Books of the Year 2014
Waggish 2017-09-09
I had less time for reading this year than I would have liked. When I selected Drago Jancar’s haunting and beautiful The Tree with No Name for Slate’s Overlooked Books, it was still with the knowledge that I’d read a lot less fiction than I’d wanted. And Antal Szerb’s excellent, though modest Journey by Moonlight is a bit of a cheat, since I read it (and wrote about it) when Pushkin Press published it all the way back in 2003, rather than when NYRB Classics reissued it this year. It’s stayed with me, though, so I can pick it with more certainty than some of the other choices.
Seeing Richard McGuire’s long-gestating Here finally be published bookends my reading the original 8 page version in RAW when I was 13, when it changed my life. I wrote about the original Here in 2003 too.
And Alonso de Ercilla’s 1569 Spanish-Chilean epic The Araucaniad has been an alluring title to me since I read about it in David Quint’s fascinating Epic and Empire in connection with Lucan’s Civil War. Quint described The Araucaniad as one of those rare epics that takes the side of the losers, and it’s one of those artifacts, like Lucan’s Civil War, that doesn’t fit neatly with any common sense of literary history. Its relevance stems from its own grim variation on a theme that is at the heart of so many great epics and books: in Quint’s words, “that those who have been victimized losers in history somehow have the right to become victimizing winners, in turn.” It deserves a new translation.
As with last year, I haven’t read the entirety of some of the nonfiction selections: Chris Wickham is an excellent historian but I’m not going to deny that some of his Annales-ish wonkery had my eyes skimming. And while the biology and physics books are pretty interesting, I can’t say with much certainty that they’re accurate.
If anyone’s curious as to why some book or other made the list, feel free to ask in the comments. Thanks again for reading my work here or elsewhere.
(As always, I do not make any money from these links; they’re just the easiest way to get the thumbnails.)
Literature
The Araucaniad Alonso de Ercilla Y Zuniga Vanderbilt University Press
Contemporaries and Snobs (Modern & Contemporary Poetics) Laura Riding University Alabama Press
The Tree with No Name (Slovenian Literature Series) Drago Jancar Dalkey Archive Press
I Am China: A Novel Xiaolu Guo Anchor
All Our Names Dinaw Mengestu Knopf
Foreign Gods, Inc. Okey Ndibe Soho Press
A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly Robert Kelly Contra Mundum Press
Prae, Vol. 1 Miklos Szentkuthy Contra Mundum Press
The Time Regulation Institute Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar Penguin Classics
The Alp (Swiss Literature Series) Arno Camenisch Dalkey Archive Press
The Stories of Jane Gardam Jane Gardam Europa Editions
Harlequin’s Millions: A Novel Bohumil Hrabal Archipelago
Journey by Moonlight (NYRB Classics) Antal Szerb NYRB Classics
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country: And Other Stories (NYRB Classics) William H. Gass NYRB Classics
Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) Victor Serge NYRB Classics
Nonfiction
Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach Erich Auerbach Princeton University Press
Plato and the Post-Socratic Dialogue: The Return to the Philosophy of Nature Charles H. Kahn Cambridge University Press
The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard, Rosemary Barrow Wiley-Blackwell
We Are Our Brains: A Neurobiography of the Brain, from the Womb to Alzheimer’s D. F. Swaab Spiegel & Grau
Inside “Paradise Lost”: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic David Quint Princeton University Press
Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts Stanislas Dehaene Viking
Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics At All? Ian Hacking Cambridge University Press
Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Translation/Transnation) Princeton University Press
One: Being an Investigation into the Unity of Reality and of its Parts, including the Singular Object which is Nothingness Graham Priest Oxford University Press
A World without Why Raymond Geuss Princeton University Press
Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away Rebecca Goldstein Pantheon
From Akhenaten to Moses: Ancient Egypt and Religious Change Jan Assmann The American University in Cairo Press
Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion Jan Assmann Polity
Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre Jonathan Israel Princeton University Press
The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself Andrew Pettegree Yale University Press
Japan and the Shackles of the Past (What Everyone Needs to Know (Hardcover)) R. Taggart Murphy Oxford University Press
Social Dynamics Brian Skyrms Oxford University Press
Discrete or Continuous?: The Quest for Fundamental Length in Modern Physics Amit Hagar Cambridge University Press
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries) Alice Goffman University Of Chicago Press
Absolute Music: The History of an Idea Mark Evan Bonds Oxford University Press
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China Evan Osnos Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia Dariusz Jemielniak Stanford University Press
Science and Emotions after 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective University Of Chicago Press
Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age Alex Wright Oxford University Press
The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 (Princeton Classics) R. R. Palmer Princeton University Press
July Crisis: The World’s Descent into War, Summer 1914 T. G. Otte Cambridge University Press
The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East Juan Cole Simon & Schuster
Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World David Carr Oxford University Press
The Logical Must: Wittgenstein on Logic Penelope Maddy Oxford University Press
After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840-1900 Frederick C. Beiser Oxford University Press
Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute) Sean Hsiang-lin Lei University Of Chicago Press
Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution’s Greatest Puzzle Andreas Wagner Current
Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War James Risen Brilliance Audio
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous Gabriella Coleman Verso
Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge Daniel R. Huebner University Of Chicago Press
The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon Brian E. Vick Harvard University Press
Children into Swans: Fairy Tales and the Pagan Imagination Jan Beveridge McGill-Queen’s University Press
Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters Martin J. S. Rudwick University Of Chicago Press
Forensic Shakespeare (Clarendon Lectures in English) Quentin Skinner Oxford University Press
The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution Tony Hey, Gyuri Pápay Cambridge University Press
Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900-1150 (Oxford Studies in Medieval European History) Chris Wickham Oxford University Press
The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England Paul Slack Oxford University Press
The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information Frank Pasquale Harvard University Press
Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame Dan Zahavi Oxford University Press
In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence Kendall L. Walton Oxford University Press
The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World Cyprian Broodbank Oxford University Press
Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (The William G. Bowen Memorial Series in Higher Education) James Turner Princeton University Press
Comics
Here (Pantheon Graphic Novels) Richard McGuire Pantheon
Beautiful Darkness Fabien Vehlmann, Kerascoët Drawn and Quarterly
Beauty Hubert NBM Publishing
Dungeon: Twilight – Vol. 4: The End of Dungeon Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim NBM Publishing
Sam Zabel And The Magic Pen Dylan Horrocks Fantagraphics
Incomplete Works Dylan Horrocks Victoria University Press
The Encyclopedia of Early Earth: A Novel Isabel Greenberg Little, Brown and Company
Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge: “The Seven Cities Of Gold” (Vol. 14) (The Carl Barks Library) Carl Barks Fantagraphics
Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: “Trail Of The Unicorn” (Vol. 6) (The Carl Barks Library) Carl Barks Fantagraphics
The Encyclopedia of Early Earth: A Novel Isabel Greenberg Little, Brown and Company
Perfect Nonsense: The Chaotic Comics and Goofy Games of George Carlson George Carlson Fantagraphics
Weapons of Mass Diplomacy Abel Lanzac SelfMadeHero
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