Flaubert once said that one should read not for the purpose of instruction, but “in order to live.” Continuing our staff summations of 2019 in literature, Asymptote’s Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska outlines an abundant year of reading, ranging from feminist favourites to autofiction to books about books, and in doing so, considers the sense of how books find their way to us, perhaps so that we may live.
Reflecting on my year in reading, I started to think about how various books came into my hands. I’m a literature professor, so a lot of what I read is determined by the classes I’m teaching, the syllabi I create. But making assigned book lists seems to have become a habit that spills over into the rest of my life as well—much of my reading seems to be part of various projects with lists of their own. It’s rare for me to randomly grab a book off my to-read shelf and just dive in, though I did just that with Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins, and it ended up being one of my favorite books of the year; a collection of formally dazzling short stories, whose pleasure was heightened for me, perhaps, because I entered it with almost no previous knowledge, and so was all the more delighted by every surprising twist and turn. I had a similar experience with Yiyun Li’s breathtaking A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. But as often as not, the result of such serendipity will be the creation of a new list—for instance, I’ve now resolved to read everything else Yiyun Li has written. What follows, then, is not a reckoning of everything I read this year, but rather a contemplation of the different ways that books assign themselves to me, and the highlights of these circumlocutious processes.
First, of course, my classes. I read Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race three times for my first-year Core Humanities course, and admired it a little more every time. The topic will invariably encounter resistance from readers, but Oluo cleverly frames the text as a guide to having difficult conversations, inviting the audience to sit with feelings of defensiveness and consider where they come from. I hope more people read this book.
A class on feminist world-building gave me the opportunity to revisit Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, which was more ambiguous than I’d remembered. Though it seems to be the trendier text for thinking about the perils of the present, I found Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sowerfar more persuasive as an imminent possibility.
These visions of the future were juxtaposed with stories from the past in a course on epics and identity, which gave me the opportunity to read The Monkey and the Monk, Anthony Yu’s skillful abridgement of Journey to the West. It was just as playful and fun as I’d hoped. The juxtaposition of D. T. Niane’s re-telling of Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali and Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf made for excellent conversations on history, politics, and the qualities of a good leader. I also snuck in Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, brilliantly translated by Lisa Dillman, which I insist is an absolutely fascinating example of contemporary epic, and an urgent one for our times.
It was thanks to my book club that I read two of my favorite things this year: Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children’s Archive, and Ali Smith’s Autumn. We also read Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which was somewhat tedious yet interesting, until the last two pages, which I absolutely hated. If it were up to me, they’d be torn out of every copy, and the book would be better for it.
But that wasn’t all of my assigned reading! I was also a judge for the Best Translated Book Award. In addition to the many excellent works on the longlist (I have a particular soft spot for Alisa Ganieva’s Bride and Groom, translated by Carol Appollonio: be sure to read the afterword!), I fell in love with quite a few texts that sadly didn’t make it. Chief among them was Muck, by Dror Burstein, translated by Gabriel Levin, an astonishing planet of a book that vertiginously layers ancient and modern, humor and melancholy. And, dare I confess? I was blown away by Book Six of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, translated by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken. I’m a big fan of Amelie Nothomb, and her newest, Strike Your Heart, translated by Alison Anderson, is good as ever. And if you’re looking for a holiday gift for your favorite mischievous aunt, you might consider An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good, by Helene Tursten, translated by Marlaine Delargy.
And then there are the books that I read as part of my research, which aren’t exactly assigned, but can be freighted with a sense of obligation nonetheless. Stephanie Insley Hershinow’s Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel, however, was pure pleasure: a phenomenal study of representations of adolescence in eighteenth-century fiction. It led me to finally read Frances Burney’s Camilla, which is, it must be admitted, awfully long, maybe too long, but—like Burney’s other books—is shockingly dark and explosively funny, so one doesn’t entirely mind. Gloria Fisk’s Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literaturewas another pleasure: a compelling examination of what Pamuk’s fame, and his writing, shows us about the ways we value literature from various parts of the world. It led me to reread his White Castle, translated by Victoria Holbrooke, which was as good as I remembered, maybe even better.
I read at least one James Baldwin book per year, because I’m determined to read everything he wrote. No Name in the Street was one of the more difficult, because it is so anguished, so raw. The alienation is palpable, and the cynicism threatens to become overwhelming, as he chronicles the loss of people close to him who are gunned down or locked up, and looks around, wondering who will be next.
I have a similar project with Muriel Spark, so I started on The Informed Air, a collection of her essays, earlier this summer, but haven’t finished yet. I’m enjoying taking my time though, so I might do Robinson or A Far Cry from Kensington in the final days of December to meet my arbitrary, self-imposed goal. We’ll see.
I tore through all three of Amy Gentry’s books this year, and it was great. Although I don’t read many mysteries, I was absolutely engrossed by Good as Goneand Last Woman Standing, the latter being a really interesting meditation on misogyny and vengeance—an excellent fable for the #MeToo era. But my favorite was her 33 1/3 book about Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele—and I’m not even that big of a Tori Amos fan! It’s a fascinating work of feminist aesthetics, and features some of the most impressive writing about music I’ve ever read.
Because I have so much assigned stuff to read, I tend to have a book of poetry going somewhere in the background, to work my way through little by little. Eve Ewing’s Electric Arches was one of my favorite books last year, and one that I kept rereading this year, so I bought her new collection, 1919, as soon as it came out, and the poems, written in a variety of forms, from Biblical verse to jump-rope songs to haibun, are gorgeous, aching and wondrous.
As things worsened in Kashmir, Fatimah Asghar (whose If They Comes for Us I loved last year) tweeted a poem written by Agha Shahid Ali, and I loved it so much that I immediately acquired two of his books, The Country Without a Post Office, and Call Me Ishmael Tonight: a Book of Ghazals. Both were excellent, but Call Me Ishmael was a particularly remarkable experience, giving me a new appreciation for the ghazal form, where the cumulative power of repetition creates a mesmerizing effect.
Among other poetry favorites, there are three books that, though very different from each other, each intermingle joy and heartbreak while meditating on the specificities of a given context: Deaf Republic, by Ilya Kaminsky, Love, an Index, by Rebecca Lindenberg, and Local Talent, by David Wright. I loved Nature Poem by Tommy Pico so much that I read it three times, and went out and bought the other books in the quartet—a new reading list for next year.
I drive an hour each way to work, and I listen to audiobooks on the way, usually of contemporary fiction. My standouts this year were the unforgettable characters in Tommy Orange’s There There; the peculiar language of Anna Burns’ moody Milkman; and the gleeful, Heathers-meets-Beetlejuice strangeness of Mona Awad’s Bunny.
In the final reckoning, aside from my various lists and projects, I think there may have only been one other book that I actually picked up and read on paper, just because: Imani Perry’s Breathe: a Letter to My Sons, a stunning meditation on race, gender, resilience, and motherhood. I’ve been reading various books on parenting since my own child was born two years ago, and I can say with confidence that this is one of the best. Okay, fine, so I guess it was part of an informal syllabus too, on motherhood.
Perhaps my New Year’s resolution will be to read more impulsively . . .
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska is an Educational Arm Assistant at Asymptote. Originally from Warsaw, Poland, she currently lives in Peoria, Illinois, and is a freelance translator and professor of English at Monmouth College.