To Each His Own, by Leonardo Sciascia

Last week I was in LA and I paid a visit to Skylight Books, a shop I last visited more than 5 years ago and remembered liking. Skylight has an impressive selection of fiction in translation, including a little shelf of new releases in translation, something I haven't seen elsewhere. They had 3 books by Leonardo Sciascia on the fiction shelves in handsome little NYRB editions -- I'm such a sucker for the NYRB classics, though I feel like they have often disappointed me. I'm also a sucker for books set in Sicily, so these Sciascia volumes were basically a perfect little trap for me. I hadn't heard of Sciascia and I bought To Each His Own partly so I wouldn't forget his name (I almost bought two of his books!). It's a slim mystery that I finished in just a few hours, and yet it packs in digressions on literature, indictments of fascism and the Catholic church, a little bit of heartbreak, and a bigger sense of unease into that small space.

Augustus, by John Williams

Nearly everything I know about the Roman Empire comes from passing references or popular culture. I had to read Julius Caesar in high school, though I don't think I actually did read it. Later on in my teens, I, Claudius was broadcast on Masterpiece Theater and I loved it so much. I remember trying to map out the complex and incestuous connections among the emperors. (This was before the modern internet, so it's not like I could just google Roman Empire Family Tree and find this.) Since that time, I can't say I've given much thought to the intrigues of the Roman imperial family. I will say, my interest in the Roman Empire was somewhat raised recently, when I visited the Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, Spain.

In any case, my initial interest in reading Augustus had little to do with any interest in Roman history. I read John Williams' Stoner a few years back and loved it. When I subsequently learned he'd written a National Book Award winning novel called Augustus, I thought I should read it too. I had no idea what it was about. It was only last September, when I was visiting my dad and found it among his collection of NYRB Classics that I discovered it was about the Emperor Augustus (not really a topic I would have expected based solely on having read Stoner).

Augustus is an epistolary novel covering the period from the death of Julius Caesar to the death of Augustus. It features (nearly entirely fabricated) letters and diaries from all sorts of figures from the period whose names I knew, without knowing much about them -- Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Antony and Cleopatra... among many others. The book does a truly beautiful job of telling the history of Augustus' reign (with I have no idea what level of accuracy) from many different angles. Reading it made me want to read Virgil and Horace and Ovid. There are two things I really wish Augustus included: a map and a dramatis personae. As I've written before, I love a book with a map, but a map would have been especially helpful in this book as a lot of the Roman place names referenced are not the modern names I'm familiar with. And a dramatis personae would have really helped both with some of the complex family relationships, but also with the wider cast of characters, who shared a lot of common names. However, both of these things are small quibbles (that can easily be remedied with online searches) with what was really a wonderful book. If I have a larger concern, it's the sympathetic picture it paints of Augustus. It reminded me a bit of Wolf Hall in its successful humanization of a clearly problematic figure -- though that is also what is so remarkable about both books. Augustus served as an introduction to the early Roman Empire to me, and will no doubt bias my understanding of it for years to come (as I, Claudius has done these last 25 years).

Life & Times of Michael K, by J.M. Coetzee

You know that advice for writing that tells you to strip everything away and get rid of all the unnecessary words, all the adjectives and adverbs? Reading Life & Times of Michael K, I understood what good advice that is. The writing was so spare, so clean, but evocative and beautiful at once. Life & Times of Michael K felt like a post-apocalyptic novel, but in this case the apocalyptic event is a civil war that is senseless to all the characters in the book, but yet they must live through it (or try to). Why invent an apocalypse when there are conditions such as these in the world?

I've had Life & Times of Michael K on my shelf for quite a while. I think I originally picked it up years ago when I was collecting Booker Prize winners. I thought I might read it for my South Africa selection, but then I read Cry, the Beloved Country instead, and Life & Times of Michael K continued to sit on my shelf, next to Nadine Gordimer (whom I've also never read) since my recent geographic reorganization of my books. There's no point in saying I wish I had read it sooner, but I'm glad I got around to it.

Thus Bad Begins, by Javier Marías

I realized just this morning that 2019 marked the third consecutive year that I've chosen to start the year reading Javier Marías. Last year, I was reading volume III of Your Face Tomorrow and in 2017 I was reading volume I. I thought maybe I had also started 2016 with Marías, but my records show that The Infatuations was the fourth book I read that year. I remember that I read it start to finish on my couch one winter weekend, but that was already a week and change into January.

The Infatuations was the first book I read by Marías, and after finishing it, I knew I needed to read his epic Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. I waited nearly a year to start it, but as soon as I read the first paragraph of the first book, Fever, I had the feeling I was back in familiar place. I remembered how much I had liked The Infatuations but I had forgotten the very specific voice Marías writes in. It's a voice that feels very much like my own mind. I read the entire Your Face Tomorrow trilogy over approximately 12 months, spacing the books out and saving volume III to close out and begin a year. I had one other book of Marías' on my shelves at home, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, the title of which comes from Richard III, but is also a refrain in the Your Face Tomorrow books. I considered starting Tomorrow in the Battle... several times last year, but I kept not picking it up because I wanted to save it. I didn't want to not have another Marías book at home to read. Then last month, I was reading An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alemeddine – a book for book-lovers if there ever was one – and Marías came up in the text. The narrator of An Unnecessary Woman had translated Marías' A Heart So White into Arabic. I'd had A Heart So White sitting on my PaperbackSwap wishlist for a long time and An Unnecessary Woman provided the nudge I needed to just finally buy it. So one Tuesday after work, I went down to the Strand and I bought A Heart So White and Thus Bad Begins (and a book by Antonio Muñoz Molina, who was also mentioned in An Unnecessary Woman, 3 books by José Saramago – I was just back from visiting his foundation in Lisbon and determined to read more of his books, and a book by Mercè Rodoreda). 

After finishing the Alameddine, I was determined to finish two more books from countries I hadn't read before 2018 was up (which I did: I read Nathacha Appanah's The Last Brother (Mauritius) and Ousmane Sembène's God's Bits of Wood (Senegal)) to get to a nice round, but also completely arbitrary, 60 countries on my world reading project. So, I set aside the Marías books as a treat for myself when I had hit that goal. I had to choose between them when I was heading upstate to visit my mother the weekend after Christmas and was fairly sure I would finish God's Bits of Wood while there. I think I grabbed Thus Bad Begins because it was longer and newer. It wasn't quite Gift of the Magi, but it turned out that my mother – with whom I'd never talked about Marías – had come across A Heart So White at the library, read it, and thought I would like it, so she got it for me for Christmas. So, briefly, I had two copies.

I started Thus Bad Begins on the train home from Hudson. Maybe I had built Marías up too much in my mind. I wasn't immediately captivated. Or maybe it was just that I'd had a few drinks before getting on the train. I just read one chapter. It took me 60 pages or so to get back into his rhythm. But I got there. I got lost a couple times. I went back. I reread. In the end, I loved it. I gasped when I read the first line of the last chapter. I almost wanted to go back and start again. But I don't need to right now. I have two more Marías books at home to read.

2018 in Books

I finished 34 books in 2018, which is better than I did in 2017, but still nowhere near the 51 books (and more than 17,000 pages) I read in 2016. I do love the annual stats you get from Goodreads, though I always need to add some additional stats. I read books from 18 countries besides the US last year (Senegal, Mauritius, Spain, Lebanon, Belgium, Equatorial Guinea, Australia, Italy, Portugal, England, the Netherlands, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Sudan, Scotland, Korea, Canada, and Japan), as well as two books that are sort of nationless: a Catalan novel and a novel set on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. I read 16 books written by women, which is quite possibly the closest I've come to a 50/50 ratio in my reading life. With that, here is the list:

Your Face Tomorrow, Volume III, by Javier Marías
Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegg
Ties, by Domenico Starnone
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Sweetbitter, by Stephanie Danler
A Broken Mirror, by Mercè Rodoreda
Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner
The Wedding Date, by Jasmine Guillory
About Grace, by Anthony Doerr
Perma Red, by Debra Magpie Earling
Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee
Spring Snow, by Yukio Mishima
Please Look After Mom, by Kyung-Sook Shin
Still Life, by Louise Penny
Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih
The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez
Loquela, by Carlos Labbé
The Consequences, by Niña Weijers
The Golden Spur, by Dawn Powell
Sepharad, by Antonio Muñoz Molina
The Uninvited Guests, by Sadie Jones
Loving, by Henry Green
Siracusa, by Delia Ephron
The Stone Raft, by José Saramago
Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi
Involuntary Witness, by Gianrico Carofiglio
City of Crows, by Chris Womersly
By Night the Mountain Burns, by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel
War and Turpentine, by Stefan Hertmans
An Unnecessary Woman, by Rabih Alameddine
The Last Brother, by Nathacha Appanah
God's Bits of Wood, by Ousmane Sembène

As longtime readers (ha) know, I always pick a favorite. For 2018, I'm not sure I can settle on just one. I read A Broken Mirror early in the year and when I had finished it, I thought: "That was the one; I won't read a better book this year." But then, over the summer, I picked up a copy of Sepharad at a thrift store in LA. I had never heard of it or its author, but I read the first paragraph (my usual method of deciding whether to read a book) and it passed the test. I read it soon after and it was so beautiful, and comprehensive, and it moved me to tears on the subway more than once.

The third contender for my favorite book of 2018 is Christ Stopped at Eboli. I bought and read this in preparation for a trip I took to Calabria and Basilicata in October. I wrote about it here after reading it, but before taking my trip. I had no idea then how glad I would be that I had read it when I got to Basilicata. The morning after I arrived in Lamezia Terme, I plugged Aliano into the GPS in my car and drove straight to the town where Carlo Levi was a prisoner of the fascist government in 1935. I visited Levi's tomb and the many sights in the town dedicated to him and had a wonderful lunch. After lunch, assuming the Carlo Levi tourism portion of my trip was over, I drove on to Matera, where I had booked a room for two nights. As it turned out, Carlo Levi was all over Matera. It started when I checked into my hotel and mentioned to the woman at reception that I had read his book. She was surprised and delighted, and directed me to the Palazzo Lanfranchi, where she told me they had a painting of Levi's. I visited the museum that evening and, as it turned out, it is home to a very large painting he did called Lucania '61, as well as the photos of the people in Matera that were used as source material. In addition, the museum had a whole room of Levi's paintings some from before his captivity and several from his time as a prisoner in Aliano, and which he described painting in Christ Stopped at Eboli. There were paintings of children from the village and of his housekeeper and of the Fossa del Bersagliere, the canyon in Aliano I had visited that same morning. The next day, I went to the Casa Noha, a cave home that was turned into a center for the history of Matera. The exhibit at Casa Noha consists of a series of films and after the film covered the ancient history of the town and conditions in the early 20th century, it said something to the effect of, "Everything changed for Matera when Carlo Levi published Christ Stopped at Eboli..." and went on to talk about him and the book at length. It turns out that Levi's book is what initially draw widespread attention to the poor living conditions of the people in Matera and he has since become something of a local hero. (There is also a major street named after him in town.) Seeing how Levi was turning out not to be one small stop but rather a recurring theme of my trip, I decided to take a detour on the day I was leaving Matera and visit Grassano, the other town where he was held captive. Grassano is bigger than Aliano, and less quaint, and it has none of the magic of Matera (few places do). It felt like a regular, somewhat run down and not very prosperous, town. They have a small center devoted to Levi (which was unfortunately closed when I arrived) and a plaque in a nearby square dedicated to him. After stopping to see these two sights, I asked some friendly locals for directions to the post office (I was happy that some of my friends received postcards postmarked from Grassano), stopped in at the town's indoor market, and then proceeded on my drive to the stunning twin villages of Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa. Grassano was unremarkable, but I was actually all the more glad I went there for that reason.

If three favorite books are not enough, I also recommend By Night the Mountain Burns (which probably performed best on the "first paragraph test" of any book I read this year and which really made me want to visit the remote Annobón island of Equatorial Guinea), The Consequences (maybe not for everyone, but a particular must-read for any fans of Bas Jan Ader), The Stone Raft, War and Turpentine, In the Time of the Butterflies, and Pachinko.