Home #edutech David Auerbach Books of the Year 2013

Books of the Year 2013

Waggish 2013-12-20

It was a pretty good year, especially for fiction. I stand no chance of ever catching up on my backlog of books to read, so these are less “Books of the Year” than “Books of My Year,” ones which happened to be published in 2013 (or late 2012). A boom in non-Waggish writing resulted in me not having time to write up some of these books, which I really do regret. I spent a month rereading old Pynchon novels alongside Bleeding Edge, which was blessedly worthwhile, but did not help my productivity. Reading list longa, vita brevis.

The order is fairly random though I have tried to put my favorites toward the top of each section. Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo was probably foreordained to be at the top, while the final appearance of Lem’s Summa Technologiae in English was a major event for me. (See my review here.) As with War and War when I first read it, I don’t have a lot to say about Seiobo right now. Maybe in ten years.

As with last year, I haven’t read the entirety of some of the nonfiction selections: Judith Herrin’s two volumes of essays will take some time, while the Maimonides book had me flagging on several topics that just aren’t my thing.

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

Seiobo There Below

László Krasznahorkai (New Directions)

Towards the One and Only Metaphor

Miklos Szentkuthy (Contra Mundum Press)

Tapestry

Philip Terry (Reality Street)

The Black Spider (New York Review Books Classics)

Jeremias Gotthelf (NYRB Classics)

Anti M

Lisa Samuels (Chax Press)

Blinding: Volume 1

Mircea Cartarescu (Archipelago)

The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller: Vol. 2

Carol Emshwiller (NonStop Press)

Dossier K: A Memoir

Imre Kertesz (Melville House)

Mo Said She Was Quirky

James Kelman (Other Press)

When the Time Comes

Josef Winkler (Contra Mundum Press)

The Forbidden Kingdom (Pushkin Collection)

Jacob Slauerhoff (Pushkin Press)

Cannonball

Joseph McElroy (Dzanc Books)

Bleeding Edge

Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press HC, The)

Middle C (Vintage International)

William H Gass (Vintage)

All That Is

James Salter (Knopf)

His Wife Leaves Him

Stephen Dixon (Fantagraphics)

The Childhood of Jesus

J. M. Coetzee (Viking Adult)

The Sinistra Zone

Adam Bodor (New Directions)

The Guy Davenport Reader

Guy Davenport (Counterpoint)

The Adjacent

Christopher Priest (Gollancz)

The Book of Monelle

Marcel Schwob (Wakefield Press)

A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer

Pierre Mac Orlan (Wakefield Press)

Georges Perec and the Oulipo: Winter Journeys (Atlas Anti-Classics)

Georges Perec, Michèle Audin, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Bens (Atlas Press)

A Hero of Our Time (Oxford World’s Classics)

Mikhail Lermontov, Nicolas Pasternak Slater, Andrew Kahn (Oxford University Press, USA)

 

Nonfiction

Summa Technologiae (Electronic Mediations)

Stanislaw Lem (Univ Of Minnesota Press)

Nagarjuna’s Middle Way: Mulamadhyamakakarika (Classics of Indian Buddhism)

Mark Siderits, Shoryu Katsura (Wisdom Publications)

Being, Humanity, and Understanding

G. E. R. Lloyd (Oxford University Press, USA)

Savage Energies: Lessons of Myth and Ritual in Ancient Greece

Walter Burkert (University Of Chicago Press)

Properties as Processes

Johanna Seibt (Ridgeview Publishing Digital)

The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance

Jonardon Ganeri (Oxford University Press)

Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind

John Miles Foley (University of Illinois Press)

Foundations of Modern International Thought

David Armitage (Cambridge University Press)

The Circle of Socrates: Readings in the First-Generation Socratics

Christopher Rowe, George Boys-Stones (Hackett Publishing Co.)

Baroque Science

Ofer Gal, Raz Chen-Morris (University Of Chicago Press)

Language, Truth, and Literature: A Defence of Literary Humanism

Richard Gaskin (Oxford University Press, USA)

Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield

Jeremy Scahill (Nation Books)

The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide

Josef Stern (Harvard University Press)

Consciousness and the Social Brain

Michael S. A. Graziano (Oxford University Press, USA)

Trade and Romance

Michael Murrin (University Of Chicago Press)

Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium

Judith Herrin (Princeton University Press)

Margins and Metropolis: Authority across the Byzantine Empire

Judith Herrin (Princeton University Press)

Complexity and the Arrow of Time

(Cambridge University Press)

The Engine of Complexity: Evolution as Computation

John E. Mayfield (Columbia University Press)

How Did Poetry Survive?: The Making of Modern American Verse

John Timberman Newcomb (University of Illinois Press)

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea

Mark Blyth (Oxford University Press, USA)

The Essential Hirschman

Albert O. Hirschman, Jeremy Adelman, Emma Rothschild, Amartya Sen (Princeton University Press)

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University Press)

Quantum Computing since Democritus

Scott Aaronson (Cambridge University Press)

 

Comics

Incidents in the Night: Volume 1

David B. (Uncivilized Books)

Black Paths

David B. (Harry N. Abrams)

Interiorae

Gabriella Giandelli (Fantagraphics)

Barnaby (Vol. 1) (Barnaby)

Crockett Johnson (Fantagraphics)

Related posts:

  1. Books of the Year 2012
  2. Books of the Year 2011
  3. The Books on the (Finnegans) Wake