreword to this book, the French novelist J.M.G. Le Clezio says: “Of all Modiano’s novels, this is at once the clearest, the purest, and the most complex.” The book’s narrator looks back after about two decades on the private school he attended just after World War II, recalling one by one a series of his male classmates and others. With “cruel, precise strokes,” Modiano sketches out a world of careless parents, teenagers abandoned to their own devices, and adults who have never grown up. Such Fine Boys is stunningly written, with passages of great beauty, sadness, and regret. The translator, Mark Polizzotti, is American, so I don’t understand why the book is marred with Briticisms like “old boy” and “old chap,” which continuously made me think I was reading about a British public school.

Cristina Rivera Garza. The Taiga Syndrome. St. Louis: The Dorothy Project, 2018. A deliberately disorienting tale of a detective and her translator who go looking for a couple who disappeared in the taiga (a northern forest in the steppes). The taiga exerts a feral attraction of both of them, luring them deeper inside. The writing is often oblique, seemingly more attracted to things at the periphery of the story, reminding me of the indie band Mazzy Star, who made dreamy, laid-back songs of great, strange beauty. The book is part fairy tale, part X-rated Twin Peaks. Outstanding.

Jack Robinson (aka Charles Boyle). Good Morning, Mr. Crusoe. London: CB Editions, 2019. On the 300th anniversary of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Boyle, who sometimes writes as Jack Robinson, explains how this one book more or less explains everything (and I mean everything) that is wrong with England. Put another way, Boyle shows how the values expounded by Defoe’s book, along with many values mistakenly ascribed to Defoe’s book, have been used by the English public school system and Englishmen in general to thoroughly corrupt English society with racist, sexist, and patriarchal values for three centuries. Boyle is quite convincing and thoroughly amusing.

Reiner Stach. Kafka: The Years of Insight. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch. The third and final volume of Stach’s astoundingly good biography of Kafka. To write this, Stach had to be completely conversant with several decades of European history of the early twentieth century and be adept in at least a half dozen disciplines beside literature. On top of those talents, he writes so damn well. I am not a Kafka nut, but I have found this biography utterly enthralling—all 1,159 pages, and I have only read volumes two and three!

Enrique Vila-Matas. Because She Never Asked. NY: New Directions, 2015. Translated from the 2007 German original by Valerie Miles. This is a great little slip of a book (pocket book, 89 pages). At her request, Vila-Matas writes a story for the artist Sophie Calle to act out in real life. Or is he making all this up? Either way, it’s a great one-night stand. I wrote a bit about the book here.

Deborah Wye. Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait. NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2017. A terrific exhibition catalog of Bourgeois’ prints and artist’s books, many of which I covet.

Everything else I read in 2023

John Ashbery. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. NY: Viking, 1975. Some of these poems, including the long title poem, still astound me as much as they did when I first read them in the 70s. The rapidly changing voice, the colloquialisms, the use of questions—these and other techniques really helped change poetry. Ashbery is often described as surreal, but I think he is simply comfortable with the adjacency of totally disparate concepts and with getting spontaneously lost and appreciating the consequences.

John Ashbery. Some Trees. 1970. Ashbery’s first volume of poetry is, not surprisingly, all over the place stylistically. But the title poem is just a stunner. Twenty lines, two sentences.

. . . the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

Alice Attie. Bending into the Light. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2023. Poems about love, friendship, nature, and language in which light and birds are frequently central elements. Five poems respond directly to photographs, most of which are by the poet herself and are reproduced on the opposite pages. The fact that a number of the poems are without titles and some are thin as can be—often only a word or a syllable wide—is a sign that Attie’s stunningly beautiful poems are usually simple and airy, yet they can sometimes be nearly abstract.

Max Aub. Jusep Torres Campalans. NY: Doubleday, 1962. “A fully documented biography of the Catalan painter” Jusep Torres Campalans, who hung around with Picasso in the cafes of Barcelona and Paris during the heady days of Cubism, before removing himself to Chiapas, Mexico, where he became utterly forgotten until rediscovered by Aub. Except that Torres Campalans never existed. Aub made him up just for fun. I wrote about this title here back in March, but forgot to enter it into my Reading Log at that time.

Quenton Baker. Ballast. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023. In 1841, the 135 American born enslaved people being transported on the ship the Creole, successfully revolted and escaped. Baker writes that “it is the only large-scale revolt of American-born enslaved peoples that did not end in capture, torture, or capital punishment. There is no known recorded speech or testimony from any of those 135 people.” The first 94 pages of Ballast are blackened redactions from actual Senate Document 51 of the Second Session of the 27 U.S. Congress of 1842, which consisted of letters between the U.S. and British consulates in the Bahamas and the sworn testimonies of the ship’s crew member. This is a visually overpowering section of Baker’s poem, with each page usually containing only a few words amidst a sea of black, creating a bitter poem. “When I read this Senate document, I wanted to harm it.” That is followed by another long section that isn’t as effective to my mind.

Quenton Baker. This Glittering Republic. Detroit: Willow Books, 2016. Powerful, often angry poems about the two Americas—Black America and white America, and where they often fatally clash. In some of his poems, Baker uses space as a very effective tool.

R.J.B. Bosworth. Italian Venice: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. After my fourth trip to Venice, I wanted to better understand its history. Bosworth makes Venice’s early history fairly interesting, but he really gets going with World War II and after, when he has no difficulty pulling punches when he thinks someone is on the wrong side. But because Bosworth feels like he must cover everything-politics, culture, sport, etc.-the book stays at the 30,000-foot level. As a result, I don’t think I will feel like I know Venice much better the next time I visit. I would be better off having read the equivalent of Kirsty Bell’s The Undercurrents, her very personal book about Berlin.

Jenny Walker [pseud. for Charles Boyd]. 24 for 3. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Writer and publisher (CB Editions) Charles Boyd takes on a female narrator who is both having an affair with an unnamed “loss-adjuster” and struggling with her sixteen-year-old stepson Selwyn. In the background, on the television and radio, are broadcasts of cricket matches, causing the narrator to try (unsuccessfully) to comprehend the rules and strategies of the game. As a result, she decides that cricket is somehow the metaphor for the way her life is going at the moment. The writing manages to be both amusing and smart, though I am not in a position to decide if Boyd has capably created a well-rounded, psychologically sound female character. This is a book that looks more lightweight than it really is.

Charles Boyd. see also: Jack Robinson.

Douglas Bruton. With or Without Angels. Oxford: Fairlight Books, 2023. Bruton’s novel is written in response to a series of eleven color photographs that he saw by the late Scottish artist Alan Smith. That series, “The New World (after Giandomenico Tiepolo),” 2015, was a response to Tiepolo’s detached fresco “Il Mondo Nuovo,” 1791, housed in Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice. Tiepolo’s strange painting shows a crowd of people with their backs turned to us while they look at an event we cannot see. Bruton’s novel is the imaginative reconstruction of Smith and his muse/model Livvy as they go about creating the series of staged and digitally collaged photographs, while Smith’s memory gives way and his cancer advances. I found this a surprisingly fun novel about how art is made.

Christoffer Carlsson. Blaze Me a Sun. NY: Random House, 2023. Translated from the 2021 Swedish original by Rachel Willson-Broyles. Sven Jorgensson was a young rural Swedish cop when he answered a call and found a woman dying in the back seat of her car. She had been raped and attacked by a man who became known as the Tiarp Man, for the this and the ensuing crimes he committed against women. Sven eventually died without the case being solved and his son Vidar joined the same police force and gets drawn into the cold case when new evidence comes to the surface. The reader and the police are led down several misleading and several misinterpreted paths before the real truth about the Tiarp Man is figured out. Blaze Me a Sun has higher ambitions than being a murder mystery/police procedural and it largely succeeds, although it strikes me as being overlong.

Willa Cather. A Lost Lady. NY. Vintage Books, 1923. I felt the need for a Willa Cather fix and a friend who had just returned from attending the annual Willa Cather Spring Conference in Red Cloud, Nebraska recommended A Lost Lady, which turned out to be great fun. Mrs. Forrester is the resident aristocrat of Sweet Water, Nebraska, a dying railroad town quickly being passed by as America rapidly changes in the late 19th century. But Mrs. Forrester is also a surprisingly loose woman, constantly charming younger men. Niel Herbert is one of those young men at first, but decides it is better to observe Mrs. Forrester than to compete for her favors. This is a quick study, not a deep dive, into the end of the American frontier era.

T.J. Clark. If These Apple Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present. NY: Thames & Hudson, 2022. Cézanne has usually been looked at as the artist who fully brought modernism into painting. Clark explores the sense of disquiet he feels is at the heart of Cézanne’s work, and looks at Pissarro, Matisse, Picasso, and others in relation to the painting of Cézanne. What I love about Clark is his very close reading of paintings, in this case, just over 100 of them. Half of the time I can barely follow Clark’s reasoning, but somehow I love his writing. And every once in a while he provides me with a truly mind-bending observation about Modernism, which is my fatal attraction.

J.M. Coetzee. Boyhood. NY: Viking, 1997. The first of Coetzee’s three autobiographical books in which he writes about himself in the third person. This covers his life until he is a young teen in suburban Cape Town, South Africa and his father’s alcoholism has all but ruined the family. There is an honesty and clear-sightedness about the writing and occasionally he realizes that he is seeing all these troubled lives as if “from above, without anger.” The grounds are being laid for the writer to come.

J.M. Coetzee. Diary of a Bad Year. NY: Viking, 2007. A somewhat tongue-in-cheek and slightly comedic book about the writing of this book, in which Coetzee seems to be making fun of himself as a writer-turned-“distinguished figure” and “pedant” who can barely stand to hug his sexy Filipino typist. Each page of the book has three sections: the “book” itself, which is purportedly a selection of “strong opinions” on political and other world topics commissioned by a German publisher; the author’s private thoughts, mostly about his book project and his typist Anya; and Anya’s private thoughts. Meanwhile, Anya’s boyfriend sets his sights on the author’s idle and not-so-modest bank account. I found it engaging but not consuming.

J.M. Coetzee. Summertime. NY: Viking, 2009. The final section of his “autobiographical trilogy , this part dealing with the period of the early 1970s and his return from England to South Africa. Most of Summertime is told in the form of pseudo-interviews conducted between a scholar/biographer and five women who supposedly knew Coetzee during this time, several of whom report on their (more or less dismal) love affairs with him. Coetzee is humorously self-flagellating in his descriptions of his naive youthful self.

J.M. Coetzee. Youth. NY: Viking, 2002. The second of Coetzee’s utterly absorbing three autobiographical books in which he writes about himself in the third person. This one covers the time he spent in England in the early 60s working as a computer programmer, trying to write a thesis on Ford Maddox Ford, and wondering when he will ever grow up to be a writer and have an honest adult relationship with a woman. Coetzee is open about being an immature dreamer and a cad with women. He’s a slow learner, but reading philosophy and Samuel Beckett begins to give him some direction.

Jess Cotton. John Ashbery. London: Reakton Books, 2023. Part of their Critical Lives series, this relatively short critical biography of Ashbery focuses on his major books and the way in which his poetry evolved across his remarkable career. Cotton does an excellent job straddling the biographical aspects and the critical inquiry. Reading this made me wish that more of the authors I am interested in were part of the Critical Lives series, but sadly they aren’t.

Douglas Crase. The Revisionist and The Astropastorales: Collected Poems. NY: Nightboat Books, 2019. Crase’s first book of poems, The Revisionist, was first published in 1981 and has been out of print for something like thirty-five years. This new printing is combined with the poems from his 2000 chapbook The Astropastorales. Crase openly took on the mantle of Walt Whitman and, to some extent, that of Hart Crane, bringing a moral and ethical voice to urban and rural America. Too, there are echoes of Emerson and Thoreau in these poems. In The Astropastorales, Crase turns his attention to nothing less than the universe. All in all, a pretty astonishing book of poetry.

Kathryn Davis. Aurelia, Aurélia. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2022. Davis’ memoir, more or less about the death of her second husband, cuts back and forth between memories of their life together, her childhood, her reading, television programs, comic strips, and other topics that take on new meaning to her with his illness and death. Very short. I have not found myself able to get into her novels yet, but this was very engaging.

Carolyn Dekker. North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac. Black Lawrence Press, 2022. Dekker moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to escape her former life, to read, to live in nature, to teach at a small private college of mostly blue-collar students, and to write. This is a rich seasonal memoir about engaging the mind and engaging students in literature. Sadly, Finlandia College, where she taught, closed this year.

Brian Dillon. Affinities. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023. Essays on artists, photographers, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people, along with ten essays on the idea of affinities. I can only marvel at the smoothness and the naturalness of Dillon’s writing. Within each essay he corrals a range of other artworks or artists—the affinities he sees with his main subject. For a book that is deliberately short on images (usually only one per essay), Dillon shows the reader how to be a better looker, a better reader of images. Dillon’s essays open up new channels or circuits in my brain

Danielle Dutton. A Picture Held Us Captive. Ithaca: Image Text Ithaca Press, 2022. A truly wonderful short (not even 48-pages long) essay with illustrations on ekphrastic writing, on how art’s purpose is to make the world strange so that we can appreciate it again, and how all of this helped her to write Sprawl, using the photographs of Laura Letinsky as a model for scenes in the novel.

Joshua Edwards. A Monthly Account of the Year Leading Up to the End of the World, by AGONISTES, Prophet and Fulfiller, or The Exhausted Dream. Marfa, TX: Marfa Book Company, 2022. A single long poem of 125 pages covering the year 2012, dealing with the psychological aftermath of 9/11 and the marriage of the poem’s narrator. The poem consists of twelve parts (corresponding to the twelve months of the year) with ten sections per part, each part containing ten lines. Every section is dated the 21st of the month. The joy of a long poem is that the poet can safely deal with minor details and daily events. The book contains three photographs of the daytime sky.

Dorothee Elmiger. Invitation to the Bold of Heart. London: Seagull Books, 2018. Translated from the 2010 German original by Kate Derbyshire. In a land ravaged by ecological disasters and massive underground coal mine fires and run by men determined to enforce “security” over freedom, two sisters become determined to find a river which supposedly once ran through the area. Poetic and ethereal. I wrote more about the book here.

Dorothee Elmiger. Out of the Sugar Factory. San Francisco: Two Lines Press, 2023. Translated from the 2020 German original by Megan Ewing. Elmiger’s novel is ostensibly about the sugar trade, along with the history of the slave trade and the raw reality of capitalism, both of which were indispensible to the sugar trade in the Caribbean and the American South. But Out of the Sugar Factory is filled with so many fascinating digressions, so many other topics, all of which seem to equally concern the narrator/Elmiger. I wrote a longer review of this title here back in May but apparently forgot to list the book here in my Reading Log.

Percival Everett. Assumption. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2011. “This messiah thing of yours—you in training or just your natural disposition?” This is a question that could be asked of many of Everett’s main characters, men who feel they must save some woman they perceive to be in distress. In this case, trying to help a succession of seemingly innocent women gets Deputy Sheriff Ogden Walker in a world of hurt. Set in New Mexico, Everett takes full advantage of the West that he knows and loves so well. The ending gets overly complex and I’m not sure about the way Everett pulls a sly one on the reader at the very end. But mostly this is Percival Everett at his top form.

Percival Everett. Dr. No. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2022. Ralph Townsend, who calls himself Walu Kitu (Tagalog and Swahili words for “nothing”), is a Mathematics professor who specializes in the math of nothing. He is kidnapped by a rich man named Sill who has a James Bond villain complex and wants to rob Ft. Knox. Sill is convinced that the vault at Ft. Knox is empty, that the gold has all been moved elsewhere, which is why he has selected Walu Kitu as his accomplice. He wants to steal the nothing that is there. Everett has a field day in Dr. No with wordplay, puns, ribald limericks, utter nonsense, and a nice parody of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.

Percival Everett. Glyph. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 1999. Every author must put out a clunker and for me, Glyph is is Everett’s. Baby Ralph isn’t even out of his crib yet, but he can already read and outthink any adult around him. His IQ is supposedly 475, but he’s decided that he doesn’t want to speak and will only write his responses to the questions put to him by his frustrated parents and a battery of scientists and experts trying to figure him out. But then he’s abducted. The books supposed has something to do with poststructuralism and Roland Barthes, but I didn’t really care, I’m afraid to say.

Percival Everett. Swimming Swimmers Swimming. Pasadena: Red Hen Press, 2011. Poetry with lots of wordplay and some nostalgia for the outdoors.

Eve L. Ewing. 1919. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019. Poems related to the Chicago race riots of 1919 and nine historical photographs of Black life in Chicago at that time. The photographs were documentary images commissioned by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations for its 1922 report on the riots called The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot. Ewing is a sociologist, writer, and professor at the University of Chicago. She also writes for Marvel Comics. These poems are mostly being asked to be evaluated in terms of how well they convey their messages, and in that sense they are very successful. The story that the book conveys is as eye-opening as that of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

Alan Felsenthal, ed. Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt. Often referred to as “the best reader in America,” or some similar expression, Michael Silverblatt’s (now-shuttered) program on the Los Angeles public radio station KCRW, Bookworm, was arguably the best literary show ever produced. Silverblatt was an author’s dream reader, someone who seemed to get to the essence of any book he read and who could articulate (sometimes better than the author) the key issues of the book and/or the author’s technique. This compendium gathers together twelve of the very best interviews with twelve giants of literature, including John Ashbery, Octavia Butler, William H. Gass, Toni Morrison, W.G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and David Foster Wallace. Stupendous reading. All of the Bookworm programs can be found at the KCRW website.

SJ Fowler. MUEUM. Tenement Press, 2022. A novella about an apocalyptic future in which there is chaos and violence and yet there are massive institutions like the Museum, which attempt to tell the apparent history of mankind. The narrator, a Museum guard, is warehoused in the Museum, perhaps once voluntarily, but now under an extremely regimented lifestyle. MUEUM quickly turns dark and menacing. Fowler has given us a beautifully written and brave reflection on our violent history. I wrote a bit about the book here.

Jean Frémon. Now, Now, Louison. NY: New Directions, 2019. Translated from the 2016 French original by Cole Swenson. I’m sorry, but despite the fact that Paul Auster and his wife Siri Hustvedt both blurb their love for this book, I found it annoying. Frémon, who knew the artist Louise Bourgeois for thirty years, didn’t dare tell her he had started to write a fictional biography of her, which he didn’t publish after her death. In Now, Now, Louison, (why does Frémon have to tsk tsk Bourgeois in his title?), Frémon writes in the second person to supposedly place us inside Bourgeois’ head. But this only makes it read as if he is mansplaining the story of a woman who spent her life fighting for the independence of women.

Helen Garner. The Children’s Bach. NY: Pantheon, 1984. I forget which of the many lit bloggers I follow who recommended reading the Australian writer Helen Garner, but thank you. The Children’s Bach is about the daily life of a couple, their two children, and several others who enter their sphere and impact their lives. They all go about suburban matters—doing laundry, buying groceries, going to the beach, hanging out, and, most importantly, testing the marriage that is at the heart of the book. This is a novel to read for the magnificent writing and for the terrific observations Garner makes about ordinary people. Garner doesn’t do much explaining; a lot is left for the reader to figure out.

Paula Geyh, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern American Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Eleven essays provide a good overview of postmodern fiction in America and a reminder of the standard titles, along with a few I’ve not heard of before.

Juan Gómez-Jurado. Red Queen. NY: Minotaur Books, 2023. Translated from the 2018 Spanish original by Nick Caistor. A murder and several kidnappings lead Inspector Jon Gutierrez and the police department’s secret weapon, Antonia Scott, a woman with a “gifted forensic mind” says one blurb, into all kinds of danger and trouble as they try to solve this high-tension case in Bilbao, Spain. Entertaining, but a bit over the top. Antonia Scott’s mind doesn’t reason, it leaps to conclusions that are unpredictable to the reader.

Robert Gottlieb. Avid Reader: A Life. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Gottlieb was a renowned publisher (Simon & Schuster, Knopf), editor (The New Yorker), writer, Trustee of both New York City Ballet and Miami City Ballet, and all-around energizer bunny. Reading this memoir of his long, distinguished career exhausted me. The book is a name-dropping cast of thousands and a bit of an ego-trip, but it was entertaining throughout.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Lighting the Shadow. Tribeca: Four Way Books, 2015. This feels very much like a book of a poet still trying out multiple voices in search of her own.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Mule & Pear. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 2011. Powerful poems for and about women, many of them using voices “borrowed,” as the book says, from the pages of Alice Walker, Jean Toomer, and Toni Morrison. Griffiths carries on a dialogue with some of their characters, but I think her best poems are personal, especially the concluding “Self Portrait / This Dust Road.”

Denise Rose Hansen, ed. Tools for Extinction. London: Lolli Editions, 2020. Eighteen very diverse pieces by eighteen authors responding to the coronavirus lockdown. Poems, mini-essays, stories, bits of diary. Naja Marie Aidt, Joanne Walsh, Enrique Vila-Matas, Jon Fosse, and Olga Ravn are just four of the writers included. Some of the pieces took me back to early 2020, which now seem like ancient history when we knew so little about the virus and we were so afraid of everything.

Keigo Higashino. A Death in Tokyo. NY: Minotaur Books, 2022. Translated from the 2011 Japanese original by Giles Murray. Lots of wasted time and a surprise solution plucked from thin air at the end. It’s an easy read, but mostly felt like a waste of time. But I learned a little about Tokyo as police detective Kaga worked the case of a man found dying on Nihonbashi Bridge.

Matthew Hollis. The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. NY: W.W. Norton, 2022. At times, Hollis’ terrific book almost reads like a day-to-day biography of T.S. Eliot, his wife Vivien, and Ezra Pound. Hollis tracks the poem as the different sections of The Waste Land take shape and get edited by Eliot and Pound, while the two criss-cross England and Europe. This is a remarkable work of scholarship and biography, made possible, in part, because Eliot kept most of the drafts of his poems and because so many letters between Eliot, Pound, and others survive. It’s a tribute, in a way, to archives.

Susan Howe. The Quarry. NY: New Directions, 2015. A mixture of essays and writings that come close to memoir, plus a few pieces that mix both. For Howe, to quarry is to extract, to go back to origins. Of particular note is “Where Should the Commander Be,” which is about Herman Melville and Charles Olson and a few other poets and writers.

Philip Hoy. M. Degas Steps Out. Oxfordshire, Waywiser Press, 2022. Another very slim book—91 pages, many of which consist of film stills. In 2011, Hoy saw a nine-second segment of film by Sacha Guitry showing the painter Edgar Degas walking on a street in Paris with a woman. The event occurred more than a century earlier. Immediately obsessed, he decided to deconstruct the film into 250 stills and conduct a forensic study into every aspect of the film clip—the who, what, where, and when of everything that appears in those nine seconds. Hoy comes up with some interesting facts and theories as a result of his research, but his book is massively overhyped by the 5-star reviews on Amazon and the book’s own back-cover blurbs. Hoy is so lost in the weeds that he doesn’t realize that he never once in his book mentions Degas’ first name, Edgar, which is only mentioned by others in footnotes and in the blurbs.

Ishion Hutchinson. Far District. London: Faber & Faber, 2021. A reissue of his first book of poems from 2010. In this volume, the Jamaican poet looks back on his younger days on the island at the people and events that helped make him a poet. He connects with the world of classical mythology and he reflects on his current life (apparently) living in Brooklyn and on the death of a grandfather. Hutchinson is a powerful poet who can weave several threads together to great effect.

Ishion Hutchinson. School of Instructions. London: Faber & Faber, 2023. I am a huge fan of Hutchinson’s poetry. School of Instruction is a book-length poem that follows the first regiment of soldiers from the West Indies organized by Britain to help in the European war zones during World War I. Their traumas and heroics with disease and the colonizers (even more than with the enemy) are intertwined with images from the life of Godspeed, a young Jamaican boy in the 1990s. It’s a dense, beautiful, tough poem that got its start in a small commission that Hutchinson found he couldn’t stop working on. His book is very much in conversation with David Jones’ classic World War I book In Parenthesis.

Tove Jansson. Fair Play. NY: New York Review of Books, 2007. Translated from the 1982 Swedish original by Thomas Teal. Amusing, occasionally dated, stories about an artist and a writer whose studios connect and who interact daily and also travel together. Each brief story is a small masterpiece in leaving much unsaid.

Gabriel Josipovici. The Cemetery in Barnes. Carcanet Press, 2018. A rereading for my 15 Books Project. A short novella about professional translator, his two wives, his three places of residence, and some strange occurrences. A nearly perfect book, in its modest way.

Mieko Kanai. Oh, Tama! Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2014. Translated from the 1987 Japanese original by Tomoko Aoyama and Paul McCarthy. After reading and admiring Kanai’s much more recent novel Mild Vertigo, I was curious about her other novels, but few are available. This novel about several rather aimless young people and a very pregnant cat (Tama) is nothing like Mild Vertigo. It’s nearly all conversation (some of which is meant to be in various local accents, which the translators can’t deal with effectively) about their lives, cinema, Japanese novels, and the photography of a non-existent relative of Gloria Swanson. Oh, Tama! is part of a series of novels about the Mejiro neighborhood of Tokyo, and I suspect it will mean much more to the Japanese reader than to an outsider like me.

László Krasznahorkai. The Last Wolf & Herman. NY: New Directions, 2016. Two short stories. My least favorite book by Krasznahorkai.

Tom LeClair and Kinga Owczennikow. Passing Again. Spybeam Books, 2022. A very zany, twisty novel pretending to be a memoir of the author and a former pro basketball player who go on a buddy road trip to Athens, Greece. Much of it is written in the forms of a blog or transcriptions of audio- and videotapes. The book includes fifty color photographs by the two authors.

Carole Maso. The Art Lover. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990. A re-reading of one of my favorite books. Maso’s novel about a writer (much like her), the death of a father, and the onset of the AIDS crisis in New York City. The book is also filled with all kinds of imagery, including artworks, photographs, newspaper clippings, and drawings. Without quite realizing it, the narrator and the novel she is trying to write begin to spin out of control.

Seicho Matsumoto. Tokyo Express. Penguin, 2022. Translated from the 1958 Japanese original by Jesse Kirkwood. A good mystery, sometimes titled Points and Lines, that depends on the close reading a multiple train schedules for the successful detection of the murderer. Engaging.

Françoise Meltzer. Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Using paintings and a series of photographs taken by his mother, which all depict the post-war ruins of Germany, Meltzer initially discusses whether images like these can ever lead to an understanding of suffering. But then she enters into ongoing philosophical debates about how we should think about the German suffering that resulted from the Allied carpet-bombing of civilian populations. The most thought-provoking ideas, it seemed to me, completely transcended the discussion surrounding images.

Stephen Mitchelmore. The Opposite Direction. A self-published e-book of twenty posts from his blog This Space (https://this-space.blogspot.com/), in which he discusses a number of books and book-related topics.

Patrick Modiano. After the Circus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Translated from the 1992 French original by Mark Polizzotti. The narrator recalls a time when he was about eighteen and fell for a mysterious young woman whose male friends all seemed criminal or at least highly suspect. The narrator dreams of running off to Rome with the woman, who might or might not be a Parisian prostitute. He’s willing to overlook a great deal to prop up his youthful vision of the situation. As in the best of Modiano’s novels, the reader gets drawn in slowly and, like the narrator, never knows enough information, even in the end.

Patrick Modiano. The Night Watch. Bloomsbury, 2015. Translated from the 1969 French original by Patricia Wolf. The narrator is an unnamed twenty-year-old reluctant “blackmailer, thug, informant, grass, even hired killer,” who works for a gang of criminals during occupied France. One of his assignments is to infiltrate and inform on a Resistance group, who, in turn (and in ignorance of his real status), ask him to infiltrate his own gang and assassinate the leaders. In this fever dream of a short novel, Modiano lets his young uncertain thug think back on his short life and imagine the possible scenarios left in his even shorter future. The second of Modiano’s Occupation Trilogy novels of the 1960s. At times, the narrator shared some characteristics with François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, from The 400 Blows, another French bad boy of sorts.

Patrick Modiano. Paris Nocturne. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Translated from the 2003 French original by Phoebe Weston-Evans. A very forgettable book, with no focus and too many coincidences. Even the Paris setting couldn’t save this one.

Patrick Modiano. Pedigree. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Translated from the 2005 French original by Mark Polizzotti. Modiano’s captivating, clipped memoir to the age of twenty-one, when his first novel is accepted for publication and he splits with his father for good. Many of the stories he remembers have gone straight into his novels for him to chew on once again.

Patrick Modiano. Ring Roads. NY: Orion, 1974. Translated from the 1972 French original by Caroline Hillier. In the third and final of Modiano’s Occupation Trilogy novels, a man recalls his recalls his youth and times with his father. After having lost track of his father for a decade, he joins up with him and his band of petty crooks who live in the houses abandoned by their owners during the German occupation of France. His father, who fails to recognize him, needs to be rescued from the gang before he is murdered as being no longer useful. Ring Roads is a litany of place names—streets, bars, brothels, small towns,—conjuring up a lost era.

Patrick Modiano. Sleep of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Translated from the 2017 French original by Mark Polizzotti. As I read this ever-so-slim novelette, I kept asking myself if it really had a raison d’etre. Modiano continues to draw on the same well, which is having his narrators vaguely recall certain episodes of their lives that happened to them roughly in the 1960s. But, in my opinion, these episodes increasingly fail to resonate. Modiano’s books now move in a predictable pattern and the past he conjures up lacks any significance to me.

Patrick Modiano. So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. Translated from the 2014 French original by Euan Cameron. A very unsuccessful novel. Modiano seems to lean too heavily into his habitual literary traits: too many unlikely coincidences, too often the main character remembers something important about his past that he has sworn is long forgotten, too much angst over insignificant lost memories, a promising title that doesn’t lead to anything of substance. I totally stopped caring and lost the plot.

Patrick Modiano. Sundays in August. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Translated from the 1986 French original by Damion Searls. The narrator remembers a noir-like episode in his youth when he and a woman tried to sell a rare necklace in Nice. Did they steal it? Not my favorite.

Patrick Modiano. Villa Triste. Other Press, 2016. Translated from the 1975 French original by John Cullen. The mysterious, nameless narrator of Villa Triste recalls the summer of 1939, spent with an equally mysterious pair—a young aspiring actress, who was his lover at the time, and a strange, gay doctor who was being well paid to do something unknown, but clearly illegal and dangerous. As the three try to live the high life in a French resort town, the tensions are palpable, both about the impending war and their own ability to carry on with their lifestyle. Like so many of Modiano’s novels, this one is filled with proper nouns—place names, bars, grand hotels, people—the stuff that nostalgia is made of. The narrator lost track of both of his companions soon after, but a newspaper clipping told him that the doctor committed suicide a few years later in his home, which he had named Villa Triste.

Horatio Morpurgo. The Paradoxal Compass: Drake’s Dilemma. Devon: Notting Hill Editions, 2017. Morpurgo fashions a fascinating, digressive essay about how narratives in history evolve and are contested using Sir Francis Drake as his main subject. The paradoxal compass, invented by John Dee in the late 1500s, was probably a chart (no one knows for sure) that helped sailors navigate in northern latitudes where celestial navigation is less accurate. Morpurgo is a really good writer and weaves together the Age of Discovery, the environment, slavery, Shakespeare, Gallileo, and much more in this splendid little book.

Fred Moten. The Little Edges. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2015. Wonderfully musically poems that should be heard rather than read.

Fred Moten. Perennial Fashion: Presence Falling. Seattle: Wave Books, 2023. Poems (some of them very long) that constantly mutate what they are “about.” Lots of wordplay and references to music and musicians. Several are angry and political.

Timothy O’Grady, author, & Steve Pyke, photographer. I Could Read the Sky. London: Unbound, 2023. A reissue of the highly regarded 1997 novel (published by The Harvill Press) of a modern Irish migrant’s life in England. The narrator works at any heavy labor job he can get, but this is also a love story. “There was a future that flickered and darkened whenever I tried to look at it. Then without warning there was Maggie and there was light and there was a road ahead to receive us.” With the original preface by John Berger. The press release says this edition has been “redesigned” and includes “many-never-before seen photographs.” The b&w photographs, many of which are portraits, are emotionally powerful photojournalist-style images.

Marjorie Perloff. Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. The second edition of this 1977 classic book about O’Hara. I’m something of a Perloff junkie, with more than a dozen of her books on my shelf. This one was especially interesting to read, since it crosses over a bit into the painting of the 50s and early 60s. O’Hara worked at the Museum of Modern Art and wrote extensively about painters like Jackson Pollack and Franz Kline. This book also follows my recent readings of and about John Ashbery. In this book, Perloff offers excellent poetic analysis, free of academic haze.

Claudia Piñeiro. Betty Boo. London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2016. Translated from the 2011 Spanish original by Miranda France. Betty Boo is longer and has more characters than her brilliant Elena Knows, which was simply outstanding in so many ways (and was my book of the year for 2022). Betty Boo is much chattier—about character’s romances, about Argentinian politics, about the class differences of Buenos Aires. The murder plot at the heart of the book is nevertheless brilliant and isn’t fully unraveled until the final two or three pages, but one has to wade through lots of fluff before this novel really takes off.

Kim Robert & Robert Revere. Corona/Crown. Cincinnati: WordTech Editions, 2023. A slim, but beautifully produced chapbook with poems by Roberts & photographs (both b&w and color) by Revere. Both the poems and the photographs deal with the act of looking and the experience of visiting museums. Their joint project was born of the corona virus pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, which closed museums worldwide. In the chapbook, Roberts uses the tradition of sonnet crowns, in which the final phrase of one poem becomes the opening phrase of the next one, in part because “crown” in Italian is “corona.” Revere’s images are of art, museums, or people looking at art.

Iain Sinclair. The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City. London: Oneworld, 2017. Typical Sinclair. Great stories of walking the more unloved areas of London, ranting about some of the big, disastrous projects that city planners and rich developers have for London, hobnobbing with other writers and artists. The Last London includes his rumination on W.G. Sebald, whom he never met in person.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. The Man Who Went Up in Smoke. NY: Vintage, Translated from the 1966 Swedish original by Joan Tate. The second Martin Beck police procedural sees him going off to Budapest to search for a missing Swedish journalist. The novel and mystery holds up quite well nearly sixty years later, except for maybe all of the smoking (even on airplanes, as some of us will remember). Much better than Roseanna (#68).

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Roseanna. NY: Vintage. Translated from the 1965 Swedish original by Lois Roth. The opening salvo in the First Detective Inspector Martin Beck of the Swedish National Police crime series, which I read devotedly many decades ago. But Wendy Lesser’s Scandinavian Noir has me reading them all over again, in order, then presumably off to something else after these ten. A woman’s body has apparently been tossed off a cruise ship as it passed through a lock. Without any identification and eighty-some passengers from around the world on board, it takes months to solve the murder. Pretty engrossing. Beck is not a stereotypical cop in any sense.

Gustaf Skördeman. Geiger. NY: Grand Central Publishing, 2022. Translated from the 2020 Swedish original by Ian Giles. I’ve never run across a blend of the spy novel and the police procedural before, but it’s pretty effective in this case. A very puzzling murder has Stockholm police officer Sara Nowak and her colleagues baffled for a long time because it’s actually related to a foreign spy ring. Skördeman’s debut mystery is overly long but I’m still tempted to read his second one whenever it is translated (although I see it is even longer at 497 pages!). We spend almost as much time learning about Nowak’s life as we spend on the victims and killer combined. The plot is a bit convoluted but very engrossing.

Amalie Smith. Thread Ripper. London: Lolli Editions, 2022. Translated from the 2020 Danish original by Jennifer Russell. A double-stranded novel (even the right- and left-hand pages are numbered identically) about 1) young, contemporary weaver undertaking a large digitally woven tapestry for a public building, and 2) Ada Lovelace, the 1830s mathematician who pioneered what we now think of as computer programming, who thinks about Penelope, who wove and then unpicked a shroud while putting off her suitors until Odysseus returned. The novel includes a number of photographs, some of which reproduce drawings and other works of art. One of the blurbs calls this a “dreamy” novel, which seems about right. The two strands often reflect on things that are woven, e.g., computer cords, DNA, language. And the weaver deeply ponders that nature of plants, which is the subject of her tapestry. Do plants think? How do they communicate? How are they different from animals? This was the most rewarding aspect of the novel for me. Lolli Editions has created a very handsome physical book for Thread Ripper.

Patricia Smith. Unshuttered. Evanston: Triquarterly Books, 2023. The poet Patricia Smith has been collecting nineteenth-century photographs of African Americans for several decades. The forty-two images in Unshuttered are exceptional, sometimes amazing. Smith has created poems that imagine stories and situations for each of these images, which are beautifully reproduced. Some of the poems seem a tad forced to me, but a few are very powerful

Dao Strom. Instrument. Portland: Fonograf Editions, 2020. Along with Traveler’s Ode, music on cassette or streaming, Instrument “is an experiment in multimodal poetics—inhabiting a synergistic blend of poetry, music, and visual art: the artist’s three forms of ‘voice’” (author’s website). The book combines color photography, personal biography and poetry. The music is described as “ethereal song-poems” that use voice, electronics, piano, guitars, and field recordings.

Typos: The Story of a Reluctant Artwork. Henley-on-Thames: Peculiarity Press, 2022. Buried in the credits on page 146 of this book purporting to be a monograph on the British artist Allun Evans is the sentence “All text by John Clark.” This is followed by the sentence “This is a work of fiction.” Nothing else in the book explicitly tells the reader that this is an elaborate hoax of monumental proportions. I can’t think of another book that illustrates a fictional artist’s work over several decades and includes elaborate texts about and an interview with that artist. Typos is a wonderfully on point parody of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms series.

Joanna Walsh. Vertigo. St. Louis: Dorothy Project, 2015. Short stories that mysteriously operate on multiple levels simultaneously. Most of the stories have a feminist bent and explore the ways in which women discover how to perceive their lives more honestly.

Marina Warner. Temporale. Paris: Sylph Editions, 2023. The Cahiers Series No. 39. During the heart of the Covid lockdown, British writer Marina Warner looked to her Catholic convent school education for ideas on how to differentiate between days that seemed repetitive to her. She realized that the Catholic church used calendars of all sorts to make each day different and memorable and she ponders who to translate this idea into a secular practice. Warner’s captivating essay is accompanied by striking color photographs by Greek photographer Dimitris Kleanthis that capture the lonely haunting feeling of the lockdown period.

Natalia Zagorka-Thomas, Curator. The Camden Town Hoard: A Collection of Archeological Artefacts Excavated Along London’s Regent’s Canal During Summer 2021. London: Studio Expurgamento & CB Editions, 2022. A beautifully produced pocket guide to the stunning small pieces of ancient whatever rescued from oblivion and given tall tales of strange utility by a group of guest writers. This farce of an archeological handbook is brilliant and laugh-out-loud funny. There are rat aqualungs, a teaselwangler, an ectoplasm tube, and many other fanciful items, each photographed like a museum piece and described in serious museum-speak. I wrote a little bit about this book here.