What I Read in 2013

Demography
I read 38 books--25 written in English, 13 written in French, German, Russian, Turkish, Italian, or Chinese. 15 from the nineteenth century, 12 in the twentieth, 9 in the twenty first, 2 from the eighteenth. 5 by women, which I think is 4 more than I read last year. 12 published by Penguin. 12 non-fiction.

Qualitative Analysis
Two moments in Pictures from Italy that are worth mentioning: 1. Dickens climbing a live volcano at night and scorching his hair looking over the edge, then sliding down the mountain in the snow. 2. Dickens getting up early in the morning and waiting seven hours or so to watch a public execution. Curiously, Fred Kaplan's biography of Dickens, which talks about Dickens and capital punishment, doesn't mention this episode. I finished that biography a few days ago. The biography did mention something about Dickens' visit to Italy that Dickens doesn't mention: Dickens mesmerizing one of his friend's wives at all hours of the day and night to control her seizures. Dickens' wife was not very happy about these visits.

Ultimately, Pictures from Italy wasn't as interesting a travel memoir as a book written within fifteen years of it, the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. This was written by a Jamaican woman who ran businesses and clinics in Central America and in Crimea during the Crimean War. All in all, I would have rather visited her establishment than the hospital of Florence Nightingale, who wouldn't let Seacole work for her. The third Victorian memoir this year was Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which I read with my brother. We met several times to talk about it, but never got around to formally talking about the last 100 pages, probably because they were the least interesting.

Eugenie Grandet is a great little novel by Balzac, but when I think of it, I usually think of Frederic Jameson's introduction. He talks about the dad, Grandet, and nostalgia for misers. In other words, nostalgia for a time in which the rich could simply accumulate and keep wealth, rather than a time in which being rich means circulating and investing capital. On that note, 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism had a lot of great 10-page chapters on different topics. The best chapter detailed why it's a mistake to run companies for the benefit of shareholders, since shareholders have the least risk. They can easily enter and exit the situation. Companies, instead, should be run for their employees, who have the most to lose if a company fails.

I read three novels by Zola, and I'd be surprised if I didn't read at least another three this year. All three take on different aspects of Paris during the Second Empire: department stores, in The Ladies Paradise; slums in L'Assomoir; property speculation and urban development in The Kill. I only realized, reading about the rise of the department store, how weird many ubiquitous commercial practices are, and for how long huge stores have price gouged to kill off smaller family businesses. I've also found some comfort in a line from the end of L'Assomoir, which is basically that you don't need to have grand ambitions to still fall short of them. I have two more of his that I haven't read--Nana and Germinal--but we'll see which one of his books I get to next.

I read a few books with bad endings, like the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I can live with bad endings, what I had more trouble with was the characterization. All of Chabon's characters are well-round, complex, have histories, quirks, strengths, weaknesses--and that's just the problem. The characterization feels too good. In other words, the narration falls flat for me because of the characterization, since the narration is missing some type of psychological realism. Nights at the Circus was another book that was great up until its final few pages: a conventional ending tacked on to an unconventional book.

After reading Swann's Way, it's hard not to see Proust everywhere, like in Forster's Howards's End, Casanova, Stendhal's Love or in Rousseau's Confessions, which I'm currently reading. My copy of this book (Love) was very dusty, which is probably why it took me over a year to read (it's not very long.) The quality of the aphorisms and essays varied wildly, but it will probably always have a soft spot in my heart, since I used part of it as an epigraph for the second part of the short story I published this year ("Tax Season.") The first epigraph came from a short story, "Falk," by Conrad in Typhoon.

After three years, I finished Phenomenology of Spirit. It's still up in the air whether it was a good idea for me to read this without guidance, since there's very little I could say about it as a whole, and it's easy to misunderstand. In any case, I had to articulate something about it last quarter when I presented, and will have the chance to study it in class this quarter. I also can't say much about Zizek's Plague of Fantasies, but odd parts come back to me at odd times, most often when he talks about desire, and how desire is constituted. For Zizek, there's nothing liberating about that type of self-knowledge. That's the direction I've been headed for a long time.

For the first time in six or so years, I didn't read a book by Murakami. I also didn't finish the third volume of 1001 Nights, no doubt because I discovered the curse that anyone who finishes reading it will die. For picaresque narrative I read Soul Mountain. It's hard, because the book is composed of brief episodes, to say much about it, except that a reporter gets his testicles ripped off when he poses for a photo with a panda.

I read the Making of Modern Medicine because there was a chapter on a nineteenth century cholera epidemic in Montreal, and I was about to visit Montreal. You can imagine how eager all of my friends were to glean my new knowledge on our trip. I also read, or started, Dead Souls, the Plague of Fantasies, Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist on this trip. For better or worse, I neglected to accompany my friends to a spa located on a boat to read Nietzsche and Gogol.

The List
Eugenie Grandet - Honore de Balzac
Shoplifting from American Apparel - Tao Lin
Nights at the Circus - Angela Carter
23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism - Ha-Joon Chang
A Sicilian Romance - Ann Radcliffe
Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson
The Ladies Paradise - Emile Zola
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
The Making of Modern Medicine - Michael Bliss
Phenomenology of Spirit - Hegel
Typhoon and Other Tales - Joseph Conrad
Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist - Friedrich Nietzsche
Dust of Dreams - Steven Erikson
Dead Souls - Gogol
Freya of the Seven Isles - Joseph Conrad
The Demon of Writing - Ben Kafka
Felix Holt - George Eliot
The Museum of Innocence - Orhan Pamuk
Apologia Pro Vita Sua - John Henry Newman
Pictures from Italy - Charles Dickens
The Plague of Fantasies - Slavoj Zizek
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
The Duel - Casanova
Swann's Way - Marcel Proust
Vanity Fair - William Thackeray
Professor Moriarty - Kim Newman
The Duel - Joseph Conrad
Soul Mountain - Gao Xingjian
The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands - Mary Seacole
History of Sexuality vol. 1 - Michel Foucault
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gold by the Inch - Lawrence Chua
The Kill - Emile Zola
Howard's End - EM Forster
Love - Stendhal
Engels - Terell Carver
L'Assomoir - Emile Zola