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The Best Books We’ve Read this Year (So Far)
Over in our cloud-based HQ, we don’t spend as much time tikking or tokking as people would like to think. Don’t get us wrong, our team has been responsible for a video meme or ten, but we are also deeply invested in the history of the printing press, and the preservation of a rich, diverse, and responsive literary culture.
Below, you will find a selection of books that we quite simply could not have lived without in 2023, thus far, that is!
1. A flat place by Noreen Masud (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin)
Never has the practice of walking, looking, and remembering been so poignant, and/or evocative.
In these pages, Noreen Masud offers readers personal insight into Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In stirring anecdotes and melodic prose, Masud’s memoir weaves the reader through a journey as piercing as it is beautiful.
2. Real Estate by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin)
We are well-aware that the final part of this trilogy—of Levy’s ‘living memoirs’ came out a little while ago, but with the current cost-of-living crisis, the concept of ‘Real Estate’ (and all its attendant metaphors), has never felt so pressing.
3. Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone by Amy Key (Jonathon Cape)
The poet Amy Key offers a rejoinder to emancipatory thinking proffered by the likes of Didi Eribon and Edouard Louis, with this memoir that takes Joni Mitchell’s Blue as its starting point. Can journeying with Joni offer the solace that we are all in search of?
4. Fantasmic Objects by Kirsten L. Scheid (Indiana University Press)
There are many who would like to lay claim to being the premiere art historians of the so-called ‘Arab world’. However, no book published in recent memory scrapes close to the surfaces of Scheid’s Fantasmic Objects—a hybrid work of art history, anthropology, and memoir. Through decades of scorched earth, eventually, materialises a route for readers from every discipline to find their way to map an art history, for Lebanon, and the world that surrounds it.
5. Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards (Knopf)
Henry Threadgill may be a legend in music, if for anything, for being one of the most unusual jazz musicians to have ever existed (that’s if you even wish to refer to it as such genre). This memoir melds detailed anecdotes of his life growing up in the heart of the American Midwest and marries this with a social history of the changing world of music, art, and culture in America over the last fifty plus years.
6. Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by James Bridle (FSG/Penguin)
Don’t let the title of this book trick you out of a brilliant read. Bridle’s elegant prose, and intimate interactions with nature are not merely intended for climate justice activists and converts. This is a book about the way that we live; a reflection regarding the way we used to live and serve as a proposition (considering its namesake) of how we should ‘look’ at the world around us. The goal is that together we can come to comprehend, not only a path for the future, but just as urgently, for our increasingly precarious present.
7. Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm (Granta Books)
Janet Malcom’s searing writing took us into the underbelly of journalism and psychoanalysis. In this posthumously published memoir, readers, perhaps aptly so, are left with a delicate and introspective set of musings about pictures and the self. A final click in a most magnificent career as an author.
8. Indelicacy: A Novel by Amina Cain (FSG/Daunt Books)
Amina Cain was not known to us at all until recently. A chance encounter with her new book A Horse at Night at McNally Jackson in Soho earlier this summer, led us to turn back the dial on this art-world novel that is as sparing as it is despairing! A museum cleaner turned debutante. We will leave it at that for now.
More reads coming your way soon.