For our December monthly newsletter, we asked NYRB staff members to write about their favorite reading experiences of the year, NYRB and non-NYRB books alike.
You can read their picks below:
“I’m currently required to read Marie Dorléans’s Our Fort pretty much every night at my children’s bedtime. That can lead a person to dislike some otherwise good books. But Our Fort is such a lush little world. Dorléans’s images—a touch Hasui Kawase, a touch Edward Gorey—and the way she conjures up the freewheeling but highly ritualized perceptions of children ('We’ll go to the fort, past the barking dog and the flock of sheep, to drink dandelion tea, every day,' and we’ll read the same book every night) make the book a pleasure to return to.
Kathryn Davis’s Versailles—recently reissued in pink by Graywolf Press—has lately been the grown-up version of Our Fort on my bedside table. It’s about Marie Antoinette, but it isn’t a historical novel. Half of it is narrated by Marie Antoinette and the other half is narrated by Kathryn Davis. To sound like an algorithm: If you liked Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, you’ll like Versailles. And if you didn’t like Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, you’ll still like Versailles.” —Alex A.
“Reading Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion this spring brought to mind some of my other favorite American writers—Joy Williams, Denis Johnson, Flannery O’Connor—and the tragically humorous, spiritually isolated characters that inhabit their work. The Mountain Lion’s central siblings, Molly and Ralph, at first unite in a shared world of imagination and loneliness and blunt disdain, but by the novel’s end, they’ve lost each other irretrievably. I love their nosebleeds and thick glasses, their absolute lack of social grace, and their goofball jokes. And Stafford’s prose is just terrific: ‘On either side ran clear small ditches, making a mouth-like sound.’
I’ve sampled only a small fraction of John McPhee’s work, but I hope to have read it all one day. The Crofter and the Laird, his account of living for a short time on the Scottish island of Colonsay, the land of his ancestors, was a particular pleasure for me this year. McPhee writes what I’d call clown car books—often deceptively slim but packed with surprise and delight.” —Alex R.
“This is cheating a bit since the book isn't officially 'out' yet, but I read the galley for our forthcoming reissue of Tove Jansson's Sun City and loved it. The book is set in St. Petersburg, FL, which happens to be my hometown. Jansson visited St. Petersburg and other parts of Florida while traveling the United States with her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä. The novel follows the lives of several aging residents of a local retirement home, revealing their dreams, prejudices, petty rivalries, and secret crushes. There are two younger characters, the home’s young and beautiful live-in housekeeper and her boyfriend, a Jesus freak-type who works on the HMS Bounty, the ship used in the MGM classic Mutiny on the Bounty, which is docked in Tampa Bay (and which was a major local attraction when I was growing up in then-sleepy St. Pete). The book is darkly funny, unsentimental but full of heart, and I recognized the St. Petersburg of my childhood in it, even though it was written a long time before I was born.
I read two novels by the Dutch author Willem Frederik Hermans, An Untouched House and A Guardian Angel Recalls, both of which have stuck with me in ways that other books have not this year. They are dark, almost brutal in the level of moral despair they capture—both are about Dutch life during World War II—but the writing is beautiful, and despite the hellish settings, I could not stop reading either, practically swallowing them whole.”—Abigail D.
“This is never an easy question to answer, but my favorite read this year was The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Mirra Ginsburg. Ever the maximalist, I cannot help but fall in love with a novel that layers bizarre plotlines and strange characters like fashion influencers layer necklines. It is a satirical, uproarious social commentary. It is a touching romance. It is a philosophical musing on virtue and artistic responsibility. Even better, it concerns a talking cat and an uncomfortably understandable Satan. Jesus is relegated to somewhere in the secondary plot line. I read it by the pool over the summer, freshly graduated from college, searching for a new set of questions to bother myself with. I found a happy abundance in this novel, one of which is: Should I now read Faust?” —Abby G.
“My great reading experience for much of the last year was volume 1 of Marx's Capital, taken on not to brush up on ‘Marxist thought,’ expounded, disputed, travestied, and perverted all too liberally, but as the extraordinary feat of writing that it is. Like the great medieval cathedrals, if in a rather different way, it takes in the whole of reality—heaven, earth, sinning and toiling humanity—and does so with a similar mix of the eccentric, the fantastic, the dogmatic, the astonishing, and the monumental. It is economics and anti-economics, philosophy and a parody of philosophy, a work of reportage, a polemic, a prophecy. Novelists looking to find a way to describe the convulsive global reality of our own time could do worse than consider the example of Marx. Paul Reitter’s intrepid new translation makes it possible to think about Capital anew and as a new kind of book.
Of the Classics published this year, the most resonant to me was Cristina Campo’s book of essays, The Unforgivable. She would have condemned every word of the previous paragraph.” —Edwin F.
“Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel (originally published in 1940) opens with a prologue by his friend, collaborator, and mentor Jorge Luis Borges, who, with an eye-roll at prevailing literary attitudes, asks readers to think a bit harder about plot. To count as ‘serious,’ said the modernist orthodoxy of the day, novels should discard with plot and focus exclusively on their characters’ inner lives. But The Invention of Morel, Borges insists, is perfect counter-evidence, a rebuke to the knee-jerk preference of psychology to plot. Plot isn’t dead, it’s stronger than ever before. And he’s right; the thrust of The Invention of Morel, the potency of the philosophical questions it raises, owes precisely to its sequencing of information—how, and through what order of events and impressions, it leaves readers alone with their confusion at inexplicable phenomena before letting them in on the big secret. But, to be sure, many of the book’s philosophical problems are psychological ones, too. What’s the difference between knowing a person and knowing an image of a person? What’s the depth of our psychic connection to others, and what happens when that connection is no longer reciprocal, but strictly one-way? In what sense does the other even exist? These questions can’t be separated from their articulation through the book’s plot, which is great news for readers because ‘to classify [the plot] as perfect,’ writes Borges at the close of his prologue, ‘is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole.’” —Justin S.
“My favorite NYRB Classic of the year is John McGahern’s The Pornographer, though Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard must be mentioned as a book like no other.
The Pornographer is about a Dubliner who pays his way writing smut for a magazine. Our protagonist/pornographer is a cold fish except for weekly visits to the hospital to see his dying aunt, smuggling her bottles of brandy. Still, he can’t escape the pull of desire and enters a short relationship with the slightly older Josephine, who he picks up at a dance hall. Josephine has had sex only once before and she’s ready for a proper life with someone else. She won’t get it with the Pornographer. McGahern writes like the best of the Irish. There’s plenty of autobiographical and Irish Catholic context in the background of this 1976 novel (cf. Anne Enright’s introduction) but it can be read today with online dating in mind. It’s a hard world out there.
The non-work reading revelation for me this year has been the poetry of Eugenio Montale. I read Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, and The Storm and Other Things in William Arrowsmith’s translations, with the Italian on the left side. It’s beautiful stuff, ranging from descriptions of his childhood on the Ligurian coast, students days sitting in cafés in Florence, depression and pessimism over Fascism, two muses—Clizia and Volpe ('Fox'), who inspire very different emotions and thoughts—local nature, birds, food, and poetry, particularly Dante. I won’t go on, but if you have some time to read deeply, you won’t waste it with Montale.” —Nick D.