I am not so interested in writing a longer summary of my year in reading, so I will put that here. Finishing the massive The Story of the Stone and reading the monstrous Finnegans Wake (here, continuing, ending) were solid accomplishments in reading, if there are such things. The worst book I read was the instructive I, Robot. I do not know what the best was.
My time with Elizabethan writers and books about them has continued
to be rewarding. For example, in
December:
MARLOWE AND SO ON
Edward the Second (1592?) &
The Massacre at Paris (1592?) &
Hero and Leander (1593? / 1598), Christopher Marlowe – On Edward II; on The Massacre.
The Old Wives Tale (1593?), George Peele – An hour of
fairy tale fluff, a patchwork perhaps written for a wedding. A cousin of A Midsummer Night’s Dream;
just the kind of thing I like.
Edward III (1595?), ??? – One great act.
Titus Andronicus (c. 1593), William Shakespeare
Elizabethan Plays & Players (1940), G. B.
Harrison – Well written and outstanding in its use of evidence.
The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe
(2004), various
Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (2019), Taylor Mac
– Okay, now this thing. Three minor
(although they all have lines) characters murdered in Titus Andronicus
turn out to have survived, and are given the task of cleaning up the results of
the last act (“[t]here is the appearance of at least one thousand corpses on
the stage,” 5). A series of outrageous
and disgusting events ensue, ending with “one of the more spectacular moments
ever to be seen in the history of theater” (4), which may well have been
true. How I would love to see this
travesty. The line in the title of the
post is said by Gary, played by Nathan Lane, p. 70.
FICTION
Lucifer (1654), Joost van den Vondel – Covered overhere.
Sod and Stubble (1936), John Ise – A novel of pioneer
days on the Great Plains, set about 45 miles due south of Willa Cather’s Red
Cloud, and globally close to the setting of Little House on the Prairie. Strongly recommended to anyone who loves
Cather and Wilder for the details of ordinary life. It is really Ise writing up his mother’s oral
memoir, as close to a primary source as fiction gets.
The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956), W. E. Bowman – A magnificent
parody of the Himalayan mountain climbing genre in a classic Wodehouse or Douglas
Adams-like English style.
My Death (2004), Lisa Tuttle – A fine little paradoxical
time-shift novel.
MEMOIR
Girl to Country (2025), Amy Rigby – One of our
greatest living songwriters tries to make it in Nashville, and succeeds, after
making it in New York, as covered in the earlier Girl to City
(2019). Making it, succeeding, artistically. The first volume of memoirs likely has more
interest to people who are not already fans, but I will testify that it has
been highly rewarding, for more than thirty years now, to be an Amy Rigby fan.
POETRY
On the Slaughter (1891-1933), Hayim Nahman Bialik –
Peter Cole’s new translation of Bialik’s poems, an outstanding addition to Bialik’s
presence in English.
Five Senses: Selected Poems (1963), Judith Wright – Australian,
full of surprises.
That Swing: Poems, 2008-2016 (2017), X. J. Kennedy
The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson (2018),
Percival Everett – “So, I kept saying to myself I was gonna write a novel
entitled Percival Everett’s Long Overdue Slavery Novel, but this is what came out.”
The Khayyam Suite (2025), Charles Martin – Last seen
here as Ovid’s translator.
IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE
Le Château des Carpathes (1892), Jules Verne – I have
gotten used to Verne rewriting Poe, but this is more of a Balzac novel, or an
adventure novel with a sudden, surprising intrusion of Balzac. Slow-paced, diffuse, thin in scientific
ideas, yet highly entertaining.
L'Effraie (1953), Philippe Jaccottet – The war is
over and Surrealism is over, so finally, some fresh ideas in French
poetry! Some resemblance to Rilke, maybe
to James Merrill. I read his second
book, too, but it will show up in January’s list.
Uma mão cheia de nada outra de coisa nenhuma: historietas
(1955), Irene Lisboa – Tiny little stories about children and their visionary
moments by an important figure in Portuguese pedagogy. These will be easy, right? Ha ha ha, no, no. But I guess that is good for me.
Cahiers de l'été 1944 (2025), Jean-Baptiste Duroselle
– An angry essay written just before the liberation of Paris by the young man
who would become the great historian of 20th century French diplomatic history,
author of gigantic (“magisterial”) volumes I will likely never read. This newly published book is an interesting
companion to Marc Bloch’s L'Etrange defaite (1946, written 1940), which
he could not have known.