My 2022 Books of the Year

My book of the year for 2022 is Orwell’s Roses by Rececca Solnit.

I’ve enjoyed Rebecca Solnit’s work for a while, particularly her earlier book Wanderlust. I think this is even better, a series of essays and a meditation and exploration of gardens, life, death, Orwell, creativity, time and place.

Read the Guardian Review HERE

I also read, and was amazed by, Gravity’s Rainbow, so inaccessible and wonderful, and so different to the breezy prose of Anne Tyler in French Braid. Her insights into family and time have always struck me as true somehow. It was also good to enjoy a new book of poetry again. Kasey Jued’s book has been well reviewed and deservedly so. Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger was unlucky not to make the list; that was a compelling and at times exasperating read.

As always you can check the READING link of my PoetryPages to see more about my reading over the years and what I’ve enjoyed.

Text version (to paste into your shopping app of choice!

Rebecca Solnit. Orwell’s Roses (NF)
Thomas Pynchon. Gravity’s Rainbow (F)
Karl Ove Knausgaard: Morning Star (F)
Anne Tyler. French Braid (F)
Kasey Jueds. The Thicket (P)

Book of the Year – Bewilderment

A few days into 2022, but here finally is my book of the year. I enjoyed Overstory when I read it a while ago, but this was a different thing again; at once simpler, more narrative-driven, but also somehow larger, more open-ended. I’ve heard criticisms, especially from the parents of autistic children, but I feel it transcends that problem. It is at once, extremely light, and extremely profound.

Bewilderment

Other books that impressed me in 2020 were:

2. Heather Clark. Red Comet. The short life of Sylvia Plath. (2021)
3. Randolph Stow. To the Islands (1958)
4. Rachel Carlson. Under the sea wind (1952)
5. Tove Jansson. The Summer Book (1975)
6. Gerald Murnane. Last Letter to a Reader. (2021)
7. Luke Stegemann. Amnesia Road (2021)
8. Philip Marsden. The Summer Isles
9. Peter Temple. The Broken Shore (2007)

I’ve given up the idea of categorising my books of the year into ‘Fiction’, ‘Non-Fiction’ etc. Those kinds of divisions seem more and more meaningless. All of the books listed above will reward your reading attention.

My 2020 Books of the Year

2020

In a year when I thought I might have read more than ever, I read only 30 books, much below my GoodReads challenge of 40. You can see the full list HERE

So, you should rightfully temper any judgements I make here with that caveat firmly in mind! Nevertheless, here’s my list:

1. Horizon by Barry Lopez (NF)

Horizon, by Barry Lopez

I was surprised to feel as sad as I did when I heard the news that Barry Lopez had died on Christmas Day. I’ve valued his work over a long time but that news, coming so soon after I finished Horizon, shook me a little. Horizons is a fitting end-piece to a career of genre-defining writing about space and place. The NY Times Obituary likened him to Thoreau; what a compliment: 

‘In a half-century of travel to 80 countries that generated nearly a score of nonfiction and fiction works, including volumes of essays and short stories, Mr. Lopez embraced landscapes and literature with humanitarian, environmental and spiritual sensibilities that some critics likened to those of Thoreau and John Muir.’

2. Wallace Stegner Crossing to Safety (F)

I hadn’t read Stegner before, and also read *Angle of Repose’ this year, but this novel seems stronger, masterly in its construction. As with all great novels I wonder at how it could be constructed by one mind. Beyond the great art of its making, it spoke to me too about friendship and a life in and around writing and reading.

3. Richard Ford – Sorry For Your Trouble (Stories)

Richard Ford has won my Book of the Year Awards three times, and almost won it again with this collection. A writer who keeps delivering, with a body of work behind him as substantial as any contemporary American novelist.

4. Haruki Murakami – Dance Dance Dance (F)

Weird, but wonderful. I’m always about halfway through a Murakami book and wonder, is this going anywhere? Maybe not, but the strange journey is enjoyable, and provoking.

5. Jonathan Bate – Radical Wordsworth (NF)

A not so radical biography of Wordsworth that focuses on the early years and the revolutionary Wordsworth who would return from revolutionary France and put all that away.

My Book of the Year

I recently completed my year in books. I read 37 books this year, hardly qualifying me to pontificate on any of the ‘books of the year’.

And, I liked how Maria Popova, over at Brain Pickings put it:

Long ago, when the present and the living appealed to me more, I endeavored to compile “best of” reading lists at the close of each year. Even then, those were inherently incomplete and subjective reflections of one person’s particular tastes, but at least my scope of contemporary reading was wide enough to narrow down such a selection.

In recent years, these subjective tastes have taken me further and further into the past, deeper and deeper into the common record of wisdom recorded decades, centuries, millennia ago, drawn from the most timeless recesses of the human heart and mind. Outside the year’s loveliest children’s books — a stratum of literature with which I still actively and ardently engage — I now nurse no illusion of having an even remotely adequate sieve for the “best” of what is published each passing year, given that I read so very little of it (and given, too, that this particular year I birthed the first book of my own — itself the product of a long immersion in the past). But of the books I did read in 2019, these are the ones that will stay with me for life.

Wise words. There’s a case against too much of this and I don’t pretend to speak with authority. Simply put, my book of the year was Overstory by Richard Powers, a story for our times. You can read others I liked, and lists from previous years here at my poetry pages here.

My Books of the Year 2016

This year I began listening to audio books more earnestly, with Reece Witherspoon’s southern-accented reading of Go Set a Watchman and Kenneth Brannagh’s passionate reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness showing just how important a good narrator is to this experience.

Elsewhere, I kept reading non-fiction, what my daughter calls ‘landscape memoir’, in particular, and it’s here where I found most of the really enjoyable things although enjoyable is not the word for Primo Levi’s horrifying memoir of life in Auschwitz.

Fiction

Winner: A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

I’ve enjoyed Anne Tyler’s work for a long time so I was surprised, when I looked back at my list of books over the years, that this is the first time she’s won my book of the year prize. A Spool of Blue Thread is like lots of her work: family, change, the passage of time, the minutiae of a relationship. All the same, someone criticised her; all the same I said, just like Dickens’ work is all the same. It’s tender and moving, held together by the threads of family, tradition and the untugging forces of time.

Highly recommended

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

Like a House on Fire by Cate Kennedy (short stories)

Non-Fiction

Winner: If this is a man …’ / ‘The Truce’ by Primo Levi

This is a harrowing account of Levi’s immersion into the hell that was Auschwitz in World War II. I’ve wanted to read this book for a long time but felt I have not quite had the strength. I’m sure part of that reluctance was a kind of holocaust fatigue; the Year 12 English course has regularly featured works of this kind, but also, more personally, a fear of facing again these dark sides of our nature. I’m glad I did face it, though several times I found myself in tears.

Sadly, this is not just a dark chapter of history but has lessons here and now, in the alienation and exclusion of the other or, as Levi puts it early on: ‘Many people, many nations, can find themselves holding more or less wittingly, the idea that every stranger is an enemy.’ I’d like to say that this is a story or triumph, recovery and the survival of the individual spirit, and there’s elements of that, but it’s a place of death and defeat and humiliation of the human too. Levi also writes here: “We cannot understand Fascism but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard…because what happened can happen again…For this reason, it is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened.”

You can read more about this book, like Howard Jacobson on ‘re-reading’ this book, and more about Levi himself in The Atlantic HERE and The New Yorker HERE.

Highly recommended

Our Man Elsewhere: In Search ofAlan Moorehead by Thornton McCamish

Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place by Philip Marsden

Rain, a natural and cultural history by Cynthia Barnett

A Land by Joquetta Hopkins Hawkes

Poetry

Winner: Have Been and Are by Brook Emery

I’m a fan of Emery’s poetry (he won this award back in 2001 with and dug my fingers in the sand) and this book delivers on earlier writing I’ve enjoyed.

These poems are a little looser, more talky, less certain somehow and a voice of man questioning things that have always felt certain.

Highly recommended

Meditations in Time of Emergency by Frank O’Hara

Headwaters by Anthony Lawrence

This list © Warrick Wynne (2016)

My Books of the Year for 2015

My Books of the Year are unashamedly personal lists. They aren’t based on any votes or reviews and don’t generally cohere much with mainstream lists. That’s not entirely a bad thing. My book of the year is H is for Hawk, which won my non-fiction award this year.

Non-Fiction

Winner: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

This book divides readers; it divided me as a reader, but like very good books when you read them, they startle and surprise and send your reading spinning off into new directions. I’m not sure I like the idea of trying to tame a hawk, nor am I sure I liked the persona here and her strange studied ignorance at times, but it’s beautifully written, and justly won the Samuel Johnson Prize, among others.

Highly recommended:

The Goshawk by T.E. White, an earlier hawking book that is directly and repeatedly references in H is for Hawk, and arguably a better book.

Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane. Macfarlane is one of my favourite writers in the genre my daughter derides as ‘landscape memoir’, and this again takes up his love of the landscape and the names that frame it, in a deliberate act of restoration and recovery.

Barbarian Days by William Finnegan. Finnegan’s surf memoir is anything but as limiting as that sounds. It’s a gorgeous, evocative, intimate account of growing up as a surfer and writer. It contains some of the most detailed descriptions of big wave surfing I’ve ever read and, more impressively, some of the most beautiful evocations of the power and terror of waves themselves. I listened to Finnegan read this as an audio book and I enjoyed that closeness and sense of intimacy with the writer.

Fiction

Winner: Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon.

Mason and Dixon was by far the most startling, difficult and interesting fiction I’d read for years. It’s not new, is nearly twenty years old, in fact, but seems fresh (though I did have some strange recall moments of Peter Carey’s fabulist tomes like Oscar and Lucinda and Illywhacker.

Highly recommended:

Let me be Frank with You by Richard Ford, new stories of middle America.

Poetry

Winner: The Moon before Rising by W.S. Merwin

This is a lovely slim volume in the tradition of slim American volumes. Merwin is 86, former Poet Laureate of the USA, and an old master. But, though he reflects on ageing and mortality, it is with a precision and sharpness and loveliness too that is as sure as ever: as in:

All at once he is no longer

young with his handful of flowers

in the bright morning their fragrance

rising from them as though they were

still on the stalk where they opened

only this morning to the light

in which somewhere unseen the thrush

goes on singing its perfect song

into the day of the flowers

and while he stands there holding them

the cool dew runs from them onto

his hand at this hour of their lives

is it the hand of the young man

who found them only this morning

 

There’s a good review from the Guardian HERE

Highly Recommended: On Bunyah by Less Murray.

Nice to come back to old man Murray again! With some of Les Murray’s marvellous work rebundled here in a slightly more autobiographical format, coupled with some evocative photos of his family and local sites, the book stands as a nice reworking of Murray in a slightly more personal context.

This list (C) Warrick Wynne 2015