A Mixed List Of Interests, Obsessions and Pursuits Organized Generally But Not Purely By History, Nature, Poetry, Biography, Greece, Women, The Brits And The Sea, Fiction And Drama: This being a selection of the books I have read these past two years that may merit your attention; the titles have been culled from a much longer list.
Among other things, I’ve spent the last 2 years trying to figure out how 45% of the American public went mad and what it means. You’ll see a pattern emerge in the histories I’ve been reading.
I’ve read much more poetry and less fiction and overall have spent too much precious time on the news. It is essential to be well informed, but my dread-scrolling had sometimes become all consuming. That has lessened since January 20, even though the Impeachment Case, expertly presented, has brought back all the sociopathic ugliness of the last four years and especially that of January 6.
But there is more here to read and choose from than that subject. I hope you find books that you will enjoy.
The most recent iteration of this list: The Biennial Book List — A Passionate, Patchy and Wholly Subjective Catalogue: Post 585 Published on
The 2021 list:
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, Anne Applebaum
Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum
Travelers In the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism, 1919-1945, Julia Boyd
The Great Terror, Robert Conquest
Desert Notebooks: A Roadmap for the End of Time, Ben Ehrenreich
What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, Carolyn Forche
Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen
Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes To War, Max Hastings
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, Valeria Luiselli
Down Along With That Devil’s Bones: A Reckoning With Monuments, Memory and the Legacy of White Supremacy, Connor Town O’Neill
The Disappeared and The Mothers of the Plaza, John Simpson
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. Shirer witnessing a Nazi rally for the first time: “We are strong and will get stronger,” Hitler shouted at them through the microphone, his words echoing across the hushed field from the loudspeakers. And there in the flood-lit night, massed together like sardines in one mass formation, the little men of Germany who have made Nazism possible achieved the highest state of being the Germanic man knows: the shedding of their individual souls and minds—with the personal responsibilities and doubts and problems—until under the mystic lights and at the sound of the magic words of the Austrian they were merged completely in the Germanic herd.”
The Judges of the Secret Court: A Novel, David Stacton. You’ve probably not heard of this book. I had not until a friend pressed it upon me. It tells the story of John Wilkes and Edwin Booth and of course the assassination of Lincoln. This is not a romantic, historical novel but the best novel about power and delusion I have read in a long time.
Tales From the Blue Archives: A Novel, Lawrence Thornton. One of a trilogy of novels set in Argentina during the “Dirty War” of 1976 to 1983.
Four Fields, Tim Dee
Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life On Earth, Richard Fortey. This is a rereading. I am taking it more carefully this time, and I am enthralled at the slow unspooling of life on earth into its present wonder and complexity.
Underland, Robert McFarlane
The Smallest Lights In The Universe: A Memoir, Sara Seager
For several years now, I’ve kept a book of poetry going continuously. No matter what else I’m reading, poetry is always a part of each day. For me, poetry does what no other form of writing is able to do — capture the core nature of a person or a landscape or an experience in images and language memorable because they have been compressed to their hardest, most gem-like truth. I have a great regret, one of those actions I wish I could go back and remake — since I began trying to write poetry myself, and combined with a concentrated attention on dozens of poets, I wish I could go back and tell all my students how I think poems evolve and how their essential importance has little to do with the kind of narrow analysis I once taught.
If They Come For Us, Fatimah Asghar
Felon, Reginald Dwayne Betts
Selected Poems, Stephen Crane
Fire To Fire, Mark Doty
The Essential Poems, Jim Harrison
Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky
Bright Dead Things, Ada Limon
Selected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz
Something Bright, Then Holes, Maggie Nelson
Brute, Emily Skaja
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.
We Begin In Gladness: How Poet’s Progress, Craig Morgan Teicher
His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life, Jonathan Alter. I am lucky to work with a good man who himself worked in the west wing of the White House for President Carter. His stories are remarkable slices of life illustrating the man and the issues of the day.
Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells, Pico Iyer
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.
Charles Dickens, Jane Smiley
The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, Sam Wasson
Agamemnon, Aeschylus
The History Of Greece to 322 B.C, NGL Hammond
Why Homer Matters, Adam Nicholson
Memorial: Poems, Alice Oswald
Catch and Kill, Ronan Farrow
She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
Know My Name: A Memoir, Chanel Miller
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper, Hallie Rubenhold
The Witches: Salem, 1692, Stacy Schiff
London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd
Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles, Bernard Cornwell
Napoleon, Paul Johnson
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.
The Siege of Krishnapur: A Novel, JG Farrell
Men of Honor: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero, Adam Nicholson
All of the Aubrey/Maturin Saga (21 titles) by Patrick O’Brian narrated by Patrick Tull (only by Patrick Tull!!) I have read all 21 books previously. Now, I am making my way through them via narration, and 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. Think of a good storyteller. Think of how you could listen for a long time to his or her stories. That is Patrick Tull’s way with these superb historical novels (better than Jane Austen in giving one the felt experience of early 19th century life in the UK).
Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, Christine Thompson
Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, Simon Winchester
The UnAmericans: Stories, Molly Antopol
Fleishman Is In Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner
The Nightfire, Michael Connolly
The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, Ron Hansen
The Dance Hall of the Dead, Tony Hillerman. I love the Southwest. Hillerman helps fill in the limits of my experience and gives a broad, sympathetic view of a community I would never know anything of otherwise.
The Middle Passage, Charles Johnson
The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel. Please, read all of the trilogy.
Hamnet, Maggie O’ Farrell. A book I loved. Intelligence and heart.
Weather, Jenny Offill
Normal People, Sally Rooney. The best novel about falling in love and all its disruptions. At times I had to stop reading because I did not want anything bad to happen to the protagonists. A perfect illustration of why character is forever the heart of good novels.
Exit Ghost; Nemesis; Sabbath’s Theater, 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.
Gem of the Ocean; Joe Turner Come and Gone; The Piano Lesson, August Wilson
These are the eternal 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, Beyond The Bedroom Wall, Taylor Branch’s The King Era Trilogy, the poems of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney.
