These are the best books I have read in the last two years. Out of everything I have read, these are the ones most worth your time.
They cover that pair of interests I have had for over 60 years – fiction and history, but other matters have insinuated themselves these last 24 months – the nature and exercise of power, the manner by which evil takes hold of a person, a community and a nation, and the ways in which war creates its own logic and rules.
As I come closer to it myself, I am more and more curious about death itself and how near-death experiences might shift one out of his or her routine and often create fundamental changes in character.
We are living in a time of both an infinite access to knowledge and an infinite capacity for self-delusion, willful ignorance and an extraordinary stupidity. This paradox has arisen when “according to Publisher’s Weekly, Book scan, which does include Amazon sales, reports 789 million print books were sold in 2022 in the US.”
I do not understand.
I am in my ninth year of working in a bookstore and since Covid, we have seen more young people buying books, but I also know that this experience represents the tiniest sliver of a sliver of a paring of a slip.
At some point do people grow weary of endless snippets of video and the poison of social media and again yearn for silence and the feel of entering another life through the imaginative springboard of good novels, poems, histories, and memoirs?
Will we again uncover our capacity for uninterrupted concentration on life outside our screens and the small lives those places foist upon us? Or will reading books become a refined and rare pastime akin to going to the Ballet or the Symphony?
I have learned that human beings love stories. Maybe such a love lies deep in the genetic code awaiting discovery. If so, I hope it remains undiscovered. Some billionaire pig would find a way to monetize it. That love of stories – the need to tell, the need to listen, the need for this special rapture – should remain mysterious and hallowed.
I find that at 72 I am reading more than ever in my life. What my Aunt Elsie showed me how to do when I was 3 or 4 remains central to each day. I hope this is true for you as well, and I also hope you might find books in this list that will encourage you to be curious and thankful and amazed.
PS: Two names I want you to watch for, both young writers who possess a fiery talent, Lauren Eggert Crowe for poetry and Nikki Volpicelli for fiction. Watch for their work.
Fiction:
The Trojan War Trilogy by Pat Barker: The Silence of the Girls, The Women of Troy and The Voyage Home; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; Landslide by Susan Conley; All the Sinners Bleed by SA Cosby; Independence Day by Martin Cruz Smith; Pafko at the Wall (excerpt from Underworld) by Don Delillo; You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrique; The Sentence by Louise Erdrich; James by Percival Everett; As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner; The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff; Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen; Conclave, Pompeii, and the Cicero Trilogy of Imperium, Conspiracy and Dictator by Robert Harris; A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin; The End We Start From by Megan Hunter; Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor; The End of the World in a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy; Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan; Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri; Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane; The Natural Order of Things by Antonio Lobo Antunes; The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride; No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy; Tom Lake by Ann Patchett; True Grit by Charles Portis; Everyman by Philip Roth; Long Island by Colm Tóibín; To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
Biography, History, Memoir, Philosophy:
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume IV by Robert Caro; Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard Evans; Lawrence of Arabia: My Journey in Search of T.E. Lawrence by Ranulph Fiennes; Muse of Fire: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets by Michael Korda; Herman Melville: A Biography, Volumes I and II by Hershel Parker; Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein.
The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War by Caroline Alexander; Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire by Simon Baker; Emperors of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Susan Beard; Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire by Eckart Frahm; Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World by Anthony Doerr; Rome: The Biography of a City by Christopher Hibbert; Brunelleschi’s Dome: The Story of the Great Cathedral of Florence by Ross King.
Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience and Family Secrets by Burkhard Bilger; There Will be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA and Two Minutes That Changed the World by Rory Carroll; Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920’s by Otto Friedrich; An Oral History of D Day by Garrett Graff; Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century by Alaistair Horne; The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambitions, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides; Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent by William Shirer; Pacific Crucible Trilogy: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 and The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944 and Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 by Ian Toll; Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend.
Memorial Days: A Memoir by Geraldine Brooks; In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of An Afterlife by Sebastian Junger; Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie.
King: A Life by Jonathan Eig; The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War by Michael Gorra; And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham; The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson.
All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley; What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator by Barbara Butcher; Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti; Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story by Leslie Jamison; Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein; A Hunger to Kill: A Serial Killer, A Determined Detective; and the Quest for a Confession the Changed a Small Town Forever by Kim Mager; A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel; Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe
Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Craig Childs; A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon by Kevin Fedarko: One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey by Sam Keith; The Little Book of Exoplanets by Joshua Winn.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt; The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer; The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli; Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Friedrich Nietzsche; The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry; Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair by Christian Wiman.
Poetry (and poetry related with 1 play thrown in):
These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson by Martha Ackmann; Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson; The Iliad by Homer (Stanley Lombardo translator); The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon; The Tempest by William Shakespeare; Asymmetry by Adam Zagajewski; The Old Life by Donal Hall; Louise Gluck: Poems 1962-2012
Movies and Shows:
Two Books: Why Acting Matters and The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film by David Thomson.
Billions; Blitz; Blue Lights; Conclave; The Counselor; Dark Wind; Dune; Fargo: Season 5; Furiosa; Godzilla Minus 1; Happy Valley; Mare of Eastown; Oppenheimer; Rebel Ridge; The Return; Say Nothing; Shadow of a Doubt; Sherwood; Shogun; Silence; Turn Every Page; The Way Back; Women Talking; Zone of Interest
