My year in fiction

Slightly off topic, but if you read or write in another language, and you need a dictionairy, I recommend Deep-L, which can translate between a large number of languages, e.g. French to English:
https://www.deepl.com/nl/translator#fr/en/ami

I have not read any on Chris Armstrong’s list – though I have bought the Otsuka, which was prominently displayed in a Berlin feminist bookshop. But I concur with Chris Bertram on the wonderfulness of Priestdaddy – one of the highlights of this year’s reading – I also re-read Wide Sargasso Sea because my German mother in law had done so and loved it. I managed around 20 books this year – more or less my average – those I enjoyed included Colm Toibin’s The Magician, a novelised life of Thomas Mann, Claire Keegan’s Small Things like These; Lena Bastasic, Catch the rabbit, The Vanishing Half – Brit Bennett and Domenico Starnone: First execution; Laurie Colwin, Goodbye without Leaving, Eley Williams, The Liars Dictionary; and Mick Herron, Dead Lions. I also concur with Ingrid that Deep L is much better than Google Translate – it has helped me tremendously to navigate German bureaucracy …

Ingrid, thanks for link. I’ve been using Google Translate, which is OK but not great

Being a long-time CT fan, I’ll weigh in here a bit. I read mostly non-fiction over the course of a year, much of it philosophy which was and is my profession even in retirement. But I’m a member of an old faculty book club (“old” now describes its tenure and our ages) for the last 20+ years, and thank heavens for that, because it’s encouraged me to read more fiction (even on my own!). This year I read Strout’s Old William (I’m a huge fan of My Name is Lucy Barton, which is continued in narrative here), Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, Backman’s Anxious People (avoid the Netflix disaster based on it), and Jess Walters The Cold Millions (I loved this almost as much as Beautiful Ruins). I finally took on Wallace’s massive Infinite Jest too. That book by turns was brilliant and infuriating, but no work has ever better captured the mind of addiction. But overall the one book that stuck with me most is Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, a simply intoxicating work of narrative genius that reworked my mind about how we perceive one another. I’ll never watch another episode of the old series Hawaii 5-0 without learning something pretty revealing that the producers of that show certainly never intended.

I had a somewhat bad year for reading. Like Ingrid, I’m being insistent on only reading in my second language. (Here, the Kindle is a life saver, since just touching a word brings up the Japanese dictionary definition (it has a Japanese-English dictionary, but it’s terrible (also, Japanese-English dictionaries don’t really work)), and it remembers the words you’ve looked up so you can review them later.) Fortunately, it’s a language with an insanely hyperactive literary world (or worlds if one insists on separating popular from intellectually pretentious (oops, serious) literature). The first trip-up was a collection of short stories by a favorite popular author. I started blithely reading away assuming it was a novel, not short stories, and I got all enthused about wondering how the heroine would resolve (or at least deal with) her problems and issues when she disappeared without a trace. Sheesh. I shouldn’t have let it irritate me but I did. Then I decided that, just for reading practice, I’d read some mysteries. Mistake. Mysteries are about the trick, not about the characters. No more mysteries. Ever. Sheesh, again. The best reading of the year was essays by Hyakken Uchida, who was a disciple of Natsume Soseki and the subject of Kurosawa’s film “Mada da yo!”, and a novel by Yoshiyuki Junnosuke. Yoshiyuki is overly taken with sex, but despite that he still respects his characters, so it’s not as obnoxious as it sounds. Also, a collection of short stories (that I had figured out in advancer were short stories, sheesh.) by the above-mentioned favorite author (Kanae Minato, probably available in translation; her “Utopia” worked for me in Japanese (wikipedia calls her a mystery writer, and that’s not exactly wrong, but she writes novels that care about the characters and have (often disturbing) twists)) that was written in the form of letters between the characters. She writes with great sensitivity about the stresses between rural and urban Japan. I’m sure it’s been done before, but she made effective use of the novel written only as letters form. I also made a bit of a start on Kinkakuji and some of his (Mishima’s) essays, but his vocabulary is dense of obscurities so my (computerized) flash cards are full of leeches (a technical term referring to words you are having trouble remembering and should forget about and move on from, since they leech time that could be spent learning easier and more useful words).

In good reading news, I was religious about reading just about every word on the first two pages of a Japanese lamestream media newspaper every day.

Anyway, the goal for this year was to have been 12 full-length novels, and I didn’t get anywhere close. I think by more careful planning, I should be able to do better than 12 next year. Maybe.

@Bob I’ve read three so far: Passion simple (this one) and previously Les Années and Mémoire de fille. Passion simple is very short and a quick and easy read, about a love affair (which she also returns to in other work). Les Années is an interlacing of her personal story with changes in France over her whole life, and very interesting in tracing those transformations and the disappointment of people who had invested their hopes in the Union de la gauche. Mémoire de fille (covering final years at school, first sexual experiences and a stint as an au pair in London) is remarkable for its outside/inside perspective on someone who is a different person from who she now is, but of whom only she has direct memories.

Thanks for the list – I always enjoy a good book list. There is so much to read in the world, anything that helps narrow the scope a bit is worth some attention. I have read two on the list.

Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox
Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Confessions was quite clever and very enjoyable. I always find Moshfegh a bit obtuse and her work requires a bit more than casual “Rest & Relaxation” reading to really get the most out of but if that’s your thing you’ll enjoy this.

I’m always hesitant to recommend because I think reading has a lot of personal taste to it and mine may not match you – but I liked:

Trust by Hernan Diaz (this is on dang near everyone’s ‘favorite for 22 list so its hardly undiscovered, but despite its popularity it is engaging) and;

Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet (it might look soft but its written on two levels).