It’s that time a year again. Below is a look at my reading over the course of 2022. This is the seventh year I have done this and it’s the first time I have topped 50 books. I am not sure what was different this year, to be honest, and I doubt I will maintain the pace through 2023, but we shall see.
And here it is over time. The books in green were started in 2021.
As always, lots of good ones in there I would recommend. Here are a few highlights.
- I spent my last semester in college (2002) gallivanting / studying in Europe. On that trip a friend lent me a copy of The World According to Garp (John Irving, 1978). It was the first book I truly devoured. It changed my relationship to reading. Once I finished it, I had a thirst for more Irving. While in Europe, I bought and read Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), and A Widow for One Year (1998). I’ve read a few of his books since that time, but none in the past 10 years or so. When I heard that The Last Chairlift (2022) was going to be his last I figured it was a good reason to pick him up again. I enjoyed the read – many characters worthy of investment. The main character (Adam Brewster) was a wrestler at Exeter Academy (just like Irving) and went on to become an author. Adam’s mother, “Little Ray” is a ski instructor who has a lifelong relationship with the “trail groomer” / “old ski patroller” (Molly) and marries (mostly to quiet some rumors) the “little snowshoer” / “little English teacher” (Elliot) whom Adam says is “the best father I could have had.” These were just some of the characters that were easy to fall in love with. I enjoyed Irving’s use of descriptive names to refer to the characters throughout the book (e.g., “the snowshoer” or “the trail groomer”). My favorite was the “diaper man” and the “infant emeritus” which he used to refer to Adam’s grandfather (a retired principal emeritus) who at Little Ray’s wedding to the snowshoer had “picked [that day] to stop walking and start crawling”. “Crawling around the big barbecue, on all fours, was the infantile Principal Brewster. He was not yet wearing his father-of-the-bride clothes, only his diaper.”
- George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021) is not like anything I read before. It is basically the book version of Saunders’ Syracuse University seminar on Russian short-story authors of the 19th century (“a high-water period for the form”). As the subtitle says, it is a book In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. Saunders says that “this is a book for writers but also, I hope, for readers.” I clearly fall in the second category. As a reader I found it gave a new appreciation for the short story and the need for “ruthless efficiency” (you have limited space so everything must be there for a reason – it has to provide value to the story). One of the stories in the book is Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” which includes the following passage (one I found particularly powerful, poignant, and brutal) spoken by the narrator (Ivan Ivanych):
Look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying— Yet in all the houses and on all the streets there is peace and quiet; of the fifty thousand people who live in our town there is not one who would cry out, who would vent his indignation aloud. We see the people who go to market, eat by day, sleep by night, who babble nonsense, marry, grow old, good-naturedly drag their dead to the cemetery, but we do not see or hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is peaceful and quiet and only mute statistics protest: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead of malnutrition— And such a state of things is evidently necessary; obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence, and if there were not this silence, happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him—illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives with ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind—and all is well. - Before this past year I had not read any Emily St. John Mandel and over 2023 I read 5 of her books. I started with Station Eleven (2014) which is a fantastic book. It was adapted for TV and released on HBO towards the end of 2021; this is how I learned about the book. I watched the series (after reading the book) and I liked them both (which is rare). The book is a story of survival set in a post-pandemic world where the “Georgia Flu” wiped out most of civilization. It was a pretty wild read especially given that it was written years before the COVID-19 pandemic. After Station Eleven, the next two ESJM books I would recommend are: The Glass Hotel (2020) and The Singer’s Gun (2010).
- I have felt for a long time that I had a large knowledge gap when it came Reconstruction which I needed to close. I am sure we touched on it in school, but it must have been pretty cursory. From the end of Reconstruction through the middle of the twentieth century, the history of Reconstruction was dominated by what became known as the Dunning School (named after William Dunning of Columbia). In Black Reconstruction (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois said that “fortified by long study of the facts” he stood “literally aghast at what American historians have done to the field.” Eric Foner set out, in Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988), to provide a “coherent, comprehensive modern account of Reconstruction.” In that, he succeeded. Since its writing, it has stood as the definitive history of the era. The magnitude of what Reconstruction set out to accomplish and the initial successes in achieving its aims where dwarfed by the regression that occurred in the late 1800s. Foner’s summarizes this well: “Over a century ago, prodded by the demands of four million men and women just emerging from slavery, Americans made their first attempt to live up to the noble professions of their political creed – something few societies have ever done. The effort produced a sweeping redefinition of the nation’s public life and a violent reaction that ultimately destroyed much, but by no means all, of what had been accomplished.”
- I have always been fascinated by post-war Germany. How did a population come to terms with the horrors committed in their name? How is it that a defeated nation that had just committed genocide and crimes against humanity (as an aside East West Street (2016) is a dual biography of the men that are most associated with the introduction of those two phrases as part of the Nuremburg trials) was, by the end of the century, a respected member of the community of nation with the world’s 4th largest economy?* Harald Jähner’s Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 (2019 in Germany, 2022 in the US) seeks to answer these questions. After reading the book, my sense of the first question is that they didn’t – at least not at first. Immediately after the war, life was hard for the average German and while we tend to lack sympathy given what they had just done, from their perspective they were focused on their own hardships rather than the atrocities of the war.
The difference between Nazi Party members and opponents of the regime now paled quickly, to make way for the moral value that was most important in post-war thinking: whether one could remain even partly respectable amidst the general collapse, and maintain any kind of ethical standard in the struggle for survival.
The hushing-up of the extermination camps continued after the end of the war, even though the Allies tried to forcibly confront the defeated German people with evidence of Nazi crimes. Post-war Chancellor Helmut Kohl used the sardonic phrase “the blessing of late birth” to suggest that the younger generation had no right to feel quite so superior to the one that came before.
It was the generation coming of age after the war that initiated the coming-to-terms. Here is a quote from a 28-year-old in 1947, “Most of our parents went along with the madness, partly out of carelessness, but also out of a lack of conscience. Of course they influenced us, their children, and thus assumed a great burden of guilt.” Given the horrors of WWII and the societal upheaval that followed the war, it is amazing to look at the success of today’s Germany. This success can be tied in no small part to the Cold War and the competition that formed between the USSR and the US; this led both (although much more the US and her post-war allies) to invest in their pieces of Germany in a game of one-upmanship. The failure of the US’s Reconstruction was driven in large part by the North’s giving up; this did not happen with post-war Germany – the US was incentivized to remain engaged and see it through to success.
As has become standard in these annual posts to do some looking at the data Below shows the number of pages in each of the 53 finished books. This totals 18,611 pages (average of 351).
And here is graph showing the pages read per day by book.
My pace of 51 pages per day was almost double last year’s 28. Below is a year over year look.
Previous posts on books read: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016
(Chart creation code can be found here.)