I am a voracious reader. At least that’s what my CV says. It’s easy for me to sink into a book, especially when I’m on the bus and should be paying attention to which stop is coming up. I’ve been doing yearly reviews of my literary conquests for close to a decade now but previously it was at a forum that isn’t very active, so I thought it might be time to move this to my blog.

I like doing this review every year especially for how it allows me to reconsider books I’d read near the beginning of the previous year. To quote one of my reads:

Distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus

The big list

To a God Unknown
It Can’t Happen Here
On the Beach
Chung Kuo 1
The White Guard (Glenny translation)
Mycelium wassonii
Introduction to the Humanities
Scattered all Over the Earth (Mitsutani translation)
This is How You Lose the Time War
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Yamamoto: The Man Who Planned Pearl Harbor (Edwin P Hoyt)
Pope Joan (Durrell translation)
This Tender Land
Notes from Underground (Matlaw translation)
The Woman in the Dunes
A Psalm for the Wild Built
Nunquam
Mathematics for Human Flourishing
V.
Anya’s Ghost
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Heid translation)
The Queen of Spades and Other Stories (Keane translations )
Little Eyes (McDowell translation)
Akira volume 1
Foundation
Around the World in Eighty Plants
L’etranger
Foundation and Empire
The Selfish Gene
Second Foundation
Billy Budd
The Encantadas
Luz de Ilusion
La insoportable levedad del ser (Fernando Valenzuela traducción)
Atlas of Poetic Botany (Erik Butler translation)

Breakdown

Why these books?

This year, knowing I would be shedding all my worldly possessions midway through the year I focused on reading everything I could on my bookshelf. I was mostly successful! Where I failed was reading my foreign language books, unfortunately, but I did make good inroads there: the list contains the first books I’ve read end to end in Spanish and French.

In addition to the spring cleaning, I also had the opportunity for serendipitous finds at hostel book exchanges and in the libraries of some of my hosts. This category makes up a large chunk of the books starting with V., the remainder being used bookstore finds I couldn’t stop myself from buying, despite their adding weight and bulk to my backpack.

Sci-Fi

I have been getting into Sci-Fi recently. There’s not a lot on this list but it’s noteworthy that I dug into the first three books of Asimov’s Foundation series. And I dug into them hard. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy them as thoroughly as I did, and when asked to explain what’s so good about them, like the author himself explains in the intro to Second Foundation, it’s a bit silly. There’s so little Sci-Fi, or what we traditionally associate as such. It’s a series of discussions and occasional narration, wherein characters scheme, postulate and debate the future of civilization in the context of their current crises. It sounds utterly dull in description but is entirely engrossing in execution.

In addition to those I also read the short but prosodically captivating This is How You Lose the Time War, the quietly dorky and occasionally heartwarming first book of an as yet uncontinued series A Psalm for the Wild Built, and the first volume of Akira, whose translator I never recorded but I read it in English. I really want to continue Akira. I’ve seen the film many times since my tender teenage years and the manga is, to put it lightly, like discovering the world behind the story. It’s so dense. There’s so much. It’s an impeccable example of world and cast building in Sci-Fi. Which gives me a great opportunity to talk about Chung-Kuo, which is a series I’ll perhaps never continue. The first book of the series was very interesting: the concept is basically that the Han rose to world dominance and erased all history of European, African and even non-Han Chinese contribution to society and technological advancement. It has a huge cast, but I’ll admit the primary villain of the series I found distasteful. He has a strong streak of cruelty that was tough to stomach. My father lent me this book after he learned of my reading Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, and it took me too long to get around to reading it, unfortunately.

Nunquam was a strange one, and a difficult one, as are many of Durrel’s novels, but unlike The Alexandrian Quartet, this one offers little humanity. It spends a great deal of time dehumanizing its characters, relegating them as cognizant cogs of technocoporatism.

It was a sign of decaying culture, of course, that dams had been built against the further development of ideas.

Little Eyes was a cool near-scifi exploration of a quickly popular toy somewhat a cross between omegle chat and I suppose Furby (the most successful fake, non-digital pet I can recall). A series of vignettes, some in long form, exploring the dark side of inviting strangers into our home.

Nature

I will endure even a little discomfort to preserve this order which has come to exist by accident. It will be a shame to destroy this order.

Natural themes played a huge role in the books I read this year. From the ever present sands of The Woman in the Dunes to the mountainscapes of Psalm for the Wild Built and farmlands and river bends of This Tender Land, I was drawn in by many promises of natural adventure. Perhaps my favorite nature worshipping work of fiction this year, however, was Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown which, in its sparing 200ish pages seemed almost cosmically horrific, or mystical — I was struggling with this the other day: what’s the non-horror equivalent of cosmic horror, that ineffable feeling of awe you experience before something indescribably indifferent and beyond humanity, though perhaps in an ambiguous (a la Stalker) or benevolent sense — Steinbeck’s god was more felt in the faith and sensations of his characters than manifested, but the conflicts and whimsy such inspires are so palpably rendered in his pages.

I read two quite similar tomes about various plants. They were in fact near echoes of each other, save the fact that one only discussed tropical plants, whereas the other also covered important Northern plants such as Maize and Cannabis.

While I never finished my reread of Desert Solitaire, which I spend not a few words anxiously considering in one chapter of my Roamings, it is one of the most magnificent portraits of the southwest as a hateful yet romantic personality in its own right, from the rocks to the sands, the secretive fauna, aggressive flora and capricious waters. Melville’s Encantadas were a delightfully exploration of the Galapagos islands, though the perhaps most delightful parts were his wildly strong opinions about the animals there, not least of all the tortoise. There are some writers who are able to take nature writing out of its typically ponderous, adjective-laden and pseudo-religious tropes and elevate it to the heights of the literary sentiment, engendering the human sense of adventure and comedy in readers, and Melville along with Abbey reach this pinnacle. The latter in particular stays conscious of the risk of essentializing the unfeeling wilderness, centering its meaning anthropocentrically while recognizing our tiny place within it.

Their crowning curse is their drudging impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world.

Existentialism

My own sense of meaning in life is so fragile that existentialism in books can often only hit me in the devastatingly weak parts of my psyche, and I miss out on an opportunity to find healing in them. The Woman in the Dunes was one that struck me thusly: a man goes seeking something, and finds himself trapped in endless, Sisyphean labor, and is assaulted by failure from all sides in his efforts to flee such an existence. His foil is the woman, his nominal wife, in their shared responsibility for their plot of land, who has accepted her fate and, to mangle a quote from Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, simply does what is necessary. This shit is brutal in its simplicity.

But more so than Notes from Underground? Half rant, half confession, the book is incredibly, somehow ironically nihilistic. I can argue myself in circles about whether it argues on behalf of or against nihilism despite knowing Dostoevsky’s personal stance toward it. Perhaps the idea that man will even in utopia act outside his own self interest if only to prove he can is just too sharp a blade on both edges to cut in a single direction.

Rereading Camus did me only a little better. It was a pleasure to return to, however, both in taking the opportunity to explore the original French prose and to be reminded how dense of a tiny book it actually is. So many characters, subplots and ideas left my memory when I closed the book on that final chapter during my first reading. That final chapter is so poignant, so beautifully executed, such a fantastically resounding denouement following Meursault’s argument with the chaplain. Nevertheless, it’s a tough pill to swallow: the universe doesn’t care about you so why care about it? How does one avoid nihilism here? It’s okay if you’re facing death directly, but what about when you’re facing living, an indeterminate amount of time? Do I concern myself too much with the avoidance of duhkha, undermining my ability to roll with the punches and find meaning in the simple choices of how I spend my time?

The dark approach of death and its impact on humanity was heartbreakingly, yet with so much misleading optimism explored in On the Beach, which follows characters in Australia after the outbreak of nuclear was in the north permanently poisons the Earth, as the resulting radiation slowly works its way through the southern hemisphere to bring their ultimate doom. Throughout the novel characters talk about how the people around them, maybe they, themselves, they occasionally wonder, don’t seem to truly grasp that the world is ending. That they will die. It’s done so gently that it’s easy to think the characters will find salvation, and while they don’t find such mortally, spiritually many of them do. Many of them find it possible to live as they’d always fantasized without the uncertainty of time to cow them into complacence. Again, I note that it seems so easy presuming death ringing your doorbell makes it easier to make the most of those final steps toward the door, so maybe what I need to find meaning in the menial is an uncomfortable sense of its breath ever on the nape of my neck.

— The trouble with you is you take too many risks.

— The trouble with you is you want to live forever!

Politics

The question of deriving meaning in life provides a nice opportunity to turn to political themes I explored through my reading this year. Foundation weaved all about this field, with its concept of using the mysticism and obfuscation of religion to protect and propagate science so advanced as to assume the appearance of magic. The idea that society’s technological advances could be preserved is not new. After all, with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it effectively fell to the Church to maintain order, and the Christian monks first, then after the Islamic conquest the Arabic scholars, preserved centuries of knowledge within religious institutions via their monopoly on literary instruction. This was covered in some part in Pope Joan. Yet I wonder who would protect the knowledge of our last five centuries should society fall today? On whose shoulders would stability’s responsibility land: a lot of modern entertainment suggests the equivalent of biker gangs and egomaniacal autocrats, for which there is indeed some historical precedence, but wanting any institutions stronger than government and commerce, where does it all land? Perhaps the wikimedia foundation. I don’t know.

It Can’t Happen Here is a surprisingly readable exploration of how the US would respond to fascism. The most entertaining part to me was the eventual rebellion of the flyover country many associate as the most gullible, most fascism-susceptible. It may be a flight of fancy meant to redeem Lewis' native neighbors, but it also speaks to something that I think a lot of novels such as those I read by Kundera this year do, that under the most trying circumstances the general intention is to keep living life as best as we can, whether our politicians or other ones are in control, but we can only be pushed so far, misled so long. Maybe this is just a flight of fancy meant to preemptively redeem my countryfolk.

The Human Spirit

The White Guard, one of Bulgakov’s first works, is a great exploration of the human response to prevailing crisis. The characters are on the wrong side of history. Not necessarily the wrong side of morality — insert your own political opinions where you see fit — but will be from our vantage point certainly destroyed. Similar to the cast of On the Beach and Isoroku Yamamato in his eponymous biography, they know, or come to know, that they are doomed. So they cling to what was important to them: family, hobby, tradition, love, and so on, and find in these things a reason to march with bravery towards their end.

Scattered all Over the Earth takes the almost opposite approach. Characters have no real reason to be linked, but cling to each other out of fascination and boredom. These characters are almost perfectly indifferent to the meaninglessness of life or the neverending approach of death, and find joy in merely exploring the world, especially language and their different uses thereof, together. They have achieved Meursault status. A Psalm for the Wild Built presents a similar irreverence for the existential troubles of man, through the lens of robots who have spent their entire, long, slow existence staring at ants and trees, only to send an ambassador to check on the surprsingly utopian human civilization and if they need anything. As a whole, it would seem no, but on an individual level, as evidenced by the main character’s profession, they all do need something, and none can quite figure out what it is. The robot is sympathetic, but doesn’t seem to understand why everyone worries so much.

Why does everyone worry so much?

Good books end with “In conclusion…”

Some of these books I didn’t comment on. V., The Selfish Gene were incredible, but I don’t really have much to say about them. Some books don’t fit in the context of the rest. Anya’s Ghost, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Mycelium wassonii are also among these. That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy them, except Mathematics for Human Flourishing which I regret buying even if the puzzles were fun. It just means I read them at a time when they either stood alone, so separate from everything else I read that I don’t know how to work them into the conversation naturally, or at a time when they only really functioned as entertainment for me. That’s ok. Not every book one reads has to be a life changing event or help to support one’s own philosophical narratives. Sometimes it’s nice to have a little fluff.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.