Loose Ends
Closing the books on 2012, just over 100 of which qualify as lit; my book-of-the-month (prose, that is) selection:
Jan: Patrick White, The Tree of Man
Feb: Joseph Heller, Something Happened
Mar: W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Anthea Bell)
Apr: Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Satantango (George Szirtes)
May: Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
Jun: Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov (Marian Schwartz)
Jul: Junichiro Tanizaki, Seven Japanese Tales (Howard Hibbett)
Aug: Tim Winton, Cloudstreet
Sep: Julio Cortazar, Blow-Up and other stories (Paul Blackburn) [reread]
Oct: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (Edith Grossman)
Nov: Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils [reread, inadvertently]
Dec: Witold Gombrowicz, Diary (Lillian Vallee)
but lots of honorable mentions, Mikhail Shishkin's Maidenhair (Marian Schwartz), Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, and Magnus Mills' The Restraint of Beasts just in the past month; also, stuff covered a couple of posts back ...
Prosers new to me this year: Goncharov and all the Dec honorable mentioned; Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (x3 *), Olga Tokarczuk, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Evelio Rosero, Gert Jonke, Orhan Pamuk, Glenway Wescott, James Merrill, Mark Helprin (and Jorge Amado, current reading) and via Archipelago, Herman Charles Bosman, Albert Cohen, and Antonio Tabucchi.
* Other authors I read more than one by: Ismail Kadare, Patrick White, Amos Oz, Elias Khoury, Danilo Kis, César Aira, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kingsley Amis (and if poetry counts, Roubaud and Merrill as well). (And other stuff left out, such as getting more breadth and depth in Brazil and Poland, beyond those mentioned ...)
Jan: Patrick White, The Tree of Man
Feb: Joseph Heller, Something Happened
Mar: W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Anthea Bell)
Apr: Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Satantango (George Szirtes)
May: Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
Jun: Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov (Marian Schwartz)
Jul: Junichiro Tanizaki, Seven Japanese Tales (Howard Hibbett)
Aug: Tim Winton, Cloudstreet
Sep: Julio Cortazar, Blow-Up and other stories (Paul Blackburn) [reread]
Oct: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (Edith Grossman)
Nov: Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils [reread, inadvertently]
Dec: Witold Gombrowicz, Diary (Lillian Vallee)
but lots of honorable mentions, Mikhail Shishkin's Maidenhair (Marian Schwartz), Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, and Magnus Mills' The Restraint of Beasts just in the past month; also, stuff covered a couple of posts back ...
Prosers new to me this year: Goncharov and all the Dec honorable mentioned; Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (x3 *), Olga Tokarczuk, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Evelio Rosero, Gert Jonke, Orhan Pamuk, Glenway Wescott, James Merrill, Mark Helprin (and Jorge Amado, current reading) and via Archipelago, Herman Charles Bosman, Albert Cohen, and Antonio Tabucchi.
* Other authors I read more than one by: Ismail Kadare, Patrick White, Amos Oz, Elias Khoury, Danilo Kis, César Aira, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kingsley Amis (and if poetry counts, Roubaud and Merrill as well). (And other stuff left out, such as getting more breadth and depth in Brazil and Poland, beyond those mentioned ...)
posted by nnyhav | 18:59
2 Comments:
A Fan's Notes was one of those rare books I just could not put down.I loaned it out so much it eventually did not come back.The other two books in the trilogy did not match it but it remains in the realm of books like Angela's Ashes that are just incredible reads.
The Gombrowicz' Diaries are special, I think you're going to love them. Best wishes and happy reading!
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