David Auerbach’s Books of the Year 2022: Humanities
Waggish 2023-01-18
A highlight of the year for me was Genese Grill’s wonderful collection of essays, Portals. Grill’s work translating and writing about Robert Musil has long been a source of great insight and inspiration for me, and her uncompromising thoughts on the purpose and function of art come as solace in these times. As do Noga Arikha’s historically-informed look at mental decline and Rens Bod’s ambitious theory of patterns in knowledge-seeking (which is admirably available free).
Portals: Reflections on the Spirit in Matter Grill, Genese (Author) Splice
The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind Arikha, Noga (Author) Basic Books
World of Patterns: A Global History of Knowledge Bod, Rens (Author), Buell, Leston (Translator) Johns Hopkins University Press
The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason (Volume 76) (Sather Classical Lectures) Ober, Josiah (Author) University of California Press
The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (New York Review Books Classics) Sewell, Elizabeth (Author), Schenck, David (Introduction) NYRB Classics
Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present Drucker, Johanna (Author) University of Chicago Press
Chaos, Cosmos and Creation in Early Greek Theogonies: An Ontological Exploration (Classical Literature and Society) Almqvist, Olaf (Author), Taylor, David (Series Editor) Bloomsbury Academic
Ming Dynasty Tales: A Guided Reader Mair, Victor H. (Editor), Zhang, Zhenjun (Editor) Bloomsbury Academic
The Lost Republic: Cicero's De oratore and De re publica Zetzel, James E. G. (Author) Oxford University Press
Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature (Thinking Literature) Daniel, Professor Drew (Author) Chicago Distribution Center