Just before I was born in 1960, my parents purchased a complete set of hardbound Compton’s Encyclopedia and subscribed to the annual yearbook supplements. I believe the year 1959 was the first.
My earliest childhood memories pertaining to books date to my looking at the photos and drawings in these encyclopedias and yearbooks, and trying to dope out the words.
Strangely, another distant recollection about books and reading centers on a Catholic publication about the lives of the saints, with quite a few of the illustrations depicting the various means of torture deployed to make the case for future sainthood. As no doubt intended, they gave me nightmares. Somehow I’ve escaped a fetish for masochism.
Following is my reading list for 2022. As is commonly the case with me, the subject matter skews heavily toward European history and travel, whether fiction or nonfiction. It’s who I am and what I do, and there’ll be no apologies. In my view the stork was drunk, and in his muddled ineptitude he mistook New Albany on the Ohio for Neuburg an der Donau. My lifetime as a Hoosier is an accident of cosmik debris.
A major exception in recent years has been Kurt Vonnegut, one of the only figures of genuine importance to ever emerge from the benighted state called Indiana. For some reason I never got around to Vonnegut’s ouevre. I’m in the process of setting this right.
Looking back, I can find something memorable about each book I read this year. If pressed to group them as “best of,” it probably would look like this:
Fiction:
- Austerlitz: “The story essentially consists of two sets of encounters, 20 years apart, between the tormented Austerlitz and the narrator, who is only seemingly detached.”
- The Inquisitors’ Manual: “António Lobo Antunes’s eleventh novel chronicles the decadence not just of a family but of an entire society – a society morally and spiritually vitiated by four decades of totalitarian rule.”
- The Tower: Tales from a Lost Country, by Uwe Tellkamp: “A key novel of the late East German state.”
Nonfiction (or, the European travel trilogy by Patrick Leigh Fermor):
- A Time of Gifts
- Between the Woods and the Water
- The Broken Road
In fact, Austerlitz is a rare reread, twenty years or so after the first. I find it utterly essential as an exposition of post-war European history, albeit utilizing the deceivingly minor story of one man’s life during this time. Sebald’s novel must be considered among the most influential in...Read more
