What did I read in 2024?
The best book I read last year was Ovid’s Metamorphoses
(8 CE). Best books, really, in translations
by Arthur Golding and Charles Martin. My
“best book of the year” answer will never be interesting. America’s librarian Nancy Pearl asked, somewhere
on Twitter, if people thought they had already read the best book they would
ever encounter. The answers were, by
far, that they had not, which is even possible, for them, but I have read The
Odyssey and King Lear and Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and
so on, a lot of books, a lot of great, great books. The odds are low.
Maybe the best book of 2025 will be The Odyssey. It has been a while. My favorite book, maybe.
I kept up on my French, and learned a lot of
Portuguese. A week of intensive French
in a classroom in Porto helped a lot. I
could use some more of those.
I read some long books: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and
Grey Falcon (1941), Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings
(1110), Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), the first 2,200
pages or so of Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (c. 1760) and Louis-Ferdinand
Céline’s Voyage
au bout de la nuit (1931), barely over six hundred pages but in such
difficult French that I am counting it, am I ever.
I built little projects around several books, piling more
Persian books around Shanameh and Chinese literature around The Story
of the Stone. I did the same thing during
the summer with Arabic literature while reading The Arabian Nights (13th c.) in Husain Haddawy’s great, not especially long, translation, adding modern
poetry by Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish and a novel and book of stories by Naguib
Mahfouz. My kind of fun.
Let’s see. I read
nine Percival Everett books, including James (2024) just a bit before
everyone else read it. How odd it felt
to have read anew book that so many other people were reading.
The best contemporary book I read, though, was easily Judi
Dench’s Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent. It is “Dench and her interviewer friend
working through every Shakespeare role she ever did, all of which she still has
memorized,” enormously pleasurable for those of us who enjoy such things.
What will I read in 2025?
Some more long books, I hope. I have barely over a hundred pages of The
Story of the Stone left. I enjoyed John
Cowper Powys’s eccentric Wolf Solent (1929) last summer and will try The
Glastonbury Romance (1932), preposterously long, any day now. Then what – The Tale of Genji? Another of the big Chinese monsters? Maybe Vassily Grossman’s Stalingrad? Someday, anyway, with luck.
If Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time
(1951-75) counts as one novel, which it does not, that will be one of my long
ones. Brad “Neglected Books” Bigelow is
hosting a year-long readalong, one short novel per month. I just finished the first book, A Question
of Upbringing (1951) and will tag along for a while. Unfortunately discussions will be on Zoom but
what are ya gonna do, who wants to write anything anymore.
Speaking of which, in the spirit of reading the Greek plays,
I would like to begin a Not Shakespeare project, let’s say next fall, where I read
and write about not all but many of the plays of Shakespeare’s
contemporaries. Marlowe, Jonson,
Chapman, The Spanish Tragedy, those folks, not that one could not also
read some Shakespeare along the way. A
play every two weeks maybe? If anyone is
interested in joining in, please let me know.
The WPA poster can be found at the Library of Congress site. I have put it up before. It is full of truth.
Okay so:
ReplyDelete1/ If it works, shall we read The Odyssey together? I want to read it this year.
2/ Also the Vietnamese book, but probably not any time soon.
There's another Vietnamese book that interests me more, but you don't have it yet, I think - it's available in English. Mourning Headband for Hue or something like that.
3/ Read The Tale of Genji. I'd like to know what you think, compared to Hong lou meng.
4/ Reading Shakespeare's contemporaries sounds good, though I won't have access to the plays till I'm in Leeds, which is possibly in the summer.
I want to check out Moliere as well though.
Maybe I will read the new Mendelsohn Odyssey, published in April, available whenever the library holds clear out. That is not good for reading together. Well, we can figure something out, or be patient.
ReplyDeleteThe Vietnamese book is Vu Trong Phung's Dumb Luck, available in this English translation, more interesting to me than the pther novel you mention because it is from 1936, not 2014.
That is one of my goals for the year, to push past the 1930s.
The nice thing about a play-based project is that it is easy for other readers to duck in and out. Follow the syllabus or don't, who cares.
Maybe I will save Genji for Dolce Bellezza's January reading challenge, like I say every year, before reading easy, short Tanizaki novels instead.
No no, Mourning Headband for Hue is from 1969, and it's a memoir, not a novel.
DeleteBut sure, let's read Vũ Trọng Phụng's book.
All right about The Odyssey. I'm reading Peter Green and I have the book. But then I'm not very flexible with time if I'm in the middle of something else hahaha.
Count me in for Not Shakespeare. I've been curious about Emily Wilson's Odyssey, too, so could read along with whichever version you choose.
ReplyDeleteI read Powys' Glastonbury Romance about three years ago and Weymouth Sands last year. I've yet to read Wolf Solent and may leave it for another year. Powys' authorial voice is somewhat overwhelming and a decent refreshing gap will help and, they are enormously long. I found the same while reading Black Lamb. I'm rereading Dance to the Music of Time and so may join the readalong. It's decades since I read any Céline; one thing his first book had in common with Powell's Dance, was a curious recurrent character, I believe he was called Robinson? Not a very Widmerpool type. In Céline’s second novel the central character attends an English boarding school as of course does Jenkins in Dance.
ReplyDeleteI see, the English translation is 2014.
ReplyDeleteI assume all of the Odyssey translations are worth reading. Maybe good for people to mix (translations) and match (passages).
I read Wolf Solent last summer and enjoyed it, but Powys has a strong flavor so I did not want to jump into another. But now I think my palate is ready for more.
Powys was as weird as D. H. Lawrence at times, an accomplishment.
Yes, Robinson, the filthy, murderous Widmerpool of Céline!
Unfortunately discussions will be on Zoom but what are ya gonna do, who wants to write anything anymore.
ReplyDeleteI hope you will write about them here; my wife and I have begun a reread of Powell (we read the series a decade ago), and I would love to hear what you think. I am not going to Zoom (*waves cane*).
I'll write at least a little about Powell, not that I have a lot to say about the first book on its own. Well, I can find 500 words.
ReplyDeleteThat crack about people not writing anymore was 90% directed at myself. But yes, Zoom, I know, I know.
Yeah, not much to say about the first book -- I don't know how much he had planned at that point, but it's mainly a necessary point d'appui for the rest of the series. A few characters, a few anecdotes.
ReplyDeleteThat tennis match, the time spent on those two Swedes and their tennis grudge. Which presumably will be important seven books later (or never).
ReplyDeletePlease, that's one Swede and one Norwegian! (says the proud half-Norwegian-American)
DeleteRegarding the idea of Shakespeare's contemporaries, I recently read a few plays by him and contemporary English writers in comparison with Spanish plays on the same topics (Romeo & Juliet, Duchess of Malfi, etc.). An interesting comparison. But like everything else right now, I need to overcome a hesitation to post.
ReplyDeletePowell is someone I've always wanted to tackle, but for some reason I wanted to read all of it near the same time. Not that it's required to enjoy them...I've got to get away from my preset notions about posting on these great works.
Right, Örn is the Norwegian, Lundquist is the Swede. Gotta keep this straight for the rematch in Books Do Furnish a Room or whenever they pop up again.
ReplyDeletePowell's Dance novels were published over 25 years. Obviously no harm reading them more spread out. We'll see how far I get
In comparison with Spanish plays on the same topic, how interesting. But yes, the writing, what a nuisance it is.
Might I recommend, as a complement to your excursion into Shakespeare's contemporaries, Greer Gilman's two Ben Jonson mysteries, Cry Murder! in a Small Voice and Exit, Pursued by a Bear. Ben Jonson solves mysteries and holds forth on all topics, great and small. Dense and allusive, Jacobean in diction but written in a stream of consciousness mode.
ReplyDeleteLikely she's the only modern author whose work has been identified by a literary scholar as "probably Thomas Nashe."
https://smallbeerpress.com/books/2013/09/17/cry-murder-in-a-small-voice/
Remarkable, thanks. I have strong opinions about the "real author as detective" genre, mostly involving ridicule, but that looks like the way to do it.
ReplyDelete