Best Books Read in 2023
Non-Fiction
1. Jose Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (1975)
I know I keep saying I’ll write more about this book. And I will! Next time I update you all on “The End” (as I’m calling my Gen X/fin-de-millennium project). For now, I’ll just say this relatively obscure work of Spanish early modern history earned the top spot against stiff competition via its insights into how to do cultural history. You’d figure, this long into the “cultural turn” in academic history, people would have figured more out, but you know how historians are.
2. Rick Emerson, Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries (2022)
I talked a lot about what made this one great in my podcast episode with John Dolan. It has a crowd-pleasing (my crowd, anyway) premise: Mormon housewife turned failed writer turned insanely successful literary fraud authors fake diaries that become adolescent classics and help accelerate the war on drugs and the Satanic panic. And it delivers! Like John said on the pod, you might start out thinking “who’s this Rick guy, all letting his smart-aleck tone into the writing?” But his judgments are sound, and wittily expressed, which elevates the whole thing.
3. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud: Volume II, The Tender Passion (1986)
Peter Gay might not sound like the kind of historian I’d like. A soft social democrat/liberal, never considered to be exactly at the cutting edge of novel subject matter or radical insights, perhaps most well known for bringing a psychoanalytic – Freud, not Lacan, though honestly I’m with the old guy on this more than the internet kiddies in their preference for the Frenchie gasser – perspective to history which, to me, is… well, actually, I think for his subject matter – the same kind of uptight bourgeois Victorians Freud dealt with – makes a certain degree of sense. Moreover, radical isn’t the only kind of insight. So is the kind of deep understanding that can come with erudition and devotion to knowing the life of a given time, and none can say Gay lacked either.
4. Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023)
Another podcast guest! Quinn details the ways in which capitalist radicals/reactionaries have sought to either break up nation-states, create their own states, or (most successfully) get current nation-states to make territorial carve-outs for them. Neoconfederates, LARPers, cranks, and the inevitable tech hucksters all make their appearances. Part of an ongoing discussion on the relationship between late capitalism and the state that is producing some exciting insights.
5. Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023)
A book whose power cannot be derailed by however annoying one might find Harris’s career as a lefter-than-thou twitter gadfly, or, indeed by a disastrously bad last chapter! It’s just good social history of an important region, connecting it into its role in regional, national, and global capital. It’s highly readable without being pandering. If you want the way you despise Silicon Valley to be more deeply rooted in material history as opposed to, you know, vibes (though Harris does relate some deeply fucked vibes), Palo Alto is for you. Just don’t look to it for solutions.
6. Jordan Carroll, Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature (2021)
This one is probably the best book I sought out for direct insight related to the work I did on transgression/edginess culture this year. It’s especially admirable for the way it threads the needle between getting at the very real class politics of transgressive editors from H.L. Mencken to Hugh Hefner to Al Goldstein – that smart, professional middle class men can consume obscene material without it negatively affecting them in ways it might those outside of their race, class, and gender – without taking the side of censors.
7. Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (1991)
An old classic, checked off the list! And by that, I mean a book Corey Robin talked a lot about. It is, indeed, erudite, readable, and pretty persuasive. I’m not convinced that all reactionary rhetoric falls into the three categories… but certainly a lot of it does.
8. Kevin Murphy, Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory (2005)
Yet another podcast guest! Here we get a view from the shop floor of the Russian Revolution, from the years leading up to February 1917 to deep into the Stalin period. If you want to know how and why the Russian working class which overthrew the Czars allowed Stalinism to happen, this book is a good way to learn more.
9. Kelly Weill, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything (2022)
As bad as more open fascists are, there’s something existentially creepy about flat-earthers, and journalist/podcaster Kelly Weill sought the movement out to figure out what made them tick. I’m not sure she found out, exactly, beyond “stubborn disdain for scientific authorities,” but how much can anyone know about this stuff? She makes a valuable connection between the internet, old mostly-ironic flat earth pre-internet flat earth clubs, and people looking for a lane for their conspiracism, picking up the joke from the old ironic guys, and taking it seriously enough to sometimes die trying to prove the Earth is, in fact, flat.
10. John Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (2014)
Choice of topic is important, and who had a more interesting life than Brigham Young? From hardscrabble New England farmboy to something like Pope-Emperor of the mountain west, Young accomplished a lot and did a lot of wild stuff and a certain amount of dirt, especially after wresting control of the Mormon church after Joseph Smith’s murder. The Mormons are one of the most interesting American stories, in my opinion, and this tells an important part of it.
Honorable Mention: Francois Cusset, French Theory (2003); H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein (1980); Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950); George Mosse, Germans and Jews (1970); Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow (2015); William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal (2006); Fred Pfeil, Another Tale to Tell (1990); Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca (2007); Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool (1995); Michael Hastings, I Lost My Love in Baghdad (2008); Edward MacKenzie, Street Soldier (2010)
Fiction
1. John Williams, Stoner (1965)
Well, they said it was perfect… I think it more or less is, but more pertinently, it’s beautiful, and great. Stoner’s academic life didn’t much resemble mine, those resonances are only make up a minor theme in the music Williams made here. Among other things, a profound look at depression. Really worth reading for anyone who likes fiction.
2. Lu Xun, The Complete Fiction (1936)
Lu’s short stories succeed in the humanist task of both rendering the strange familiar and vice versa. When I say I don’t know enough about China (and I don’t), I don’t want that space to be filled by either orientalist nonsense or “we’re all the same” kumbaya-ery. Lu does neither- his characters have recognizable motivations and feelings, in radically unusual situations whose logics he nevertheless makes plain. Early twentieth century China was a hard place, and Lu shows it in all of its unsentimental tragedy and accidental humor.
3. Sarah Schulman, Rat Bohemia (1995)
I’ve been thinking Schulman might be high in the running for greatest living American writer, given the span and quality of her work, but hadn’t read any of her fiction to see if it holds up. I fixed that, and it does! Schulman is of the monomythic school of literary greatness, and her white whale is the New York of her youth and early adulthood, the possibilities it held out to bohemians and gay people… and that she lived to see turned into a sales pitch for normies, including one of her novels’ plots stolen and made into Rent. The fact that novels like Rat Bohemia can actually move someone in the sour spot of both not being especially bohemian to begin with, and who is turned off by nostalgia and city-lifestyle marketing, shows something of Schulman’s talent.
4. Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)
Butler’s reputation is reaching plaster-saint status in contemporary critical spheres, especially those touching scifi/fantasy and/or social justice politics. Well, she deserves to be highly regarded! But there’s nothing plaster about the people (and other beings) in her stories, including slaves and slaveowners in all their grimy human contradiction. That said, there is something of the saint — not the plaster kind, but the ineffably touched human kind — in much of her work, including here.
5. Candice Wuehle, Monarch (2022)
“Nineties child beauty pageant winner turns out to be Bourne-style sleeper super-spy” was enough of a hook for me, but as much as Wuehle delivered on that promise (and she did!), she did a hell of a lot more here. She ties in esotericism, the history of intelligence agencies, a whole lot of suburban weirdness, the ways we perform our selfhood and trauma that avoids the pitfalls of our trauma-laden literature… it’s a really bravura performance I wish more people would read.
6. Maurice Druon, Accursed Kings novels (1955-1960)
These historical novels by French statesman-author Druon found a new lease on life after George R.R. Martin cited them as inspirations for Game of Thrones, but if you ask me, The Accursed Kings are far superior books. What they might lack in magic and dragons they more than make up for in insight into history and politics, Druon’s droll humor and unsentimental pathos, and the knowledge that what we’re seeing isn’t that far off from what France saw in the 14th century, in all its intrigue, squalor, and tragedy.
7. Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus (2015)
The desert! I haven’t seen much of it. When I’ve seen it from a plane, I just sort of did a “nope.” I’d be willing to see it close up, but I think I’m a dude for the wetter climes. In any event, we see a lot of the desert here, as Nevadan Watkins sends us on a pre-apocalyptic journey into the Mojave, as ex-model Luz flees a drying-up California with a kidnapped baby in tow, only to find herself among cults and other oddities of a dune mountain. This didn’t make me want to spend more time in the desert, but did make me want to read more Watkins.
8. Percival Everett, Erasure (2003)
I just saw the cinematic adaptation of this, called American Fiction! I don’t see a lot of movies but that one was decent, some funny moments. Well, Erasure has funny moments, but also has a hardness, an immersion in the psyche of a detached man who’s maybe not as detached as he thinks, but not in the Hollywood “he actually loves people” way. Come for the skewering of reductive pandering race novels, stay for the finely-grained depiction of depression among the black bourgeoisie!
9. Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake (2014)
I guess if I had an award for best “reading on the right” in a given year, Kingsnorth would win? He would probably deny being a right-winger, insisting he’s beyond that kind of thing, but his particular version of eco-pessimism, with its emphasis on a vaguely mystical connection with place and disdain for “progress” and cosmopolitanism… well, here we see a Saxon, a true son of the English soil (what of the Britons, one wants to ask, if they’re that kind of a nerd), relate his horror of the Norman invasion, his efforts at resistance, and his subsequent mental breakdown. It’s not exactly subtle, the way the Normans stand in for modernity, but who needs subtle when you’ve got Germanic gods and Kingsnorth’s inventive (and often hilarious) variant of Old English?
10. Sam Lipsyte, The Ask (2010)
This one’s just a funny, real-feeling depiction of failure in contemporary New York. That’s a common subject in contemporary literature! And the depictions usually suck. This one doesn’t! The narrator is both awful and relatable, the jokes actually funny most of the time, and, most importantly, does not inhabit as small of a world, as closely guarded from anything outside the east coast bourgeois ambit, as so many of this books.
Honorable Mention: Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead (2000); Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow (2006); Dennis Cooper, Frisk (1991); Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World (1949); Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô (1862); Ada Palmer, Terra Ignota novels (2016-2021); Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens (2016); James Ellroy, The Enchanters (2023); Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman (2016); Isle McElroy, The Atmospherians (2021); Joe Mungo Reed, Hammer (2022)
Worst Books Read in 2023
No ranked lists, here. I just go by category. Let’s see:
Stuff I read “for the pod”
A lot of the worst books I read either came from Chieftain-level subscribers (at the highest subscription level to this here channel, you can make me read a book! Terms and restrictions apply) (thanks guys!), were discussed on Reading in the Time of Monsters, or both. Probably the worst book I read all year was J.K. Rowling’s Ink Black Heart, not the transphobic nightmare you might imagine, just fucking long and dull, was assigned to me by one of the mighty Chieftains! I discussed Chieftain-assigned Putin stooge Vladislav Surkov’s attempt at fiction, Almost Zero, on an episode of RITTOM. My friends Quentin and Kit came on the pod to discuss Heinlein’s libertarian/solipsist incest fantasy Time Enough For Love and R.F. Kuang’s weak-shit anticolonialism-for-mean-girlbosses in Babel, respectively, and good times were had with both. Lastly, one of my first episodes was about a disappointing attempt to write a critical biography of Hunter S. Thompson. Memory lane!
Zeitgeist time
It occurred to while me compiling these lists that I’ve assigned myself to study musty old zeitgeists, whatever ideas were meant to really reflect “the spirit of the age.” That’s what I’m doing with Gen X, for instance. I am skeptical of zeitgeists. I don’t know how much I follow my own- I do try to read some contemporary literary fiction I wouldn’t otherwise, on the idea I want to know where literature is going (I do find unexpected gems that way, too). I don’t write about them to celebrate them. But now I wind up reading a lot about them.
In specific, I did a lot with zeitgeists between the eighties and now, and those where “transgression” or “edginess” was considered an important value. I read some good stuff in this vein. I also read a lot of crap. Gavin McInnes is arguably one of the architects of “edgy” “style” and had been from well before he turned his hand to organizing fascist paramilitaries, and his 2012 memoir How To Piss In Public displays transgression culture at its hollowest. Is he worse or better than Jim and Debbie Goad, in Answer Me!, the nineties zine the Goads put out before Jim abandoned Debbie (she being the better writer of the pair), took up with a barely legal girlfriend, got arrested for beating her, and appointed himself the savior of white trash everywhere, eventually descending into open fascism? Well… Jim tried harder. That both means his rants are a little less glib than McInnes’, but also, you can smell the lamp on them, just how hard lil Jimmy tries to shock. Neither are worth pursuing except as primary sources for the sort of project I’ve taken on.
As for other edgy litterateurs, old and new, I re-introduced myself to William Vollmann, who made himself semi-famous with flowery writing about sex workers and drugs, by trying is 2005 novel, Europe Central. I figured, hey, it’s about the ideological madness of Central Europe, 1914-1945, at least that’s interesting, right? Well, it is, but Vollmann isn’t. He’s the same over-writer he always was, with the same dumb predictable points. I will likely write more about this in my project. On the younger (but not as young as he tries to get across!) end of the spectrum we have Canadian fashionista Alex Kazemi and his New Millennium Boyz. Bret Easton Ellis for zoomers, set mistakenly in the nineties even though the vibe is at least ten years down the line, the proverbial “pizza cutter”- all edge, no point. Though pizza cutters usually don’t gleefully anticipate lib censoriousness like Kazemi’s blurbs and the publicists who compiled them seem to do. I’m not sure even the most censorious lib will be bothered with this turd- it doesn’t seem to be rocketing Kazemi to literary fame in a hurry. Chuck Klosterman always did edgy-but-safe, saying “fuck,” relating tales of feckless low living, and swearing his fealty to alternative (or anyway, loud and aggressive) music, but finding his way back to conventional morals and pat thinking within the span of any given essay. We see this in The Nineties, which seems to be my main rival, currently, for narrative about the space I’m looking to claim. It only competes in that Klosterman is an established writer with money and I’m just some dude. Also in being finished and published. Minor points!
Grafton Tanner tried to explain the zeitgeist of the internet and its obsession with nostalgia but let The Circle of the Snake collapse into the same sort of pseudo-sophisticated meaningless theorizing that a certain corner of the internet — the customer base for Zero Books, roughly, anyway the ones not there solely for woke-baiting — thinks is just great. Jeff Gordinier would compete in the Gen X definer space with X Saves the World but doesn’t. If nothing else, publishing a book like he did that close to 2008 was just a non-starter, and it seems like he slunk back to writing about restaurants.
Not quite in the same vein, but close, is a real disappointment: Joseph Darda’s How White Men Won the Culture Wars. Darda has a provocative and promising thesis: that veteran politics post-Vietnam War served to unite white liberals and conservatives. Both understood the war as harmful primarily to white American servicemen (who came to be almost racialized in some weird ways), and in attempting to “heal the wounds of Vietnam” defined as the alienation and trauma of veterans, put aside both criticism of American imperialism and the claims of the black freedom movement. I think there’s a lot of truth there. But Darda gets really far-fetched and tendentious in places: I don’t think Tim O’Brien ripped off Song of Solomon by having a character pretend to fly in one scene; how anyone can think heartland rockers like Tom Petty or Bob Seger came off as “clean” and drug-free is beyond me. More importantly than harming the reputation of Tom Petty or Tim O’Brien (who did say some dumb shit about Toni Morrison, to be fair), it shows the basic pattern of mediocre social-justice-inflected analysis: identify a Thing as Bad, and then link it to other Things via various identities of varying degree of superficiality. These things are then part of Bad. Honestly, it’s not the judgment I have a problem with, so much as the seeming lack of interest of really engaging more with the subject matter, seeing what really made this cultural formation — and I genuinely think he’s onto something with the importance of a Veteran American identity category — work.
In terms of more contemporary zeitgeisty writers, I read some lousy examples there, too. Marissa Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was dull, mediocre, and a bad argument for the idea that video games are art and deserve their own great novel (which they damn well are, and they damn well do!). Sean Thor Conroe gets a li’l pat on the head for his desperate grab at relevance by making his lame contemporary dude narrator talk in specious bro-dialect in Fuccboi, and a derisory boot in the ass for pretending that mean libs are keeping art like his won. Ken Kalfus trod territory I tried, in a bad first attempt at writing a novel, in 2 A.M. in Little America! Ever wonder how an Iowa Workshop type guy would write a second-American-civil-war-nowadays novel? Well, Ken has the book for you! His tale of life in American war refugee colonies abroad refuses to name anything meaningful about either the war (other than it being Bad) or the host countries his narrator goes to (other than them being Foreign), including not naming the countries! Hell yeah, literature!! Good job!
I might write more about Elif Batuman’s The Idiot in a later newsletter, because I do think it’s a prime example of something I’ve run into a lot in contemporary literature, a sort of militant boredom and affectlessness that acts less, as its supporters might say, to get across what the contemporary condition is like, and more to block out scarier (and more alive) aspects of that condition from a readership that sees itself in writers like Batuman and characters like The Idiot narrator Selim. I don’t think Batuman lacks for talent, or intelligence. I think some of our bad literary writers might be dumb or just bad at their jobs, but I’m not convinced Batuman is one. I think the commitment to a small, hermetically sealed world comes from a choice- maybe not fully conscious, but a choice nevertheless. More on that down the line.
Readings on the right
I never love this category. But this year, my readings on the right yielded a smaller percentage of decent reads — Paul Kingsnorth, Mark Helprin, George Nash being just about the only ones I could recommend to anyone — and a whole load of crap. One of the OGs of the “cultural marxism” conspiracy theory, William Lind, got signed by Nazi press Countercurrents for a series of incoherent letters to the editor about how old stuff is cool. Retroculture is less a book and more a sustained act of exploitation of an elderly man. Patrick Deneen and Richard Weaver were both supposed to be hot shit conservative intellectuals of their day- now, and the immediate post WWII era, respectively. Real “made me put down my NPR mug and really think, y’know?!” types. Bullshit- I can barely remember what Deneen was getting at in Why Liberalism Failed. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences had more in the tank, at the very least a real, bone-deep crazed medievalism that almost certainly inspired John Kennedy Toole when he wrote the character of Ignatius J. Reilly (absurd reactionary blogger Rod Dreher cites both Ideas Have Consequences and A Confederacy of Dunces as being among his favorite books- Toole was not a comrade, but Dreher does not get jokes)… but that’s about it. We’re supposed to at least sort of like G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, early twentieth century English Catholic propagandists who were such bros they occasionally referred to themselves as “Chesterbelloc.” They’re supposed to be witty and learned. Well, compared to similar scribblers today, maybe. But Orthodoxy and The Great Heresies show that while the degree of education they beat into the elites back then did make for more elegant writing than we usually see today, it didn’t actually make for good ideas or sound thought. It’s a bunch of glib horseshit. Chesterton writes jokey, Belloc writes pseudo-profound, both are hard to stomach after a few pages if you have any ideas of your own. The sad thing is, they do sound a lot like parts of the pseudo-literate internet.
Anyway! Bit of a downer ending. But, we here at Melendy Avenue Review with you a New Year full of books, cats, and fun times!