I didn't finish very many books this year. I did do a fair amount of reading, but some of it was reading in books rather than completing them. Therefore it didn't make the list that appears in the sidebar. Foremost among this dipping was a sort of review of modern American poetry, with special attention to the more adventurous among America's poets. I'm looking forward to reading more Rae Armantrout, Susan Howe, Christian Bök, and also good old John Ashberry.
I remain, however, a narrative addict, so the book of the year, as it is most years, is a novel, one I stumbled across in the last few weeks of 2013, Minae Mizumura's A True Novel. It is, in some ways, an updating and relocating of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to post-war Japan. That sounds like it could be quite awful, but Mizumura, far from slavishly following Brontë, makes it something entirely new: an experimental novel, a riveting narrative, a commentary on class, and also on the novel. That A True Novel is more than twice as long as Wuthering Heights—and that none of those pages seems unnecessary—is an example of just how different it is. That it will send readers back to Brontë's classic is, of course, another plus.
Honorable mention should go to the best non-fiction (?) book I read this year, Sophie Calle's The Address Book. This attempt to construct the identity of a man whose address book Calle finds on a Paris street is mysterious, and mysteriously profound.
Finally, I've got a great deal of reading pleasure this year from revisiting the private-eye novels of Ross Macdonald, books I haven't looked at since I was ten or eleven, when my father ripped the Hardy Boys novel I was reading out of my hands and replaced it with Chandler, and the Macdonalds, John D. and Ross. I look forward to making my way through the rest of the the Lew Archer novels in 2014.
And I wish you all a happy year of the . . .
—David
