Well! It’s been another year. Thanks for reading, everybody! I plan on adding a new feature to the Review in the new year, you’ll see what it is soon. For now, enjoy my discussion of the worst and best books I read this year!
WORST READS OF 2022
Readings on the right - I never like this part, because it makes it seem like I read material I disagree with solely to make fun of it. I don’t. And I did read a few books from the right that I liked, by figures like Eric Voegelin, Joseph de Maistre, and Russell Kirk, even as I strongly disagreed with them (and in de Maistre’s case, found it somewhat disenchanting of the idea that the dude was an especially lucid thinker). That being said, I read some real right-wing drek this year. Yoram Hazony’s The Virtues of Nationalism, Ross Douthat’s Privileged, Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy, Bruce Lincoln’s Red Victory were shitty in boring ways. Bronze Age Mindset, written by a blogger who calls himself Bronze Age Pervert but is likely a Romanian-American low-end academic, Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, and Alexander Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory were somewhat more conceptually ambitious but collapsed into not just into incoherence – I expect that – but just lameness, laziness. The worst book I read this year combined the ambition of a Dugin, the knowing efforts to rope in liberals/leftists of a Douthat, and the sheer dumbassery of some prick with a Punisher skull avi commenting on a local news story: Thaddeus Russell’s A Renegade History of the United States.
Bad leftist writing - Even up the score, right? Well, wrong, because there’s only two worth discussing here (I mean I guess some of the shitty litterateurs I’ll be discussing below are leftists but you know what I mean). And one is Catherine Liu, who, if she hasn’t taken her turn into full-on right-wingery yet, she’s just wasting her time. Her The Virtue Hoarders has the benefit of the true passion of the fanatic – Liu hates her subject, the “professional managerial class,” with the gut-level sincerity of a pimply teenager staring into the mirror – but it also sloppy and absurd, an exercise in the sort of equation that internet discourse will eventually make all our thought into. “Talks about money and class, gooooood, talks about race and sex, baaaaaad!” Stuart Jeffries’ Everything, All the Time, Everywhere, which is supposed to be a history of postmodern culture, is boring in comparison, but partakes of the same sort of internet brain-rot- if it’s kinda weird and not meaningfully political, it must be postmodern! I’m past calling for the internet to be taken away. This is on the internet. These people should just grow up and learn to handle their shit.
Shit I read for projects (Birthday Lecture version) - I read a bunch of Gen X and Gen X-related literature for my Birthday Lecture this year, most of which was bad. Strauss and Howe’s Generations is an absurd brick of astrological quasi-history. Charles Cross’s Come As You Are, about Kurt Cobain, was also bad. For fiction, the “literary brat pack” writers of the eighties produced some dull nonsense- Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York, Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction. Was this stuff really shocking, to audiences only twenty years separated from the decadence of the sixties? I get it, they were playing cynical, but is that all it took? Doug Coupland’s Generation X was an exercise in pointlessness, and I kind of wonder why they let him publish it, who in the hell it was for. Jim Goad’s Redneck Manifesto, part of my wheel into nineties edginess culture (and race politics) that I might need to approach again as I didn’t have time to expand on it, was a candidate for worst book I read this year, a flop-sweat soaked not-so-tite five at a shitty comedy club turned into a book masquerading as social critique. Thaddeus Russell beat it out by virtue of Russell’s superior smugness, but it was real dumb.
Shit I read for projects (Podcast version) - In order to pull my weight on the podcast I do with my friend Isaac, I’ve embarked on a project to read a good sample of the memoirs and journalism that came out of the Whitey Bulger saga and the general Boston crime milieu of that period, for an episode tentatively titled “The Wordy Goons of Boston.” Some of the books I read for this are all right, and I’ll discuss them on the pod. Two are just shit, however- Red Shea’s Rat Bastards and Kevin Weeks’ Brutal. Crime memoirs are usually only good when they’re honest- not necessarily about the details of crimes, it makes sense why you’d want to obfuscate some of that. They need to be honest about their motivations and their worlds. It also helps if they’re not fucking boring, which both Shea’s and Weeks’s books are for long stretches, especially Shea’s endless braggadoccio about how tough he was/is, how much sex he had/has (his memoirs literally begins with him bragging about how a sex worker told him he had a big dick), etc. Weeks is more the middle-manager trying to parlay his association with the big man Whitey, though there’s also a lot of bragging about how many black kids he fought during the bussing crisis. Shea makes a big deal about being one of the few involved in Bulger’s network to not turn state’s evidence after Whitey, patron saint and enforcer of the South Boston code of silence, proved to be the rat king. Weeks, who was Whitey’s aide de camp and successor after Whitey fled Boston, does a “more in sadness than in anger” thing about Whitey’s betrayal. But both books are just sludge, literary cash-ins baiting white suburban men who want to fancy themselves tough. It was a weird time in Massachusetts, when books like that were selling, and an unpleasant time on Melendy Avenue, when I had to read them.
Lousy Overrated Scifi/Fantasy - This wasn’t the best year for scifi/fantasy reading, for me. I read some decent ones but I also read a few that made an unpleasant theme among them. These were highly-praised works that purported to undertake mind-blowing, subversive feats of worldbuilding. No longer would we have to read stories of questing knights errant and bold space captains set in white-guy-centric worlds! Except, these books were not only mediocre on a prose level, they also all failed to subvert anything. They were about as lowest common denominator as you can get and still attract an NPR-type educated audience, and their plots and worlds were the same old same old dressed up in very thin non-European or non-patriarchal stage dressing, like a cheap reskin of a video game. Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun and R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War did nothing original with the highly worthwhile premises of epic fantasy based on Mesoamerican mythology and nineteenth/early twentieth century Chinese history, respectively. For her part, Naomi Alderman’s The Power turns a premise about literal gender (well, really, sex) warfare into a mediocre Black Mirror episode. Yes, it sucks that the most noteworthy lousy thing in SFF appears to be the province of women writers, often women of color. White men are also writing lousy books, but generally, these books aren’t being presented as genre-redefining works of subversive imagination anymore, like these are.
Lousy Literary Fiction - I do try to read contemporary literary fiction, often as audiobooks (maybe that’s not the best way to go about it?). Most of the time, I don’t like it, but sometimes it’s ok. I read a few respectable recent literary novels this year, by the likes of Hari Kunzru, Torrey Peters, and Joshua Cohen. I also read some pretty bad ones. Two that stand out are the two ‘woods. Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind wasn’t great, though I did appreciate that it was a mediocre literary book that didn’t lie like a rug. The other wood, Patricia Lockwood, wrote a loathsome internet book, No One Is Talking About This. A lot of people I know like Lockwood, and I’m willing to look into more of her work, but her whole “gleefully proclaiming the death of meaning because twitter exists” schtick is tired and hostile. Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays kind of sucked, too, in my opinion, and the Didion-worship prevalent in American criticism probably hasn’t helped contemporary American literature to become more lively or more honest. To round things out, I read Charles Shields’s And So It Goes, a biography of Kurt Vonnegut, which was just flatly inadequate to the task of getting across what made the old guy special.
BEST READS OF 2022
Nonfiction
10. Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (1987) - Combine the fissiparous passions of Trotskyism with the stakes and ambitions of public political intellectual life in America between the twenties and the fifties, and you have a pretty interesting story, here.
9. Charles Gallagher, The Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front (2021) - My old dissertation committee member dug up some fascinating stuff on Catholic fascism in the US, mainly the northeast, and its connections to Nazi spies- and antifascist connections to British ones.
8. Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (1995) - Just a good political biography with more analytical heft and attention to context than you usually see.
7. Marcia Chatelain, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America (2021) - The story of fast food in black America is sad enough on its own, but much sadder in the context of the rise and decline of the twentieth century black freedom movement that Chatelain charts.
6. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (1952) - I more or less entirely disagree with this book, which purports that the descent of more or less all progressive thought can be drawn directly back to the Gnostics, but it was an interesting read.
5. J.W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (1981) - Just the sort of toothsome intellectual history read I enjoy, and focusing on an area that didn’t get much attention when I was training in that subfield- the history of conventional liberal thought.
4. Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 (2021) - Inspiring, saddening, fascinating, and always impressive in its historical spadework undertaken by a participant-scholar in the great anti-AIDS street movement.
3. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (1958) - The uncanny world of the Gnostics… not quite comes alive, but comes to the reader in tantalizing and deeply-analyzed texture in this work by the great philosophical historian and student of Heidegger’s.
2. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009) - This is an incredibly rich, and often entertaining, exegesis on a genre of writing I often find bland, dull, and mostly meaningless: workshop fiction. No mean feat!
1. Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (2022) - This year saw the publication of what we can only hope will be the first in many “black books of imperialism,” where the British Empire comes to be understood as the ideologically-motivated atrocity that it was. Much honor to Elkins for ignoring the many reasons not to write this kind of book, and embracing the good reasons to do so: truth, and glory to the truth-teller.
Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army (1991); Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water (2016); Michael Patrick MacDonald, All Souls (1997); Max Chafkin, The Contrarian (2021); Eric Bogosian, Operation Nemesis (2015); James Forman, Locking Up Our Own (2017); Andy Stapp, Up Against the Brass (1970); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles (2011)
Fiction
10. Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt (2022) - Holy zombie testicles, Batman! This story of trans survival in a literal gender apocalypse hits notes of body horror, survival, and of the terror of love and intimacy hard and deftly.
9. Gore Vidal, Burr (1973) - An anti-Hamilton decades before the fact, the old phrase-monger’s retelling of Aaron Burr’s adventures and of political skullduggery in nineteenth century New York entertains and intrigues.
8. Attica Locke, Heaven, My Home (2019) - The second installment of the Ranger Mathews series, where a black Texas Ranger confronts crime, hatred, and the contradictions and joys of life in a historically-rooted black Texan community delivers the genre goods and more.
7. Hari Kunzru, Red Pill (2020) - Holy smokes, an internet-identity-paranoia novel that isn’t completely stupid! It came perilously close at times but Kunzru’s basic good sense, especially where history is concerned, as well as his deft style, more or less rescued it.
6. Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948) - One of the real surprises of this year’s reading for me was finding how much I loved the first novel by a guy I think – thought, now, maybe – as mainly being a pretentious buffoon. His war story is thoughtful and wrenching.
5. Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) - The great science fantasy master’s first truly spectacular work, this takes the whole colonies-in-space thing as something other than a fun fantasy, getting into what that would mean for both colonizer and colonized.
4. Jonathan Lethem, Fortress of Solitude (2003) - I wonder if this will eventually be considered historical fiction? A sprawling, but never patience-trying, tale of growing up in late twentieth century New York, and an actually interesting meditation on nerd/pop culture and what it means- everyone tries it, but Lethem is one of the few who makes it interesting.
3. Philip Roth, The Human Stain (2000) - Brutal, not a word out of place, this tale of disgrace, dissimulation, and efforts to just live a decent human life in the midst of them is the work of a master at the top of his form.
2. Halldór Laxness, Independent People (1934) - A tale of grinding positional economic warfare for mere survival in the weird and deeply isolated world of pre-WWII rural Iceland, this book was an extended treat for me.
1. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) - This feminist scifi classic eschews subtlety for passion and vision, and it pays off in ways it would be hard to see happening for a lesser writer. A harrowing, enchanting, and revelatory vision of the future- and of Piercy’s present.
V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street (1959); Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby (2021); Avram Davidson, The Phoenix and the Mirror (1969); Cintra Wilson, Colors Insulting to Nature (2004); Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021); Caitlin Kiernan, Tinfoil Dossier books (2017-2020); Elle Nash, Animals Eat Each Other (2017); China Miéville, Embassytown (2011); Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012); Laurent Binet, HHhH (2010); Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool (1950); Yoshiki Tanaka, Dawn (1982); J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999); Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus (2022); Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Captain Alatriste (1996); Rachel Sharona Lewis, The Rabbi Who Prayed With Fire (2020)
For the last Mithra pic of the year, please enjoy this shot of Mithra cuddling. You can’t really see it, but she is reaching her little paw out to tap my arm in a request for more pats. Believe me- I gave.