A Year in Reading: Phillip Lopate

My reading is unsystematic and all over the place.  Below are some of my discovered gems from a year’s worth of book-diving.

The Book of Eve. This is a wildly imaginative, zany and inventive book by Mexican novelist Carmen Boullosa, about the first woman, correcting all that nonsense in Genesis about Adam from a feminist point of view.

Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder. David Bordwell, America’s finest film scholar, has connected the dots between movies and popular detective stories by Dashiel Hammett, Agatha Christie, Donald E. Westlake, Patricia Highsmith, etc. for a thrilling X-ray of genre.

Louise Glück, our great Nobel-winning poet who sadly just passed away, left us the most charming, eccentric, delectable novella about two infant twins, Marigold and Iris.

The Copenhagen Trilogy (Childhood–Youth–Dependency) by one of Denmark’s greatest 20^th century writers, Tove Ditlevsen, is a harrowing, searching memoir, one of the most honest I have ever real.

Big Man and the Little Men is a graphic novel by the multi-talented African-American essayist Clifford Thompson that explores the hijinks of politics today in a most disarming, satisfying manner.

One of my favorite bookstores is Lyrical Ballads in Saratoga Springs, New York where I recently bagged a treasure-full of items old and new:

The Flowering of New England by Van Wyck Brooks is a masterpiece of literary history that I’ve always been meaning to read, and boy is it good.

I try to read everything by George Gissing, the inimitable 19^th Century English realistic novelist (New Grub Street, The Odd Women) and gobbled up The Whirlpool, a bittersweet tale of a lively woman trying to find her independence and her courtly, passive husband, baffled by her.

Attention: Dispatches From the Land of Distraction, is a collection of essays, literary criticism, memoir and diary entries by one of our smartest, most erudite observers, Joshua Cohen.  Feel free to be challenged and stimulated.

Robert Louis Stevenson is the definitive biography of the complex Scottish fiction writer, essayist, wanderer, a hero of mine, by Frank McLynn.

Independence Day is the middle book in a trilogy by Richard Ford. Marvelously written—in fact the last Great American Novel—it reveals the American Dream gone kaput.

A few last recommendations:

Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity, by David M. Friedman, is an amusing account of the brilliant, self-aggrandizing author’s 1882 tour of the United States.

Fever of Unknown Origins: Poems by Campbell McGrath, is this immensely gifted, comic and lyrical poet’s best book. These poems are accessible, warm and heart-breaking.

Maestros & Monsters: Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner by Robert Boyers is a fascinating, candid memoir about the author’s friendship with two intellectual giants who were a handful.

More from A Year in Reading 2023

A Year in Reading Archives: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005