Of course people around here read Tolstoy
And many other books, and one of them (OK, it's me) will fill you in on some of the best from 2023
The New York Times did a podcast interview with filmmaker Steven Soderbergh to highlight his annual list of the books he has read, as if this is a novel idea. Why has no one interviewed me about my own list, kept now for more than 30 years, of every book I have read? I suppose it has something to do with the lack of several arty movies on my resume, and the fact that my list isn’t published each year. Better, I suppose, to delight you kind folks with my musings about the year’s reading.
Though I must say, I was startled by Gilbert Cruz’s apparent surprise that Soderbergh read more than 80 books, earning him a “(!)” at the very idea. That’s not a lot of books for a voracious reader. I read 92 in what was a very good year for me (with an additional 37 poetry collections… don’t ask me why I count them separately, I just do). I usually feel good about such numbers until I talk with someone who read more. I suppose the surprise comes from the fact that Soderbergh is also a busy auteur, but then, aren’t we all busy? I usually have six or seven books going at once, different genres and styles at the ready so there is always something to read no matter the time available or my mood.
We left our teenager home for the afternoon on Sunday, encouraging him to read a book he had been assigned for school. “Time at home to rest and read? that sounds pretty good to me,” I told him. “That would be a vacation for you,” he responded. Ah, dare to dream…
After writing about some favorite music from 2023 in my last missive, I wanted to share some thoughts about books that rose above the rest in the past year. Again, no numbered list or anything purporting to be more than a gathering of books I read last year that I enjoyed, that made me think, that taught me something, or, for many of these, all of the above. Note, most of these were published in 2023, but not all.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict led to some late-in-the-year reading for me, and each book offered valuable context and perspective. The first was not a new book, but rather Jimmy Carter's 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. In clear, compelling prose, the former president provides historical grounding for what has taken place over the past several decades, much of it involving his direct participation. It was joined by a fairly recent novel and a new poetry collection.
I picked up the novel, Adania Shibli's A Minor Detail, after the furor over a decision to cancel an award ceremony where she was to be recognized during the Frankfurt Book Fair. Anything that can draw that much light and heat is probably worth reading, and that thought was borne out by this slim but haunting work about the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers. Based on a true story from the late 1940s, the novel explores the idea of borders, real and perceived, and the way they shape lives. It was one of a few works of translation I read this year, something that happens organically more often than not, but something I purposefully pursue if that hasn't been the case for a while.
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, a collection of poetry by Mosab Abu Toha, also made my reading list because of a news report. Toha, a Palestinian poet, was arrested by Israeli soldiers in November. An outcry in the literary community seems to be part of the reason he was freed. I immediately bought his book and was moved by the depictions of life in Gaza he shares there. For more on this, I highly recommend reading his subsequent piece in the New Yorker that details his captivity. It is a brutal portrait that complements his poems.
Not all of my reading was so serious. The months leading up to the Iowa City Book Festival, which I direct, usually find me reading books by festival authors. As a result, I end up with a stack of books each October that have accumulated during that time. After some heavy reading, I devoured several mysteries one after the other in late fall. The latest from Michael Connelly (Resurrection Walk) and John Sandford (Judgment Prey), two authors I have read more than nearly any other, were particularly strong series entries. Relative newcomers Allen Eskens (Saving Emma), S.A. Cosby (All the Sinners Bleed) and Richard Osman (The Last Devil to Die), also had stand-out offerings. I also caught up with Attica Locke's Bluebird Bluebird from a few years back, and I'm happy to hear it is in development for TV.
Other crime and mystery books that stood out last year are Gangland by Chuck Hogan, Five Decembers by James Kestrel, Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka, and Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper (if you miss James Ellroy's early, less-stylized work, this is the book for you).
I have amassed an entire shelf in my music library of books about Bob Dylan, and three of them moved from "to be read" to "read" last year. The first was by Dylan, though it was the least among them. There was much fanfare about Philosophy of Modern Song, but it took me nearly the entire year to slog through it. If you like Dylan's "Theme Time Radio Hour" program, you'll find things to enjoy here, but without Dylan narrating these entries, they grew repetitive and corny. If I had the energy, I could parody an entry here, but there is enough of that in the world thanks to this book.
Better were two new books about Dylan’s late period masterpiece, Time out of Mind. Whirly Gig: Inside Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind by John Lewis (no, not that John Lewis) is a brief look at the impact of producer and musician Jim Dickinson on Dylan's '90s comeback. The premise is a thin slice of Dylanology, but it is written with a deft hand and offers insight unavailable elsewhere. Meatier is Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan's Time Out of Mind by Graley Herren, looks at the same album through the lens of dreaming, positing that all of the songs are reflections of the dreamscape of one character. Not all albums — Dylan's and otherwise — could stand up to such analysis, but Time Out of Mind does, and these two books made me appreciate it all the more (as did the multiple extra tracks, takes, and mixes on last year's Fragments boxed set for the album).
At their best, novels for me are a portal to places and times I wouldn't experience otherwise, and some of the best delivered me all over the globe last year. DK Nnuro's What Napoleon Could Not Do brought me to Ghana and showed me the immigrant experience (or rather, the experience of even attempting to emigrate, let alone how to navigate it when you arrive) with grace and feeling. Paul Harding's This Other Eden took me to a fictional stand-in for Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, where in 1912, mixed-race inhabitants were forcibly removed by whites from the mainland. Harding is perhaps the best sentence-level writer since his mentor, Marilynne Robinson, and there were so many passages here I took time to savor.
Justin Torres has said Blackouts doesn't really have a plot, and while that isn't necessarily true, to describe what happens is difficult and really sells the book short. It is a wildly creative look at queer identity and a sort of history of perceptions of the queer lifestyle over the decades, and it was one of the most compelling books I read all year.
As has been the case since the beginning of the pandemic, I read many long classic novels at the insistence of my friend Anna Barker, who has taken it upon herself to be a one-woman book club, leading legions of faithful readers in Facebook groups through the sorts of books you always felt you should read but would never have the time or patience to complete. In 2023 alone I read Don Juan, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina, among other shorter works, and I can now proudly say things like “I prefer War and Peace to Anna Karenina” without feeling like a fraud. I’m ready for my next highbrow cocktail party.
I even read a book simply because it mentions Tolstoy, in this case British publisher Mark Hodkington's No One Around Here Reads Tolstoy, a charming look at how a working class British teen found another world for himself in the pages of books.
Anna's tutelage began in the appropriate place back in 2020, with our freshly locked-down group tackling Boccacio's 14th century classic, The Decameron, about a group of young nobles fleeing the plague in the Italian countryside. Others took inspiration from Boccacio’s tale as they grappled with their own plague of sorts, including New Zealand author Fiona Farrell, whose The Deck is certainly inspired by the plot and structure of The Decameron. Hers is the more serious read, however, addressing modern concerns against the backdrop of forced isolation. Thanks to my City of Literature colleague from Dunedin, for the gift of this captivating novel.
Beyond classic novels, I found myself reading a lot from another category I had been able to avoid with little effort: YA books. I’ve never been a fan, having long shed the “Y” of “YA.” However, as with Shibli's novel mentioned above, if you tell me I shouldn’t read something, you can be sure you have just suggested that I check it out. When right-wingers began circulating lists of books that shouldn't be in schools — particularly when I saw beloved titles included — those instead became reading lists for me. In the past year, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren't Blue, Patricia McCormick’s Sold, and Juno Dawson’s This Book is Gay captured my attention. None was written with me in mind as a reader, and I wouldn't have stuck with any had I not been externally motivated. But I wholeheartedly believe students should have access to them, particularly when a teacher or librarian who knows the student suggests they would benefit from reading them.
Finally, I read more poetry in 2023 than in any previous year, making it a habit to start each day with a few poems. The result is the most wide-ranging corner of my reading year, with the broadest diversity of voices and perspectives. In addition to Toha's book mentioned above, two really stuck out: Robert Wood Lynn's stunning Mothman Apologia and Crystal Simone Smith's inventive erasure poetry in Dark Testament.
An ultimately unsatisfying book about the Iowa Writers' Workshop did still have the benefit of sending me on a few reading tangents. Or perhaps "benefit" isn't the right word, for Elizabeth Hardwick's The Simple Truth and R.V. Cassill's Eagle on the Coin were dated, not terribly compelling reads, but each brightened a corner or two in my knowledge of literary Iowa City.
The latter created a connection that led me to one of the best books I read in 2023. Cassill's book shares the name of a protagonist with Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time. I read a review of the latter while reading the former, and was struck enough by the coincidence that I decided to rectify my inattention to one of Dublin's finest writers and picked up Barry's novel. There doesn't seem to be any other connection beyond the name Tom Kettle, but I'm glad for the serendipity that led me to this deceptively simple story of a retired police officer drawn back into a case.
Speaking of connections, I closed the year reading Barry and Jason Mott's A Hell of a Book. Each dealt with unreliable narrators who were dealing with the problem of seeing people who weren't there, a condition manifested in both cases by trauma and grief. This unintentional dialogue between and among books enriches the reading experience, and brought 2023 to a satisfying close. I’ll likely write more about such connections and intersections in my reading in the months ahead.
I had planned to tackle a few other, shorter topics here, but got a bit longwinded, so I'll hold off and give you a second, one hopes shorter post later this week. And stay tuned: Last night I saw the first of what promises to be three compelling shows this week that will explore the ways a man and a guitar can entertain, and plan to post something about all three next Monday.