It’s so interesting to see everyone’s eclectic list.
WilkinsonMJ and
Chris P: I read Frankenstein this year also. Almost dizzying depths of meaning in that work; knowing Mary W. Shelley was all of 18 when she wrote it almost makes me set down my pen.
Okay, here’s mine. I have not quite reached the 52-book goal I set on Goodreads for 2018, but I think I will get there in the next ten days - if not, I’ll be solidly at 51-and-a-half. I am also a rereader, so some of those 52 were books I’d read previously, and a couple of them are books I read twice this year. Among the ones that affected me the most (in no particular order):
Sol Stein,
Stein on Writing: I read a lot of writing books this year, and more than any other this is the one that left me feeling inspired and energized to dive back into my manuscript and start FIXING STUFF. I’m working on a longer review of it; stay tuned.
P. O’Connell Pearson,
Fly Girls,The Forgotten Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II: Though aimed at middle-graders, it is a thorough and interesting recounting of the American women pilots who flew ferry missions and often dangerous test missions during WWII. I’m going to read more about WASPs - I’ve got fantasies about writing about them - and this book was just such a pleasant introduction.
Elspeth Barker,
O Caledonia: A haunting, wry, and sad story of an adolescent girl trying to make sense of life on a suitably gothic Scottish crag. A friend recommended it to me with comparison to Shirley Jackson’s
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, another favorite that I reread in 2018.
Gore Vidal,
Julian: Vidal’s historical fiction is always amazing for its humanity and detail, and the fact that it manages to be historically rich while not really being historical fiction at all; rather it’s always rich allegory and even polemic. In this story of the 4th-century Roman emperor who tried to stem the tide of Christianity, Vidal expresses all his rage at the modern church.
Anthony Trollope,
Barchester Towers: I read a lot of Trollope this year, and this was the favorite. Who would have thought the machinations of 19th-century rural church politics could be so compelling? Also one of the most fun of Trollope’s trademark nonconventional women characters in La Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni.
Andrew Wilson,
Beautiful Shadow, A Life of Patricia Highsmith: I have strong feelings and complex thoughts about Highsmith, both the woman and the writer. Wilson does too, and he expresses them in a compassionate book that probably whitewashes the absolute worst of the woman, while approaching the writer with an appealing mixture of analysis and reverence.
Ann Petry,
The Street: A heartbreaking 1948 novel about a woman trying to get by in Harlem. Most depressing is how little has changed in 70 years of the way the twin boots of racism and patriarchy stand on the neck of women like the book’s protagonist Ludie Johnson. I’m also finishing up Audre Lorde’s memoir,
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, whose first third covers a lot of the same time and place as
The Street and provides an interesting compare-and-contrast.
Helen Eustis,
The Horizontal Man: I read a lot of midcentury American fiction by way of research for my novel in progress, and this one was a delightful find, a charming skewering of life in an elite women’s college community, couched in the form of a whodunit. Possibly my single favorite book of the year, except for...
Grace Paley,
The Little Disturbances of Man: Paley’s genius for voice and rapier-sharp critique of midcentury patriarchy make this first collection of her stories an absolute treasure from start to finish.
Pearl S Buck,
The Good Earth: I read this with a bifurcated mind, my 21st-century-reader’s brain on guard for signs of misappropriation and Orientialism, the rest going willingly where it took me, into the Yangtze valley at the dawn of the modern era in China. Buck did know her subject well, and wrote with an almost biblical cadence that establishes a sense of timelessness. Today, of course, I would favor such stories written by Chinese authors over white Americans. But the 1930s were not today, and Buck’s contribution to the 20th-century American’s picture of China is enormous - for better and for worse.
Halldor Laxness,
Iceland’s Bell: This is the one-half that I might not get finished by the new year. Translated from Icelandic, this novel by the Nobel-Prize-winning Laxness takes place in the 18th century among Icelanders and the Danes who ruled them, and is a hilarious wry commentary on 20th-century Icelandic independence. That makes it a little slow-going - it’s full of cultural and political references I don’t understand, which means I have to either stop to look them up, or let them slide on by with incomplete comprehension. But it’s a lot of fun, all the same. (I was in Iceland a few weeks ago, and as my tour guide proudly pointed out the chalet outside of Reykjavik where Laxness wrote his novel Independent People, I excitedly blurted out that I was reading Iceland’s Bell. The guide wasn’t as impressed as I hoped he would be.)