A Year in Reading: Kristen Radtke
A Year in Reading: Lorin Stein
She can make you believe, for pages at a time, that the two languages--two ways of thinking and feeling--are a hair's breadth apart. It really is magic.
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A Year in Reading: Hamilton Leithauser
The further I get away from this book the more I suspect that very few of the arguments actually hold water.
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A Year in Reading: Tana French
The way Guy's mind twists and disintegrates makes the book an incredible study of psychological torture and how fine the membrane is between normality and the underlying darkness.
A Year in Reading: Jason Diamond (Flavorwire)
I've spent more time outside of New York this year than any other year since I moved here a decade ago, so I’ve been thinking less about what I'm reading, and more about where I'm reading things. I wonder if the constant change in location adds to why, when I look through the things I've read this year, I notice that the books I read for pleasure -- not for work or research -- are more varied than usual.
Susan Steinberg’s collection Spectacle arrived as a galley before 2013 started, though I only opened it after the new year. It was an excellent way to start off a year that promised more than a few wonderful short story collections, including Spectacle, Adrian Van Young’s The Man Who Noticed Everything, and especially Laura van den Berg’s superb The Isle of Youth.
I picked up Max Beerbohm’s Selected Prose in a Provincetown used bookshop, and started reading it that night. After reading two great books this year on Dandyism -- one put out by Yale Press and another co-authored by a dear friend of mine, I Am Dandy -- my interest in Beerbohm’s work was piqued, and although I’ve been told that reading his novel, Zuleika Dobson, should be very high up on my list, I couldn’t help but be delighted by his stories and essays that called to mind S.J. Perelman, P.G. Wodehouse, and even Fran Lebowitz at some points.
Both James Wood and Wayne Koestenbaum continue to be in leagues of their own, something that was hammered home while reading Koestenbaum’s My 1980s & Other Essays, as well as Wood’s The Fun Stuff. I was chomping at the bit to read James Wolcott’s Critical Mass, and probably won’t stop talking about Michelle Orange’s This is Running for Your Life. I’d just like to put it out there that somebody should give Orange a whole bunch of money to just sit around and write essays. I’d appreciate that very much.
I read Sean Doyle’s zine The Day Walt Disney Died on an airplane, totally ignoring the weird looks the passenger to my right kept shooting at me for whatever reason. Sooner or later somebody is going to tell Doyle to write an entire book, and that person will be doing a big mitzvah for all of us. I also wasn't shocked to find that the Gigantic crew put out another great issue this year. The fifth issue, read on a train bound for Connecticut, upon my return, had me combing through my personal archives for stellar old issues. The editors (who are friends of mine) have consistently had their fingers planted squarely on the pulse of what’s good in literature and design.
More from A Year in Reading 2013
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews
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A Year in Reading: Manjula Martin
My reading list this year was about growing up, I guess; about how, be we little or epic, we become.
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A Year in Reading: Anne Landsman
Anne Landsman is the author of the novels, The Rowing Lesson and The Devil's Chimney, which were nominated for awards including the PEN/Hemingway and South Africa's most prestigious literary award, the M-Net Book Prize. The Rowing Lesson was recently named to the Financial Times's Best Fiction of 2008 list. She has written for numerous international publications, including The Washington Post, The Believer, The Guardian, and The Telegraph.I can always tell how much I enjoyed a book by the state it's in when I'm done with it. If many of the pages are turned back at the corners, and there are stippled lines in the margins as if sandpipers have been walking on the edges of the text and making notations, if the back page has a jumble of lines from the book, interlaced with thoughts and ideas I had while reading, then this is a book I wanted to remember, ingest, carve into my psyche. On my bookshelf this year, Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk wins the prize for most dog-eared, most written upon, most abused book of 2008. I started reading it before going to Turkey last summer and read it at every available moment during my two weeks there. I gazed at the Bosphorus through the scrim of Pamuk's layered descriptions of this mighty river, which divides east from west. Five times a day, I listened to the muezzin's call to prayer and thought of the Pamuk family's ambivalence towards religion and the whole country's wrenching relationship with it. As I walked the streets of Istanbul with my husband and two children visiting mosques, eating Turkish Delight, noticing stray dogs, dodging cars, I walked the pages of Pamuk's Istanbul, the sandpiper treading in the clean sand of the margins.More from A Year in Reading 2008
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A Year in Reading: Julie Klam
Reading a Sarah Vowell book is like getting the coolest, smartest and funniest person in the world to take you on a tour of the kind of places you’d go to if you weren’t held down by a nagging wife, whiny kids, and demanding cats.
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