To close out the year, here are ten books I’ve read since January and a paragraph on each. These are mostly spoiler-free, but read on at your own risk.
Ulysses, James Joyce
I went in with a longstanding curiosity. I came out four months later with my curiosity fully sated. I’m sure there’s a lot in there for literary academics and students of Irish history; there’s much less for the layperson—particularly if you’re not inclined to research all the subtleties of what you’re reading. That said, I didn’t hate it, and despite the slog, I had some fun. Watching Leopold Bloom jerk off to a girl on the beach at sunset with a fireworks display to punctuate his orgasm was a high point, as, of course, was Molly Bloom’s delightfully filthy soliloquy. Contemporary literature has turned so squeamish!
A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe
Not great, not terrible—and mercifully quick. It’s hard to translate Japanese to English, and the result has a stiff quality that takes effort to push past. Oe nonetheless provides a window into postwar Japan from a vantage point I hadn’t previously encountered, and the characters are richly sketched and thoroughly flawed. Lots of sex and drinking paired with morally questionable decisions, and to that I say, “Hear, hear!”
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Similarly to Ulysses, I’m sure students of history will love this book. But I know far too little about the Soviet Union. The entire first half was an entertaining directionless mess, and the plot, when it arrived, did not grab me the way I wanted it to. And as with A Personal Matter, the prose lost much of its luster in translation (or so I assume).
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
This book blew me away. I hadn’t read any Ishiguro, and I went in with high expectations (a Nobel Prize will do that). By page fifty, I was ready to write the Nobel committee to commend them on their choice. The prose is good—but the plot! The characters! The way the horrifying truth slides slowly to the foreground! Masterfully done. I finished in five days and enjoyed every moment.
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
I read The Bluest Eye in 2018 but didn’t go back to Morrison until this year. I’m glad I finally did. The Bluest Eye is a good book, and one that reflects talent—but in many ways it is a very simple book. Song of Solomon shows more maturity. Although the plot unravels slightly at the end, the full experience rewards the reader with deep characters, complicated relationships, and beautifully tapestried settings. It's about as challenging a read as a good book should be.
Barbarian Days, William Finnegan
The only nonfiction on this list. Why should I spend time on nonfiction when I read nonfiction all day at my job? Because, William Finnegan admonishes, sometimes you can discover something new. I’ve been surfing four or five times in my life, but Barbarian Days made the sport and its culture come alive. It helps that Finnegan has traveled to some truly fascinating places and honed his writing as a long-form journalist. Read this book if you want a trip around the world that offers insightful commentary on humans and modernity accompanied by tender and detailed descriptions of waves, surfboards, and wild characters.
Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
This was my first encounter with Baldwin, and I harbored some trepidation. Baldwin has gotten a lot of play post-Black Lives Matter, and as I am skeptical of other figures who have watched their stars rise for similar reasons, I wasn’t sure if Baldwin’s ascent reflected his talent or only the political moment. I shouldn’t have worried. He’s a good writer, and Go Tell It on the Mountain is a good book. In the afterword, Baldwin counts the King James Bible among his literary influences, and it shows—for the better. The prose is firm and freighted without being overbearing, and the plot, despite and because of its simplicity, works well.
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Like everyone else who grew up in the American public school system, I read Great Expectations when I was fifteen and didn’t like it. A law school friend and Dickens fanatic complained to me that Great Expectations is the wrong entry point, and the junior year English teachers are doing it all wrong. It’s hard to say for certain that she’s right—maybe fifteen-year-olds are going to find Dickens boring no matter what title you pick—but I got a lot more out of A Tale of Two Cities than I did Great Expectations. Among other things, Dickens is very, very funny in a way I was not set up to appreciate in high school. Nevertheless, I’m neutral on this book. It’s good, it’s fine, it’s historical, it’s whatever—but the plot (typical of Dickens, I’ve been told) feels contrived, and reading about what Dickens thinks happened during the French Revolution reminds me how much higher research standards are for novelists today than in 1859. Yes, yes, I know Dickens did a lot of research, and most of what he writes is reasonably accurate—but some of it, very obviously, is not.
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
Another book translated into English—but Italian is much closer than Russian or Japanese, so the prose does not suffer too much. An entertaining read, a colorful read, a gaggle of excessive personalities (what do you expect? They’re Italian), a skillfully sketched portrait of Naples in the fifties. Narrative arc, however, is lacking, and character development doesn’t go much beyond, “They grew up.” I plan to finish the series, but the first book left me disappointed.
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
This one is still in progress, though judging by my pace, it won’t be for long. Vonnegut writes with unrestrained glee, delivering zingers on every page. A business owner decamping from unionized Chicago to a poor Caribbean dictatorship remarks, “The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!” Even Dickens can’t beat that. (If you want to tell me Joyce or Bulgakov is funnier, you can go jump in a lake, you pretentious nerd.) Everything is goofy in the sharpest way, and the sharp and goofy characters proceeding on their sharp and goofy plot have captivated me. I just want to hurry up and get to the apocalypse.