What I read in 2021 & what I'll read in 2022

When I think about what I am going to read for the year or what I have read, I focus mainly on whole novels, memoirs or books of essays that I have completed, ignoring the little scraps of reading I do, often in the form of reading a poem here or there.

But you can find a whole world in a single poem. And most of us are probably voracious readers who move from a book to a magazine to the cereal box to an article online (about, say, literary controversies).

So it seems fitting to note that after reading a New Yorker article  about Paul Celan and wartime poetry that mentioned Wilfred Owen, I grabbed down from the shelf the old anthology of poetry I spirited away from my father to look up Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est." Then I left the book open to that page for a few weeks. I suppose to commune, for a while, with this idea:

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

That's reading, right? The one-off poem. A single verse could save your life, so maybe I can log it here. I'd read the poem 1,000 years ago at school and it's as stunning as ever.

This past year was a particularly fertile year for reading. I read voraciously -- maybe extra voraciously! In my diary, I find notes about days in which I read bits from five or six or even seven different books. I guess that doesn't speak well of my ability to concentrate but I wanted to wallow in reading at times, I wanted to bathe in books. You, too?

I also read vastly contrasting books -- so one day in March, while I was reading Le Carre's Legacy of Spies I was also listening to the audiobook of Blue Highways (for that course on travel literature that got canceled), before dipping into Il Pane Perduto (an Italian memoir), La Stanza del Vescovo (I re-read it after the ALTA judging; it was a finalist in our contest) and a compilation of "Mafalda" comics (in Spanish -- some of the panels escape me because I don't have a big vocabulary (!) but when I understand what the little Spanish-speaking cherub is saying, it is deeply satisfying!)

Some of my reading resulted in reviews that I published here and there. For example, I reviewed the Italian memoir Distant Fathers written by Marina Jarre and translated by Ann Goldstein (a.k.a. Elena Ferrante's translator).

Indeed, there were lots of memoirs in the early part of the year! Including a book by New York Times editorial board member Brent Staples: Parallel Time. I teach an essay by Staples called "Black Men and Public Space" and have long wanted to read his memoir, which did not disappoint.

I also finally "discovered" Rebecca Solnit. In Wanderlust, she writes, “Walking ideally is a state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord.” And, “Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.” The Gospel according to Rebecca!

And then around the time I went to the New York Public Library for the translation and research fellowship, I switched back to heavy Italian reading.

In all, I read 40 of books from start to finish, and 15 I perused without finishing. That's not great; my Uncle Larry reads something like 80 books a year.

Some of the books I actually read:

A Stranger's Pose, by Emanuel Iduma (travelogue)
Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon (travelogue)

Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever (memoir)

Parallel Time, Brent Staples (memoir)
The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster (memoir)
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott (memoir/writing guide)
Distant Fathers, Marina Jarre (memoir)

Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin (essays)
Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit (essays)

Bourdain: The Official Oral Biography of Anthony Bourdain
JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century by Frederik Logevall (biography)

Northern Spy, Flynn Berry (novel)

Voices within the Ark: Modern Jewish Poetry (anthology)

Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong (poetry)

Some books in Italian (outside of NYPL fellowship)

Anna by Niccolo' Ammaniti (novel -- er -- romanzo!)

Non ti muovere by Margaret Mazzantini (novel)

Tre volte all'alba by Alessandro Baricco (novel)

Il Pane Perduto by Edith Bruck (memoir)

Notable non-book reading

*Cards and letters from the New Yorker cartoonist Jack Ziegler to my uncle (they were friends)

*The photo albums my mother painstakingly compiled when we were children

What I read at the New York Public Library for my fellowship (at least in part):

*Smoke Over Birkenau by Liana Millu (translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, my old Bennington prof!)

*Voci della Shoah: Testimonianze per non dimenticare

*Giorgio Agamben’s Quel che resta di Auschwitz (In English: The Remnants of Auschwitz)

*Auschwitz by Frediano Sessi

*Il libro della memoria: Gli ebrei deportati dall'Italia (Liliana Picciotto)

This last book ("The Memory Book") contains a directory of all the Jews deported from Italy during the war – a stunning directory; the book, which beyond the directory includes historical information and citations to explain sources of information, is 1,000 pages. It’s like a doorstop.

I noted the entry for Primo Levi:

“Nato a Torino il 31.07.1919, figlio di Cesare e Luzzatti Ester. Ultima residenza nota: Torino. Arrestato a Brusson 12/13/1943 da italiani. Detenuto ad Aosta caserma, Fossoli campo. Deportato da Fossoli 2/22/1944 ad Auschwitz. Matricola: 174517."

Some of the books I'd planned to read but did not:

Art and Ardor by Cynthia Ozick (to be fair, I started reading it but didn't like it) 
What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forche

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold 
Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey

Books I began but did not finish:

*Horizontal Vertical: A City Called Mexico by Juan Villoro

*The Best of Me by David Sedaris (essays)

*Will's Boy by Wright Morris 

What I'd like to read in 2022:

*Forty-one False Starts (essays) by Janet Malcolm

*Horizontal Vertical: A City Called Mexico by Juan Villoro

*What You Have Heard Is True 

*The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

*Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey

*Something, anything by Patrick Modiano (possibly Dora Bruder)

*The Secret History by Donna Tartt (about Bennington!)

*Lezioni di tenebra by Helena Janeczek

*The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin

ALSO:

*Any book my father owned or recommended (including perhaps Alan Turing: The Enigma)

What did you read? What will you be reading in the new year? Comment here or on social media. Happy reading!

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