I don’t “keep up” with non-picture books the way I at least try to with comics, so anything I read for the first time that was first published in English in the last ten years is eligible. I excluded Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which I previously wrote about in my novels of the century list, partly to avoid redundancy but mostly to avoid a hard decision for number one.
FICTION
1. Yiyun Li: The Book of Goose
A highly modern novel that nevertheless uses plot and character to develop its themes—does she think she’s Italian? The themes themselves sound pat when stated out loud (authorship vs. plagiarism, Boarding Schools Are Bad), but Li keeps prodding at them with sentences that appear so simple that it might take a while to recognize how she’s twisted them. The work has a non-trivial number of points in common with Look Back, except with manga tropes replaced by litfic tropes, and this satisfies my obligation to mention Tatsuki Fujimoto in every column vaguely connected with literature. Maybe 2022’s most acclaimed novel, maybe correctly so.
2. Olga Tokarczuk: Flights (tr. Jennifer Croft)
Kind of a novel by 2018’s Nobel Prize winner: many passages read like nonfiction, but many set-pieces, like a dazzling one about a Polish expat who comes back all the way from New Zealand to kill an old lover, could only stem from the imagination, one hopes. One through-line is “travel psychology”: people think differently away from home or, God help us, in transit. Also: beached whales, disappearing families, fun facts on sanitary pad wrappers, anatomical models as peak art, lesser-known members of the Dutch Golden Age Ruysch family, the usual.
3. Susanna Clarke: Piranesi
Some are calling this an all-timer, and while I can’t go that far yet, I’m still thinking about the work. Piranesi’s a naif, and since the book is his diary, that does limit how much fun it is moment to moment. But the plot keeps unfolding, the tides rise and fall, the Beauty of the House is immeasurable. The novel’s most major achievement may be that it makes it feel okay to appreciate High Yurrupean Culture even if the road to said culture was paved with more than a little fascism.
4. Patricia Lockwood: No One Is Talking About This
Eventually it ends up being about grief and family and all that, and that part is well done. But it wouldn’t mean as much without the first half, which is specifically about being on Twitter too much and more generally about how one’s use of language ends up coloring one’s interactions with the non-linguistic real world. Basically Wittgenstein if Wittgenstein was primarily interested in explaining what “binch” means to offline people.
5. Shehan Karunatilaka: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
The Great Sri Lankan Novel (superseding his last one about cricket), with the title character trying to work out how he died and perhaps incidentally solve his country’s civil war. Atrocities are borne witness to, posthumous bureaucracy is negotiated, past loves and bars and gambling dens are revisited. Quite funny and sometimes moving, though the weight of historical tragedy might’ve hit me harder if it was about cricket.
NONFICTION
1. Hillel Cohen: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929
Nobody besides the less crazy of my Republican senators needs to hear my take on the current Israel-Gaza tragedy besides “killing civilians is bad” (it really is, though), not least because I’m relatively underinformed on the history. Years ago I learned that many people place much more importance on Palestine than I ever will, and I figured I could leave them to work out if one or two states was the solution while I yelled at people to pay more attention to the crimes of, say, Min Aung Hlaing. One of the messages of Cohen’s book, however, is history can’t be left solely to partisans, even if you’re broadly on their side. Stories become narratives, narratives harden into dogma. Cohen investigates the 1929 riots that claimed a couple of hundred lives, working out as best he can what actually happened and what the motivations were (complicated enough even at that early stage.) There are stories of heroism, but just as inspirational is Cohen’s M.O.: even where objective truth isn’t fully obtainable, it’s still something worth striving towards knowing, no matter what one’s ends are.
2. RJ Smith: Chuck Berry: An American Life
The biography Chuck deserves, in more ways than one—occasionally Smith’s literary flourishes don’t land, but he keeps the prose motorvating. The book’s great strength is in accurately describing the senses in which his ’50s words and music were revolutionary—highlights are the “Maybellene” chapter and the rehabilitation of drummer Ebbie Hardy, whose straight boom-pop proved remarkably capable of accommodating Berry-Johnson’s newfangled swing. Chuck’s bad-to-despicable stuff is described in necessary detail, contextualized but not excused. The main context is of course that he achieved fame as a Black man in the mid-20th century United States, and the main caveat to that is that he was an asshole pervert regardless of historical period, and then we can get to the usual art/artists distinctions and whether “Sweet Little Sixteen” was an overestimate. Smith reminds us the Berry oeuvre is worth arguing about.
3. Jefferson Cowie: Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance
Cowie outlines two centuries of dickery in Barbour County, Alabama, and asks: how could white citizens be so convinced they were acting in defense of freedom when depriving others of their basic rights? And yes, I hear literally everyone mashing their buzzers right now, but the contours are morbidly fascinating, from seizures of Creek lands so illegal that Andrew Jackson was appalled to the rise of Barbour’s own George Wallace. Federal pushback, however occasionally feckless, has been the only effective counterweight. A book that’s just as relevant in our time, by which I mean after Killers of the Flower Moon came out.
4. Hua Hsu: Stay True
Might be too close to home to have its full impact on me—I kept thinking things like yes, I remember that turn-of-the-millennium Berkeley Asian-American publication, so what. It’s a fine book though, both in its ability to evoke a specific time and place and in the way Hsu frames up his experience as something that grew organically out of his immigrant parents’. About the larger issue—basically how to live ethically as an Asian-American when you have some privilege and when there are people who might kill you (not necessarily because you’re Asian, America doesn’t need a reason)—there’s not much to be said. You just have to stay true as best you can.
5. PJE Peebles: The Whole Truth
Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist recaps key 20th century discoveries with a mind to establishing the existence of the observable universe, as well as clarifying his thoughts on the role of theory in (his version of) the scientific method. The modern cosmology is hard to follow if you haven’t kept up with the stuff, but the earlier part of the book on the (slower than commonly understoof) confirmation of Einstein’s theories is fascinating if you have at least a bowling-ball-on-a-trampoline understanding of general relativity.
POETRY
I don’t read nearly as much contemporary poetry as I used to (especially in non-book formats) but I did like Rae Armantrout’s Finalists and Carolyn Forché’s In the Lateness of the World.
SHORTISH NERD FICTION
Suzanne Palmer: Falling Off the Edge of the World
C.L. Polk: Even Though I Knew the End (Tordotcom)
Suzanne Palmer: The Sadness Box
Greg Egan: Solidity
Catherynne M. Valente: The Difference Between Love and Time
Alix E. Harrow: A Mirror Mended (Tordotcom)
Alix E. Harrow: The Six Deaths of the Saint
S.B. Divya: Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold
T. Kingfisher: What Moves the Dead (Tor Nightfire)
Samantha Mills: Rabbit Test
I almost never read poetry but I saw Carolyn Forche read 40 years ago and can still get chills from some of her poems about El Salvador. Nice to know she’s still around and maybe I’ll find time to look for her latest book when I get a chance.