Related Books:
I didn’t accomplish much in 2022. I didn’t publish a book, or really very much at all—the only thing I can think of is a single book review. But I did reach my goal of reading 100 books this year, an arbitrary number that appealed for its solid roundness.
I had the great fortune of spending much of my summer by the shore, in a little town with no real diversion to speak of; we didn’t even have a television. Packing for this sojourn was fraught, the place isolated enough that if you run out of books your only recourse is a Little Free Library stuffed with waterlogged Robin Cooks.
Any book is a beach read if you read it at the beach. I began with Elena Ferrante’s electric The Days of Abandonment, and Gabriel Bump’s warm and funny debut Everywhere You Don’t Belong. I read Gwendoline Riley’s taut and discomfiting First Love and so loved it that I then read My Phantoms, which is probably the best contemporary novel I read in 2022.
When I say there was nothing to do in this little place, I’m not kidding. I tried to make each book last two days but I often failed: J. Robert Lennon’s unsettling Subdivision, Mat Johnson’s space parable Invisible Things, Yoko Tawada’s end times fable Scattered All Over the Earth, Danzy Senna’s memoir Where Did You Sleep Last Night? I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper, testing my own assertion that any book can be a beach read, and Ravi Mangla’s suspenseful The Observant, and Liska Jacobs’s hilariously grotesque The Pink Hotel, Dani Shapiro’s Signal Fires, Helen Garner’s Cosmo Cosmolino, and three books by Patrick Modiano: Out of the Dark, In the Café of Lost Youth, and The Occupation Trilogy.
It wasn’t all play and no work. Or maybe it was—I read four books because I had agreed to blurb them but that hardly counts as work: Ore Agbaje-Williams’s forthcoming novel The Three of Us, De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s forthcoming novel Decent People, a new translation of Thomas Mann’s stories by Damion Searls, and Patrick Bringley’s lovely memoir of his time as a museum guard, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me. All were superb.
It’s a good thing I packed so much: Daisy Johnson’s Sisters, Percival Everett’s Wounded, Thea Astley’s Drylands, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Anita Brookner’s Altered States, Jane Smiley’s A Dangerous Business, Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir, Mark Prins’s The Latinist, Jennifer Egan’s The Invisible Circus.
I somewhat arbitrarily decided, at the start of the summer, to read more Philip Roth and so I did: The Anatomy Lesson, Nemesis, My Life as a Man, Zuckerman Unbound, and Operation Shylock, which was my favorite of the lot, playful and funny. But Roth wasn’t my summer romance; that distinction belongs to Karl Ove Knausgaard, as I listened to the entirety of My Struggle—all six deranged volumes of it. It’s a superb audiobook experience, beautifully read, very well paced, and the intimacy of that medium (a story whispered into your ear!) suits Knausgaard’s project. I listened every morning, while making beds and sweeping up sand; I listened in the afternoon, strolling along the water and listening to Karl Ove’s misadventures at a child’s birthday party, or his thoughts on Paul Celan. It’s winter now, my least favorite time of year, and I find myself wistful for the sun and the quiet of that place, all connected, in some complex way, with thoughts of Karl Ove himself, so that when I see his name, I feel a warmth on my skin, I hear the ocean in the distance.
