Best Non-fiction and Best Book of the Year!
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
by Katherine Rundell
This biography is a relatively short and superb review of the life and white-hot mind of our greatest poet of sexuality and also our most astounding preacher (as in “for whom the bell tolls”). The author, who has a gift for words herself, says Donne took Elizabethan love poetry down a dark alley and knifed it. Later in life, he filled St. Paul’s Cathedral in London with avid listeners. His years of hardship were more numerous that his years of success, but he was a loyal husband and the father of seven living children whom he raised on his wife’s death.
Best Fiction
Cancer Ward
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
This long novel is a panorama of Soviet society in the time of Stalin as seen through the lens of a cancer hospital. But it is also an achingly gorgeous and slow love story between a physician and a patient who is a rough-and-ready permanent exile. The last pages at the least rival the last pages of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
The Fiction I Liked
I see that, this year, my favorites were not contemporary books. But, I tell you, the nineteenth century and the 1940s produced some incredible stuff.
My Cousin Rachel
by Daphne Du Maurier
I found this in a street-side library and said “What the heck.” Well, what a great book, and now I see why Miss DuMaurier was so famous. The author does not interpret what’s going on. IMO it is a story of the mental illness of an unlikely candidate. Intense.
Dubliners
by James Joyce
Wonderful stories about nice people, drunks, men who play on women to get petty amounts of money, etc. It has one of the best stories on drunks that concludes with impending domestic violence that will make you so sad.
The Way of All Flesh
by Samuel Butler
This author is an incredibly elegant and easy writer. The book is what I think is called a bildungsroman, the history of a young man from childhood to adult. And this kid has quite a path that includes a clergyman father, prison, an unwise marriage, etc., etc. It is amazing to me to read the violence with which boys used to be raised. (Beatings occur in another book of the 19th that I read this year.)
The Tale of the 1002nd Night
by Joseph Roth
The author had been a journalist, and this may be why he has an eye for story. A brief royal sexual intrigue affects the lives of the people involved in it. How can a girl who honestly came by the money involved, lose it over time, and end up in jail? How can the noble cavalryman who loves her (but won’t admit it) end up losing his self-esteem and his money because of her. A great story.
Ivanhoe
by Sir Walter Scott
Yes, I read this entire old chestnut. People think of Sir Walter as a romantic, but he is definitely not. His book is full of nasty, greedy people, and Ivanhoe is rather dumb as is Richard the Lion Heart. The shining light is Rebecca, the Jewish maiden, who can articulate for us the life of an outsider. Sir Walter deserves a rethink.
Imperium
by Richard Harris
Mr. Harris writes about ancient Rome, and he did a fabulous book called Pompeii. Imperium is about the early career of Cicero when the Roman Republic was being undermined. It is a great novel of law and politics by a writer who knows his stuff. I should tell you there are no gladiators, bloodshed, or mayhem.
Marrow and Bone
by Walter Kempowski
Kempowski obliquely visits a great German trauma — the 1945 winter flight of the civilian population of East Prussia before the advancing Soviet army. In 1988, the protagonist, who was born during the flight, gets a chance to tour East Prussia as part of a group planning a car rally. He comes on the places of his parents’ deaths and is transformed from a dilettantish, youthful life, to a directed adult life. A lovely book, with some laugh-out-loud passages.
The Non-Fiction I Liked
Reader Come Home
by Maryanne Wolf
We all love to read, and Prof. Wolf tells points out that reading is a marvel of the plastic mind because we are not genetically disposed to read. She talks about deep, reflective reading, and the good use of digital reading. She realizes we have to read in both realms, and her ideas about being “biliterate” are great. You can catch her utterly charming presence on an Ezra Klein podcast of 2023. Her voice and intelligence turned me onto this book.
Ancient Iraq
by Georges Roux
Mesopotamia has always fascinated me, and M. Roux satisfies the hunger. He wrote about the subject originally for an oil company magazine, and then transformed his work into a book that covers pre- and early history, the Sumerians, and onward through the Babylonians and Assyrians with clear presentations of the many other peoples who have stomped over this territory — Aramaeans, Hittites, Amalekites, Elamites, et al. Due to clay tablets, we probably know more about day-t-day history there than for practically any other age. Amazing.
All the best for the New Year,
Larry/Lawrence/Lorenzo