Books Read in 2022

NON-FICTION:

The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England and The War of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones

Hathaway, Oona Anne, and Scott Shapiro. The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

By Steven Pinker, 2019.

Real Americans by Jared Goldstein.

Fighting for Justice: The Improbable Journey to Exposing Cover-Ups About the JFK Assassination and the Deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen

By Mark Shaw

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut.

The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy by Samuel L. Perry and Philip S. Gorski 

 The Sexual Reformation: Restoring the Dignity and Personhood of Man and Woman. by  Aimee Byrd. Zondervan 2022.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by Graeber, David and Wengrow, David

FICTION:

Scenes from Village Life and My Michael by Amos Oz

And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov. Beautifully-rendered images of WWI-era Cossack life.

• A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolaño. 
• Portrayal of household marxism briefly enough rendered to avoid becoming tedious.

Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone.  

A novel of political theology. Remarkable portrayal of 1930s Italian countryside--its amalgams of peasantry, clerisy, socialists, and fascists. While the translated dialogue seems sometimes clunky, the interweaving of religious and political symbolism is thought-provoking and deep. Applicable to the American contemporary moment of recrudescent religious fascismo.

• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Follow Me Down, Jordan County, and Love in a Dry Season

 by Shelby Foote (a relatively and unjustly forgotten literary artist) 

Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee

The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck 

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Fantasy is not my favored literary genre, but this is about the most compellingly rendered I've encountered.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Gaiman, Neil

Shooting Star by Wallace Stegner

A change of pace for the author by his portrayal of a frustrated female protagonist amidst damaged male antagonists (the usual Stegner specialty). Title theme and images beautifully and artistically rendered. 

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

The Professor's House, Alexander's Bridge, and Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann 

         Literary and romantic finishing school for the ingenue Hans Castorp in an asylum set in the Swiss Alps. Brilliant disquistions on romance, art, humanism, and history; a bit tedious when discussing mysticism, physiology, and recorded music. Powerful, damning, and (anti-)humanistic concluding scene as history chews up the innocent.

Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

Grim but strangely affecting story of a family so impoverished as to become cretinous. Irredeemably? The main couple is more concerned with presenting respectability at their burial--which they perceive as imminent--than keeping up their health and decency. In landedness is their geneaology of respect disrupted by the capitalist classes, robbing them of the will and then the ability to survive.

Music of a Life: A Novel; Human Love: A Novel; and Requiem for a Lost Empire by Andrei Makine

Clandestines in the Soviet Empire's service set in relief with simple folk of the countrysides that hosted the gulag. Poignant scenes and images of love amidst senseless cruelty and crude corruption. The terror of history giving way to the silence of unfilled, grandiose, and profane dreams. Beautiful translations of French manuscripts adorned with dense psychological and historical detail.

The Idiot, The Insulted and the Injured, and White Nights by Dostoevsky

Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville.

 

NOT FINISHED

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (realized midway I had seen the movie adaptation)

Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker (pedestrian and annoying)