Books of the Year 2012
Waggish 2013-04-16
So many books, so many books. I consciously tried to expand my reading horizons this year, which has helped to swell my reading list to unmanageable lengths. Sifting out worthy entries in disciplines with which I’m not especially familiar is not at all easy, so sometimes I just have to go on faith that apparent hard work, diligence, and care have resulted in an enlightening end product.
Krasznahorkai’s Satantango is certainly for me the book of the year, though in its way Lucan’s Civil War was as well, and I was very happy to have William Bronk‘s later poetry collected.
I have hardly read all of all of the nonfiction selections–I’ll be lucky if I ever read the Bailyn book cover to cover–but they have all been of note to me at least as reference or inspiration. Some stragglers from 2011 have snuck in as well.
If anyone’s curious as to why some book or other made the list, feel free to ask in the comments. Reviews on a couple are forthcoming.
(As always, I do not make any money from these links–this was just by far the simplest way to get thumbnails and metadata.)
Literature
László Krasznahorkai (New Directions)
The Galley Slave (Slovenian Literature Series)
Drago Jancar (Dalkey Archive Press)
Bursts of Light: The Collected Later Poems
William Bronk, David Clippinger, editor (Talisman House, Publishers)
Lisa Samuels (Shearsman Books)
David Albahari (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Marginalia on Casanova: St. Orpheus Breviary I
Miklós Szentkuthy (Contra Mundum Press)
Alasdair Gray (Canongate UK)
Alta Ifland (Spuyten Duyvil)
An Ermine in Czernopol (New York Review Books Classics)
Gregor von Rezzori (NYRB Classics)
Berlin Stories (New York Review Books Classics)
Robert Walser (NYRB Classics)
Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts
William H Gass (Knopf)
Happy Moscow (New York Review of Books Classics)
Andrey Platonov (NYRB Classics)
Lucan (Penguin Classics)
Andrei Bely (Penguin Classics)
Tyrant Banderas (New York Review Books Classics)
Ramon del Valle-Inclan (NYRB Classics)
The Person I Am Volume One (Laura (Riding) Jackson Series)
Laura (Riding) Jackson (Trent Editions)
The Person I Am Volume Two (Laura (Riding) Jackson Series)
Laura (Riding) Jackson (Trent Editions)
Imre Kertesz (Seagull Books)
Minuet for Guitar (Slovenian Literature Series)
Vitomil Zupan (Dalkey Archive Press)
Jacques Roubaud (Dalkey Archive Press)
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
Oksana Zabuzhko (AmazonCrossing)
Comics
David B. (SelfMadeHero)
Ralph Azham: “Why Would You Lie To Someone You Love?” (Vol. 1)
Lewis Trondheim (Fantagraphics)
Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: “Lost in the Andes” (Vol. 7) (The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library)
Carl Barks (Fantagraphics)
Carl Barks (Fantagraphics)
Nonfiction
Oral Literature in Africa (World Oral Literature Series)
Ruth Finnegan (Open Book Publishers)
Michael Levenson (Yale University Press)
Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry: Decoding Facts and Variables (Cultural Sociology)
Richard RichardBiernacki (Palgrave Macmillan)
Apoha: Buddhist Nominalism and Human Cognition
(Columbia University Press)
William M. Reddy (University Of Chicago Press)
Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography
Arnaldo Momigliano (University Of Chicago Press)
Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850
Denise Phillips (University Of Chicago Press)
Memory: Fragments of a Modern History
Alison Winter (University Of Chicago Press)
Davesh Soneji (University Of Chicago Press)
The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition
Gerard Passannante (University Of Chicago Press)
Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition
Sorana Corneanu (University Of Chicago Press)
Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature
Alastair Fowler (Oxford University Press, USA)
German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond
Michael N. Forster (Oxford University Press, USA)
Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century
Frederique Ait-Touati (University Of Chicago Press)
Reality: A Very Short Introduction
Jan Westerhoff (Oxford University Press)
American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University Of Chicago Press)
Augustus: Introduction to the Life of an Emperor
Karl Galinsky (Cambridge University Press)
Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives
Aleida Assmann (Cambridge University Press)
Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination
Jan Assmann (Cambridge University Press)
The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (The Evolution of Modern Philosophy)
A. W. Moore (Cambridge University Press)
Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame
Christopher Boehm (Basic Books)
Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus (Harvard University Press)
More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India
David Shulman (Harvard University Press)
The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction
Eckart Förster (Harvard University Press)
Scholarship, Commerce, Religion: The Learned Book in the Age of Confessions, 1560-1630
Ian Maclean (Harvard University Press)
The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat
Santiago Zabala (Columbia University Press)
David Rothkopf (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Jaak Panksepp, Lucy Biven (W. W. Norton & Company)
Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy 2 Volume Hardback Set
M. F. Burnyeat (Cambridge University Press)
Peter Brown (Princeton University Press)
On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present
Alan Ryan (Liveright)
Governing the World: The History of an Idea
Mark Mazower (Penguin Press HC, The)
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction and Interpretation (This Way Up series)
James O’Shea (Acumen Publishing)
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