Throughout December The Millions bombarded the collective sensoria with a series called "A Year in Reading."I grew increasingly concerned as the month went on. Many of my friends should have been asked what they read, but they were looked over. It seemed to be a little popularity contest. So I’ve taken matters into my own hands, on behalf of my friends and perhaps, given the general lack of guys interviewed in the series, the “fellas.”
Jake Bittle
I read a lot of great books in 2022, many of them on the longer side. I read Edna O'Brien's trilogy The Country Girls, which I found just as raw and engaging as Ferrante. I read Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters, which expanded my ideas about what a social novel can and should be. I read Conrad's Lord Jim, maybe the hardest non-Henry James book I've read in a while, and Flaubert, and Naipaul, and discovered new novelists, Mishima and Jane Bowles and Leonora Carrington, and even read a lot of great nonfiction for the first time in years. But none of these books did as much for me as Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, which I reread in its entirety from March through May. Often condemned as comically long, or misunderstood and misconstrued by people who've only read the opening volume, Proust's masterpiece is a unique kind of book, a book that simulates not the subjective experience of life, as so many other great modernist novels do, but the experience of reconstituting one's life in one's own memory. It features some of the greatest sentences ever put to paper, sentences of profound complexity and baffling power, so that often the pleasure of reading the book feels almost guilty. Critics and philosophers much smarter than me have written at length about Proust's philosophy of time and memory, his unparalleled skill as an ekphrastic and a naturalistic writer, so I'll just add one thing: In Search of Lost Time is also one of the great novels of class. It depicts a society with innumerable class distinctions, not just between the bourgeois and the aristocracy but also between various types of merchant, artist, intellectual, doctor, duke, marquis, princess, foreign noble, diplomat, politicians, peasant, aunt, maid, spinster, and so on. Living as I do in a city full of secret heiresses, hackish artists, turncoat writers besotted by money, insidious faux revolutionaries, and layabout would-be aristocrats, it was hard not to see the Faubourg Saint-Germain as a distorted picture of my own New York. Of course, that act of historical misperception is itself the kind of intellectual folly Proust depicts with such consummate skill.
Chris Crowley
Last year, I went to a bunch of basketball games including two of the worst I’ve ever seen — a late-season, sloppy Nets loss against the Raptors, and another Nets loss to the Celtics during the first round of the playoffs — but I also got to see my Knicks lose to a LaMelo Ball-less Hornets squad on MLK Day. (Didn’t matter MSG is a riot.) The one book I read about the beautiful game (what we call basketball) made up for all the times I went to Barclays despite knowing better
New Yorkers love to talk about how everything started sucking the moment they got here, and how good things used to be. For Knicks fans around my age, this is actually true, in that the Knicks were at least contenders, okay. I got to relive the past through Chris Herring's Blood In The Garden, which corrects the record – and religious fervor around Jordan – by arguing the Knicks were the most important team of the '90s. (Cue Stockton dunking on MJ). I really enjoyed Sam Anderson's Boomtown, the mention of which is mostly a chance to state once again that the greatest sporting event ever was the 2016 Western Conference Finals (except the last game). The book that I have thought about most this year, though, is Bill Bufford's Among The Thugs, a book about English soccer hooligans that's really about crowd violence (and also guys who really love being one of the lads.) It is repulsive and engrossing.
My interests were otherwise all over the place, ranging from Strangers To Ourselves by Rachel Aviv (maybe my favorite New Yorker writer, and another contender for the Book of the Year) to City of Quartz by Mike Davis to Flyboy in the Buttermilk by Greg Tate (essential reading), and Dreamland by Sam Quinones (I thought the writing was stifled but I think I have a much better understanding of the opioid crisis now). Now that I'm thinking about it I realize this was a big year for me and New Yorker writers: Aviv, Jamaica Kincaid's Talk Stories (need to study it), and Hua Hsu's Stay True (relevant to my life, let's say).
I no longer regret waiting a while to read Franchise, Marcia Chatelain's book about the relationship between black Americans and McDonald's, because the reading felt enriched by these last few years. I made my first foray into the Elena Ferrante Extended Universe with The Days of Abandonment, which made me feel insane, but not everything was good. I read Michael Pollan's This Is Your Mind On Plants, which felt like an attempt to cash in on the attention around How to Change Your Mind, and Grace Cho's Tastes Like War… which, well, felt off to me. The writing is stiff! Anyway. To end on a positive note, after talking endlessly about the 1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, and stating somewhere around 12 times this year that it may be the greatest movie ever made, my girlfriend got me a collection of all of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels. I've read three so far, and I keep talking about going "Ripley mode" in Italy this summer.
Micah Cash
For the third year in a row, so many year-end lists began with an obligatory acknowledgement of how awful 2022 was, despite all the great books. I tend instead to agree with Dean Kissick: “life is still beautiful, it’s culture that’s in the doldrums.” But as Amina Cain writes in Indelicacy, the best and most unexpected novel I read this year, “I knew how lucky I was; I could’ve had to work at a glue factory.”
The theme for my year in reading was obsession. In real life I moved from South Harlem to Brooklyn, finished a thesis, and juggled a carousel of freelance jobs. Lacking the time to devote myself to anything, perhaps I hoped the fanaticism of the authors would compel me through literary osmosis.
Peter Stamm’s succinct, brooding Agnes and John Fante’s under-appreciated American classic Ask the Dust boldly ask: what if a lost dude fell into all-consuming thrall with a woman who may or may not be real? Not to be left out, men had their turn as objects of obsession in Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy, and Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir (which I read between Christmas and New Years, when no-one was left in the city to see me holding the thirst trap cover).
Some obsessions are political, as in the French crime novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Nada, a lightning-quick account of an anarchist plot to kidnap the American ambassador. While some members of the titular groupuscule give in to moderation or apathy, the heroic Cash is clear-eyed in her aims: “I believe in universal harmony, and in the destruction of the pitiful civilized state. My cool and chic exterior hides the wild flames of a burning hatred for techno-bureaucratic capitalism.”
In Percival Everett’s Erasure, an obscure academic writer develops an envious obsession with the latest Black American bestseller. Needing some quick cash, he stoops to write a bestseller of his own, and the provocative parody appears as a novel inside the novel. Everett is frequently hilarious, but what sticks with me from Erasure are the breathtaking scenes of grief and loss.
And for those who like me spent an embarrassing amount of 2022 playing online chess, I recommend Stefan Zweig’s 1941 Chess Story, a slim NYRB beauty. Written during Zweig’s exile in Brazil in the year of his suicide, the novella tells the story of Dr. B, kept in solitary confinement by the Nazis with nothing but a stolen chess book to occupy himself. Soon he loses even the book, and after weeks of playing only against himself in his own head, he descends into madness, only to reemerge on a boat to South America with the world champion on board. Next year may all our obsessions end in such a shot at redemption.
Zain Khalid
Rarely is a book injurious. Though it seems Changes: Notes on Choreography, by Merce Cunningham, can only be read properly by a contortionist. The writing, when legible, is askew or upside down, contoured into pyramids and kites. Photographs and illustrations of dancers, stage designs, and musical compositions overlap and sever each other. The resulting panorama provides insight into the mind of an exacting choreographer who collaborated with artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Isamu Noguchi to embody space and time. Still, when reading the book, one looks deranged; it has to be rotated, angled, flipped, danced with. The presumed thesis comes as a diary entry and can be found in a slight and fading paragraph of typewritten text: "clarity is the lowest form of poetry." All well and good, but as I was milly rocking with this book in the vestibule of a bar this winter, an overzealous diner opened the outer door into my side. It wasn't too painful then, but an hour later, I swear I could hear my arm's hinge begin to click. When I attempted a self-diagnosis in the middle of the night, the internet suggested hypochondria—or a mild case of lateral epicondylitis.
Andres Vaamonde
2022 was my year of really trying to try to be a writer. I left a lease and a full-time job to take a position as a writer-in-residence at a small university in Amish country. I spent winter and spring adding a lot of words, and a lot of commas, to a Big Long Google Doc. A full trip around the sun later and I remain without lease and without a full-time job. I’m also without a book. What I’ve got is a fraying passport, an unfounded(?) worry that I’m losing my hair, and a list of Venmo transfers that I do not intend to report to the IRS.
2022 was also my year of books about people who see trouble coming a mile away but dive towards it anyhow. I started in early January with Paul Auster’s CITY OF GLASS, a mystery novel about a mystery author who decides to investigate the mysterious case of an insane scholar after receiving a phone call intended for a man named Paul Auster (no, obviously not that one, silly). Great confusing fun. Icy Hot for anyone sore of autofiction. I continued on thereafter with a bunch of buzzy contemporary titles—most notably Marlowe Granados’s HAPPY HOUR, a novel about two friends out on the loose in the city for the summer. Hemingway for the girlies? I loved it, even despite the Rockaway surf lifestyle slander. I recommend force-feeding this novel to certain male friends of yours. Tell them it’s recon, idk. My last book of the year was Bill Buford’s nonfiction AMONG THE THUGS, in which the author journeys into the fetid armpit of English football hooliganism in the late 1980s. Oh my. Immersive, slow-broiling storytelling. A lucid explication of the theory of crowds. But also—did you know that you can suck an eyeball out of its socket? I sure didn’t. This book is a good experiment for anyone coming down off the World Cup to determine for themselves whether or not ball really is life. Ball certainly is life, meanwhile, for the protagonist of my very favorite read of the year: BORGES AND THE ETERNAL ORANG-UTANS, a fickle little caper about a struggling literary critic who witnesses a murder at an Edgar Allan Poe convention in Buenos Aires and thereafter lucks into the unofficial gig of trying to crack the increasingly convoluted case with—yup, you guessed it—Jorge Luis Borges himself. Of course, aLl Is NoT wHaT iT sEeMs. In the final chapters, the minotaur finds his way out of the labyrinth and into the dim Cretan morning in a somewhat expected (yet irrepressibly charming) twist. There’s a bunch of pseudo-Borgesian mythological mumbo jumbo in the middle, yes. But this super short book is also just completely irresistible to anyone trying and failing to hack it. Brazilian author Luis Fernando Verissimo says: Maybe you’re just not hacking like you mean it? Have you tried committing to the bit?
Duncan Stuart
In 2022 I finished Aleksandar Tišma’s Novi Sad trilogy, concluding with the final and bleakest volume, Kapo (NYRB 2021). Kapos were Jewish inmates of the concentration camps who were made prison guards in exchange for better treatment and rations. Kapo follows Lamian, a former kapo in Auschwitz who survived the war and its aftermath. Tišma’s portrayal of what can only be described as absolute guilt is equal parts masterful and horrific. Tišma, who hails from Serbia, is consider a pessimistic writer in the extreme but in Kapo it is the moral arc of the universe that has the last laugh. In March I was excited to get my hands on a reissue of some long out of print essays by Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, collected anew and published as Essays, Paradoxes and Soliloquies (Sublunary Editions 2022). Spain, these days, is known for anything but literature; the only time Spaniards are inclined to spill ink is while making chipirones en su tinta. This very absence, Unamuno claims over a series of exquisite and unique essays, is itself due to the fact Spaniards live their philosophy rather than discuss it. Finally, I got around to reading Australian writer Luke Carman. His essay collection Intimate Antipathies (Giramondo 2019) is equal parts cynical and romantic. From literary festivals to the novels of Gerald Murnane via a bout of insanity, Carman casts his critical eye over all aspects of Australia’s literary hellscape and takes them apart one by one. Australians pride themselves on their convict roots, but really, they are the descendants of prison guards, at least culturally. Carman proves a rare exception.
Noah Kumin
In January of this year I started working full time on the Mars Review of Books. As a consequence I've probably done less reading for pleasure this year than any other year in my adult life. Mostly I've been reading pieces for the magazine, tweets, messages on Signal or Urbit. One reprieve was when I went to Normandy for ten days to read through the oeuvre of the late, great gnoseologist Roberto Calasso. His writing confirmed for me a suspicion I've always had that modern life is but a sick parody of existence and literature is the only thing that really matters. Yesterday I read and enjoyed the first half of Tao Lin's Leave Society. Also, a book I've read that helped me cultivate an elite mindset was Way of the Wolf by Jordan Belfort.
Zak Gill
Greetings from my office in sunny West Hollywood, CA
What a momentous year of books it’s been for me, when I can manage to gather my wits against that incessant plastic ping coming in through each and every open window. I won’t be able to list it all, so here’s some highlights (and even a few lowlights): I read some fine works from some grim Europeans, namely Sebald’s Vertigo and Bernhard’s Concrete; I read more playful fiction from the UK, like Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary and Henry Green’s Concluding, easily one of the greatest novels I’ve ever come across; I read dire nonfiction, including The Cryptopians by Laura Shin and The Space Barons by Christian Davenport (and I read Astrotopia by Mary-Jane Rubenstein and Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles, both of which are cerebral, vivid books, and are decidedly not dire); I read fine film criticism from the Fireflies Press Decadent Editions series, like Melissa Anderson’s monograph on Inland Empire and Dennis Lim’s excellent book on Hong’s Tale of Cinema; and I waded a bit further into the world of small press books, the best of which I read being Elle Nash’s devastating Gag Reflex, Mike Nagel’s hilarious Duplex, Jon Berger’s gorgeous Goon Dog, and especially Calvin Westra’s Donald Goines, one of the best books to come out in these United States this year or any year.
A wiffle ball just flew in through the bay window one office over. I’m going to find the kid at the other end, and when I do, I’m going to murder him in bright, broad daylight and cold blood
Sam Venis
This was my first full year of life in New York, and also the first devoted to writing, so 2022 was a period of many transitions. A friend joked recently that I became a different person every four months. I think my reading reflects that.
It started with a breakup and a frantic move. I spent the first few months of the year holed up in a studio apartment in Williamsburg thirsting on personal essays and memoir; like Jonathan Franzen’s How To Be Alone, Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, and my hometown girl, Alice Munro’s Selected Stories. In “Family Furnishings”, probably the best story in the collection, Munro is re-introduced to her childhood hero (her aunt) only to find that she’s insufferable, and the story ends with Munro ditching her aunt’s funeral, and lying. Living within my own little story of escape, it seemed an apt parable for the mixed burdens of freedom. I also read Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, a series of “travel logs” so cliche you’d be shot for writing them today. The collection includes essays on tripping in Amsterdam, falling in love at a full moon party, and whatever one does at Burning Man.
Cary Stough
It was my intention to dedicate at least half the year to a single author. The effort failed, but the formal residue remained. The year began in pleasure: “The Stein Year,” rereading The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, then Everybody’s Biography, then How to Write, a book she wrote waiting for car repairs. This seemed necessary. I thought maybe it would be “The Knausgaard Year,” but, halfway through the first volume I didn’t know who I was anymore. I increased my dose of Buspirone. Naturally, what followed was a return, a sort of mewling-digging through philosophy, “The Phenomenology Year,” to be terminologically exact. I wish someone had warned me. I read Husserl’s The Crisis in European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, still unsure of whether the title refers to two different crises or two different books. Around this time, my little family experienced a loss. Funny how division makes a little family littler. A crisis, alright. I had finished The Gift of Death in March, but needed Derrida’s help with Husserl, so I read Voice and Phenomena, then Aporias, too. I’m confused by what the French fellas meant by “access.” Access to Being towards death, for example. June. Death sent its second drop shot: my Granny, Betty Shirkey, an Ozarkian. I thought, if there was ever a time—I said hello to “The Heidegger Year.” Reclined atop the deceased’s duvet, I read “Life has its own kind of being, but it is essentially accessible to Dasein.” What could that mean? On the way back, I wrote a much delayed and unpublishable elegy for C.D. Wright, another Ozarkian.
I brought two books on the plane, actually: Being and Time as well as The Adversary, by Emmanuel Carrere. I was doing a deep dive. I would be writing a review of Carrere’s Yoga for The Cleveland Review of Books in August and was preparing. I began to see life as a kind of being that only death understood. I read My Life As A Russian Novel and cried. I read Lives Other Than My Own and cried. I read The Kingdom and considered getting a PhD. The only poetry book I read this year was Hyperphantasia by Sara Deniz Akant, and loved it, but wondered how we'd been transported back to 2009 all of a sudden. I read Bernadette Mayer’s latest/last book, Milkweed Smithereens, late in the summer and nearly finished a review of it when, in November, we all received the most awful news. I read The Letters of Rosemary and Bernadette Mayer, 1976-1980 and Bernadette’s book of letter-poems, The Desires of Mothers To Please Others In Letters. Now I’m writing an essay about sisterhood (something I know nothing about) and death (something I wish, like Spinoza, I knew nothing about). Today, December 23, 2022, I read the first page of Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. It begins: “In every day’s newspaper there are stories about the two subjects I have brought together in this book…disgrace…and disaffection.” I’m tired. Give me a break. A beer.
Daniel Rathburn
This year brought lots of change for me, and my reading was sporadic. I spent most of it becoming an Elite Tight End, getting closer to God, and falling in love — not necessarily in that order.
The best book I read this year was (sorry) My Struggle Vol. 1. In July, I took a trip to my parents’ house in Michigan. It provided the perfect backdrop for Knausgaard’s moody epic, consisting in Volume One of tales about getting drunk as a teenager, long passages about the virtue of art and writing, and complaints that the love of his children don’t affect him as much as looking at a painting.
It also contains a nice explanation of why I think working from home sucks:
“At home in our flat everything was us, there was no distance; if I was troubled the flat was also troubled. But here there was distance, here the surroundings had nothing to do with me, and they could shield me from whatever was troubling me.”
As the Slack sound bounced off the walls of my bedroom, Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death gave my banal dissatisfaction—with my job, with life—a world-historical weight.
My attention span has gotten worse since I got a proper 9–5 at the end of 2021, which meant I kept my literacy alive with lots of short-form stuff, mostly reading print editions of Bookforum and the LRB and NYRB.
On the train on my way to play football with my friends at McCarren Park, I encountered the best poem I read this year, in the Jan. 13, 2022 NYRB issue, which was later used as a goal post. The poem was “Laxness” by Cyrus Console, named after the Icelandic writer who you’ve probably heard about if you’re engaged with a certain annoying arm of literary Twitter.
The poem begins with the narrator walking a dog he’s euthanizing later that day, which is the best metaphor for writing a poem I’ve ever heard. Based on the strength of “Laxness”, I read Console’s (who grew up with Ben Lerner in Topeka) Romanian Notebook and The Odiocy. Nothing affected me so much as my first brush with Console, but his poetry is both funny and sincere in the way Lerner’s is, which I plan to revisit next year.
I read other stuff too — mostly essays (Leonard Michaels, DH Lawrence, Niebuhr) and stories (Brodkey, Murnane, Hazzard). If you haven’t read Brodkey, I recommend “Hofstedt and Jean and Others” and the cunnilingus story. The latter contains one of the best lines about a beautiful woman in all of literature: "To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die.” On Brodkey you should also read Justin Taylor’s 2017 BF piece.
Here’s to a year of intention, doing whatever it takes to keep that dawg in you, and love.