Yesterday I taught my last class of the semester, to my wonderful group of NYU MFA students. For the last two weeks of the course we read Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, a book I approached teaching with a little trepidation. I worried about how the students would receive it (thoughtfully, as they’ve received everything this term); but also I worried about how much I would find in the book this time around. I’ve read it I don’t know how many times, and I was reading it now for the first time since the very intense process of writing an essay on the book a couple of years ago. Maybe it wouldn’t seem so inexhaustible to me; maybe I wouldn’t feel I had much more to think about alongside the book.
Well, I needn’t have worried: it seemed to me as rich as ever—richer. I found myself tracking patterns I hadn’t paid enough attention to before. In class we described the first of the book’s two parts as a kind of fragmented mirror, each shard of glass reflecting another; one could track those reflections, I’m pretty sure, forever. I feel as convinced as ever—more convinced than ever—that it really is inexhaustible, as the greatest literature is inexhaustible. In the final eighty pages, an extraordinary crescendo-ing culminating sequence, I think Roth touches the wellspring of art; it’s as good as anything I’ve read.
Anyway. I’m sending this dispatch from the Delta lounge at JFK, before getting on a flight for Spain, where I’ll join Luis for the next month. It’s my first trip to Europe since before the pandemic. Wish me luck.
For what will probably be my last post of the year (see you in January!), I’m going to do something hackneyed and offer a list. It was a year of projects and intense writing and teaching; I did not read enough new books to offer anything like a Best Books list. So this is not that, sorry. Instead, below you can find a dozen titles, many of them not new, that I read for the first time this year, and that made a particularly deep impression. I’ve excluded books I’ve already written about: Idra Novey’s Take What You Need and Alice Winn’s In Memoriam; Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans. I also haven’t included what was certainly one of my best reads of the year, Jamel Brinkley’s Witness, because I have an essay on one of that book’s stories coming very soon in Sewanee Review; I’ll share that here when it’s out.
Not the best books of the year, then; just some of my favorites. In no particular order.
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