I cannot not read. I’m sure there’s a study that describes why this is the case with me and the millions like me. I know that words, for me, are a most compelling spur to concentration, and that my imagination, my inner eye, my third eye, fills with images and thoughts and associations and memories, and that those are an elixir, especially when I sort them out with more words like the ones now appearing before you. It has been this way since my earliest memory of a book and of being read to by my Aunt Elsie. The pictures were always there, and I cannot rest from those pictures or from the heft and feel of a book or from the place I fall into when I am fully engaged in reading. I do not want to rest. There’s not much time left, and I have such a stack before me.
These books are new since 2021 and represent a selection of the books I have read over these last 24 months:
Fiction:
The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy, Pat Barker. Two books of a 3-book cycle. The Iliad as told from the point-of-view of the Trojan women enslaved by the Greeks. Desert Star, Michael Connelly. Bosch, now retired, but always a cop. Razorblade Tears, S.A Cosby. The revenge we yearn to exact. Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr. Many characters over a thousand years are shown to be connected. Middlemarch, George Eliot. The Victorian novel becomes modern. Astonishing depth of psychology in her character creation. The Blessing Way, Tony Hillerman. Navajo police. In The Penal Colony, Kafka … and many other of his stories, but this one goes to a very particular kind of darkness. Apeirogon, Colum McCann. I have loved everything I’ve read by him. This is a book about wringing hope out of ongoing tragedy. The Singing Forest, Judith McCormick. A lawyer and a mass grave in Belarus. Pure, Andrew Miller. Paris, post revolution and the demolition of a church. Beloved, Toni Morrison. One of the five or six best American novels since the end of WWII. Indelible scenes. The Aubrey/Maturin Series, Patrick O’Brian. The British Navy in the Napoleonic Wars. I’ve read all 21. Now I’m listening to them on recorded books. Magnificent, but only if you make sure Patrick Tull is the narrator. I have rarely driven so often out of the way to give myself more time to listen to Patrick Tull’s mastery of voices, accents, the dramatic pause, battle description and character creation.
History:
Touched With Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific, Eric Bergerud This Will Not Pass: Biden and the Battle For America’s Future, Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin Grant, Ron Chernow At the Hands Of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, Philip Dray The Ruin Of All Witches, Malcom Gaskill The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World, Barry Gewen Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, Harald Jahner Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, Halik Kochanski War: How Conflict Shaped Us, Margaret McMillan Blood and Ruins: the Great Imperial War, 1931-1945 , Richard Overy One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, Andrea Pitzer Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam, Stephen Sears Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience, Gitta Sereny Tutankhamun’s Trumpet: Ancient Egypt In 100 Objects From The Boy King’s Tomb, Toby Wilkinson
Poetry and Memoir:
The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland: A Biography of a Poem, Matthew Hollis Maxine Kumin Skating with Heather Grace and Still Life in Milford, Thomas Lynch Robert Frost: A Life, Jay Parini What the Thunder Said, Jed Rasula Teaching My Mother to Give Birth, Warsan Shire Here Bullet, Brian Turner
The Walk, William deBuys Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is, Gretel Ehrlich Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past, W.Ralph Eubanks Island Dreams: Mapping An Obsession, Gavin Francis Freedom, Sebastian Junger In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado In the Eye of the Wild, Natassja Martin Fox And I, Catherine Raven. I will add this to my list of books for exile. Heartbreaking. Sublime. The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, James Rebanks
Nonfiction:
Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion How The Mountains Grew, John Dvorak We Don’t Know Ourselves, Fintan O’Toole Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth Samet A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life, George Saunders Murder and the Movies, Davis Thomson Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy, Elizabeth Williamson
I’ve kept these books from the 2021 list:
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine and Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, Carolyn Forche Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer. An immense book, clear and compelling. Step by step, this is how Germany happily, willingly embraced all its devils.
Selected Poems, Stephen Crane The Essential Poems, Jim Harrison
Look, I Made A Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany, Stephen Sondheim. And because I love this scene and song: this.
Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia, Michael Korda (a rereading) He commands my imagination, a man of such complexity and so many faces. Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles, Bernard Cornwell The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, Rick Atkinson. A remarkable history. It strips away the myth of the Revolution, a bloody, desperate, close-run uprising. The first book of a trilogy. I’d also recommend Atkinson’s The Liberation Trilogy. Men of Honor: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero, Adam Nicholson
The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, Ron Hansen Hamnet, Maggie O’ Farrell. A book I loved. Intelligence and heart. And All Is True!! Exit Ghost; Nemesis; Sabbath’s Theater, many others, Philip Roth Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf. Incomparable. She rivals Joyce here in her attention to how the ephemera of our daily life makes up the fabric of our daily life.
These are the books I would carry on my back into exile:
King Lear, Hamlet, War and Peace, Ulysses, The Brothers Karamazov, Great Expectations, Moby Dick, The Iliad and War Music, Taylor Branch’s The King Era Trilogy, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will, Judith Schlansky, the poems of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney and Memorial by Alice Oswald.
These are the movies and TV shows that I enjoyed the most since 2021:
All Is Well, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Banshees of Inisherin, Bill Russell: Legend, Borgen, Hell or High-Water, High-Flying Bird, The January 6 Hearings, Kimi, Nope, She Said, Sicario (a perennial), The Underground Railroad, The Verdict.
This is the 6th iteration of my retirement booklist I began with my seniors in 1990. I’m posting them 2 years apart now. If books have disappeared from this most recent list, it is not because I have found them wanting, but only because I have others to add. The other lists are available on this site under the menu heading Books.
