I’m not a book Nazi: you can even name more than one! (Because how can I deny you a privilege I will insist upon myself?)
For me…
Best (new-to-me) fiction: Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori
Do you know why—why we quarreled? Don’t say a word, I too know it, I too know it was not so harmless, so irrelevant as I made it out to be. I knew you were stupid, my darling, and I loved you very much for what I often tenderly and often with hatred called your stupidity; yet you should have understood that as someone lost among the lotus-eaters, like yourself, I couldn’t believe in the truth of reality. One can’t believe in a reality that comprises Auschwitz and the Opernball of Vienna at the same time. One simply has to escape into possibilities that make it appear possible. Yet, one must not fool around with the dreadful power of invention: a fool can create a reality that drives millions to madness, I know, I know… [...] Look: my betrayal of pure truth—isn’t it also a possibility for the fallen angels to make the world lucid? You who believe in art the way St. Cecilia believes in resurrection in God, you ought to have known that my transfigurations, the fairy tales I wove out of images from my and other people’s pasts, were an act of love; love—as we both always knew—is identification. Well, this was the only way to identify with a world one was bound to hate and a mankind one loathed and despised. Transfiguration as the alchemists who strove to change vulgar materials into gold—I could even identify with myself; had I not done this I would have denied myself. But I did make something lucid with my love and my hate, didn’t I?
Best nonfiction: Siri Hustvedt’s The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves, on the entanglement of illness, imagination, and identity:
True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.
Best re-read: Middlemarch is the clear winner in this category (what could ever beat it? why did I wait so long to re-read it?!) but I also revisited Czeslaw Milosz’s exquisite memoir, Native Realm, this summer:
But it was not the same as it had been in America; it was not only nature that cured me. Europe herself gathered me in her warm embrace, and her stones, chiseled by the hands of past generations, the swarm of her faces emerging from carved wood, from paintings, from the gilt of embroidered fabrics, soothed me, and my voice was added to her old challenges and oaths in spite of my refusal to accept her split and her sickliness. Europe, after all, was home to me. And in her I happened to find help... while I climbed the hills of Saint-Emilion near a place where only yesterday the villas of Roman officials had stood, I tried to imagine, gazing out over the brown furrows of earth in the vineyards, all the hands that had once toiled here. Something went on inside me then. Such transformations are, of course, slow, and at first they are hidden even from ourselves. Gradually, though, I stopped worrying about the whole mythology of exile, this side of the wall or that side of the wall. Poland and the Dordogne, Lithuania and Savoy, the narrow little streets in Wilno and the Quartier Latin, all fused together. I was like an ancient Greek. I had simply moved from one city to another. My native Europe, all of it, dwelled inside me, with its mountains, forests, and capitals; and that map of the heart left no room for my troubles. After a few years of groping in the dark, my foot once again touched solid ground, and I regained the ability to live in the present, in a "now" within which past and future, both stronger than all possible apocalypses, mingle and mutually enrich each other.
Honorable mention: Lea Ypi’s Free:
Biographies were carefully separated into good or bad, better or worse, clean or stained, relevant or irrelevant, transparent or confusing, suspicious or trustworthy, those that needed to be remembered and those that needed to be forgotten. Biography was the universal answer to all kinds of questions, the foundation without which all knowledge was reduced to opinion. There are words after whose meaning it is absurd to inquire, either because they are so basic that they explain themselves and everything that is related to them or because you might be embarrassed to reveal that, after so many years of hearing it, you still don’t understand something that should have been obvious all along. Biography was like that. Once the word was said, you just had to accept it.
I'm reading the astonishing Rejection, the book of interconnected short stories by Tony Tulathimutte, which is the most incisive satire of the contemporary age and Gen Z culture I've ever read. I also very much found fascinating The Emperor of All Maladies, the history of cancer from some years ago. And I re-read Eric Hoffer's True Believer, which was a good reminder that mass movements take common forms throughout history.
The Wager by David Grann (who also wrote Killers of the Flower Moon). Nonfiction that reads like fiction. It has nothing to do with gambling--The Wager was the name of a British ship that wrecked trying to round the tip of South America in the 1700s. Hundreds of men died but a few dozen survived and HOW they survived is insanely compelling. You know from the get-go that a handful even eventually made it back to England, but you can't see how, so you keep reading! No women in the book at all, except for one very short encounter with some indigenous people. One of the survivors was the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. Wildly readable!
I have not read anything more mind-blowing than Ivan Illich's "Gender". I'm still not all sewn up again, I still have loose threads that I must and will follow.
The most disturbing and challenging book I read in Spanish, because its reality was too real and too complex, was La llamada, by Leila Guerrero, a narrative account of the author's interviews (and experience as she did them) with a former Argentine guerrillera who was imprisoned in the infamous torture and disappearance center of the Argentine dictatorship, and later moved to Europe, then back to Argentina... the story itself is incredible, but the ethical and moral conundrums, the way they are conveyed... it is, all in all, a fabulous book.
The funniest and most surprising book was Bestializing the Human Female, by Margot Sims, because it unwittingly reveals so many of the notions that made feminism go down crazy roads, but it is also earnest and sweet and funny. And hilarious.
The best fiction, As I Lay Dying, by W. Faulkner, which I had never read.
> "... because it unwittingly reveals so many of the notions that made feminism go down crazy roads ..."
Sounds like a solid recommendation, particularly since asking how that happened seems to be the question of the hour. I see that Kathleen Stock's bio alludes to the crux of the matter:
"Kathleen Stock: Mostly devoted to clawing feminism back from the idiots that ruined it. ...."
Apropos of which, Helen Dale recently interviewed both Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater during which Dale had suggested that Forstater had tweeted that "hostility to evolution is feminism’s Achilles’ Heel." Which Forstater had elaborated on with this:
MF: "But the lie or the misapprehension that men and women are the same from the neck up is only a hair’s breadth removed away from that."
Something that Stock's earlier Welcome post went into some detail on:
KS: "What I do find interesting, though, is how things went so badly wrong: the causes, not the reasons. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. One big question for this newsletter will be: how did mainstream feminism come to embrace what I’m calling the stupid story, so that many feminists ended up cancelling themselves out of politically effective existence? Effectively, the stupid story functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
It’s been a bit of a lean year for my reading, for various reasons.
But what I enjoyed most was re-reading “Cider with Rosie” by Laurie Lee
“Never to be forgotten that first long secret drink of golden fire, juice of those valleys and of that time, wine of wild orchards, of russet summer, of plump red apples; and Rosie’s burning cheeks…
For a long time we sat with our mouths very close, breathing the same air. We kissed, once only, so dry and shy, it was like two leaves colliding in air.”
I read so many good ones this year I can’t list them all!! But have you read The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon? I keep recommending it bc it was an unexpected delight. It’s sort of memoir/stream of consciousness/poetry (a “pillow book” is essentially a journal that Japanese people at court kept by their bedsides). And Sei Shonagon was a lady in waiting in Heian Japan and an amazing poet, and she wrote this book filled with all the happenings at court, but also long, poetic lists of things and remarks on different subjects. The lists have names like “Things now useless that recall a glorious past,” “things that are hard to say,” “things with terrifying names,” or lists of women’s garments and fabrics, forests, or wildlife. She’s can be a terrible snob and classist, but she’s an amazing writer— a total aesthete and quite funny in a witty, flamboyant way— a bit like an ancient, Japanese Oscar Wilde. It was cool to see what life was like in 900’s Japan, and what aspects are the same or different from now.
Here’s an excerpt:
[215] On a bright moonlit night, when your carriage is crossing a stream, it’s lovely the way the water will spray up in shining drops at the ox’s tread, like shattered crystal.
Yes! 🙌 I couldn’t believe how modern a lot of it felt. I walked to a nearby lake and read it on the pier looking into the water and it was a transcendent experience. After I finished, I kept wishing there were more beautiful descriptions of nature I could read throughout my day.
I was just thinking about Middlemarch today and thinking it's time to re-read it.
I scored Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel for $2 at the opshop which made it my Score of the year as well as most enjoyed book so far. How that woman is still standing...
Just finished Rabbit is Rich by John Updike. For sure the best written book I’ve read this year, though perhaps the most uncomfortably explicit. I also really enjoyed The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever and hated hated hated the novelization of E. T. The Extra-terrestrial
My favourite Nonfiction of the year so far is The German Genius by Peter Watson, which argues that from 1750-1933 Germany experienced a large scale Renaissance of the likes not seen since the Italian Renaissance and that it’s not given that credit because of bad taste of the Nazis has prejudiced people (fairly or unfairly) against German thought and influence.
The best fiction has to be The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. It’s so entertaining and the poetry is delightful. It jumps from the conventional to the unconventional and all throughout there is an optimistic moralism that I find refreshing compared to our postmodern nihilism that’s so trendy in fiction these days.
Middlemarch is one of the few very long books I've read twice! Speaking of very long books, my top pick of the year, War and Peace, took me months to read but was worth it. One day, I hope to read it again, too, but in the meantime, I've got lots of other books to read. I'm thankful to have so many recommendations in this thread!
I've been going deep on Milton Erickson. Two are audiobooks of his stories: My Voice Will Go With You and Uncommon Therapy.
I also reread John McKnight The Careless Society, which is so poetic and profound to me.
Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo. Incredible story of adventure and intrigue, death and rebirth, honor and the impossibility of redemption through revenge.
I am currently reading Framed: Women in the Family Court Underworld
I know one of the families featured, and it's absolutely heartbreaking and chilling to see good safe Moms who report abuse lose custody of their children for alleging alienation.
I am glad you mentioned this. I have been keeping up with family court advocacy after working in that system. Parental alienation had become the prime strategic control tactic for a parent disguising their own abuse by accusing the other parent. These accused parents need so much support to convey to the court professionals how to discern what is happening.
Lisa Vogel's "We Can Live Like This," a memoir/history of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (2024) is such a brilliant and important Lesbian and women's history.
And "The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth" by Zoe Schlanger is one of the best and most important books about nature that I've ever read.
Ed by Susan Dalgety & Lucy Hunter Blackburn ( Voices From The Front Line of Scotland’s Battle For Women’s Rights & The women who would not be silenced
Fiction
Award winning The Prophets Song by Paul Lynch …. “paean to maternal love amidst gathering forces of darkness “ .. in reading this I had to remind myself this was fiction
Don Quixote by Cervantes, Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn (both felt eerily relevant or maybe I just have a one-track mind). Short stories by Isaac Singer (It was a nice break from my obsession about transgender cult and I found no parallels. "A Crown of Feathers " was particularly riveting). Thanks for ideas for my next reads, Eliza and everyone else.
Ha! Currently reading Solzhenitsyn as well .. Gulag. Also feeling like I need to read it for some disturbing reason. And also taking a break from reading about the trans insanity. I’m living it in our house so need a break!
I just finished Zodiac Academy series and was fantastic. 🤪 Not quite on the same lines as what others are listing but if you’re looking for a fun escape there you go. 😊
Non-fiction Naomi Klein's Doppelganger for the most helpful search for thinking about the bizarre response to the pandemic public health response which in this country - NZ - was world leading. Also helps with the total lack of acceptance on the right generally that there have to be consequences to having a pandemic..... Klein's humility and capacity to start with a herself and a small issue and widen it to look at ourselves as well as the other is what we need.
Fiction Chaim Potok's The Chosen and 2 novels about Asher Lev - mid-century New York Orthodox Jewish boys and men. Bildungsroman - good to read about the culture now to remind myself Israel is not the only Jewish culture - and the interaction of even this deeply conservative religious culture with the serious redistributive left. As well as the mid-century culture of art that believed ethical values existed not post-1990s plastic pseudo-conceptual art.
“The Lincoln Highway” by Amor Towles was a joy to read. It is hard to give voice to radically different personalities and make them believable and interesting (even the rogues).
Late to the party hoping I might read a book this year and not look like a big eejit. So far, it's not looking likely, but I might get round to finishing Wise Animals by Tom Chatfield by New Year. It's pretty tedious, though. ... Or I might finish my Kindle edition of Trans, by Helen Joyce.
Best fiction I’ve read this year so far, without doubt, is Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. So beautifully imagined and so much a brilliant ending. One of the only works of fiction to have genuinely brought me to tears.
Best non-fiction, Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed.
Thanks Eliza and everyone! This is so much fun! Here’s what I’ve got:
Nonfiction: An Everyone Culture—Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. I’ve been fascinated with these ideas since I first read Kegan’s In Over Our Heads—The Mental Demands of Modern Life many years ago.
Fiction: The Poisonwood Bible. Barbara Kingsolver. I savored every sentence.
Fun Fiction (or “Fluff” as my mother-in-law used to say): Goodnight, Irene by Luis Alberta Urrea
Last year's (or so?) nonfiction: Galileo's Middle Finger by Alice Dreger, on academia and activism: if you want justice, support the search for the truth.
Two favorites, both nonfiction and both concerning Israel and Palestine. Nathan Thrall's A Day in the Life of Abed Salama was a searing read and deserves the strong reviews and high praise that have come its way. A bigger surprise came from the old titles bin: Ghada Karmi's 2002 autobiography In Search of Fatima. I had never heard of Karmi, who is more well known in Britain for her activist work there. In Search of Fatima turned out to be a masterful autobiography, one of the best I've ever read, a beautifully written and very honest work. Karmi takes us deep into the anguished heart of refugee and emigre life.
Good question, Eliza! Hard to pick a best for me, so a short list of good reads: He Chose Porn over Me, edited by Melinda Tankard Reist; Tough Crowd, by Graham Linehan; close to finished reading: It's Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics, by Robert Jensen; The Reckoning, by Kara Dansky; and just for fun, a mystery of 18th century Venice by Gregory Dowling called The Four Horsemen (halfway through). Now on to reading others best bets. And best wishes as always!
The Gene Keys by Richard Rudd. It's the most profound of all the personality typing systems and reading the bits pertaining to me has been revolutionary. Also The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doige. Doige is a neuroscientist and this book covers the early evidence of brain plasticity and very compelling case studies in a very readable or listenable-I mostly do audoibooks- form.
I just read Safekeep by Yale Van der Wouden. Part of me didn’t want to like it for some reason and I was warned there was a plot twist but wow, didn’t expect it but looking back it should have been obvious. It is on the long list for the Booker prize and the author is Dutch (and I just moved to the NL so … ). I suspect she won’t win because well … politics. Currently reading Part 1 of the Gulag Archipelago. Also love all of Rachel Cusk’s books, I can’t explain why I love her writing so much. It’s just … real, grounded.
I just finished Mao’s America by Xi Van Fleet. She describes her life growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China, the ways it affected her family, friends, and her path in life. I never really learned about that period in history, except for the occasion movie or essay. She does a great job explaining the politics of Communism and Maoism through her personal experience and the similarities she has been seeing in the American educational system and beyond. If you think people like James Lindsey are exaggerating the threat of socialism/communism, I recommend reading this book. For fiction, I loved Mania by Lionel Shriver. It is wickedly delightful satire with a satisfying redemption arc.
"Being Wrong: Adventures in the margins of error" by Kathryn Shultz
"Cultish: the language of fanaticism" by Amanda Montell.
"Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World" by Tara Isabella Burton
"Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living" by Dimitris Xygalatas
For me, these books interconnect, so I can't pick just one. Once I understood the full influence of religion on our culture (any myself), especially secular religions, I saw the modern age in an entirely new light.
The best thing I've read this year is Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher. It's so nasty in every way the word applies, but retains a shameful eroticism that I couldn't stop thinking about for weeks after I finished it. Probably the most interesting character study in 21st century literature.
I also loved Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Colette's The Vagabond, Rikki Ducornet's The Plotinus, Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk, and Dorothy M. Richardson's Pilgrimage 1.
I've been going on an Angela Carter bender, rereading "Nights at the Circus" and her reworked fairy tales in "Burning Your Boats". Her nonfiction is equally wonderful - "Shaking a Leg" is a collection of her essays and critical writing. She was such a great thinker - brilliant and hilarious and imaginative. It's been a delicious treat to rediscover her work.
This is difficult but I'll say, fiction: History of the Island by Eugene Vodolazkin; poetry: Say it into my mouth by H. L. Hix; nonfiction: Roots of Christian Mysticism by Olivier Clement
I'm reading the astonishing Rejection, the book of interconnected short stories by Tony Tulathimutte, which is the most incisive satire of the contemporary age and Gen Z culture I've ever read. I also very much found fascinating The Emperor of All Maladies, the history of cancer from some years ago. And I re-read Eric Hoffer's True Believer, which was a good reminder that mass movements take common forms throughout history.
The Wager by David Grann (who also wrote Killers of the Flower Moon). Nonfiction that reads like fiction. It has nothing to do with gambling--The Wager was the name of a British ship that wrecked trying to round the tip of South America in the 1700s. Hundreds of men died but a few dozen survived and HOW they survived is insanely compelling. You know from the get-go that a handful even eventually made it back to England, but you can't see how, so you keep reading! No women in the book at all, except for one very short encounter with some indigenous people. One of the survivors was the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. Wildly readable!
I have not read anything more mind-blowing than Ivan Illich's "Gender". I'm still not all sewn up again, I still have loose threads that I must and will follow.
The most disturbing and challenging book I read in Spanish, because its reality was too real and too complex, was La llamada, by Leila Guerrero, a narrative account of the author's interviews (and experience as she did them) with a former Argentine guerrillera who was imprisoned in the infamous torture and disappearance center of the Argentine dictatorship, and later moved to Europe, then back to Argentina... the story itself is incredible, but the ethical and moral conundrums, the way they are conveyed... it is, all in all, a fabulous book.
The funniest and most surprising book was Bestializing the Human Female, by Margot Sims, because it unwittingly reveals so many of the notions that made feminism go down crazy roads, but it is also earnest and sweet and funny. And hilarious.
The best fiction, As I Lay Dying, by W. Faulkner, which I had never read.
> "... because it unwittingly reveals so many of the notions that made feminism go down crazy roads ..."
Sounds like a solid recommendation, particularly since asking how that happened seems to be the question of the hour. I see that Kathleen Stock's bio alludes to the crux of the matter:
"Kathleen Stock: Mostly devoted to clawing feminism back from the idiots that ruined it. ...."
https://substack.com/@kathleenstock
Apropos of which, Helen Dale recently interviewed both Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater during which Dale had suggested that Forstater had tweeted that "hostility to evolution is feminism’s Achilles’ Heel." Which Forstater had elaborated on with this:
MF: "But the lie or the misapprehension that men and women are the same from the neck up is only a hair’s breadth removed away from that."
https://lawliberty.org/podcast/when-does-sex-matter/
Something that Stock's earlier Welcome post went into some detail on:
KS: "What I do find interesting, though, is how things went so badly wrong: the causes, not the reasons. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. One big question for this newsletter will be: how did mainstream feminism come to embrace what I’m calling the stupid story, so that many feminists ended up cancelling themselves out of politically effective existence? Effectively, the stupid story functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/feminist-reboot-camp?utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
It’s been a bit of a lean year for my reading, for various reasons.
But what I enjoyed most was re-reading “Cider with Rosie” by Laurie Lee
“Never to be forgotten that first long secret drink of golden fire, juice of those valleys and of that time, wine of wild orchards, of russet summer, of plump red apples; and Rosie’s burning cheeks…
For a long time we sat with our mouths very close, breathing the same air. We kissed, once only, so dry and shy, it was like two leaves colliding in air.”
I read so many good ones this year I can’t list them all!! But have you read The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon? I keep recommending it bc it was an unexpected delight. It’s sort of memoir/stream of consciousness/poetry (a “pillow book” is essentially a journal that Japanese people at court kept by their bedsides). And Sei Shonagon was a lady in waiting in Heian Japan and an amazing poet, and she wrote this book filled with all the happenings at court, but also long, poetic lists of things and remarks on different subjects. The lists have names like “Things now useless that recall a glorious past,” “things that are hard to say,” “things with terrifying names,” or lists of women’s garments and fabrics, forests, or wildlife. She’s can be a terrible snob and classist, but she’s an amazing writer— a total aesthete and quite funny in a witty, flamboyant way— a bit like an ancient, Japanese Oscar Wilde. It was cool to see what life was like in 900’s Japan, and what aspects are the same or different from now.
Here’s an excerpt:
[215] On a bright moonlit night, when your carriage is crossing a stream, it’s lovely the way the water will spray up in shining drops at the ox’s tread, like shattered crystal.
I love The Pillow Book - it's one of those books that makes me tremble with the knowledge that we're all the same species, no matter time or place.
Yes! 🙌 I couldn’t believe how modern a lot of it felt. I walked to a nearby lake and read it on the pier looking into the water and it was a transcendent experience. After I finished, I kept wishing there were more beautiful descriptions of nature I could read throughout my day.
It's on the Internet Archive (unfortunately down at the moment because of a DOD attack)--should be available to all.
I was just thinking about Middlemarch today and thinking it's time to re-read it.
I scored Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel for $2 at the opshop which made it my Score of the year as well as most enjoyed book so far. How that woman is still standing...
Just finished Rabbit is Rich by John Updike. For sure the best written book I’ve read this year, though perhaps the most uncomfortably explicit. I also really enjoyed The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever and hated hated hated the novelization of E. T. The Extra-terrestrial
Not his latest, but The End of the World is Flat by Simon Edge is a satire that will have everyone here laughing.
I loved that one!
My favourite Nonfiction of the year so far is The German Genius by Peter Watson, which argues that from 1750-1933 Germany experienced a large scale Renaissance of the likes not seen since the Italian Renaissance and that it’s not given that credit because of bad taste of the Nazis has prejudiced people (fairly or unfairly) against German thought and influence.
The best fiction has to be The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. It’s so entertaining and the poetry is delightful. It jumps from the conventional to the unconventional and all throughout there is an optimistic moralism that I find refreshing compared to our postmodern nihilism that’s so trendy in fiction these days.
I read parts of The Faerie Queene back in college. Perhaps I should pull it out again. I really like that you mentioned it!
Middlemarch is one of the few very long books I've read twice! Speaking of very long books, my top pick of the year, War and Peace, took me months to read but was worth it. One day, I hope to read it again, too, but in the meantime, I've got lots of other books to read. I'm thankful to have so many recommendations in this thread!
I've been going deep on Milton Erickson. Two are audiobooks of his stories: My Voice Will Go With You and Uncommon Therapy.
I also reread John McKnight The Careless Society, which is so poetic and profound to me.
Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo. Incredible story of adventure and intrigue, death and rebirth, honor and the impossibility of redemption through revenge.
Thanks for reminding me. I have those Audio books already. Milton Erikson is mind blowing.
Second Class by Batya Ungar Sargon was fantastic.
Whale by Joe Roman. How whales effect history. A fine read.
Frederick Douglass, the new fictionalized biography of the great American abolitionist.
Reread 1984 and Brave New World.
Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier.
All very good!
I am currently reading Framed: Women in the Family Court Underworld
I know one of the families featured, and it's absolutely heartbreaking and chilling to see good safe Moms who report abuse lose custody of their children for alleging alienation.
I am glad you mentioned this. I have been keeping up with family court advocacy after working in that system. Parental alienation had become the prime strategic control tactic for a parent disguising their own abuse by accusing the other parent. These accused parents need so much support to convey to the court professionals how to discern what is happening.
Moby Dick. Rereading it right now.
Lisa Vogel's "We Can Live Like This," a memoir/history of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (2024) is such a brilliant and important Lesbian and women's history.
And "The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth" by Zoe Schlanger is one of the best and most important books about nature that I've ever read.
Non fiction
The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht
Ed by Susan Dalgety & Lucy Hunter Blackburn ( Voices From The Front Line of Scotland’s Battle For Women’s Rights & The women who would not be silenced
Fiction
Award winning The Prophets Song by Paul Lynch …. “paean to maternal love amidst gathering forces of darkness “ .. in reading this I had to remind myself this was fiction
Don Quixote by Cervantes, Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn (both felt eerily relevant or maybe I just have a one-track mind). Short stories by Isaac Singer (It was a nice break from my obsession about transgender cult and I found no parallels. "A Crown of Feathers " was particularly riveting). Thanks for ideas for my next reads, Eliza and everyone else.
Ha! Currently reading Solzhenitsyn as well .. Gulag. Also feeling like I need to read it for some disturbing reason. And also taking a break from reading about the trans insanity. I’m living it in our house so need a break!
I just finished Zodiac Academy series and was fantastic. 🤪 Not quite on the same lines as what others are listing but if you’re looking for a fun escape there you go. 😊
Non-fiction Naomi Klein's Doppelganger for the most helpful search for thinking about the bizarre response to the pandemic public health response which in this country - NZ - was world leading. Also helps with the total lack of acceptance on the right generally that there have to be consequences to having a pandemic..... Klein's humility and capacity to start with a herself and a small issue and widen it to look at ourselves as well as the other is what we need.
Fiction Chaim Potok's The Chosen and 2 novels about Asher Lev - mid-century New York Orthodox Jewish boys and men. Bildungsroman - good to read about the culture now to remind myself Israel is not the only Jewish culture - and the interaction of even this deeply conservative religious culture with the serious redistributive left. As well as the mid-century culture of art that believed ethical values existed not post-1990s plastic pseudo-conceptual art.
I just found out that JK Rowling wrote a whole series of Young Adult Novels about magic. They're fantastic. She really is amazing.
“The Lincoln Highway” by Amor Towles was a joy to read. It is hard to give voice to radically different personalities and make them believable and interesting (even the rogues).
Late to the party hoping I might read a book this year and not look like a big eejit. So far, it's not looking likely, but I might get round to finishing Wise Animals by Tom Chatfield by New Year. It's pretty tedious, though. ... Or I might finish my Kindle edition of Trans, by Helen Joyce.
Best fiction I’ve read this year so far, without doubt, is Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. So beautifully imagined and so much a brilliant ending. One of the only works of fiction to have genuinely brought me to tears.
Best non-fiction, Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed.
Best re-read, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
3 masterpieces there for you.
Thanks Eliza and everyone! This is so much fun! Here’s what I’ve got:
Nonfiction: An Everyone Culture—Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. I’ve been fascinated with these ideas since I first read Kegan’s In Over Our Heads—The Mental Demands of Modern Life many years ago.
Fiction: The Poisonwood Bible. Barbara Kingsolver. I savored every sentence.
Fun Fiction (or “Fluff” as my mother-in-law used to say): Goodnight, Irene by Luis Alberta Urrea
Last year's (or so?) nonfiction: Galileo's Middle Finger by Alice Dreger, on academia and activism: if you want justice, support the search for the truth.
Two favorites, both nonfiction and both concerning Israel and Palestine. Nathan Thrall's A Day in the Life of Abed Salama was a searing read and deserves the strong reviews and high praise that have come its way. A bigger surprise came from the old titles bin: Ghada Karmi's 2002 autobiography In Search of Fatima. I had never heard of Karmi, who is more well known in Britain for her activist work there. In Search of Fatima turned out to be a masterful autobiography, one of the best I've ever read, a beautifully written and very honest work. Karmi takes us deep into the anguished heart of refugee and emigre life.
Good question, Eliza! Hard to pick a best for me, so a short list of good reads: He Chose Porn over Me, edited by Melinda Tankard Reist; Tough Crowd, by Graham Linehan; close to finished reading: It's Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics, by Robert Jensen; The Reckoning, by Kara Dansky; and just for fun, a mystery of 18th century Venice by Gregory Dowling called The Four Horsemen (halfway through). Now on to reading others best bets. And best wishes as always!
The Gene Keys by Richard Rudd. It's the most profound of all the personality typing systems and reading the bits pertaining to me has been revolutionary. Also The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doige. Doige is a neuroscientist and this book covers the early evidence of brain plasticity and very compelling case studies in a very readable or listenable-I mostly do audoibooks- form.
I just read Safekeep by Yale Van der Wouden. Part of me didn’t want to like it for some reason and I was warned there was a plot twist but wow, didn’t expect it but looking back it should have been obvious. It is on the long list for the Booker prize and the author is Dutch (and I just moved to the NL so … ). I suspect she won’t win because well … politics. Currently reading Part 1 of the Gulag Archipelago. Also love all of Rachel Cusk’s books, I can’t explain why I love her writing so much. It’s just … real, grounded.
Oh, and just started listening to Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind. Omg. So on point for our times!
I just finished Mao’s America by Xi Van Fleet. She describes her life growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China, the ways it affected her family, friends, and her path in life. I never really learned about that period in history, except for the occasion movie or essay. She does a great job explaining the politics of Communism and Maoism through her personal experience and the similarities she has been seeing in the American educational system and beyond. If you think people like James Lindsey are exaggerating the threat of socialism/communism, I recommend reading this book. For fiction, I loved Mania by Lionel Shriver. It is wickedly delightful satire with a satisfying redemption arc.
"Being Wrong: Adventures in the margins of error" by Kathryn Shultz
"Cultish: the language of fanaticism" by Amanda Montell.
"Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World" by Tara Isabella Burton
"Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living" by Dimitris Xygalatas
For me, these books interconnect, so I can't pick just one. Once I understood the full influence of religion on our culture (any myself), especially secular religions, I saw the modern age in an entirely new light.
The best thing I've read this year is Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher. It's so nasty in every way the word applies, but retains a shameful eroticism that I couldn't stop thinking about for weeks after I finished it. Probably the most interesting character study in 21st century literature.
I also loved Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Colette's The Vagabond, Rikki Ducornet's The Plotinus, Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk, and Dorothy M. Richardson's Pilgrimage 1.
I've been going on an Angela Carter bender, rereading "Nights at the Circus" and her reworked fairy tales in "Burning Your Boats". Her nonfiction is equally wonderful - "Shaking a Leg" is a collection of her essays and critical writing. She was such a great thinker - brilliant and hilarious and imaginative. It's been a delicious treat to rediscover her work.
This is difficult but I'll say, fiction: History of the Island by Eugene Vodolazkin; poetry: Say it into my mouth by H. L. Hix; nonfiction: Roots of Christian Mysticism by Olivier Clement