(3) "Austerlitz," by W. G. Sebald

A few things to note while it's fresh on mind.  Like the other two Sebald novels I read, this is amazing.  Unlike them, though, there is a focused narrative here.  Yes, it has the meandering plot and prose you can lost in (I did quite a few times), but it generally follows the life of a single person, Austertiz, as he remembers his childhood and relates it to the nameless (often ethereal) narrator during a series of chance encounters over the course of decades.

Additionally, I was bored with this at many points, but the fault lies with me as a reader.  I know Sebald enough to know how you must give your all to your reading, leaving your anxieties & desire for contact via Smartphone or Internet (or work, or family) behind.  It didn't help that I was reading this at the same time as a couple of nonfiction texts.  When I read the only Sebald novel I haven't yet tackled, I will make sure I'm reading nothing else. 

A Decade of Reading: The 10 Most Significant Books, 2012 to 2021

Top 10

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

Silence by Shūsaku Endō

Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr

The Evenings by Gerard Reve

Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

Honorable Mentions

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

Children of Men by PD James

The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor 

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

The Trial by Kafka

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

Old School by Tobias Wolff

Significant Authors Who Somehow Didn't Make the First List But Deserve Mention Because They Wrote a Lot of Books I Read and Loved Over the Past Ten Years

Tobias Wolff

Haruki Murakami

C.S. Lewis

Ron Hansen

Toni Morrison

Evelyn Waugh

Flannery O’Connor

W. G. Sebald

Some Final Thoughts & a Tentative Rubric

When I label a book a "favorite," what do I mean?  Is it different if it's a "favorite" of a particular year or of "all-time"?  In short, how do I determine the significance of a book to me?

Below is a two-criterion rubric for answering exactly these questions.  To be honest, for most years and most books, I distinguish between "significant" and "not significant" ─ or somewhere between these extremes ─  on a gut-level.  In fact, I created this rubric as an attempt to formalize my unconscious (or at least unreflective) responses to books.  The relationship between the two (the gut-response and rubric) might not be perfect; but after creating it, I've used it to reflect on other books, and it seems accurate, even if not perfect. 

Rubric

1.1.  A book is significant if and when the reading experience was powerful.  By experience, I mean emotional experience, as well as physical, psychological, or even spiritual.  But the root of this is phenomenological: the felt experience when I was reading was powerful.  1.2  A book is significant if and when the memory of the reading experience echoes, in some shape or form, the power and/or form of the initial reading experience.  The very thought of when I read the book (not just the thought of the book, but the thought of when I read the book) is enough to encourage a return to that experience.  (In this way, I both want to reread these types of books but am simultaneously afraid to do so.  My desire is rooted in an attempt to replicate or even deepen the original experience; the fear comes from the potential that neither will happen.)

2.  A book is significant if and when it changes me, if and when it speaks truth to me.  I bow to the words of Tobias Wolff here because he speaks exactly what I believe, but he said it first ─ and he said it a hell of a lot better: "I was changed by literature, not by cautionary or exhortatory literature, but by the truth as I found it in literature. I recognize the world in a different way because of it, and I continue to be influenced in that way by it. Opened up, made more alert, and called to a greater truthfulness in my own accounting of things, not just in my writing, in my life as well."  From a young child, what Wolff says is true for me.  

(2) "Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind," Alan Jacobs

(1): "A Theology of Love: The Hermeneutics of Love," by Alan Jacobs

This was an amazingly interesting (and, often, fun) book to read.  It took me a bit to get through it, despite its relative brevity, because I wanted to always read it when I was able to give my full (completely awake) attention.  

The basic question Jacobs asks in this book is, if the law of love is the central Christian law (love of God and love of neighbor), should it not guide every other endeavor, literary interpretation/criticism included?  The second question, assuming the answer to first is a yes, is What does a hemerunics of reading look like guided by Christian charity?  The book is, in part, an extended reflection on  how best to define Christian charity, and then how this applies to the act of reading and interpreting.  I wished more for the latter, but Jacobs feels it necessary to focus on the former.  Early there's a lot of Aristotle and Augustine, both who offer a lot to say on the subject, even if they also offer only limited answers to the central question.  Bakhtin is probably the only figure (maybe Auden too) whose ideas Jacobs uses constructively and unconditionally.  

Reading into it a bit, it seems that Jacobs wants to protect reading against both sides of the culture wars, both of which want to "force" the text into a simple interpretative model, whether that's "cultural criticism" or "religious orthodoxy."  Neither of these give the type of attention to the text that true charitable reading requires.  

For now, I'll end by saying that this has sprung me into the world of Alan Jacobs.  Before even finishing this, I purchased two more of his books: the collection of essays published right after this one (which seems to be his earliest publication) and his most recent book, on the value of reading in an age of distraction.  I look forward to both.

2021: A Year Of Reading

In hopes of preserving some of my reading experiences from the past year, I’d like to say something very briefly about what I’m considering to be the “5 Most Significant Books I’ve Read in 2021.”  I’ve included, at the end, another 4 “honorable mentions.” 

I’d like to begin with a question: When can you determine that a book has been “significant” to you?  Some books that have deeply impressed me while reading leave little long-term traces in my mind and heart, while some that I’ve “pushed” myself through, or even openly criticized while reading, have stuck with me for years, sometimes even decades.  I suppose we could consider a 1-month test; then a 6-month, 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year test.  

At each stage, we could ask the following questions: 

• Which books continue to provoke the strongest emotional response, either a faint or strong echo of the original reading experience?

• Which books contain characters or events that live in my memory in a similar way to (perhaps indistinguishable from) real persons and real events?

• Which books, upon conscious reflection, are remembered in a spirit of gratitude?

• Which books still affect the way I think about and react to the world, whether I’m thinking about them or not?

This is all just to say that some of these books, those read in the first half of the year, are open to at least a 6-month test, while others can barely offer themselves up for the 1-month test.  But I choose to assess nonetheless.  

1. The Evenings, by Gerard Reve.  What a romp, this book is!  It’s like a genuinely funny Waiting for Godot (as opposed to the humor I now receive from teaching Godot, which is a result of reflection and repetition.)  This novel was also painfully piercing in its portrayal of small town life: its random focuses, its pettiness, but most of all, its boredom.  

2. The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald.  Four meandering little character life sketches, told by outsiders seeking to know more about elusive and depressing characters.  I am mesmerized by Sebald ─ have been since reading The Rings of Saturn.  Also, he only wrote 4 novels!  And I’m presently reading the third…

3. The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.  A conversationally written take on what’s going wrong with our youth, from college campuses to high schools to childhoods.  I found it equal parts depressing and refreshing.  It’s depressing in its presentation of stories and facts, but refreshing in the sense that it’s helped me put into words a lot of what I’ve observed and thought about over the past 5 years.  A seriously important book for today.

4. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud.  Hands down the best “comic book” / graphic novel/book I’ve ever read.  It helped me enormously in my understanding of “what to do” when I’m reading a graphic book.  Simply awesome.  On top of that, one of the best books on art and aesthetics in general.  While I don’t agree with everything, it wasn’t presented in any sort of authoritative way.  McCloud attempts, humbly, to define some terms, make some category distinctions, and offer some reflections.  Even his own ideas are amenable to changes and reconfigurations.  

5. Searching for and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart, by Jacques Philippe.  This is one of the great Philippe texts, the one most obviously focused on one of his central themes: inner peace.  Nowadays, I simply rotate between a few Philippe during my morning prayer/meditation.  This was amazing.    

Honorable Mentions

Maus, by Art Spiegelman

The song at the scaffold, by Gertrud von Le Fort

A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders

The Abolition of Man, by CS Lewis