Pan Books for 2022
I’m pretty sure this will be my last post for 2022 (but there are still a few more days. so anything’s possible). I wanted to mention a few of the books I read this year. Some of these books came out in 2022, but most are older. They are all books that I found personally important in one way or another. If you are interested in any of them, order them from The Great God Pan Is Dead bookstore! (As I write this, I realize I should have published before Christmas. But as my brother pointed out on Christmas—no one gives books as gifts anymore. So gift yourself!)
Fiction
Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen. Franzen writes a family saga set in the early 70s. The Hildebrandt family lives in a suburb of Chicago in Indiana. Russ Hildebrandt is a pastor at a liberal suburban protestant church, is married, and has four children. Each member of the family gets their own chapters and Franzen does a great job of getting the reader to root for them before changing your mind about them. They are complex, very imperfect characters. The book ends quite suddenly without an ordinary novelistic climax. It was only then that I discovered that this 500-page novel was the first part of a projected trilogy. So I guess I have committed to another 1000 pages of the Hildebrandt saga. Sinking into another chunk of Franzen’s beautiful writing and penetrating character studies is something I am already looking forward to.
Jack Ruby and the Origins of the Avant-Garde in Dallas: And Other Stories by Robert Tramell. I wrote at length about this book earlier this year. It was one of the best books I read in 2022.
Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco. A very short novel about a child in Mexico City who falls in love with an adult woman—a love that obviously has no future. It is considered a classic in Mexico, and often assigned to teens to read in high school, apparently. It’s hard to imagine assigning this to a 16-year-old, but it was an emotional and powerful novella.
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec. I wrote a post about this collection of short pieces that fall between essay and fiction without fitting neatly into a particular category. That uncertainty seems typically Perecian.
Street Cop by Robert Coover. A weird and wonderful collaboration between Coover and Art Spiegelman, which I wrote about here.
Poetry
After-Dinner Declarations by Nicanor Parra. Parra was a witty Chilean poet. He died in 2018 at the age of 104! He was adored by beat poets, but he was not a beat poet himself. Many of the poems in this thick volume are occasional poems, hence the title. They are the things he would read after formal dinners.
History and Current Events
The Greek Experience of India: From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks by Richard Stoneman. Stonemen’s sprawling, strangely personal history of Greek contact with the Indian world is fascinating. We think of the Hellenistic Greek world as ending in 30 BC with the death of Cleopatra, but Stoneman reminds us that the Indo-Greek kingdoms lasted until about 1 BC. The Greeks in India were profoundly affected by Indian thought, eventually becoming Buddhists. Stoneman relates an amazing story of Alexander meeting “gymnosophists”, the Greek word for “naked philosphers”, or extreme ascetics, which is related in a fanciful later story called The Alexander Romance. Admittedly the Greeks didn’t leave a huge mark on India nor vice versa—but it is fascinating to read about what happened when they met.
In the Face Of War by Yevgenia Belorusets. A powerful picture of life in Kyiv in the early months of the Russian invasion. I wrote about it here.
Forget the Alamo: The True Story of the Myth That Made Texas by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford. This book made the ultra-right who run Texas so angry. One can’t read it without realizing how evil the Texas Revolution was. The details of the Alamo after the battle are less interesting, though.
Comics and Graphic Novels
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton. Kate Beaton is best known for her witty books Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside Pops, but Ducks is a very different type of book. It is a long, involved autobiographical story of working in the work camps of Alberta in the oil sands. Specifically, what it means for a woman to work in these very male environments. Beaton talks about lack of economic opportunity in the Maritime provinces of Canada, the lure of the oil industry, as well as being a young woman in an unremittingly hostile workplace.
Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix by Drew Friedman. Friedman has made a career recently of drawing portraits and capsule biographies of old-time comic book artists. This book fits in with that body of work, but here he changes his focus to the creators of underground comix. These are the artists who influenced his own cartooning career, so it feels more personal than Heroes of the Comics or More Heroes of the Comics. Also, while underground comix were rife with sexism, there are a substantial number of female cartoonists in this book, while there were hardly any in his previous books.
Time Zone J by Julie Doucet. Another book I mentioned in an earlier post. I loved Julie Doucet when during her years of producing the comic book Dirty Plotte, but Time Zone J is the story of an early love affair told from the perspective of a middle aged woman—it has a reflective feel without the right-now urgency that Dirty Plotte had.
Life of Che: An Impressionistic Biography by Héctor Germán Oesterheld, Alberto Breccia and Enrique Breccia. I wrote about this one in April. An important work, and for some American comics fans, an introduction to the impressive comics art of Enrique Breccia, the son of Alberto Breccia.
The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel. Bechdel is one of my favorite cartoonists and is probably best known for Fun Home. All of her autobiographical comics are great, as was her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Here she talks about her history with sports and exercise. I related to it because she engages in somewhat extreme body modification, which I have spent the last year doing as well.
Music and Art
The War on Music: Reclaiming the Twentieth Century by John Mauceri. I reviewed this book earlier in the year, and one effect it had on me was that it encouraged me to listen carefully to a lot of music that I had hitherto overlooked.
A Life Of Picasso: The Minotaur Years: 1933-1943 by John Richardson. This is the final volume of Richardson’s multi-volume biography of Picasso. Richardson died in 2019, so the last few decades of Picasso’s life are not covered, but the detail in these volumes is staggering, and Richardson was a highly entertaining writer.
Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace by William Robin. This was the subject of a two part essay early in 2022. I read this because I was interested in delving into the world of contemporary “classical” music, and I found several composers whose work I became quite fond of, including Louis Andriessen and Evan Ziporyan.
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