2022 in Books

The last year has not been a great year for reading for me. I finished 41 books in 2022, which is certainly a respectable number of books, but I had many false starts and long spells of no reading. (I didn't finish a single book between October 3 and December 9!)  During the latter half of the year, I blamed my poor reading on my impending move, which happened in mid-December but was in the works since July or August. My problems really began before then, so I can't blame the move for everything. January started off strong. I think the stumbles started in March or April, and they continued throughout the year. I allowed myself to fall out of my daily reading habit and I often found I wasn't in the mood to read. And then I kept feeling that I had selected the wrong book. The end result, though I haven't kept count, is that I believe I read an unusual number of very short books last year, which I read in the space of a day or two while on more days than not I didn't read at all. 

In the order that I finished them, the books I read in 2022 were:

• The Man of Feeling, by Javier Marías
• One Last Stop, by Casey McQuiston
• The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, by Gaito Gazdanov
• My Life as a Fake, by Peter Carey
• Childhood, by Tove Ditlevsen
• My Sister the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite
• Youth, by Tove Ditlevesen
• Dependency, by Tove Ditlevsen
• Affections, by Rodrigo Hasbún
• American Spy, by Lauren Wilkinson
• Last Night in Nuuk, by Niviak Korneliussen
• The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles
• Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli
• In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz
• Big Sky, by Kate Atkinson
• Garden by the Sea, by Mercè Rodoreda
• Home Reading Service, by Fabio Morábito
• Loving Day, by Mat Johnson
• Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, by Balli Kaur Jaswal
• Justine, by Iben Mondrup
• Persuasion, by Jane Austen
• The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang
• Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets
• The Trees, by Percival Everett
• Tremor of Intent, by Anthony Burgess
• Rattlebone, by Maxine Clair
• The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie
• Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami
• Saint Sebastian's Abyss, by Mark Haber
• Oliver VII, by Antal Szerb
• Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck
• Happiness, as Such, by Natalia Ginzburg
• Not One Day, by Anne Garréta
• Rum Punch, by Elmore Leonard
• The Moon and the Bonfires, by Cesare Pavese
• Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli
• Martha, Jack & Shanco, by Caryl Lewis
• So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, by Patrick Modiano
• Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in the Piazza Vittorio, by Amara Lakhous

And the stats:

For the second consecutive year (and second year ever), more than half the books I read last year were by women. Apart from the U.S., which only accounts for 8 of the books I read last year, I read books from 18 countries including 5 new ones (marked in bold): Australia, Bolivia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greenland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Palestine, Russia, Singapore, Spain,  Ukraine, and Wales. This is worse than last year on both counts. Two of the books I read (Persuasion and Tremor of Intent) were rereads. The only nonfiction books I read were the three Tove Ditlevsen volumes. 

Some years I just know what my favorite book of the year was. This is not one of those years. I think the honor goes to The Trees. In the Distance would be the other contender. Other notable mentions include Garden by the Sea, which I loved almost as much as A Broken Mirror – one of my favorite books read in 2018; The Spectre of Alexander Wolf and Justine, both of which had twists that have really stayed with me; The Story of My Teeth, which I'm really glad I decided to try after not really enjoying the previous Valeria Luiselli book I read; and Not One Day, which was just unexpectedly beautiful and gave me a new way of thinking about writing. 

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, by Amara Lakhous

I've had Class of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio for a few years now. I know I got it before the pandemic because I picked it up at my old favorite thrift store near the office, which I haven't visited since March 2020. It reading was this "Read Your Way through Rome" column that prompted me to finally get around to it, though I read that article a couple months ago – before I visited Rome in November – and I really only got around to it today because I wanted to get one last book in for 2022. It was short and I had read about it somewhat recently. 

I thought I was going to return to Vladimir and just get it done – something I'd been telling myself I'd do since I set it aside after 2 days of reading it voraciously in early April. I did go back and read one more chapter of it, but I couldn't do it. I feel that the intensity of my feelings actually say something positive about the book, so others shouldn't take this as a warning to stay away. I just... I knew where it was going and I couldn't go there.

So after that brief flirtation, and with a free afternoon ahead of me, I decided to find another book I could read in a few hours and feeling nostalgic for my recent trip to Rome and the Times article, I landed on Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio. The story takes place in the wake of the discovery of a body in titular elevator, and the police's assumption that the one resident of the building who is not accounted for – a man named Amedeo – must be the murderer. Each chapter is told from the point of view of one of the other tenants and others in the neighborhood, a mix of immigrants from abroad and Italians who have, for the most part, moved to Rome from other parts of the country. The residents mostly dislike each other, but it turns out that Amedeo is the one person they all have some affection for. They all have prejudices, but he seems to confound them. None believes he can be the murderer. Meanwhile, the murdered man is someone nobody likes. They're all glad to see him gone. These chapters are interspersed with recordings Amedeo himself has made recounting his own interactions with the residents. This was a fun book showing an Italian diversity that's not often represented.

So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, by Patrick Modiano

I moved a week ago today. I've been living without most of my books since early October when I boxed them up and moved them ahead of the big move. This morning I set up my bookshelves (three of them at least) and unpacked my 18 boxes of fiction. It's wonderful to be reunited with these books. I've spent the bulk of the last week unpacking and organizing, so after lunch I decided to give myself the afternoon off to read one of my newly close-at-hand books. For reasons I can't exactly articulate, or maybe just reasons I don't want to go into at the moment, Patrick Modiano was the clear choice. I had kept out another book of his – a trilogy, in fact, in a single volume – but I decided to pick a book I could read in one sitting. 

So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood is just 150 pages, which was the primary reason I chose it. I hadn't realized it was a relatively recent book (2014) and I was caught off guard when a reference to a mobile phone showed up in the first paragraphs, but true to what I expected from Modiano, the heart of the book is in the past, in those early post War years in Paris. The narrator is an old man who is thrust back into memories of his childhood and early adulthood following an encounter with a pair of mysterious strangers. The book takes place in three distinct times: 1951 when the narrator was a young child; 15 years later when he is unexpectedly reconnected with that childhood year; and 2012 when it all comes back again. Modiano gets to the heart of memory and loss like nobody, and this book is an excellent example of that.

Martha, Jack & Shanco, by Caryl Lewis

It's been so long since I finished a book. I've started books; I've even made significant progress in books; but I haven't finished a book since early October. Goodreads thinks I'm "currently reading" six books, but there are at least a couple more that I've started and not recorded. The vast majority of my books have already been moved to my future home, where I will move myself in a week, but I have a small selection I kept here because I might want to read them and several have a bookmark to note where I abandoned my intentions. I do think my impending move is partly responsible for the fact that I haven't been a good reader these last several months. I've had a lot on my mind. But I also worry that I've lost the discipline I once had. We'll see as I get settled in my new place I guess.

Even in early October I was struggling to finish most of the books I started, but I was determined to read the (fortunately short) book selected for my Women in Translation book club. It's thanks to that book club that I've finished Martha, Jack & Shanco too. (Give me a deadline and a sense of obligation and I can accomplish anything,)

Martha, Jack & Shanco is the second Welsh novel I've read. Several years ago I read a Welsh novel called Mifanwy in a rush at the end of the year to get in one more country and one pre-20th Century book all in one go. Martha, Jack & Shanco is set in present day (or the present day of the book's original publication which was 2005), but the book's titular characters aren't living so differently than they might have a hundred years earlier. The three past middle age siblings live on a farm in rural Wales where they raise sheep, keep dairy cows, grow barley and hay, and speak Welsh. Jack, the oldest, is domineering and bitter; Shanco, the youngest, is intellectually disabled; and Martha takes care of them all. The book spans one year of their lives, measured by the seasonal changes on the farm and marked with the occasional incursion of the world outside. This was a dark but lovely book. 

Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli

Minor Detail had been on my radar since it was published in English. I originally made note of it as something to read for my world books reading project to represent Palestine, and I ordered a copy with that in mind. So, I was happy when my Women in Translation book club selected it as our next book to read. Having now read it, I'm also glad I will have a group of people to talk about it with, because it's a book I feel I need to talk about with people.

The narrative in Minor Detail is divided into roughly two parts, each taking up about half the book. The first part is written in the second person and describes the horrific actions of a group of soldiers in the Negev desert with the charge of clearing the area of Arabs capture over a few days in August 1949. The second half of the book is told in the first person in roughly present day. The narrator is a Palestinian woman living in the West Bank who reads a newspaper article about the actions of these soldiers and wants to learn more, specifically to understand the events from the point of view of their primary victim - a young girl. At great risk to herself, the narrator borrows a colleague's ID card that will allow her cross into Israel and another colleague gives her use of his credit card so she can rent a car, all so she can visit the scene of the crime. As she drives through the desert and among the settlements echoes from the first half of the book start showing up in the second. She briefly experiences a kind of freedom of movement that is novel in her life. 

This book was powerful, and extremely stressful to read. There is a deep tension in both halves. I was relieved that it was only 100 pages because I don't think I could have handled it for longer.

The Moon and the Bonfires, by Cesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese is a name I feel I've been familiar with for a long time, but I don't know why and I didn't really know who he was until I read Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, which is what led me to The Moon and the Bonfires. I feel like it took me forever to read, but in fact it was only two weeks. It's a slim book; I didn't read on more days than I did during those two weeks. I'm preparing to move, so I've had lots of other things to do around the house when I had a free moment and even when I did want to take a break, my mind was too busy to read something slow and contemplative, which The Moon and the Bonfires was. 

The book takes place on farms and in small villages in the Piedmontese region between Genoa and Turin. The present day of the book is a few years after the end of World War II, but much of the story is set in the past – when the narrator, who is 40 in the present, was a boy and a young man. In the early years of Fascism in Italy, the narrator left for America, where he traveled west to California and made a small fortune making liquor and wine before being interned during the war. We only get bits and pieces of the narrator's time in the U.S. – he's more interested in telling us about his childhood. He was a bastard taken in by a poor family of tenant farmers who wanted the monthly stipend given in return for his care. When that family moved on, he was given room and board in return for light labor on the estate of a wealthy family in the village. He spent his teenage years working for that family and the central story revolves around them: the three daughters, their suitors, the other workers in the household. It's unclear to the reader why the narrator has returned to this village after the war. It seems to be unclear to himself, and to his childhood friend, Nuto, with whom he reunites as well. You sense that he's trying to recapture that time before, but he has become different now from leaving. And the ones who stayed have become different too, from staying – through the war, the Fascist regime, the Partisan resistance, the German occupation. 

Unlike his narrator in The Moon and the Bonfires, Pavese did stay in Italy through the Mussolini era. He was an anti-fascist who, like Carlo Levi and Natalia Ginzburg, was arrested and sent to a village in the south of Italy (Calabria in Pavese's case) for a year of confinement. After his release he worked as an editor for a leftist newspaper and as a translator of English books. It felt strange to be reading this book at the moment when a neo-Fascist regime seems about to take hold in Italy. 

Rum Punch, by Elmore Leonard

After a strong start, by big plans for Women in Translation month blew up. I finished three books and had three more I intended to get to, but the first one I picked up – Death in Spring, by Mercè Rodoreda – just wasn't working for me and I stalled out. I've read three other books by Rodoreda and adored two of them, so I had picked that one on the assumption it would be a delight, but it's incredibly dark and quite different from the other books of hers I've read. I may go back to it yet, but it wasn't for me in the moment. 

I was still waffling on finishing it or starting something new when I headed to Philadelphia last Friday, and then on my way out the door I found a copy of Rum Punch on the free table in my lobby. I hadn't read anything by Elmore Leonard before, but I thought it might be just what I needed for the train trip ahead. Between my trip down, short spurts of reading in my dad's backyard, and my trip home, I got about two-thirds of the way through the book. Tuesday, I had a work trip to Connecticut that involved another several hours on the train and I thought I would finish the book, but when I tried to read on the ride home I found it too stressful – the events in the book were reaching their denouement and I found myself worried about how things would go. Being unfamiliar with Leonard, I didn't know: would he give me the ending I wanted, or would it all go wrong? I started to wonder if I would even finish the book before I had to leave for Texas tomorrow. But last night, after I finished work I found I was in a mental state where I could read. I sat down on the couch and finished Rum Punch in the space of an hour. It did give me what I hoped for, which I suppose was a relief. But I now have no idea what I'll read en route to Houston.

Not One Day, by Anne Garréta

I choose short books to read for Women in Translation month in the hope that I can get through more books than I do in the average month. So now, although it took me a week and a half to read Go, Went, Gone, we are at the mid-point in August and I've finished my third book. Not One Day is just under 100 pages, but it's not an especially fast read. I found myself rereading paragraphs regularly, even sometimes going back a page or two because I found my mind wandering. But then on the second, or sometimes third (one chapter, Y, required even more) reread, the force of what Garréta had written would finally hit and I would find myself awestruck, and then perhaps I would reread it once more to feel it again. 

But let me back up. Not One Day is a book (a memoir? a confession?) that states at the outset what it intends to do: Each day for one month, the author will write from memory about a woman she has desired, or who has desired her. She will spend five hours each day on one woman, making a full-time job of it. Garréta is a member of Oulipo who regularly writes with constraints, and these are the constraints she has laid out for herself for this book. Right away, however, you (the reader) realize that something is off. Opposite the dedication (TO NONE!!), there is a table of contents. At a glance, you can tell it's not 30 chapters long. And besides, there is simply the length of the book: could five hours a day for 30 days produce a scant 100 pages? The post script reveals all (well, some). Garréta bored of the project after a week, she became distracted, she procrastinated, she got caught up in reading Chateaubriand, sixteen months later she had 12 accounts of desire (one of which is a fiction), and those are what we find in the book, organized alphabetically after the the first initials of the women have been reshuffled according to some cypher. 

I wrote a little about my experience with Oulipo last year when I read Garréta's first book, Sphinx. The Oulipo books I was familiar with by reputation – A Void most notably – always seemed to have constraints that I believed would make the writing more difficult (both to compose and to read – how could a novel with no Es not be clunky? – let alone to translate). Sphinx and to a greater extent Not One Day – as well as my own writing practice – really changed my perspective on constraints. The constraints that Garréta sets out for herself for Not One Day are not so different from the conditions I've set for myself during my most productive periods of writing. (I only wish I could devote five hours in a day.) I regularly participate in the novelist Jami Attenberg's 1000 Words of Summer, a writing accountability project where participants strive and mutually encourage each other to write 1000 words a day for 2 weeks (or one week in the mini versions). The pomodoro technique is also a type of constraint that encourages productivity. (Personally, I find that word count goals work better for me than time goals.) When I did 1000 Words of Summer in 2020, the project I set up for myself was in one way quite similar to Garréta's constraints for Not One Day. Every day, I wrote 1000 words, relying solely on my memory (or such was the intention), about a place I had visited. In parts of Not One Day where Garréta talks about memory – about the limits and fallibility of memory, something I both struggled with and wanted to represent in my writing about places and travel. So, where I always imagined the constraints would make writing harder, I think they often do the opposite. The trick, of course, is – within the constraints – to make a book that's still interesting or beautiful or profound (or to throw away the constraints when they stop serving you). Not One Day does all of this.

Happiness, as Such, by Natalia Ginzburg

Continuing with Women in Translation Month, I read Natalia Ginzburg's Happiness, as Such, which I picked up after reading and loving her book Family Lexicon. Happiness, as Such is an epistolary novel about Michele (the Italian title is Caro Michele or Dear Michele, as many of the letters open), a young Italian emigré to England, and the family and friends he has left behind in Italy. While Michele is the character who ties the story together, he's actually a small part in the book and only a few of the letters that comprise it are from him. We barely know him. But the same could be said for several of his correspondents. Or perhaps it's that each knows a different Michele. 

Michele's mother writes long, complaining letters expressing her dissatisfaction with her home life, with his departure, with the way she is treated by her family and friends. Michele's ex-lover, mother to a baby who might be his, writes funny, occasionally bitter letters revealing her own ineptitude. His sister is called upon to handle his affairs in Italy and her correspondence with him is mostly practical. The person who seems likely to have been Michele's closest friend, as well as possibly his lover, who probably could have best represented Michele to us, we mostly get to know through the what the others write about him. Instead, the Michele we know is incomplete. He is more of an absence than a presence – because that's what he was to the people he left behind.

Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

After I read Jenny Erpenbeck's memoir, Not a Novel last year, I loved it and I knew I needed to read her fiction. Go, Went, Gone met my expectations. I went into it solely on the basis of how much I enjoyed the memoir not knowing at all what it was about*. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was a little to find the extent to which the themes from the memoir were present in the novel. 

The central character in Go, Went, Gone is Richard, a recently retired widower professor of classical philology who grew up in East Berlin then went on to have a comfortable middle class life in unified Germany. For reasons that aren't quite clear, he becomes interested in the African refugees in Berlin and ends up befriending a group of them. His acquaintance with the refugees begins to alter (to broaden really) his worldview and give his life  – which seemed to be drifting toward purposelessness on his retirement – a new vitality. While the book addresses the tragic histories and frustrating realities of the refugees, it does so in a very quiet way. These stories – Richard's and the refugees'  – could have been told very differently. They could have been action rather than memory (a two-star review on Goodreads describes the prose as "communist grey") – but the way they were told worked for me. I loved the quiet, meditative feeling of this book.

*I realize I say something like this often in these posts. I prefer to read books knowing as little as possible about them ahead of time. I almost never read the plot summaries on the back covers of books. If I do, I try to just read the first sentence. Instead, I'll read the first page to get a sense of the writing.