Books Read 2023, and Some Other Stuff
Many of the books below are quite short. I’m obviously an easy mark for New Directions. I’ve read other Tišma and plan to read more. I read Magda Szabó’s The Door last year. I will read more Daša Drndić once I read more of what I bought at the Brooklyn Book Fair apart from the James Schulyer letters. In 2024, I’d like to see more music and run the 5K 10 seconds faster, if my body doesn’t break. I’ll read more Proust, and also more of the books (Foucault!) I’ve received from academic presses for reviewing book manuscripts, although most of my library is now in storage. I’d like to read some poetry cover to cover.
The Brad Fox is one of my favorite books of the year.
Eastern European Misery Prose, Mostly Fiction
Aleksandar Tišma, The Book of Blam, trans. Michael Henry Heim
Dubravka Ugresic, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, trans. Celia Hawkesworth
Daša Drndić, Dopplegänger, trans. Celia Hawkesworth and S. D. Curtis.
Daša Drndić, Battle Songs, trans. Celia Hawkesworth
Vasily Grossman, The People Immortal, trans. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
Agota Kristóf, The Illiterate, trans. Nina Bogin
Books by People I have, in most cases, ever had beers with or near or whose place of residence I’ve hung out in, however long ago, or worked with in some capacity
Brad Fox, The Bathysphere: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths
Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
Colin Dickey, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy
Joanne McNeill, Wrong Way
Sandra Newman, Julia
Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry
Alexander Doty and Patricia Clare Ingham, The Witch and the Hysteric: The Monstrous Medieval in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxen
Books by People I Primarily Know from Online
Sheila Liming, Hanging Out
Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans
Books Read as a Scholar or Teacher
Bernard of Clairvaux, On Grace and Free Choice, trans. Daniel O’Donovan
Madeleine Jeay and Kathleen Garay, ed / trans, The Distaff Gospels
B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom & Dignity
Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine and Man a Plant, trans. Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka
Thomas de Cantimpré, Christine l’Admirable: Vie, chants, et merveilles, Sylvain Piron ed and trans
The Arras Witch Treatises, ed. and trans. Andrew Colin Gow, Robert B. Desjardins, and François V. Pageau
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims
Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason, trans. Matthew O’Connell
Anselm, Three Philosophical Dialogues, trans. Thomas Williams
[Middle English treatises on hunting, hawking, and fishing, which you can tally, if that’s your thing, when the chapter is published]
Book Club Books
Proust, Swann’s Way, Lydia Davis [next volume nearly done]
Kristin Ross, The Politics and Poetry of Everyday Life (abortive club)
Gifts
Adam Kirsch, The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us
Vassily Grossman, Everything Flows, trans. Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Anna Aslanyan
Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family
David Keenan, This is Memorial Device
Carl Seelig, Walks with Walser, trans. Anne Posten
Miscellaneous Fiction
Xu Zechen, Beijing Sprawl, trans. Eric Abrahamsen and Jeremy Tiang
Helen Dewitt, The English Understand Wool
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Kapa, trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell
Olga Ravn, The Employees, trans. Martin Aitken
Miscellaneous Essays
Lindsey A. Freeman, Running
Édouard Louis, Who Killed My Father, trans. Lorin Stein
Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother
Other Attempts to Write about Real Things
Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627, trans. Karl Smari Hreinsson and Adam Nichols
Rick Steeves, Copenhagen (a very practical book)
The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara
Mithu Sanyal, Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo
Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
Musical Events of Various Types
Unwound Reunion Show
Blonde Redhead
Duran Duran (!)
Nile Rodgers (!!)
Dialogues des Carmélites
Florencia en el Amazonas
Places Visited
New Orleans, USA
Kalamazoo, USA
Chicago, USA
Montreal, Canada
Copenhagen, Denmark
Nantes, Angers, Paris, and Amiens, France
Edinburgh, UK (for now)
Boston, USA
Hanover, New Hampshire, USA
Miles Run
1,432.7, over 220 hours and 19 minutes, and 230 separate runs.
Persistent right hip problems, but did get a PR on Aug 2 in the 5k (22:37)
