The Wuthering Expectations Best Books of 2013 - or, another year of sideways reading

How I love the end of the year book lists.  I read, or at least look at, dozens of them.  I would read all of the books on those lists if I were not already reading other books from other lists.

The Wuthering Expectations Best Books of 2013 are probably as follows.

1.  There is always a ringer.  This year it is Genesis, and the narrative parts of Exodus and Deuteronomy.  I did not write about it.  The Norton Critical Edition of  the King James Bible, edited by Herbert Marks, is a masterpiece of the form (the form of the critical edition).

2.  The Selected Poems of Catullus, tr. Horace Gregory and the Selections from the Canzoniere of Petrarch, tr. Mark Musa, were also especially good and went unmentioned.

3.  As did the so-called adult novels of Tove Jansson, the three published by NYRB:  The Summer Book (1972), The True Deceiver (1982), and Fair Play (1989).  The first one, about a grandmother and granddaughter and how they spend their summer, plays a dirty trick.  The child’s mother has recently died.  This fact is mentioned just once, early in the novel.  Jansson can be not just subtle but almost sly.

Every one of the novels has something interesting to say about creativity, aside from whatever else the book might be about.  Jansson was an artist, and a child of artists, so she explores artists.

2014 is the Jansson centennial, so I have jumped the gun.  More on Tove Jansson next year.  Here, I will just say that I thought all of these novels were excellent.  The Moomin books are good, too.

4.  While on the subject of unmentioned NYRB books, The Hall of Uselessness (2013), an essay collection by Australo-Belgian classical Chinese specialist Simon Leys, was superb.  And collection that begins with a section on “Quixotism” is likely to appeal to a book blogger.  Maybe I will write more about this one, too, after the holiday.

5.  I did not write about Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, either, although I did manage a note about “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

6.  I reread some Theodor Storm novellas for my trip to his home in Husum.  Immensee, Paul the Puppeteer, “Journey to a Hallig” – they were even deeper than I remembered.  Sebaldists, Krasznahorkaians, seriously, track down “Journey to a Hallig.”

7.  For many novels, especially long ones, I want to break them apart, so I can include Part I of Oblomov, Part I of The Idiot, the best parts of Buddenbrooks – I mean the sister’s story, and then Hans’s part at the end – and anything in Zola’s Belly of Paris that had to do with food.  The symphony of cheeses, passages like that.

8.  Georg Trakl’s poems, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s two volumes of New Poems, fresh discoveries for me, even though I had read the Rilke before.

9.  Book blogging is always better with company.  Karl Kraus and Louisa May Alcott, somewhat different writers, were improved by being read with Caravana de Recuerdos and Dolce Bellezza.

10.  Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer is the trickiest book to put on a list like this.  In many ways it is a bad book – flat, dull, plotless, characterless, neurotic – yet so rich.  I had to learn how to read it, and I think I did.  Rohan Maitzen recently wrote that “[t]here’s always a slightly sideways quality to Tom’s readings.”  For this novel, sideways is the only way in.  What looks like an entrance is a fake, just painted to look like a door.

What I am really doing here is listing books that have at least some portion that I learned how to read.  Maybe later I can learn to read more parts of them.

I seem to have forgotten The Hunting of the Snark, Fathers and Sons, Kim, at the very least.