nedjelja, 6. siječnja 2013.

David Auerbach (Waggish) - najbolje knjige 2012




David Auerbach, genijalac iz New Yorka, ima jedan od najboljih blogova za književnu kritiku (s ponekim postom o filmu i muzici) - waggish. Dobra, stara modernistička škola. Oni tipovi koji obožavaju Krasznahorkaija i Georgea Konráda, ali i još jednog, kod nas nepoznatog mađarskog genijalca, Miklósa Szentkuthyja, no - gle! - i susjedne nam Dragu Jančara, Vitomila Zupana i Davida Albaharija.
No naročito je izvrstan njegov izbor non-fiction knjiga, recimo knjige o tome kako se zapravo kod ljudi uvriježila ideja da je neravnopravnost nešto prirodno ili bogom dano.


Books of the Year 2012

So many books, so many books. I consciously tried to expand my reading horizons this year, which has helped to swell my reading list to unmanageable lengths.  Sifting out worthy entries in disciplines with which I’m not especially familiar is not at all easy, so sometimes I just have to go on faith that apparent hard work, diligence, and care have resulted in an enlightening end product.
Krasznahorkai’s Satantango is certainly for me the book of the year, though in its way Lucan’s Civil War was as well, and I was very happy to have William Bronk‘s later poetry collected.
I have hardly read all of all of the nonfiction selections–I’ll be lucky if I ever read the Bailyn book cover to cover–but they have all been of note to me at least as reference or inspiration. Some stragglers from 2011 have snuck in as well.
If anyone’s curious as to why some book or other made the list, feel free to ask in the comments. Reviews on a couple are forthcoming.
(As always, I do not make any money from these links–this was just by far the simplest way to get thumbnails and metadata.)

Literature

László Krasznahorkai (New Directions)
Drago Jancar (Dalkey Archive Press)
William Bronk, David Clippinger, editor (Talisman House, Publishers)
Lisa Samuels (Shearsman Books)
David Albahari (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Miklós Szentkuthy (Contra Mundum Press)
Alasdair Gray (Canongate Books Ltd)
Alta Ifland (Spuyten Duyvil)
Andrey Platonov (NYRB Classics)
Lucan (Penguin Classics)
Andrei Bely (Penguin Classics)
Ramon del Valle-Inclan (NYRB Classics)
Laura (Riding) Jackson (Trent Editions)
Laura (Riding) Jackson (Trent Editions)
Imre Kertesz (Seagull Books)
Vitomil Zupan (Dalkey Archive Press)
Jacques Roubaud (Dalkey Archive Press)
Oksana Zabuzhko (AmazonCrossing)

Comics

David B. (SelfMadeHero)

Nonfiction

Ruth Finnegan (Open Book Publishers)
Michael Levenson (Yale University Press)
Arnaldo Momigliano (University Of Chicago Press)
Denise Phillips (University Of Chicago Press)
Alison Winter (University Of Chicago Press)
Gerard Passannante (University Of Chicago Press)
Alastair Fowler (Oxford University Press, USA)
Michael N. Forster (Oxford University Press, USA)
Frederique Ait-Touati (University Of Chicago Press)
Jan Westerhoff (Oxford University Press)
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University Of Chicago Press)
Karl Galinsky (Cambridge University Press)
Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
David Shulman (Harvard University Press)
Eckart Förster (Harvard University Press)
M. F. Burnyeat (Cambridge University Press)
Mark Mazower (Penguin Press HC, The)
James O’Shea (Acumen Publishing)




 About David Auerbach


I live in New York with several thousand books. I am a writer and software engineer. I have contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, n+1, Bookforum, Triple Canopy, The Quarterly Conversation, and elsewhere.
Literature and philosophy are my two loves but I try to supplement them with healthy, empirical doses of reality.
See also My Life in Books, The First 30 Years.
I am always happy to hear from readers: waggish@waggish.org.
 

Articles Available Online:


My Life in Books, The First Thirty Years

This is a meme of my own invention (as far as I know). [Update: Nope, Paul did it first. I may have subconsciously plagiarized him. Sorry Paul!] The books that had the greatest impact on me year by year. Obviously very subjective, and vexing for all sorts of different reasons. Not always the best books, not often the most helpful books, just those that occupied my mind more than others. The years are to my best recollection; I may have fudged some of them.
I’ve had to list a number of unbreakable ties, where I remember the influence of each book as being so dominant and the books as so incommensurable  that it was impossible to choose.
And there were a couple near-ties where I painfully excluded a runner-up. (Invisible Man, Catcher in the Rye, Wittgenstein, Lucretius, and Hegel’s Phenomenology all fell into this category.)
So, by age, from the beginning!
  1. Goodnight Moon
  2. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Virginia Lee Burton
  3. What Do People Do All Day? (unabridged), Richard Scarry
  4. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, Judith Viorst
  5. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Dr. Seuss
  6. Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics, Carl Barks
  7. The Pushcart War, Jean Merrill
    The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster (tie)
  8. The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
  9. The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, Daniel Pinkwater
  10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
    What is the Name of This Book?, Raymond Smullyan (tie)
  11. “By His Bootstraps” and “—All You Zombies—”, Robert Heinlein
  12. The Singing Detective (script and serial), Dennis Potter
  13. The Sirens of Titan; and Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
  14. White Noise, Don DeLillo
  15. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
    Moby Dick, Herman Melville (tie)
  16. Ulysses, James Joyce
  17. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
    Imaginary Magnitude, Stanislaw Lem (tie)
  18. The Tunnel, William H. Gass
  19. The Castle, Franz Kafka
  20. Lanark, Alasdair Gray
    Interstate; Frog; Gould; assorted short fiction, Stephen Dixon (tie)
  21. The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil
  22. Michael Kohlhaas, Heinrich von Kleist
  23. The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai
  24. The Obscene Bird of Night, Jose Donoso
    How It Is, Samuel Beckett (tie)
  25. The Waves, Virginia Woolf
    Epileptic, David B. (tie)
  26. The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi
    Simultan, Ingeborg Bachmann (tie)
  27. Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
  28. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
    Rameau’s Nephew, Denis Diderot (tie)
  29. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
  30. A House in the Country, Jose Donoso
I am sure there are many books that felt more significant at the time whose influence I have mostly forgotten because I failed to pursue the directions they signaled. My memories have persisted of those books that were close to the parts of me that remain with me now.
This is probably as good an autobiography as any. Anyone else want to try?



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