My Year in Books, or How I Stayed Sane in 2018

A year of absurdity, cruelty, stupidity, violence, and barbarism must be countered with what poor means we have, even if it's only the intermittent escape into the imagination of a storyteller, the craft of the poet, or the fresh perspective of a historian. I was apparently too anxious, distracted, and generally discombobulated to actually write in detail about any of the books I read last year, so I offer up this summary and hope to do better in 2019.

I rang out 2017 with Emily Dickinson, accompanied by the brilliant commentary of Helen Vendler, and came away with new appreciation and even awe for the unpredictable genius of Amherst. I also loved that beautiful movie with Cynthia Nixon as Dickinson. Highly recommended! I enjoyed the Vendler so much, I also ordered her book on Shakespeare's Sonnets but I haven't finished working my way through it. I expect I'll spend some time with it this winter for bedtime reading.

In January 2018 I was finishing Ron Chernow's Grant. If ever one was in need of an actual American hero, this was the time. A flawed man who was greater than his flaws, Grant embodied courage -- both physical and mental -- quiet stoicism, loyalty, intelligence, toughness. He was an honest man surrounded by liars and cheats and rogues in the White House -- not quite an inversion of the present moment since the current resident heartily approves of the liars, cheats, and rogues surrounding the black hole of amorality that sucks in the weak and witless. But I digress.

Contemplating Grant's life, the catastrophe of the Civil War, and the nasty politics of the post-war period from the vantage point of 2018 events was often depressing, actually. So as much as I admired Chernow's writing and erudition and enjoyed my immersion in Grantland, I ran away immediately into the fabled and mystical world of early Britain. Finally, I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, which turns the Arthurian legend into the Morganan legend.

I read books and authors long on my list like Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; my first Iris Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers; Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and Aphra Behn's Orooknoko. I expect there's a lot more Murdoch to come. Muriel Spark's sharp and quirky Ghost Stories was a fun Halloween read.

There were also contemporary authors. Tommy Orange's There, There about modern Native American life in Oakland deserved all its accolades. It brings the shameful history of America's treatment of Native American's into the present with all its consequences. By turns funny, heartbreaking, endearing, and fierce, Orange has created something that will stand for a long time. Rachel Cusk's Trilogy (Outline, Transit, Kudos) is a subtle, melancholy expression of one woman's losses through the seemingly random interactions and conversations she has with both strangers and intimates.

One of the most creative and unique novels of the year, Sergio de la Pava's page-turning and almost uncategorizable Lost Empress dabbles playfully and intelligently in  many novel genres -- alternative history/time travel, heist, prison escape, sports triumph, thriller, romance, legal, and comic. De La Pava is a working public defender in New York, so how he finds time to write such a tour de force is beyond me. For sheer ambition and narrative scale, he reminds me of China Miéville.

I finished the year with a new favorite, The Essex Serpent, by Sarah Perry. I loved the cast of characters and the setting in late Victorian England. A mythical sea dragon seems to be haunting the inhabitants of a rural Essex town, forcing them to consider their sins and shortcomings as signs that a legendary monster is coming for them.

Two notable non-fiction books of the year were Jennifer Ackerman's The Genius of Birds, an entertaining exploration of the particular intelligence of several birds species, including crows, chickadees, and sparrows, among other more exotic feathered creatures. Susan Orlean tells the story of the epic LA Public Library fire in 1986, which despite it's historic destruction, was overshadowed by the events at Chernobyl. It is a mystery, a history, and a love letter to libraries, making a case for the importance and significance of libraries in American life and culture.

It was also a year of revisiting some of my literary heroes: A.S. Byatt's The Game, Cormac McCarthy's The Outer Dark, Rebecca West's Cousin Rosamund, Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent, and William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow. I also spent some time rereading a good bit of Spenser's Faerie Queen and Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella.

I only read two non-English speaking authors: The Summer Book by Finn Tove Jansson and Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend.

I'm feeling the pull of classics in 2019 - I'll probably drop back into Trollope and Dickens' Victorian England. Maybe Woolf, although there's not much I haven't already read. I hear they are republishing a Rose Macaulay novel, which I'll probably get my hands on too. Maybe I'll re-read Middlemarch or Adam Bede (or Daniel Deronda...). I can't get enough of Eliot. She's good for the brain and the heart, and always so startlingly insightful about what motivates people.