The Wuthering Expectations Best Books of 2012, in a certain narrow sense

The best books I read in 2012 were Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).  Although I made use of the books I did not actually write about them.  This is a recurring pattern, my avoidance of the Best Book of the Year.  I will hash this out with my therapist and in the meantime write about an overlapping subject:  the Books I Most Enjoyed Writing about in 2012.

1.  Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert; The Toilers of the Sea, Victor Hugo; The Kill, Émile Zola.  I was actually worried that Madame Bovary would not be so much fun because of its familiarity, but I was wrong.  All I had to do was plunge my hands into the muck of the text to dig up all sorts of unusual specimens, spiny or slimy, generally good whether grilled or fried.

The writers are half-lunatics and their novels are packed with unpleasantness, but writing about books in this tradition is like a holiday for me.  Whenever I was having trouble with some other writer, which was all the time this year, I would think “Get another Zola novel, that’ll be fun.”  I always resisted, though.  Basically, if you see me reading Zola it will likely be as a desperate curative to a loss of blogging confidence.

2.  But then again trouble is fun, too.  Robert Browning is often intensely difficult, sometimes to the point of obscurity.  Reading him, writing about him, is a vigorous, thrilling struggle.

The challenge with Fernando Pessoa is not always the individual poem, some of which, like those of the shepherd heteronym Alberto Caeiro, are deliberately if deceptively simple, but the system, the enormous imaginative contraption of poets and poems and non-poems Pessoa constructed.  My metaphor is wrong, since much of the fun of Pessoa is that the reader constructs his own system out of all of the amazing parts Pessoa created.

3.  This was a good year for writing about short fiction:  Robert Walser, Giovanni Verga, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Schnitzler, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, the masterpieces of world literature of Machado de Assis.  Part of the fun, I suppose, is that it so quickly becomes possible to hop around among texts, so even lesser – heck, often trivial – work like the early Twain I read suggests a lot of ideas.  Given major work like the best Kipling or Verga or Machado and the possibilities overwhelm.

4.  Charles Dickens could fit in with the French writers in that I knew how to attack Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend.  The latter seemed like the better novel; the former was more fun to write about.  I do not know why.

Knowledge of the writer is not the key, but comfort with a set of techniques.  So though I barely know the work of Henry James it was easy to see how to attack Washington Square and "The Aspern Papers" with some well-worn tools.

5.  Writing about Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives was made vastly more entertaining because of all of the other people writing about it at the same time.  I hope that Little Women in January is half as fun.  I am still working on it, but I have an angle.

Thanks to everyone who helped me write, whether through a comment here or a half-remembered but inspirational post from three years ago at your own place.

And happy holidays to everyone!   Soon I will be on Christmas break until early January.