My Favourite Reads of the Year [December 23]
I am very grateful to have been able to share this newsletter with you throughout this year!
This month, I decided to include a list of my five favourite books from the year. I have added a short passage from each book to help you get a sense of the writing styles. I’ve also included a full list of my 2023 reads at the bottom of the newsletter. If you’d like to chat about any of these, please do reach out. I hope you all have a lovely end to the year.
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China — Ezra F. Vogel (926 pages)
When Mao Zedong died in 1976, over 85% of Chinese sat below the international poverty line (≤ $1.90 a day in 2011 dollars PPP); by 2016, this had dropped to less than 1%. There is perhaps no single person more responsible for this drastic reduction in poverty than Deng Xiaoping. Vogel’s book carefully reckons the image of Deng as China’s calm and pragmatic leader, with a darker portrait of the hardliner who oversaw the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
"The economy “is like a bird. You can't hold it in your hand but have to let it fly. But it might fly away, and that is why you need a cage to control it."'
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle — Vladimir Nabokov (480 pages)
Ada is a delicious, decadent read: the most sensuous use of the English language I have encountered. Nabokov takes the reader on a time-dance through the pomp and beauty of a parallel Antiterra, where fatal love spans decades.
'Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.'
Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe — Kapka Kassabova (400 pages)
After decades of living abroad, Kassabova returns to find many overlapping Bulgarias: smugglers outwit Soviet border guards, mystics sway over Thracian tombs, and modern Syrian’s make the desperate journey West.
'The money came in bundles tied with elastic bands, in exchange for the promise of a lorry ride across the border. In many cases, people were dumped off before they even reached the border, and so they were back to square one, back in Turkey, back in Ali’s Café, but this time without money.'
The Unnamable — Samuel Beckett (177 pages)
Beckett’s clauses flit and fleet as our unnamed hero struggles to chase his thoughts: to catch his tail. This language was made to be heard. I especially recommend the Sean Barrett audiobook.
'I'm all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I'm something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place...'
The Rings of Saturn — W.G. Sebald (320 pages)
A sprawling catalogue of abyss. Sebald’s semi-fictional semi-memoir is a sober delight.
'I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals … Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond mines to the floors of today's stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease. If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realise how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea.'
Man’s Search for Meaning - Frankl; Ada or Ardor - Nabokov; White Teeth - Smith; Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Tokarczuk; The Motorcycle Diaries - Guevara; The Bell Jar - Plath; All About Love - hooks; Brideshead Revisited - Waugh; Stars of the New Curfew - Okri; Border - Kassabova; Family Lexicon - Ginzburg; Acts of Service - Fishman; Entangled Life - Sheldrake; The Great God Pan - Machen; Giovanni’s Room - Baldwin; Ways of Seeing - Berger; The Enchanter - Zanganeh; The Case Against the Sexual Revolution - Perry; Death in Venice - Mann; You Will Be Safe Here - Barr; Evgenii Onegin - Pushkin; Steppenwolf - Hesse; Lucy - Kincaid; The Player of Games - Banks; The Mabinogion - Unknown; The Rings of Saturn - Sebald; “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” - Feynman; Every Man for Himself and God Against All - Herzog; Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China - Vogel; The Mind’s Eye - Cartier-Bresson; Bartleby the Scrivener - Melville; The New Leviathans - Gray; The Unnamable - Beckett; The Odyssey - Homer; The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng; The Buddhist and the Ethicist - Singer, Chao-Hwei.
