Happy New Year! With a Glimpse of My 2023 Reading

One of my birthday presents this year was this collection of haiku, a multilingual volume beautifully bound (in the Chinese style) and illustrated. The translator is Hart Larrabee.
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I’ve been impressed with several of the 2023 readings lists I’ve seen on Facebook, so I’ve come up with my own list. I’m a sloppy reader—sometimes reading just parts of books, rereading books in whole or part, unsystematically taking notes. I’d like to think my reading habits are like the bee described by Jonathan Swift, that “visit[s] all the Flowers and Blossoms of the Field and Garden, but whatever I collect from thence, enriches my self, without the least Injury to their Beauty, their Smell, or their Taste.”

Below are some of the books I visited this year, with quotations from some. In the spirit of Swift’s bee, they are presented as I think of them.

• The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text:
  “And when he had said these words, he wept;
  and the multitude bare record of it.
  And he took their little children, one by one, and blessed them
  and prayed unto the Father for them.
  And when he had done this, he wept again.
  And he spake unto the multitude and saith unto them:
  Behold your little ones.
  And as they looked to behold,
  they cast their eyes towards heaven;
  and they saw the heavens open,
  and they saw angels descending out of heaven
  as it were in the midst of fire.
  And they came down and encircled those little ones about
  —and they were encircled about with fire--
  and the angels did minister unto them.”—3 Nephi 17:21-24
• Kate Holbrook, Both Things Are True: “For me, the most urgent and relevant questions about the truth of the Church have to do with our relationships to one another and to God. Do you find God in the Church? Does earnest Church participation bind you to others? Does the ritual and service you engage in at Church enlarge your soul?”
• Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: “Unamuno was a Catholic for whom the problem of faith remained all his life the central issue: not to believe was inconceivable—and to believe was impossible. This dramatic contradiction was well expressed in one of his poems:
  ‘ . . . I suffer at your expense, / Non-existing God, for if You were to exist, / Me too, I would truly exist.’”
• Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: “When young and cocky, I had defined a poem as any piece of writing that could not be quoted from except out of context. Older but even more ambitious, I had the temerity to define prose in the same way: a prose work of whatever length should be dependent, in each part, on every other part of what was included, and so respect the importance even of what had been left out. From the force of cohesion would come the power of suggestion, and one of the things suggested should be the existence of other voices.”
• Winston Churchill, The River War
• Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert, the first four volumes of the eight-volume biography of Winston Churchill
• Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012: “Even now one is amazed / by transience: how it outlasts us all” ("Scenes with Harlequins")
• Andrew Skinner and Gaye Strathearn, Third Nephi: An Incomparable Scripture
• Joan Barasovska, Orange Tulips. My review is forthcoming in the NC Literary Review (online) (along with a review of the next book by Janis Harrington). Here's part of a poem from Orange Tulips: 
  At night the trees lie down to rest.
  They unclench their roots, groan,
  and all sink down....
  At sunrise they rustle,
  yank themselves upright.
  Some leaves get lost.
  They twist to get the angle right
  and dig in for the day.
• ​Janis Harrington, How to Cut a Woman in Half:
  Jeweled colors splash to the horizon:
  yellow fennel, poppies, verbena, blue lupine.
  Annie parks on the shoulder, opens the door,
  finds a path to the meadow. Shedding
  her jacket, she lifts her face to the sun.
  Let this temporary parole from distress
  remind her that beauty and joy still exist. 
  (“Prayer for My Sister,” 57)
  
• N.T. Wright, Paul: A Biography
• Joseph Bathanti, Light at the Seams, and Joseph Mills, Bodies in Motion. My review has been published by the NC Literary Review (online). Bathanti: “Each year, the centurial black walnut / threatens to expire, // yet flowers branch by branch, bud by bud, magisterial / in its hour” (“Daylily”).
• Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, esp. the intro. by Harold Bloom
• Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch: “Tsar Peter III, who played games with wooden soldiers and had a mouse court-marshaled and hanged for daring to climb over two cardboard fortresses, decided to introduce in Russia the code of law that Frederick the Great had recently brought into force in Prussia. ‘But,’ as Claude Rulhière noted, ‘both through the ignorance of the translators and the shortage of words in the Russian language for all the ideas of law, not a single senator could understand the code; and the Russians saw this vain attempt merely as a sign of contempt for their own ways and a foolish attachment to foreign ways.’ When it came to the age that sought to explain history step by step, Frederick’s enlightened and military law was replaced by Marx’s law of the phases of development of productive forces. But both of these served above all to perfect the practices of the Bureau of Secret Affairs, set up by Peter the Great to oversee the conduct of the nation through a sophisticated policing system—and which continued operating with zeal and providence under various names, from Ochrana to the KGB, offering among other things the only example in Russia of the undeniable march of progress.”
• Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands
• Roger Scruton, Philosopher on Dover Beach
• Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates
• Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism
• Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: “Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life.” “The point of metaphor is to bring together the whole of one thing with the whole of another, so that each is looked at in a different light. And it works both ways, as the coming together of one thing with another always must. You can’t pin one down so that it doesn’t move, while the other is drawn towards it: they must draw towards each other. As Max Black says: ‘If to call a man a wolf is to put him in a special light, we must not forget that the metaphor makes the wolf seem more human than he otherwise would.’”
• Samuel Beckett, “Krapp’s Last Tape” [a play]
• Mary Terrall, Catching Nature in the Act
• Horace’s Odes, in translations by David Ferry and James Michie
• W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn: “If we stand today before the large canvas of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson in the Mauritshuis we are standing precisely where those who were present at the dissection in the Waaggebouw stood, and we believe that we see what they saw then: in the foreground, the greenish, prone body of Aris Kindt, his neck broken and his chest risen terribly in rigor mortis. And yet it is debatable whether anyone ever really saw that body, since the art of anatomy, then in its infancy, was not least a way of making the reprobate body invisible. It is somehow odd that Dr Tulp’s colleagues are not looking at Kindt’s body, that their gaze is directed just past it to focus on the open anatomical atlas in which the appalling physical facts are reduced to a diagram, a schematic plan of the human being, such as envisaged by the enthusiastic amateur anatomist René Descartes, who was also, so it is said, present that January morning in the Waaggebouw. In his philosophical investigations, which form one of the principal chapters of the history of subjection, Descartes teaches that one should disregard the flesh, which is beyond our comprehension, and attend to the machine within, to what can fully be understood, be made wholly useful for work, and, in the event of any fault, either repaired or discarded."
• Kevin and Leah Klein, Showdown Symphony
• Ethan Unklesbay, “Dust.” I published a brief appreciation on my blog.
• Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History
• Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, Passchendaele: The Sacrificial Ground
• John Keegan, The Face of Battle​: “Just as the Lisbon earthquake is said to have given a timely stimulus to religious observance in eighteenth-century Europe, it is often adumbrated that the battle of Stalingrad has been the most important single lesson in the education of a democratic Germany. How true is that? The repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 undoubtedly left scars on the psyche of working-class Paris which ache to this day. But what exactly did the battle of France in 1940 do to the psyche of the French nation? The very size of the question ought not to deter the historian from attempting an answer. A few have already had a bite at it. Alistair Horne had tried to demonstrate that the experience of Verdun in 1916 led the French, by way of the building of the Maginot line, to the construction of the fortress of Dien Bien Phu, and its fall to the collapse of their colonial empire. But a real examination requires ... a very special sort of historical expedition: not so much a plunge into the archives as a voyage through a nation’s literature, from Sartre’s La Mort dans l’Ame via the script of Les Jeux Interdits to the soundtrack of Le Chagrin et la Pitié.”
• Charles Habonimana, Moi, Le Dernier Tutsi: "J'ai 12 ans et je vais mourir." Here's my rough translation of the first chapter:
  Calvary
       My name is Charles. I’m twelve years old and I’m going to die.
       Like those who preceded me to the top of the hill and who lie in a heap before my eyes, bodies mutilated, limbs scattered, heads decapitated. Bodies everywhere, and all around, the mob beside itself. Hundreds of faces I know, neighbors and former friends, who have come running to participate in the executions as if they were hurrying to a family party. They want to see. They must see. So they trample the corpses, climb the heaps of broken bodies.
       Many are ready to finish off the dying. The blood flows and they chant their victory to the insistent pounding of feet beating the earth in time. Like a warning signal, in the din I hear the rasping of the machetes as they scrape against rock and sharpen their blades. Something in the air impels, inebriates more than beer, clutches tighter than hate. Something awe-inspiring and insane.
       Before me, so close that I can almost touch, lies our dear Léonard Sebuyonde, who served as a priest in the village. Immobile, lying on his back, his arms crossed, crucified on the rock like Jesus on the cross. Slashed in so many places I can’t count his wounds.
       Over there are my buddies, who played football after school. In the middle, Toto, my dear cousin: his face, cleanly cut off with a machete, lies to the left of his head, which is no more than a gaping wound open to the sky. Farther away, Eustache Kayihura, the old wise man, the intellectual, so respected in the village, rigid in his Sunday suit, with his beautiful white beard soaked in blood. Throat cut.
       Lying against him is another elder, Daniel Mujyarugamba, survivor of the [mass] murders of 1973. His right arm was then severed by a machete blow and he has since worn a sort of rod in its place. This time, the machete struck him on the left and a club killed him. The force of the blow made his eyes start from their orbits. Below, a young married couple is dying; she is still in her white dress, shaken by spasms that make her swallow her tongue, he is still in his elegant suit begging for someone to finish them off. But no one comes. There is also the old Anastasia, bleeding in her ceremonial outfit; Évariste Birikunzira and her brother Vincent Nzitabakuze, struck down side-by-side; and all those whom I do not recognize—too much blood, too many corpses.
       I’m afraid. I look at Papa, seated next to me with his cousin Fidel Rwirangira.
       We have climbed together our familiar hill, since this morning rebaptized “the way of Calvary” by the killers themselves. Since then they’ve made their prey—women, men, children, old people—climb up. The hunt began at first light, around 5 o’clock, and has not stopped. As the day of their hellish work has gone on, the captured have formed a long moving column, like ants that stubbornly follow each other and that I’ve annoyed with a twig without ever making them leave their route.
       Then it was our turn to take the path. From his first steps, Fidel understood that this was his way of the cross. Official propaganda identified him to the crowd as the leader of the “cockroaches,” the leader of the “snakes.” Those who must be crushed like vermin. Then, all along the climb, two rows of villagers unleashed their blows on him. Everyone took turns taking a swing, with a club, with a stick or machete, and with a powerful leap each landed a blow on Fidel. His beautiful suit, his Sunday suit, gradually turned red, was torn to shreds, as blow followed blow. Each time he fell. Each time he rose alone; the torturers stopped us from helping him.
       Fidel has arrived at the summit a thousand times dead, but is still with us, still in his Passion. Until the last three club blows, the spurting blood, the cheers.
       He is no longer moving.
       I do not wish to die like him. Not by the club—I prefer the machete, like my buddy Toto. A blow, a single one, to end it all. I’m so afraid, Papa. But you can no longer hear me. The killers circle you. They chant, shout, whistle. They already rejoice in your death, here, under the eyes of your child. Papa, you who always seemed so strong, so courageous, are now powerless, resigned. Like an animal at the slaughterhouse waiting for the knife.
       They call out to the cook of my father’s cabaret, whom father threatened one evening during an argument. They push him to kill: “he wanted to kill you, so kill him!” The feet, the spears, the rhythm on the rock, the earth, the skin, the terror. Two men press him, encourage him. All three begin the work. They strike in rotation, blow after blow. The back, the head. At each impact, I cry out. Papa falls, the blood flows from his mouth, his nose, the ears, the eyes. I see the jolts [of his body]. It is the 24 of April 1994.
       I am twelve years old and I am going to die.
  by Charles Habonimana and Daniel Le Scornet, Moi, le dernier Tutsi (French Edition) (pp. 4-6). Place des éditeurs. Kindle Edition.
• Hart Larrabee, trans., Haiku Illustrated
• Dominic Hibberd and John Onions, The Winter of the World. An excellent anthology of British poetry from the First World War. I visit it often. 

Updated 2-3, 10 January 2024. 
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