Thursday, January 2, 2014

Books Read 2013

2013 was Marooned Off Vesta's first full year, and I've decided to mark it by beginning a tradition (stolen both in concept and in form from Richard, who was also the reason I read quite a large number of these books) of a big round-up post of all the books I read in the past year. In 2013, for a variety of reasons which I mostly hope do not repeat, I read an awful lot. First the list; afterwards, some statistics and comments.

Links are to posts where I wrote about or after, or posted an excerpt from, the book or writer in question.

1. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
2. John Hawkes, The Passion Artist
3. Kate Zambreno, Heroines
4. Thomas Bernhard, The Loser
5. Marina Tsvetaeva, After Russia (trans. Michael M. Naydan with Slava Yastremski)
6. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2012 issue
7. Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (re-read)
8. Christine Schutt, Prosperous Friends
9. Plato, Theaetetus (trans. M.J. Levett, revised by Myles Burnyeat)
10. Clifford D. Simak, Why Call Them Back from Heaven?
11. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
12. Plato, Sophist (trans. Nicholas P. White)
13. Lyn Hejinian, My Life (1987 version)
14. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies (trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards)
15. Dorothy M. Richardson, Pointed Roofs (Pilgrimage 1)
16. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
17. Plato, Statesman (trans. C.J. Rowe)
18. Gabriel Josipovici, Infinity: The Story of a Moment
19. Mary Shelley, Mathilda (re-read)
20. Angélica Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial (trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)
21. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn)
22. Denise Levertov, With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads
23. James Joyce, Chamber Music
24. Samuel Beckett, Endgame
25. Lars Iyer, Spurious
26. Joanna Russ, And Chaos Died
27. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker)
28. Dorothy M. Richardson, Backwater (Pilgrimage 2)
29. Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepeneur, Diplomat (re-read)
30. Joan Slonczewski, A Door Into Ocean
31. Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way (re-read)
32. Lorrie Moore, Birds of America
33. Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
34. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January/February 2013 issue
35. Joss Whedon et al., Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8
36. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
37. James Blish (as William Atheling Jr.), The Issue at Hand: Studies in Contemporary Magazine Science Fiction
38. Pascal Quignard, The Roving Shadows (trans. Chris Turner)
39. Isaac Asimov, The Beginning and the End
40. Claudia Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
41. Dorothy M. Richardson, Honeycomb (Pilgrimage 3)
42. L. Timmel Duchamp, Love's Body, Dancing in Time
43. Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312
44. Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, During 1843
45. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume One, 1929-1964, Robert Silverberg, ed.
46. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D.J. Enright)
47. Muriel Spark, The Public Image
48. Joanna Russ, On Strike Against God
49. Brit Mandelo, We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-Telling
50. Patricia Cumming, Afterwards
51. Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (re-read)
52. Gabriel Josipovici, The Singer on the Shore: Essays 1991-2004
53. Deb Taber, Necessary Ill
54. David Byrne, How Music Works
55. Lars Iyer, Dogma
56. Dorothy M. Richardson, The Tunnel (Pilgrimage 4)
57. Samuel R. Delany, Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction
58. Renata Adler, Speedboat
59. Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible
60. Algis Budrys, Outposts: Literatures of Milieux
61. Alex Irvine, Rossetti Song: Four Stories
62. L. Timmel Duchamp, The Grand Conversation: Essays
63. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
64. Samuel R. Delany, The Ballad of Beta-2
65. Dory Previn, Midnight Baby: An Autobiography
66. Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat (re-read)
67. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2013
68. Dorothy M. Richardson, Interim (Pilgrimage 5)
69. Vonda N. McIntyre, Fireflood and Other Stories
70. Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+
71. Mark Siegel, Hugo Gernsback: Father of Modern Science Fiction, with Essays on Frank Herbert and Bram Stoker
72. Justina Robson, Natural History
73. Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D.J. Enright)
74. The Cascadia Subduction Zone volume 3 number 2
75. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet issue 28
76. Tao Lin, Taipei
77. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman that Never Evolved
78. Dan Hind, The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment Was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim It
79. Rosamond Lehmann, Dusty Answer
80. Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Time for Everything (trans. James Anderson)
81. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class
82. Joanna Russ, What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class and the Future of Feminism
83. Keith Roberts, Pavane
84. Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17 (re-read)
85. Samuel R. Delany, Empire Star (re-read)
86. The Other Half of the Sky (ed. Athena Andreadis, co-ed. Kay Holt)
87. Olive Moore, Celestial Seraglio: A Tale of Convent Life
88. Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip (re-read)
89. Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought
90. Marilyn Hacker, Presentation Piece
91. André Gide, Corydon
92. Kiini Ibura Salaam, Ancient, Ancient
93. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
94. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2013 issue
95. Olive Moore, Spleen
96. Muriel Spark, Not to Disturb
97. Lars Iyer, Exodus
98. The Cascadia Subduction Zone volume 3 number 3
99. Mary Ruefle, The Adamant
100. H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
101. Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (trans. Dorna Khazeni) (re-read)
102. Robert A. Heinlein, The Past Through Tomorrow: Future History Stories
103. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
104. Alchemy and Academe, ed. Anne McCaffrey
105. J.M. Coetzee, Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986-1999
106. Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D.J. Enright)
107. Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (ed. Justine Larbalestier)
108. Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics
109. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley)
110. Dorothy M. Richardson, Deadlock (Pilgrimage 6)
111. Timothy Clark, Martin Heidegger
112. bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
113. Imogen Binnie, Nevada
114. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading
115. Lyn Hejinian, The Book of a Thousand Eyes
116. Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
117. Christopher Isherwood, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (aka The Last of Mr. Norris) (re-read)
118. Richard Wright, Black Boy
119. Lori Selke, The XY Conspiracy
120. Thomas M. Disch, 334
121. Peter Handke, Across (trans. Ralph Manheim)
122. The Homeric Hymns (trans. Thelma Sargent)
123. Dorothy M. Richardson, Revolving Lights (Pilgrimage 7)
124. Khatru Symposium: Women in Science Fiction (ed. Jeffrey D. Smith, rev. ed. Jeanne Gomoll)
125. A.E. van Vogt, The World of Null-A (re-read)
126. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964) (ed. David Farrell Krell)
127. Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
128. Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters (trans. Ewald Osers)
129. Barbara Paul, Pillars of Salt
130. Isaac Asimov, Foundation (re-read)
131. Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction, Kelly Jennings and Shay Darrach, eds.
132. Asimov's Science Fiction, December 2013

General statistics

Number of different writers represented: 86
Most represented writer: Dorothy M. Richardson (7 books)
Most represented writers all of whose books I read were not part of the same long multi-volume novel: Samuel R. Delany and Virginia Woolf (5 books each)
Number of books written by men: 59
Number of books written by women: 59
Number of books written by (people known to me to be) (people who in the U.S. would be considered) people of color: 17
Number of books written by people not from the U.S. (with some tendentiously subjective decisions regarding emigrés, by which e.g. Denise Levertov "counts" but Hugo Gernsback does not): 57
Number of books in translation: 20
Number of "books" that are actually magazines: 8
Number of books not included in authorship statistics (magazines, anthologies): 14
Number of re-reads: 16 (not including a small handful of books I read for the first time and re-read in 2013)

Fiction
(includes both plays and comics, of which I only read one each anyway)

Number of books I consider fiction: 79
Number not included in authorship statistics: 11
Number of writers represented: 47
Most represented writer: Dorothy M. Richardson (7 books)
Most represented writer all of whose books I read were not part of the same long multi-volume novel: Virginia Woolf (4 books)
Number of books by women: 35
Number of women writers: 22
Number of books by people of color (with same disclaimers as before): 8
Number of writers of color: 4
Number of books by writers not from the U.S. (with same disclaimer as before): 36
Number of writers not from the U.S.: 19
Number of books by writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 26 (not including Beckett)
Number of writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 12
Number of books in translation: 10 (including Beckett)
Number of writers of books in translation: 7
Number of foreign languages represented: 4 (French, German, Norwegian, and Spanish)
Most represented foreign language: French (3 writers, 5 books)
Number of re-reads: 13

Science Fiction

Number of books that seem like they could conceivably be called science fiction whether I would call them that or not: 43
Number of books I think it makes sense to consider science fiction: 37 (removing Hawkes, Jackson, Knausgaard, Russ's On Strike Against God, Whedon, and Woolf's Orlando)
Number of books that seem uncontroversially science fiction: 34 (removing further Beckett, Gorodischer, and Lovecraft)
Number not included in authorship statistics: 11
Number of writers represented (from here on figure are based on the 37 books I consider sf, minus the 11 anthologies and magazines): 23
Number of books by women: 10
Number of women writers: 10
Number of books by people of color (with same disclaimers as before): 4
Number of writers of color: 2
Number of books by writers not from the U.S.: 4
Number of writers not from the U.S.: 4
Number of books by writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 2
Number of writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 2
Number of books in translation: 2
Number of writers of books in translation: 2
Number of foreign languages represented: 2 (French and Spanish)
Most represented foreign language: French and Spanish (1 book each)
Most represented writer: Samuel R. Delany (3 books)
Number of re-reads: 8

Non-Fiction
(Includes philosophy, history, politics, criticism, etc., as well as most "unclassifiable" books such as Pascal Quignard's, etc. Two books, Gide's Corydon and Larbalestier's Daughters of Earth, are counted both here and in fiction: Gide's because it seemed to belong equally to both; Larbalestier's because it contains equal numbers of stories and essays.)

Number of books I consider non-fiction: 44
Number not included in authorship statistics: 4
Number of writers represented: 36
Most represented writer: Plato (3 books)
Number of books by women: 15
Number of women writers: 15
Number of books by people of color (with same disclaimers as before): 8
Number of writers of color: 7
Number of books by writers not from the U.S.: 17
Number of writers not from the U.S.: 14
Number of books by writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 6
Number of writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 5
Number of books in translation: 10
Number of writers of books in translation: 8
Number of foreign languages represented: 4 (French, German, Greek, and Japanese)
Most represented foreign language: French (4 books)
Number of re-reads: 4
Number of books of or about literary criticism*: 25
Number of books about science fiction*: 12
Number of books of or about philosophy*: 12
Number of books about science*: 4
Number of books about music*: 1
Number of books of or about history*: 9
Number of books of or about feminism*: 17
Number of books about racism and/or POC experience*: 7
Number of books about sexual minorities: 1
Number of books of or about theology and/or religion*: 3
Number of memoirs, autobiographies, etc.*: 5

*broadly speaking, making snap judgments, and with a lot of overlap

Poetry

Number of books I consider poetry: 11
Number not included in authorship statistics: 1 (The Homeric Hymns, by multiple unknown writers; included back in consideration of national origin, language, etc.)
Number of writers represented: 9
Number of books by women: 9
Number of women writers:8
Number of books by people of color: 1
Number of writers of color: 1
Number of books by writers not from the U.S.: 4
Number of books by writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 2
Number of writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 2
Number of books in translation: 2
Number of writers of books in translation: 1 (not including The Homeric Hymns)
Number of foreign languages represented: 2 (Greek and Russian)
Most represented foreign language: Greek and Russian (1 book each)
Most represented writer: Lyn Hejinian (2 books)
Number of re-reads: 0

Scattered, drastically incomplete comments

As I said above, I read an awful lot in 2013--almost certainly more than I have in any other year of my adult life. And for the most part I think I read well, with a great deal of thinking, discussion, and writing (here and for myself) on what I read, and with more immediate or near-immediate re-reading than I've ever done before (though still not much, not enough). A small handful of the books listed above I have basically no memory of (sorry, Margaret Fuller and James Joyce!), suggesting that I maybe didn't so much read them as pass my eyes over them, but the vast majority I feel I could still speak intelligently on if called upon to do so (to whatever degree I am capable of intelligent speech!).

2013 started with a decision to pay close, conscious attention to how many books by women I was reading, as I realized that what I had thought was approximate parity in previous years was anything but. This was largely successful, as evidenced by the fact that I read the same number of books by women as by men; on the other hand, it's quite likely that I read a bit more by men than by women because of the disproportionate representation of men in most of the multiple author anthologies and magazines that I did not count towards the total (the Larbalestier- and Andreadis- edited anthologies, along with the fascinating Khatru Symposium, go some small way toward rectifying this, but I doubt they are enough). And when we break things down, it turns out that my reading was still heavily gendered: in every category except for poetry--the one in which I read the least--I read more men than women.

Still, I'm glad I made the "effort," especially since it became less and less of an effort as I went on; one of the things that makes one's reading skew heavily male if one does not try consciously to fix it otherwise is that, as Joanna Russ discusses in How to Suppress Women's Writing, women writers are treated as though they all worked in isolation; where reading one man might lead one naturally towards reading another and another--influences, cohorts, what have you--reading one woman tends to lead nowhere without effort--not usually because she did work in isolation, but because male supremacist culture behaves as though she did. When one begins to read a lot of women deliberately, however, it becomes easier and easier to be led from one to another, and easier and easier to prioritize these paths. And even aside from that, I read a huge number of just truly wonderful books by women in 2013 that I doubt I would have read without a deliberate program of reading women.

On the other hand, my reading was incredibly white. There is no excuse for that. I'm going to be working on it.

My other major reading "goal" in 2013 was basically to begin filling in gaps, reading those essential works that I have until now missed; thus my first-ever reading of Proust and Woolf, for example, both of whom have been immensely satisfying, both of whom I plan to continue reading in 2014 (incidentally, I swear that I didn't know when I started that reading Proust in 2013 was, like, A Thing). Filling in gaps in my sf reading has been less pleasant; a great deal of both the contemporary* and classic sf I've read has left me cold (Disch's 334 stands out as a book I had eagerly anticipated only to find it had little to say to me).

*Not included on the list above is the unsystematic reading I've done in the online sf magazines: Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Daily SF, Expanded Horizons, GigaNotoSaurus, and others; I have found in them a small amount of truly excellent work in an otherwise very, shall we say, mixed bag.

I did, however, read a number of books from outside of sf that I thought had a great deal to say to sf, books that I wish the bulk of sf readers weren't too parochial ever to give a chance. Books like Beckett's Endgame, which in many ways is sf while also posing a fundamental challenge to it; like DeWitt's The Last Samurai, Knausgaard's A Time for Everything, and Moore's Spleen, three of the very greatest books I have ever had the privilege to read, which among other things investigate the nature of knowledge and of knowing to a degree sf readers and writers seldom dare to (Knausgaard too is relevant on the matter of time, history, and "the future"); and like Richardson's long novel Pilgrimage, just over half of whose thirteen volumes I read in 2013, which finds so much wonder in the present moment that it becomes an implicit slap in the face to sf--and even, sometimes, an explicit one, as when it cogently argues against the literary enterprise of "Hypo Wilson", a character who pretty directly and transparently stands in for H.G. Wells (who was a friend of Richardson's). And above all there is Heidegger, whose explorations of art, science, technology, and (natch) the nature of being should be central to the sfnal consciousness, but of which I'd guess 99% of sf readers and writers are totally ignorant.

I'm not trying to be a snoot. But I've become very disheartened with sf over the course of this year, not least because of the horrifyingly extreme philistinism flaunted by the great bulk of its readers and writers, most of whom seem absolutely to revel in assuming that anyone who cares about art and life is axiomatically stupid and frivolous; most of whom brag ad nauseam about their intellectual daring and curiosity while in actuality restricting themselves to one or two tiny corners of expertise, deeming all else, again, axiomatically stupid and frivolous; for most of whom the past--even the recent past of their own field--is as irrelevant and unknown as the future is constricted and "trope"-ified. If the total sf apostasy that has been threatening to overtake me for the last few months does happen, this will be a big part of why.

Um, but anyway. I did read a good deal of worthwhile sf. My re-reads of Asimov and van Vogt (both during the months of potential apostasy, sort of a self-administered first aid) reaffirmed me in my faith that, despite all its many inanities, something beautiful really did happen, at least from time to time, in the American magazine sf of the 30s and 40s. Books by McIntyre, Russ, Delany, and Roberts (some re-read, some read for the first time) re-convinced me that it was once possible to do amazing, necessary, and transformative work within that tradition. And though such oases are few and far between, Duchamp, Robson, Salaam and Taber indicated to me that the 1980s did not totally destroy those possibilities, that sf since then has not been a total wasteland. The stories, if not the criticism, in Larbalestier's anthology opened up worlds of writing that had been deliberately hidden but that are simply too powerful to stay hidden.

And Lovecraft, whose incomparable At the Mountains of Madness I re-read and whose short fiction is also ongoing reading, has re-emerged for me as one of the major writers of the 20th century, unappreciated alike by those unaware of him, by his detractors, and by his "fans," the majority of whom seek, panic-stricken, to deny everything that his writing says, does, and is, in favor of pretending that he was a "bad writer with great ideas" (whatever that means) and that tentacles qua tentacles are the peak of these ideas.

In non-fiction, 2013 brought me some excellent and thought-provoking sf criticism of very different kinds (Budrys, Delany, Duchamp, Houellebecq) but also a great deal of awful. The area of thought somewhere between philosophy and literary (and art and music) criticism continues to be perhaps the most essential to me, what with Benjamin and Hyde and Quignard and Tanizaki and the always-necessary Josipovici and, again, Heidegger, from all of whom I have learned more than I could ever say. I read brilliant (and often horrifying) feminism ranging from the medieval to the extremely contemporary, all of it vital; the disconnects in it (wishing, for example, that Russ and Davis and Federici could have written more directly to one another's arguments), most of them no doubt due to the fragmentation of feminist thought enforced by patriarchal violence and "forgetting," are as depressing as ever. Speaking of which, Zambreno (who makes this fragmentation one of her major topics) emerged as having one of my favorite brains. And she along with Wright, Malcolm X, and--perhaps surprisingly--Woolf's A Room of One's Own convinced me, in all their extremely different ways, of a vitality in self-exploratory writing ("memoir", roughly) that I had not suspected was there.

This blog was once intended to be about both sf and poetry, but the latter has obviously fallen by the wayside. I started the blog at a time when I was reading an unprecedentedly huge amount of poetry; I still am interested in it but am not reading nearly so much of it, and find myself generally without much to say about it that has not been said much better by any number of other people. Levertov and Hejinian are my primary passions out of those I read in the past year.

For the most part, the best reading I did in 2013 was outside of this blog's supposed purview. Almost nothing I know of in sf can give anything close to the sensawunda, if you will, of Woolf, Bernhard, Hejinian, Richardson, Josipovici, Benjamin, Levertov, Beckett, Gunn Allen, DeWitt, Quignard, Proust, Knausgaard, Moore, Carson, Wright, Handke, and Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger. You might say that comparing sf to these "giants" is unfair--but it shouldn't be.

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