During the pandemic, I read around one hundred books --which is an unchanged number from years past and a much lower number than my pre-social media days. Looking at the stats on Goodreads, it seems like I read fewer pages this year. Maybe I didn't read many long books? I think the longest might have been the Southern Reacg TRilogy by Jeff VanderMeer.
All in all, it was a wonderful year in reading. Highlights below!
Ok, drum roll for my top reads of 2020....
2020 Top Read: The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium, by Juan Pimental
***This was the book that stayed in my mind all year! I was so inspired by this wonderful history of science book that I wrote an essay on Durer's Rhinoceros (forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine), and a short story I wrote about the megatherium won a creative writing award judged by the great XXX! Announcement in January*** Megatherium Notes Here
Best in Fiction (Top 3):
#1 Bangkok Wakes to Rain, novel by
Sudbanthad, Pitchaya * (My review in Dublin Review of Books--here)
#2 Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry of the Future (3QD Essay Here)
#3 The Shadow King, by Maaza Mengiste
Best in Non-Fiction (Top 3):
#1 Freud's Trip to Orvieto, by Nicholas Fox Weber (Essay in 3 Quarks daily here)
#2 The Anxieties of a Citizen Class: The Miracles of the True Cross of San Giovanni Evangelista, by Kiril Petkov
#3 Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance by Holly S. Hurlburt. An essay I wrote on the painting is forthcoming in a gorgeous Canadian magazine called, Ekstasis. My Bellini Notes are here.
Most unique:
The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality, by Morgan Meis
Best in Memoir:
Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey
Other Memoirs Here
Sebald's Rings of Saturn and Vertigo
Posts in Bavarians Category
Most Beautiful:
This year saw two great memoir about the Heart Sutra, by Alex Kerr and Frederik Schodt
Biggest Surprise Discovery:
Jeff VenderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy
Sichuan peppercorns and Fly by Jing (I am looking forward to reading Fuchia Dunlap's memoir).
Most Thought-Provoking and World Changing:
When Animals Speak: Toward an Interspecies Democracy
Food:
Fermentation as Metaphor, by Sandor Katz (review coming!) Notes Here.
&
Naoko Takei Moore's Donabe and A Universe in a Clay Pot
On Foraging [Reviews Coming]
Don't miss: Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods, with a Guide to Plants and Recipes By Winifred Bird
Feral, by George Monbiot
On Flowers: Lessons from an Accidental Florist
by Amy MerrickForage,
Harvest, Feast: A Wild-Inspired Cuisine Hardcover –
by Marie Viljoen
Incredible Wild Edibles Paperback –
by Samuel Thayer
Best Science:
Extraterrestrial Languages
by Daniel Oberhaus
Best Re-Read:
Death in Venice in he 2009 translation by Michael Henry Heim and re-read quite a lot on Mi Fu--notes here.
New Journeys:
This year, I discovered the Heart Sutra at long last--in Japan, our family was part of Pure Land Tradition, so the Heart Sutra was was never on my radar. I was very moved to read about it. My notes are here. My essay on Xuanzang in Kyoto Journal was shared here at 3 Quarks Daily. And my book Goodreads review of Alex Kerr and Frederik Schodt's books above.
I started reading David Hinton last year --and my astonishment is on-going. My review of his new book is here: China Root is here at Asian Review of Books.
&
Minae Mizumura: Inheritance from Mother, The Fall of Language, and review of her new novel coming in Chicago Review of Books coming in February.
**
--2020 Book Towers Below--
The First Stack: Orvieto
Maybe like a lot of people, the first time I stepped inside the magnificent cathedral at Orvieto--I had no idea what I was looking at. The entirely painted chapel overwhelms. I looked but didn't see... but back home later, images I recalled puzzled me. Was that Jesus as the AntiChrist? What had we seen and more, how stupid was I not to learn all about it before traveling all the way. But that trip, Orvieto was just a whim. A day-trip escape when we were staying in the strange abbey with the astronomers. Back home, I embarked on a journey in reading to learn everything I could about the frescoes.
My essay: When Freud Met The Antichrist In Orvieto
And the fantastic and very unique book by Nicolas Fox Weber: Freud’s Trip to Orvieto
Other Books
Seen from Behind: Perspectives on the Male Body and Renaissance Art
by Patricia Lee Rubin
Luca Signorelli --written in 1899 (to enjoy how different art history was back then)
by Maud Cruttwell
The Renaissance Antichrist: Luca Signorelli's Orvieto Frescoes
by Jonathan B. Riess
How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World
by Creighton E. Gilbert
Jo Walton's novel, Lent.
Luca Signorelli: The San Brizio Chapel, Orvieto
by Jonathan B. Riess
Confessions of the Antichrist (A Novel)
by Addison Hodges Hart
The Etruscans
by Lucy Shipley
Dante's Journey to Polyphony
by Francesco Ciabattoni
Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse
Articles
Forgetting Signorelli: Monstrous Visions of the Resurrection of the Dead , MARGARET E. OWENS Source: American Imago, Vol. 61, No. 1, Picturing Freud (Spring 2004), pp. 7-33 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable Download Signorelli
Next Year?
Fuentes: I’m really interested in comparing Signorelli's frescoes to Bosch's heavenly delight. I found it so jarring that Fuentes imagined the Orvieto frescoes flying off the walls in the cathedral in Orvieto and landing as paintings in El Escorial where Philip II proceeded to gaze on them and obsess on them just like he did the Bosch triptych. I was puzzled because Philip II and the Bosch triptych is a case of fact being better than fiction--or so I thought?? But how to improve on the Triptych? But the more I am reading, the more inspired and fascinating I am finding this idea of the genius that is Carlos Fuentes.
The Second Stack: Venice
Venice essays forthcoming at Dillydoun, Ekstasis Magazine and Ekphrastic.
After Orvieto, we traveled to Venice to see Titian's Transfiguration. But --sad to say--it was under conservation, so all we saw was a huge reproduction in the Frari. Despite this major calamity, the trip still became a kind of Titian pilgrimage, as we were staying in the quarter where Titian lived and found ourselves breaking down in tears in front of his last painting in the Academia. That work, the Pieta, made a great impression on me--in great part because of a fabulous book I read by Mark Hudson, called Titian's Last Days. It was my favorite non-fiction of the year. I wrote about my experience here at the Hedgehog Review. Other wonderful reads on Titian were : Titian: His Life, by Sheila Hale; The Titian Committee, by Iain Pears; Titian: Lady in White, by Andreas Henning (Norton Simon Museum Exhibition Catalog)
On essay I wrote on Bellini is forthcoming in a gorgeous Canadian magazine called, Ekstasis. Books included, The Anxieties of a Citizen Class: The Miracles of the True Cross of San Giovanni Evangelista, Venice 1370-1480 by Kiril Petkov and Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance by Holly S. Hurlburt. My notes are here.
Also on Carpaccio: Ciao, Carpaccio!: An Infatuation, by Jan Morris [Re-read twice and it's still out to read again!}; Carpaccio: Major Pictorial Cycles, by Stefania Mason
My reading so far:
- Venice Ecology: If Venice Dies, by Salvatore Settis; The Science of Saving Venice, by Caroline Fletcher; Also fascinating: Venice: Extraordinary Maintenance, by Gianfranco Pertot
- Venice the beautiful: Venice Is a Fish: A Sensual Guide, by Tiziano Scarpa (and Dream of Venice in Black and White)
- Jewish history: Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice, by Erica Jong [worst book of 2019]; A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare's Venice, by Harry Berger Jr.;Venice and Its Jews: 500 Years Since the Founding of the Ghetto, by Lenore Rosenberg
- Venice the amazing: The Horses of St Mark's: A Story of Triumph in Byzantium, Paris and Venice, by Charles Freeman [FANTASTIC!!! GOING TO RE-READ]; The City of Falling Angels, by John Berendt (runner up for best in non-fiction!)
- Venice Cooking: Fantastic Cookbook:Venice: Four Seasons of Home Cooking, by Russell Norman. Also FUN: Brunetti's Cookbook, by Roberta Pianaro, Donna Leon.
And not to neglect the classics below: Ruskin's Stone's of Venice, Norwich's A History of Venice, and Jan Morris' famous The Venetian Empire. Also Crowley's City of Fortune, which I am unable to locate despite having bought two copies. Also beautiful: Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited, by Sarah Quill.
Venice Notes Here
The Third Tower: Talking to Space Aliens and Animals
An Inter-Species Crowd: How To Talk To Animals And Space Aliens
In 2018, I started a tower of books on the topic of animal consciousness. Book list here and the culminating 3 Quarks Daily post here. This year, I wanted to continue pursuing the topic--in fact, had not even put the stack of books back on the shelves since. My interest was re-ignited when I read Daniel Oberhaus’ book Extraterrestrial Languages --after stumbling on a really exciting review in the London Review of Books. But it was not the history of SETI attempts to communicate with alien civilizations that excited me. What genuinely grabbed my attention was when the author made the obvious point that if we can’t even communicate with other species on our own planet, how are we supposed to communicate with aliens? Of course, we have been able to teach primates, Corvids, parrots and other birds, and certainly dolphins a lot of our human language — But how many words do we speak of Dolphinese or Chimpanzine? And what songs can we sing to in Whale-song?
Coincidentally in my UCLA creative writing class Writing the Fantastic, the first exercise was to write from a non-human POV. So this all led me back first to the books on animal consciousness and communication.
This perfectly aligned to some recent books on philosophy. I believe we are on the precipice of a new paradigm. More and more intellectuals—from Timothy Morton, Eva Meijir, and Paul Kingnorth’s Dark Mountain Movement to Bay Area Greats: Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Michael Pollan and Jenny Odell, we are hearing about a new way of being in the world. Starting with the Great Donna Haraway, these thinkers are not only telling us we need to stay with the trouble, but they are heralding a new age of interspecies democracy and solidarity with non-human people.
So, below are the books that I read and resulting 3 Quarks Daily post An Inter-Species Crowd: How To Talk To Animals And Space Aliens
Bay Area Thinkers:
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene 3rd ed. Edition
Both by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan
Other New Movement Philosophers
Hyperobjects, by Timothy Morton
Also by Morton: Dark Ecology for a Logic of Future Coexistence
and Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays by Paul Kingsnorth
Inter-Species Crowd
When Animals Speak by Eva Meijir
Timothy Morton's Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway
Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist
by Christof Koch
Looking ahead, I will be reading a lot of memoirs. I would love to finish Fuentes as well next year.
What I wonderful gift. Thank you for this. And I love the organization into stacks. I will drop my own list for 2020 onto Fb but it is just a list in order that the books were published or for collected, for the author's death.
Posted by: Steven Forth | 01/01/2021 at 06:35 AM