The blog has been on hiatus for a bit due to a press of other responsibilities, but of course I haven’t stopped reading. These were the most memorable books I read this year, listed in the order I read them.

Fiction

• Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock. This year I completed a long-running and rewarding personal project to read through all of Cather’s writing in order. Her Death Comes for the Archbishop is generally recognized as a masterpiece, and reading it again confirmed that judgment. Shadows on the Rock was her next book, and resembles it most closely, also being deeply researched historical fiction set in early colonial North America, this time Quebec. It’s another triumph of imagination and sympathy.
• Natasha Pulley, The Mars House. I haven’t been able to get into much recent sci-fi, but I enjoyed this tale of the travails of climate-change refugees in a Chinese Mars colony: compelling and filled with intriguing political and geopolitical speculation.
• Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors. Contemporary fantasy fiction has also become mostly unreadable for me; too often it is an endless recycling of tropes with minor variations. This book, the well-deserved winner of this year’s Nebula award, is a delightful exception. Its urban quasi-South Asian setting is unexpected, and the fantastical elements are truly mysterious rather than laboriously systematized.
• Itamar Vieira Junior, Crooked Plow (trans. Johnny Lorenz). This Brazilian novel depicting the lives of impoverished sharecroppers on the country’s northeastern frontier has been extravagantly praised, and indeed the first two-thirds was one of the best things I’ve read in ages. For me, though, the last third was a real disappointment, so ultimately a somewhat mixed experience.
• Guzel Yakhina, A Volga Tale (trans. Polly Gannon). The new novel from the author of Zuleikha, one of my favorite books of the last several years, does not disappoint. A schoolmaster in an isolated German-speaking colony inside Russia survives his trials through immersion in local folktales; the fable-like qualities of his own story intensify as socialism advances on the village. The translation is marvelous and vivid.

Nonfiction

• David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. The harrowing tale of the Wager is one of the ur-texts of nautical fiction, inspiring writers from Herman Melville to Patrick O’Brian. Grann’s book is a feat of research and writing, creating impressive narrative clarity out of the complicated and contradictory evidence (the LRB review points out a few of the inevitable compromises he made).
• Eileen Chang, Written on Water (trans. Andrew F. Jones). Chang’s first book of essays, published when she was just 24, shows her as something like the Joan Didion of pre-revolutionary China: a preternaturally sharp and cool observer. She is remarkably comfortable with one foot in Chinese culture and one in English, a stance few have been able to hold so well then or since. Here are some excerpts.
• Ian Johnson, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future. Though I read lots of China history books, I rarely end up recommending any to non-specialists. I’m happy to say Ian’s latest is an exception: this account of how people today continue to grapple with the harshest episodes in China’s history is written with his trademark grace and sympathy.
• Tara Zahra, Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars. This fascinating history of little-known episodes in a previous “backlash to globalization” has obvious contemporary relevance. For me, though, the takeaway was how far the 1920-30s popular reaction, driven by understandable fears of the famine and death created by wartime trade embargoes, is from today’s more politically driven trade sentiments.
• Halik Kochanski, Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945. Even-handed and stunningly comprehensive, there is no better way to learn the reality behind the wartime mythmaking. Though Kochanski’s assessment of the accomplishments of the resistance is often deflating, there are still many striking and heroic episodes. To cite just one example, the operation to disable Europe’s only heavy-water plant, in Norway, and thus prevent the Nazis from making an atomic bomb, would make a fantastic movie.
• Joan Acocella, Willa Cather and the Politics of Critcism and Benjamin Taylor, Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather. I couldn’t get enough of Cather this year. These two books–both remarkably concise–were just what I needed, helping flesh out the context of Cather’s work during her life and after. While both are nicely done, they are probably best appreciated when, as I did, you have the fiction fresh in your mind.
• Ian Mortimer, Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter. In a sterling example of historical writing for the “general reader,” Mortimer explains the big waves of social change across centuries in concrete and practical ways. He shows how the differences between the 11th and 16th centuries are bigger in many ways than between the 16th and 21st.
• Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire. After publishing his famous A River Runs Through It, a nearly perfect piece of American prose writing, Maclean spent the rest of his life working on this nonfiction account of a 1949 forest fire. He never finished it, and it shows: the posthumously published manuscript has some longueurs that editing could have solved. But it’s still a compelling meditation on mortality.
• Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. A marvelous book integrating the historical big picture and the personal, together making for an illuminating guide to the nature and origins of Eastern Europe’s peculiarities. Mostly, though, it’s a vehicle for the author to stitch together lots of the typically Eastern European style of “tragicomic stories” that he has collected over the years.
• Richard Flanagan, Question 7. Flanagan interrogates the historical forces behind his father’s survival of a Japanese internment camp, and thus his own birth, resulting in an unclassifiable narrative that takes in his own upbringing in Tasmania, H.G. Wells’ romance with Rebecca West, and the making of the atomic bomb. Brilliant; winner of this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction writing.

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