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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Notes -
A couple of Fridays ago there was a comment thread on what the best series you watched in 2022 was/were. In honor of @EdenicFaithful's weekly Sunday reading question, what were your best reads of 2022? What did you enjoy or find interesting? Anything of note you didn't finish?
For me:
God Emperor of Dune. Such a good book. Well, Idk how to qualify it in terms of goodness. Such a unique book. How many have a near-omnipotent, centuries old, giant worm-man with voices in his head as the main character? My favorite bit: Leto is so wrapped up in his own ancient internal monologue about the voices of his ancestors inside him and the future he can see that he almost misses getting a gun that he knows is going to be pulled on him pulled on him.
I read a bit of horror later in the year. Ghost Story by Peter Straub would probably be my favorite of the bunch. It loses some steam near the end, but I think that's a flaw intrinsic to the horror genre. Or maybe that's all the Stephen King I've read talking. Speaking of, Revival would be my runner-up. It's the only post-car accident King I've read that's not The Dark Tower, and I wasn't disappointed. He maybe could have used a little trimming in the second quarter of the book to shorten the gap between the inciting incident and the next big plot movement, but other than that I think he even stuck the landing.
Books I did not finish:
I didn't read a lot of books this year. Sometime around March I attempted to do what I thought of as a "liberal arts" read: reading world history, art history, music history, philosophy history, and literature concurrently, going through sections that aligned with the same time period. A bit ambitious. Couple of problems with it, besides coming up with the "curriculum" on my own based on what we already had in our home library: I started with human pre-history, which kept me hopping between just a couple of books at first; a couple, particularly the philosophy book, were Western focus, whereas I wanted to be more comprehensive; the literature portion (the first volume of Norton's world lit anthology) covered a lot I had already read; for world history, I picked a book that's like the notes to a world history encyclopedia - very dense and dry, and I wasn't trying to skip any of it; finally, the sections just didn't line up that well for jumping between things and keeping it "fresh". My goal was to get to 0 AD. I barely got to the Greeks. After a couple months or so of spending my bedtime reading time on this, I was worn out and needed a narrative I could start and finish without interruption and moved on to a fiction splurge. I'd like to go back and read some more of the individual books on their own. Except that encyclopedic notes one. It's literally organized in a ABC, 123 subnote style. Very dense and dry. Overall, and interesting experiment.
Off the top of my head, the highlights are:
a) The Great Gatsby - technically I read this right around Christmas of 2021, but I'll include it here. Gatsby's a total simp. Daisy, so far as we can tell from the text, probably isn't even that hot. You know who's cool and who I want to read a book about? Meyer Wolfsheim. How did he claw his way up the ranks of organized crime? Did he kill a dude and make his teeth into cufflinks? I think he did.
b) The Maltese Falcon, Dashiel Hammett. I'd tried some Hammett before - the Glass Key and Red Harvest - but I just didn't get that into them. I liked this one a lot more for some reason. I think it just seemed more tightly written than those two, though I'm not sure if that's the explanation
c) Francis Fukuyama - Political Order and Political Decay. This one was on audiobook so without an actual copy in front of me, I have a hard time remembering what I thought about it. The main impression I retained is that Fukuyama is clearly a smart guy who's read and thought a lot about his topic, but is hamstrung by his commitment to an orthodox-western-liberal view of "progress" and state formation. His analysis would probably have been more interesting if he'd been willing to consider more heterodox ideas.
d) The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster. Famously gloomy and violent Jacobean revenge drama. Probably one of the best works of fiction I read this year. The anti-heroic Bosola gets all the best lines, even though he's largely tangential to the plot until the last few scenes. Surprised I haven't seen a film adaptation of this sometime in the last ten years.
e) The Folk of the Air, Peter S. Beagle. Beagle is probably best known for The Last Unicorn. This is a sort of early urban-fantasy story about an itinerant musician who returns to a thinly-veiled Berkeley after ten years of wandering. He finds that all his old friends are now part of a thinly-veiled Society For Creative Anachronism and that some of them get way into character and sometimes their re-enactments get just a little too real. Started off slowly but hit it's strides at the two-thirds mark and wrapped up with a satisfy albeit ambiguous conclusion.
f) The Ballad of the White Horse, GK Chesterton - Sometimes hailed as the last epic narrative poem in the English language. A fictionalized depiction of King Alfred's defeat of the Danes at the Battle of Ethandune. Short, with a pretty simple and straightforward plot, but a lot of great quotable lines. A few choice morsels
A gloomy Norseman: "You sing of the young gods easily/In the days when you are young/But I go smelling yew and sods/And I know there are gods behind the gods/Gods that are best unsung."
The narrator: "The Great Gaels of Ireland/Are the men that God made Mad/For all their wars are merry/And all their songs are sad".
Alfred, rebuking the Norse kings pseudo-Nietszchean worldview: "What have the strong gods given?/Where have the glad gods led?/When Guthrun sits on a hero's throne/And asks if he is dead?"
I'm told that Tolkien didn't like it on account of how he felt the Norse were misrepresented. Nonetheless, its well worth your tim."
TL; DR - The Autobiography of Benevenuto Cellini. He was probably a pretty interesting dude to hang around but the writing didn't hook me.
TL; DR - The Divine Comedy. Tried it, couldn't get into it.
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