Ambitious readers must, despite a carefully cultivated insouciance, reckon with the time left against the weight of unread books. Some may have already estimated a number, assuming average lifespan and the preservation of cognitive clarity. The shelves groan not only with what has already been acquired, but also with volumes yet to be found, welcomed with either furtive delight or solemn resignation. Umberto Eco, whose libraries totalled fifty thousand books, regarded them as essential: “I don’t go to the bookshelves to choose a book to read. I go to the bookshelves to pick up a book I know I need in that moment.”
Non-fiction often follows the trail of a passing or deepening curiosity—Kabbalah, brain evolution, the Punic wars—usually kindled by something only half understood in a novel or poem. “Not understanding,” Enrique Vila-Matas wrote, “can be a door swinging open.” These texts live in the moment and age less well than fiction or poetry, unless aligned to a tradition of thought. Theology and philosophy sometimes endure beyond the generational churn. Poetry and fiction, layered by time, tend to improve with its patina.
Poetry arises from the right admixture of form and subject, pursued for aesthetic bliss and the texture of other minds. George Oppen once described it as a “determination to find the image, the thing encountered.” The thing seen, whose meaning becomes the colour of life. Poets are chosen carefully, with the same instinct as food. Few intellectual acts rival the pleasure of following another’s thinking across lines.
Fiction is chosen with equal care. Some novels fail to open a door into reflection, to borrow Jenny Erpenbeck’s phrase. As Peter Schwenger observed, “When narrative works, when a text is felt, it produces that complex metabolic reaction in us that we call a work’s ‘effect’.” Even if all that remains is an atmosphere, the deeper things stay, blind and mute. Fiction and poetry reveal others from within.
Books that settle deeply are rarely the ones expected to last. After several attempts, Gerald Murnane’s Tamarisk Row opened that threshold. With Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs and more so A Million Windows, the experience became one of discovery: a living writer doing something beautiful, advancing the form, stripped of stylistic postures. His vision, necessary and singular, changed the way the world was seen, even in small increments. This remains the only demand placed on fiction and poetry: to see differently, even briefly.
Jeremy Cooper’s Ash Before Oak carries this same feeling. What first seems like the diary of a reclusive man becomes something darker and more lyrical, closer to The Enigma of Arrival than to nature writing. The book opened a space of quiet reflection. There was no impulse to explore the author further. The book sufficed.
Poetry read in recent months ranged widely—Auden, Larkin—but it was Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem that remained on the desk, returned to daily. Her symbolic richness is paired with clarity, her work both beautiful and intellectually alive. It refracted lived experience into a new understanding of the world. The earlier collection When My Brother Was an Aztec waits patiently.
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Not a Novel, despite the unevenness of collected essays, offered insight into her East German past and the formation of her literary ethics. The prose reinforces the seriousness that pervades her novels, prompting plans to revisit them, this time chronologically, alongside the relevant essays.
Peter Schwenger’s At the Borders of Sleep lies at the edges of literary criticism. Inspired by Borges’ suggestion that literature is a guided dream, it explores that liminal zone. One reading of the book prompted a hypnagogic vision—an effect as rare as it is revealing. It recalled Murnane’s remark about a fictional space accessible even without a book in hand: a persistent terrain formed by reading itself.
To finally hold Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, a visual project of great scope, was its own event. Georges Didi-Huberman’s Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science offered a path into its cosmological structure, prompting reflection on how images persist and how meaning evolves across eras.
There is, behind this catalogue of impressions, an unvoiced question: what is this writing, and what self emerges from it? There is no clear answer. The compulsion to write continues, mostly in notebooks. Still, it seems necessary to place something here, in this shared and ephemeral space, as a gesture toward continuity and presence, even as form, time, and interest shift elsewhere.
Thank you so much for this amazing post, Anthony! Yes, let’s wish for a far less interesting year!
Dear Anthony,
This reading has been one of the most pleasurable presents I have received this time of the year. I hope you keep on writing and posting. Mis mejores deseos.
Thank you!
Really hope you will continue writing for us (your almost anonymous, silent & invisible – but still very appreciative blog gang 😉)
ps: I cannot remember how I came to read «When My Brother Was an Aztec», but I do remember it as an extraordinary book of poems …
Thanks, Sigrun, your appreciation is much appreciated! I rarely discover a contemporary poet that speaks to me, so looking forward to seeing Diaz’s first book, and what may come in the future.
Delighted to see you here again and read these reflections and suggestions, Anthony. I published my own year-end reading comments and list today, too. I read Murnane’s “The Plains” several years ago, and though I finished it, I left the book feeling bemused and not really satisfied that I had fully understood what he was doing. On the strength of your comments here, I’ll try again with “Tamarisk Row.” Also, I’ll get Diaz’s collection. Thanks. (And please keep writing here, I miss your posts!)
Hi Beth. I read your post earlier with much pleasure and will respond in comments soon. I tried starting with “The Plains”, but “Tamarisk Row” gives a better grounding I think. And thank you for your delight. It means a lot.
Very good to see you back, Anthony. I enjoy your extended literary reflections. Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas looks fascinating. I’m curious to read more of your reactions to it. Regarding reading and consciousness, and semi-consciousness, I often find that reading late at night results in the hypnogogic development of a book into realms that the author hasn’t actually committed to paper. It’s an interesting area of the mind that has quite a different weight than the interesting developments to which we are subjected in waking life. Looking forward to more of your writings here. All good wishes for the ever-opening and unpredictable future.
Thanks, Des.Very best wishes for the new year.
I see I am not the first to welcome you back – but welcome back, if “back” is where you are. Thusfar the only Murnane I’ve gotten to is “Stream Systems,” which certainly does stick in the teeth of one’s reading mind, as it were. I love how he’s constantly “doing philosophy” in his work without the jargon and the redundancy, and I love how his fictions, so coolly obsessive, hunt down the idea of meaning without bothering to explain what they’re doing. And reading him does disarrange whatever one thought “style” ought to be.
Thanks. I’ve enjoyed the two days spent writing this post, and pushed the Publish button after two hours of agonising, so, yes, back, in some form at least.
So glad to see you back Anthony, and I hope to be able to read more of your thoughts when you feel like sharing them. These times are far too interesting for me, and I have been hanging on to books as a survival mechanism. Much of what you say resonates, particularly the fact that I now own more books than I will ever be able to read. But I take comfort in the fact that like Eco, if I want to read a particular book or type of work I will probably have the right thing to hand. I have found myself very drawn to non-fiction this year and quite selective about the fiction I engage with. Whether that will continue into 2021 I’m not sure, but it will be interesting to see! May the year bring you many bookish blessings!
Thank you. From week to week I veer between filling what seem to me gaps in my library, to wondering how many of my books I shall leave unread. I’ve long had a policy of reading the prelude/intro or first few pages of every book I acquire, so none can be said to be truly unread and each gets a chance to be ‘engrafted in the tenderness of thought’ and become necessary of immediate attention. Very best wishes for the new year.
What a wonderful way to write an end-of-year roundup, Anthony! I just wrote mine, but it was much more prosaic. Your recommendation of Gerald Murnane was so convincing that I’ve just ordered a copy of Tamarisk Row. I could do with a divine lizard of my own right now. Happy New Year!
Thanks, Andrew!
So wonderful to see you writing here again!
Thanks, A! I’m enjoying writing here, so pleased that you are still reading.