Here are the books that I read from January 1, 2023 to January 1, 2024.
The Bridge of Sighs by Olen Steinhauer is what got me started on the Yalta Boulevard series: "It's August 1948, three years after the Russians liberated this small nation from German Occupation, but the Red Army still patrols the capital's rubble-strewn streets, and the ideals of the Revolution are but memories." And then it began.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. This author is so outside my comfort zone, and I am so absorbed by his fictional environment and the strange life of urban Japan, that I can safely say Murakami is my cult. Simple as that. This book takes you by the hand and insists that the subconscious is a world of its own, different for each of us, full of private symbols and sensations that nobody else can understand or access. You're always treated to a fine 1:00 a.m. meal and some lonely sex mixed with regret or insecurity in a Murakami book.
The Confession by Olen Steinhauer, number two in the Yalta Boulevard series. It's Eastern Europe in 1956, and Ferenc Kolyeszar (a writer as well as a state militia homicide detective) is estranged from his wife, frustrated by writer's block, and growing increasingly uncomfortable in the politicization of the police force. Lots of deception and horrible individuals in this book. That's why I recommend it.
36 Yalta Boulevard is number three in Olen Steinhauer's Yalta Boulevard series. It's been published as The Vienna Assignment as well. We are now in the shadows of the political climate of the 1960s. It is a "tour-de-force political thriller that teaches that loyalty to the cause might be the biggest crime of all." You bet I liked it.
House of Glass, vol. 4 of the Buru Quartet, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. This volume is narrated by our hero's nemesis, the sleazy self-loathing colonial official who is trying to destroy the emergent Indonesian independence movement. People are very conflicted in this book, and it deals with as much inner turmoil and it does with the national turmoil under the heavy heels of Dutch colonialism.
Angel Pavement by J.B.Priestley is a good old-fashioned novel published in 1930 about the lives of employees at the firm Twigg & Dersingham, and #8 Angel Pavement, London. Their lives are changed after the arrival of a mysterious Mr. Golspie, an entrepreneur with import-export contacts with the Baltic. It depicts the high levels of economic insecurity of late1920s London before the Great Depression.
This is a wonderful and at times hilarious biography of one of the most productive writers of our time, well, of the previous century, half of which is my time so I can say that. Wodehouse by Robert McCrum does a superb job of taking us all across Wodehouse country, from England to France to Long Island and Beverly Hills taking with us his frighteningly financial forays and his incredible creations: Psmith, Jeeves, and the Empress of Blandings, and his followers:: John Updike, Dorothy Parker, Salman Rushdie, John Le Carre, Seamus Heaney, and associates: Guy Bolton, Jerome Kern.
Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif tells the story of how the West took possession of the Middle East's oil reserves and brought whole desert countrysides into conflict with the modern, cash-obsessed world of greed. This was my first foray into what is called petro-fiction, a genre that deals with the role of oil in society and its impact on developing cultures. I have two more of his books waiting to be read. And I can't wait.
The Istanbul Variations by Olen Steinhauer (also published as Liberation Movements) is the fourth book in the Yalta Boulevard series. I tell you, once you start with Steinhauer, it's difficult to stop. His characters are so well presented and the postwar ambiance so well-kept and creepy makes you wonder not how Eastern Europe survived the war, but how did they survive the peace.
Shibumi by Trevanian (aka Rodney William Whitaker) is the story, set in the 1970s, that details the struggle between the "Mother Company" (a conspiracy of energy companies that secretly controls much of the Western world) and a highly skilled assassin, Nicholai Tel. This is a riveting book, twists and turns. Not my usual bill of fare, but a very good read.
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami is a nostalgic novel of loss. It is told in first-person narrative: Toru looks back on his days as a college student living in Tokyo, and of his relationships with two very different women: the troubled Naoko and the outgoing, lively Midori. Set in late 1960s, during a period when Japanese students were protesting against the established order.
The Chronicler of the Winds by Henning Mankell. From the creator of Wallander and many other fine works of literature, we have here a beautifully crafted novel about a mystical orphan boy named Nelio. He's on the rooftop of a small theater company on a hot African night. And he's dying slowly of bullet wounds. Nelio tells the story of his life as a sole witness to the cruel raids on his village by bandits, the abandoned children living on the streets. Says The Observer, "...Mankell writes eloquently of the realities of poverty and violence without becoming sugary or didactic."
In these pages, I have previously mentioned how much I love Alice Munro; how much I love her stories; and how they have been soul-tending for me. The late Nobel laureate gave us plenty of short stories to enjoy and to empower, to enlighten and to entertain. Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You is one of those collections. If I were you, I'd start with the Collected Stories of Alice Munro and work around that with any missing ones.
Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami. No matter how many books you may have read by people who want to tell you how to write, how they write, etc., I really think this is one of those books that you read in spite of those others. Murakami shares with us his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society, his own origins as a writer, and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians. I think this is a wonderful book, especially for those who don't write but would like to have an inkling of what the writer, a good writer, is concerned about, what's going on in that head.
Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa is a heartrending novel about Uganda in the 1970s and 80s, and follows the narrator Mugezi as he tries to break free from his parents and capitalize on his charm and intelligence. There is the chaos of transition, the despair of the younger generation over the failure of transition from colonial to postcolonial life. There is life under Idi Amin and then under Milton Obote. Corruption followed corruption. This is a really good book, important, and recommended by Nancy Pearl, I believe.
The Actual and The Bellarosa Connection by Saul Bellow. Two minor works in the late period of Bellow's canon. Both are not memorable.
That Distant Land by Wendell Berry is another one of those beautiful books populated with unforgettable characters from the rural landscape of Berry's homeland, Kentucky. It's an enjoyable and lovely follow-up to other Berry books that I have read, e.g., Nathan Coulter, The Memory of Old Jack, A Place on Earth, Jayber Crow, to name but a few.
All That Is Left Is All That Matters by Mark Slouka. A collection of short stories dealing with the lives of ordinary people battling the forces of love and loss, from Czechoslovakia to California, to the Pacific Northwest; they're about what "life is like when our back is to the wall."
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories by Denis Johnson is a posthumously published collection of short stories that Johnson finished weeks before his death. Critics called the stories "...ravishing, painful, as desolate as Dostoevsky." He is noted for Jesus' Son and Tree of Smoke.
A continuation of my journey into Shusaku Endo's works, Deep River is a moving novel of a group of Japanese tourists, each with their individual life traumas, who visit India, which is dealing with the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination. This was at times heartbreaking.
The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005. This is the second volume of Zachary Leader's two-volume bio of Saul Bellow. It was, for me, monumental. Having always been a big fan of Bellow, I could not put this book down, in spite of the Nobel prize winner's personal foibles and difficult relationships with five wives. I still am enamored of him.
Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami. A novel about the narrator's quest to find his mysteriously vanished girlfriend Kiki. He plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence, metaphysical dread and collides with call girls, plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic, and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Yes, it is somewhat bizarre but comical.
The Fall by Simon Mawer. Great friends from childhood, the two main characters became top climbers, but have since become estranged. One of them is nevertheless amazed and grief-stricken when he hears of the other’s death after a fall on a relatively easy Welsh rockface. The past, though, hides the secret clues behind the tragedy. Layer by layer Simon Mawer peels back what happened, going not only into the friends' childhoods but that of their parents - who were also intimate.
The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst is about 1983 London, and Will, a privileged, gay, sexually irresistible 25-year-old, saves the life of an elderly aristocrat who has a heart-attack in a public lavatory. This chance meeting ultimately requires Will to re-evaluate his sense of the past and his family's history. There's a lot going on in this novel, I'm telling you.
Maps by Nuruddin Farah takes place in 1977, after the Ogaden Rebellion (1963-1965), and uses the innovative technique of 2nd-person narration for exploring questions of cultural identity in a post-independence world. (The Somali populated Ogaden region is part of Ethiopia.)
Dirt Music by Tim Winton is an absorbing book. It was filled with surprises and unfortunate decisions by characters on how to live their lives. I'm looking forward to reading more of Winton's work.
Just like William Boyd's other books that I've read, The Blue Afternoon is as captivating and charming a story as you could get, about an architect who is shadowed by a mysterious stranger who claims to be her father. It is some ride into the past. Boyd's books take you into strange places, each of which I can't get enough of.
The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey. In this novel Granny Catchprice runs her family business (and her family) with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives. Her daughter Cathy would rather be singing Country & Western than selling cars, while Benny Catchprice, sixteen and seriously psychopathic, wants to transform a failing auto franchise into an empire—and himself into an angel. Out of the confrontation between the Catchprices and their unwitting nemesis, a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office, Carey creates an endlessly surprising and fearfully convincing novel.
Some of the most sordid, horrific, funny, agonizing tales join the queue in Kolyma Tales by Varlan Shalamov. All of these people are attached to the Soviet Gulag apparatus. All of them suffer. It makes no sense but it's all they have, this Kafkaesque brutality. And I couldn't stop reading it.
I needed to understand the beginnings of one of my favorite writers, W. Somerset Maugham, and so I picked this from corner of the room and realized what a bleak society London could be indeed. Liza of Lambeth by W. Somerset Maugham. I'm so glad he moved on to bigger and better scopes of view.
Virgin Soil by Ivan Turgenev. The big man's sixth and last novel. Depicts young people in late 19th-century Russia who rebel agains the standard cultural mores of their time. There are the simple workers and peasants, the illegitimate son of an aristocrat, the niece, a Populist manager of a factory.
Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercer is one of the best books of the year for me. It "...plumbs the depths of our shared humanity to offer up a breathtaking insight into life, love, and literature itself. It "...is an astonishing novel, a compelling exploration of consciousness, the possibility of truly understanding another person, and the ability of language to define our very selves." I highly recommend it.
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates. "Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers or the heartbreak of a single mother with artistic pretensions, Yates ruthlessly examines the hopes and disappointments of ordinary people with empathy and humor."
The Island Within by Richard Nelson. In his work among Alaskan native peoples, anthropologist Nelson came to admire their relationship with the environment and sought to emulate it. Thus his exploration of an island off the Pacific Northwest coast is a search for a way of belonging to its natural community, to be not only observer, but participant in its life cycle. I loved this profoundly beautiful and inspiring book. Jim Harrison is quoted as saying "On the borders of consciousness as in Matthiessen and Lopez...a holy book...a text to help us understand ourselves within the natural world."
Mohr: A Novel by Frederick Reuss. When a solitary man stumbles upon a cache of photographs, sometimes--and only sometimes--he can sense the lives of the people in them. Sometimes he can find in their faces, and in the way they hold themselves or the way they perform before the camera, the light trace of their story. It is a love story of historic proportions. Mohr: A Novel is about a man and wife whose life together is marked irreparably by a deeply troubled and world-testing era.
Silverview by John Le Carre, who is high on my list of bodhisattvas, was Le Carre's last work; finished by his son. You can pass on this one, but not his others.
Learning to Talk: Stories by Hilary Mantel. Mantel has fast become one of my favorite modern writers, having first been introduced to her by her Thomas Cromwell novels. Her writing continues to inform my own. She is indeed a literary blessing.
A Miracle of Catfish by Larry Brown was published posthumously, and although his family may have felt it was ready for publication, I don't think it was. I have read a lot of Larry Brown's works, and I'm a tremendous fan. But an unfinished novel, it was a disappointment.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, who is one of my heroes, is a very strange linguistic book. I liked it, but I know many critics and other readers found it lacking authenticity. I think they're wrong; a boy in Southern Appalachia, with a single, wounded mom, is written pretty well: This is not Holden Caulfield, people, this is Demon--a poor kid in the middle of the opioid nightmare that is West Virginia and environs.
Yes, that's right, another William Boyd book, Restless taps right into my obsession with the Soviet Union, the horrors of Stalinism, World War 2, and those dark, gray clouds that were everywhere. I liked this book a lot.
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by MG Vassanji is a must read. Vikram had to flee Kenya to Canada because of bribery accusations and other hints of corruption. But that is not the main story. This is post-colonial Africa, where people just don't get along, and remnants of Mau Mau freedom fighters are still lurking in the shadows. Kirkus puts it "...bleak but affecting portrait of loss by a master writer." I'll buy that. I did.
Another Bernie Gunther detective novel, The One From the Other by the late Philip Kerr, is as fascinating and right up my World War 2 alley as Kerr's Gunther series always is. We've got the constant tracking of ex-Nazis and their collaborators and even a stint in a Soviet POW camp, "...the human propensity to be inhumane." I'm looking forward, of course, to the next Gunther novel, which is just two feet away from my lamp.
Everybody's Fool by Richard Russo continues the story of his "beat-up cast of variously broke, overweight, senile, adulterous, dissolute, and philosophical citizens..." in a broken down resort town. I have laughed so often while reading Russo's North Bath, NY series of novels sometimes it hurts. I love his books.
The Devil's Mode: Stories by Anthony Burgess is a collection of short stories, "varied in their settings and themes and display Burgess's characteristic wide range, while touching on...the private life of Shakespeare, ...and the lives of British expatriates in the Far East."
The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise by one of my other bodisattvas Pico Iyer is another book in the spiritual and travel writing canon of this brilliant man. He discusses the concept of paradise that is imagined or believed in different cultures and religions. Starting in Iran, he takes you to Sri Lanka, Jerusalem, and various shrines in Japan. His previous books that touched me as strongly are The Global Soul and The Art of Stillness.
Dickens by Peter Ackroyd is a huge book, as Dickens was a "huge" man. Ackroyd's books are such a pleasure to read, not only for the philosophical speculations, or the blooming historical vignettes, but for the sheer brilliance of the subject matter. This is an eye-opening appraisal not only of Dickens's work, but of what Ackroyd has been able to glean from the many sources of biography that have been written about Charles Dickens. I'm not so sure I feel the same way about genius anymore.
A wonderful book, Nickel Mountain by John Gardner, this pastoral novel set deep in the Catskills with a charming unpredictable story. As George Stade writes in the NYTimes, "...good fiction can be written out of them...(the recovery of ancient forms)...as proved by Nickel Mountain, which is shapely and moving enough to make you believe in ancient forms and permanent truths. ...the task [of Gardner's characters] was to rub the cliches off them until they shone with the dull gleam of permanent truth."
October Light by John Gardner is a masterwork. "The penniless widow of a once-wealthy dentist now lives in the Vermont farmhouse of her older brother. Opposites in nearly every way, their clash of values turns a bitter corner when the exacting and resolute brother takes a shotgun to his sister’s color television set. After he locks the sister up in her room with the trashy “blockbuster” novel that has consumed her (and only apples to eat), the novel-within-the-novel becomes an echo chamber providing glimpses into the history of the family that spawned these bizarre, sad, and stubborn people." This book was so funny and so insane at times it bred in more even more admiration for Gardner than I ever had.
Pulse: stories by Julian Barnes. I like much of what I've read by Barnes. And these short stories are darker than his others, yet they retain a modicum of quiet and remarkable elegance.
As I have previously stated, I love Richard Russo books, and in Somebody's Fool, we return to North Bath, NY remembering Russo's memorable characters Sully and Raymer and ruth and all the others, especially Sully's sidekick, Rub. Kirkus says "...[Somebody's Fool is] the good old-fashioned comic novel is the gold standard, full of heart and dexterous storytelling."
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki andHis Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami tells the story of Japanese railroad engineer Tsukuru Tazaki. When his close-knit group of friends abruptly cuts all relations with him, a young Tsukuba attempts to reconcile with his old friends, embarking on a quest for truth and a pilgrimage for happiness.
After the Quake by Haruki Murakami is a psychological journey that is in six narratives that take place within the 6-month period between the earthquake and the terrorist attack, both in 1995. I'm glad that I read this book.
Sweet Caress by William Boyd is a fictional autobiography supposedly written by a woman, Amory Clay, and it includes extracts from her diary, written on a Hebridean Island in 1977, with flashbacks from her career as a photographer in London, Scotland, France, Germany, the U.S., Mexico, and Vietnam. Boyd describes it as a "whole life novel" in that it tells the story of the book's main character "from cradle to grave."
To Heaven By Water by Justin Cartwright. I like Justin Cartwright novels, they're as thought-provoking and well-written, as engrossing as Ward Just. In this thoughtful novel, a circle of friends and loved ones are attempting to face down their personal troubles: a deceased wife, a callous lover, an affair with a young colleague. As they stumble through the events of their own lives, they turn to one another for advice and compassion, and, occasionally, to cause more trouble. All three romances are faced with serious decisions--how to go escape their shortcomings and demons, how to move ahead, how to survive the decisions they make.
The Destiny Thief by Richard Russo. This is my second reading of this book, this collection of essays, "wise, personal pieces, and readers get to know the author as a comforting, funny, and welcoming guy. These admirable qualities are most prevalent in "Imagining Jenny," an afterword to Jennifer Finney Moylan's popular 2003 memoir, She's Not There (about her sex-reassignment surgery). These were fresh, thrilling and marvelous even the second time around.
The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz. This is a wild book, I was enraptured the whole way through. In this quiet and devastating novel about the rise of fascism, Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is assigned to write a routine German lesson on the “The Joys of Duty.” Overfamiliar with these joys, Siggi sets down his life since 1943, a decade earlier, when as a boy he watched his father, a constable, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist artist from painting and to seize all his “degenerate” work. Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. “I was trying to find out,” Lenz says, “where the joys of duty could lead a people.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (remember him?) said “If ever the Third Reich was pictured in microcosm, with its prejudices against people not rooted in the land, and its tiny spasms of nationalistic fervor that added up to an irrational howl in final sum, then Lenz has done it….”
Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys toYemen and the Red Sea by Eric Hansen is oftentimes unbelievable, astonishing, and frustrating to the max. In 1978 Eric Hansen found himself shipwrecked on a desert island in the Red Sea. When goat smugglers offered him safe passage to Yemen, he buried seven years' worth of travel journals deep in the sand and took his place alongside the animals on a leaky boat bound for a country that he'd never planned to visit.
A Guest at the Feast by Colm Toibin, a collection of essays about Irish novelist John McGahern, a cancer diagnosis, a dark and empty Venice, Italy, and Buenos Aires among others on history, literature, politics, family, and the self.
A Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. This was an extraordinary book, I kid you not. At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Her destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean shortly before the outbreak of the Opium Wars in China. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners on board, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of Canton.
One of the best books I have ever read! And a highly influential (to me) resource on so many levels, intellectually, morally, psychically. This is an incredible volume of incredible efforts. Europe Central by William T. Vollmann is a novel, but it's like a WW2 newsreel interspersed with professorial lecturing and whispered readings from individual diaries and overheard asides from the people surrounding Hitler and those in the halls with Josef Stalin. Shostakovich is a constantly recurring character, as is Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, among others, including Soviet artists and musicians, and German functionaries and wives of functionaries, even inmates and commandants of concentration camps.
The Elephant Vanishes: Stories by Haruki Murakami. Stylistically and thematically, the collection aligns with Murakami's previous work. The stories mesh normality with surrealism, and focus on painful issues involving loss, destruction, confusion and loneliness. The title for the book is derived from the final story in the collection.
