Happy New Year, reader! To ring in the ’20s, we are getting personal and sharing our own reading resolutions. From literature engaged with the effects of climate change to classic theological texts, here are the reads we have on the radar for 2020. Maybe our titles overlap with some of yours? If you’re inspired, share your resolutions with us in the comments below.
Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor:
We are becoming ever more impelled by the worst-case scenarios, the ultimate consequences of our carelessness. Climate change is cemented at the pinnacle of every engaged mind, consuming the concerns of those on the forefront of human progress—the writers. December is a month of returns, and a trip across the Pacific on my part meant a reabsorption into the beloved stacks of books left behind by a past self who had endlessly imagined the present. I found in those volumes an incredible vitality—it takes considerably more courage to speculate on the future now, yet in our infinitely ideating language, we can’t help it, we imagine naturally, as we have always done.
Usually my reading directives are predictable, by which I mean they’re somewhat “in accordance” with my being a female Chinese poet—the tendency veers towards a healthy majority of women writers, plenty of Chinese literature, and as much poetry as possible. As we approach the new decade, however, I’ve turned my attention to literature more specifically in dialogue with our planet. In Amitav Ghosh’s beautifully urgent book-length essay, The Great Derangement, he convincingly argues for an overhaul of the fiction genre so that it may better address and reflect upon our contemporary precarity. Though the best of our stories are inevitably engaged with our environment, I found Ghosh’s take riveting in its insistence that we continue to build and invent language that is ever more precise, alert, and curious.
Catastrophes will affect us all disproportionately, so in 2020, I aim to read more from the regions that stand to lose the most as we teeter on collapse. Southeast Asia is astounding with literary riches, from the feminist works of Indonesian author Ayu Utami (recently interviewed on the blog) to the sensitive verse of Vietnamese poet Nguyen Duy. The prospect of becoming more acquainted with these immensely variant and potent national literatures is thrilling. Of South American literature as well, I’ve always leaned hard on certain lionized Argentines, but as Brazil made headlines around the world this year, I’ve been curious beyond at the vast literary landscapes beyond Clarice Lispector. I’ve also already plumped the shelves, indebted to Verso’s incredibly generous end-of-year sale, with titles addressing climate change directly, including The Shock of the Anthropocene by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, translated by David Fernbach, and The Lamentations of Zeno by Ilija Trojanow, translated by Philip Boehm.
I could go on with the places and the titles, but my overarching resolution is to read ever more mindfully, with a sense of duty that is by no means resented, but instead feels sacred as the worlds held in pages live out their miraculous language through this act, reading, this communion. In those worlds we find hope for our own. I never forget that there are things only literature can do, and I never forget that the role of literature is to save us from ourselves. The language we gain from great texts move through us to heighten our speech, our actions, and our moralities. I’ve, at times, felt guilty for devoting myself to writing while there is so much need for organized, contributive action (sending my friends panicked texts: “Should I just go work at an NGO??”), but every time I close a book, filled to the brim with its gifts, I regain the conviction that writing is an act of enormous generosity, and that, while unable to halt rising temperatures or depleting water supplies, it provides a sanctuary for all the things worth protecting, the reason why we fight to live.
A decade falls into retrospect, and I find myself reaching for my well-loved copy of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. On this day—a day, like all others, full of beginnings—I leave you with his words that have given me so much comfort:
Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic . . .
To devastation and what comes after devastation. To our time, which, by way of being immeasurable, never runs out.
Sarah Moore, Assistant Blog Editor
This year I discovered the writing of the Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi through her two-part autobiography—A Daughter of Isis (ZED, 2018) and Walking Through Fire (ZED, 2018). El Saadawi is an activist who has fought for women’s rights, fiercely opposing practices such as FGM but she is also an incredibly talented writer of novels and non-fiction. I am looking forward to reading her Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, which will be released in February 2020 with ZED books. El Saadawi was imprisoned, along with other Egyptian intellectuals, in 1981 by the Sadat regime in Egypt. This account narrates how her and her fellow inmates survived and resisted with, one can imagine, the same indomitable spirit displayed in her autobiography.
Other new releases that I’m looking forward to include Abigail by Hungarian writer Magda Szabó (NYRB, January 2020) and A Woman by Italian feminist Sibilla Aleramo (Penguin Classics, June 2020). Magda Szabó’s The Door is a masterpiece in exploring loneliness and shame, and Katalin Street was a powerful portrait of a family whose lives are torn apart in Budapest under German occupation. Abigail is Szabó’s most widely read novel in Hungary and is a coming-of-age story of a young girl growing up in Hungary during World War II. First published in 1906, A Woman is semi-autobiographical and one of the first explicitly feminist Italian novels. Set in Milan and a southern Italian village around 1900, it recounts the life of a young woman forced into an unhappy and abusive marriage and is now considered a classic of Italian feminist literature.
As well as new releases, a particular reading goal for 2020 is to read the entire works of an author I already admire. Reading the new English translation this year of Calvino‘s The Baron in the Trees reminded me how intelligent, inventive, and enjoyable his works are. Although prolific, and I have so far only read a handful of his works, I intend to take on the challenge (and pleasure!) of reading his whole œuvre.
Rachel Allen, Assistant Blog Editor
Reading only starts as resolution; allusion soon effects drift. Maybe intentions to read are, functionally, more like prayers than like plans. (That is if you, with Simone Weil, think that prayers have the function of directing attention.) Apparently, we expect something by making them; that that something is “achievement” is not obvious. In any case, here is my prayer for 2020, which fittingly begins with a suite of canonical religious works and some of their theological spawn. I’d like to read more of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, plus Robert Alter’s recent translation of the Hebrew Bible, and Bernard McGinn’s anthology of Christian mystical writings. Jacques Roubaud erects something canon-shaped in “the project” that began with the totalizing and abyssal The Great Fire of London, and it was from him that I learned about Prae, a Hungarian work by Miklós Szentkuthy not entirely dissimilar to Roubaud’s in scope and ambition. I am also keen to read St. Orpheus’ Breviary, Szentkuthy’s baroque ten-volume epic spanning 2000 years and encompassing much philosophical and religious history, which Roubaud does not discuss. Finally, I look forward to Mark de Silva’s Points of Attack, out later this year from CLASH Books.
*****
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