Ilse's Reviews > 2022 on Goodreads

Books and cats, books and coffee, books.

Wrapping up 2022 solely from the angle of reading, it was a year that was book-wise mostly fulfilling, unless or maybe because it was another year of not really sticking to intentions (again not getting to re-read Nabokov or Proust, nor books that have been gathering dust on the shelves for years). Mood; serendipitous reading and numerous visits to the local library (and its unsurpassed reading café, my favourite place in town) took me to explore new and more familiar territory, discovering awesome new-to-me voices (Scholastique Mukasonga, Elizabeth Taylor). Fortunately there was also time to curl up loyally with old favourites (Patrick Modiano) and even to add a new favourite to my personal pantheon (Javier Marías) .



Once more, some books that friends recommended to me turned out highlights of the year.

A selection of novels I particularly enjoyed
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Devils
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Javier Marías A Heart So White
Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
Willem Frederik Hermans, Au Pair
Scholastique Mukasonga, Kibogo
Patrick Modiano, Scene of the Crime
Christian Oster, Trois hommes seuls
Emmanuel Bove, My Friends
Elisa Shua Dusapin, Winter in Sokcho
Alberto Moravia, The Voyeur
Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters
Sofi Oksanen, Purge
Sevgi Soysal, Dawn
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels

Hybrids/Blends/Misc
Edmund de Waal, Letters to Camondo
Dominique Fortier, Paper Houses (on Emily Dickinson)
Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat
Deborah Levy, Real Estate

History, biography, philosophy
Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich
Eric Roussel, De Gaulle
Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris
Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
Marlies de Munck, Waarom Chopin de regen niet wilde horen : en andere vragen uit de filosofie van de muziek
Kate Kirkpatrick, Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (with an excursion to two of her novels, The Inseperables and Misunderstanding in Moscow)
Camille Bourniquel, Chopin
Dominique Arban, Dostoïevski
Henri Raczymow, Le Paris retrouvé de Marcel Proust
John Hersey, Hiroshima

Short stories
I do love reading short stories a lot, and thanks to Leonard’s initiative to start and moderate the (still ongoing) The Short Story Club lot of my reading consisted in short stories from Dana Gioia’s compilation The Art of the Short Story. Reading a short story every week not only offers a delightful variety, but also making me read more American authors than usual and quite a few which I hadn’t read before (Hawthorne, Cather, Stephen Crane). From the thirty-some stories we read so far I noticed that I most enjoyed reading more stories by authors that were already favourites (Katherine Mansfield, Miss Brill, Anton Chekhov Misery, James Joyce, Araby)). Apart from the selection for the club, I also enjoyed short stories from Woolf, Mansfield and Kafka brought to my attention by my daughter and by friends: The Legacy, A Cup of Tea and Unhappiness). Toni Morrison's outstanding Recitatif - including the essay Zadie Smith wrote as a foreword - was another highlight.

I loved the short story collections Black Venus(Angela Carter), A Postcard for Annie (Ida Jessen) and To the Stars and Other Stories (Fyodor Sologub).

Graphic novels
Two graphic novels that charmed me were Olivia Burton’s Un Anglais dans mon arbre and Jiro Tanogushi’s Furari ((Apparently another theme I have been reading around was Japan: Kijken in de ziel van Japan; Over het Japanse klooster Kozan-ji en de beroemde dierentekeningen; The Gate; The Thorn Puller; Het dagboek van mijn vader), the pentalogy Le poids des secrets by Aki Shimazaki)

Poetry
I read very little poetry this year (apart from the poems friends posted on GR): a collection of Rilke, two collections by Louise Glück (Faithful and Virtuous Night, Winter Recipes from the Collective, the anthology Poems of Paris – and collections by Ingmar Heytze, Remco Campert and Menno Wigman.

Essays
I mostly enjoyed reading Hillary Mantel’s Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books The White Album (Joan Didion) and parts of Affinities (Brian Dillon); the collection that so far spoke most to me however is the one I will continue reading as soon as it is available again in the library, Salman Rushdie’s Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020.

Art
Visiting Lille, Vienna and Paris and a couple of exhibitions running there this year made me read on Paul Klee, Egon Schiele and the friendship of Georges Braque and Picasso. David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring in Normandy, 2020 was memorable as well.

Paris played a role in quite a few books I picked, on purpose or by chance – or the link with Paris was obvious from the title or the subject (Met Parijse Pen, Willem Elsschot in Parijs, Parisians, Chopin, de Gaulle, the novels and the biography of de Beauvoir, Bove), or I was quite surprised of ending up there once again with a Swedish author, writing a novel mostly set in Göteborg but sending her characters to Paris in their student years (Lydia Sandgren, Collected Works).

Closing the year with Catherine Certitude and the illustrations from Jean-Jaques Sempé, once more I would like to thank all of you who make this such a wonderful place of friendship, support and inspiration by engaging into writing on and discussing books and life. Currently reading The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokly and thinking of what still is going on now we are leaving 2022 behind, the usual best wishes for the new year feel somewhat out of place, but I wish you all peace with these words from the Ukrainian poet Kateryna Kalytko:

War does not abolish the power of tenderness and love.