In 2022, I once again reached my usual target of reading at least forty books, this year’s total clocking in at 42. However, before we get into the details and talk about the highlights, I’d like to mention a change I’ve made.

Towards the end of the year, I decided that I shouldn’t be so strict with regard to the number of books I try to read each year, because this has in some way been hampering my choices and making me avoid the long tomes I once delighted in taking on.

And so in November I decided to begin a program of reading for 2023 consisting of the following material, all over 600 pages in length:

James Joyce - Ulysses
Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
George Eliot - Middlemarch
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
Ann Radcliffe - The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ellen Wood - East Lynne
The Arabian Nights Volume 1

I’ve already completed the first item and am now half way through Don Quixote. I’m not going to plough straight through everything, though - I’ve stockpiled a few very short works which I’ll slot in as palate cleansers between the big works.

Anyway, let’s get on to my best reads of 2022. We might as well start with the one I’ve already mentioned:

JAMES JOYCE - ULYSSES

It was purely by chance that I read this exactly one hundred years after it was published.

I first tried to read it about twenty years ago, but gave up at some stage, not having been very impressed with it. I’m not sure what suddenly made me want to try again, but I’m glad I did, because it turned out to be a superb read. There was I expecting it to be a struggle to finish, but in fact it was a page-turner and I was sad when it was over.

Perhaps this is a book which should only be read by those who are somewhat advanced in age, since a certain level of accumulated knowledge, literary and otherwise, is a prerequisite. A general understanding of European and especially Irish history around the turn of the century is essential, while knowing the plot of Hamlet is necessary to make one particular chapter comprehensible. In my case, the years between my attempts saw me come to appreciate poetry, and I think this helped a great deal since this is a book in which the language itself is centre stage rather than any story.

Joyce’s linguistic inventiveness is astonishing, as is his erudition. The language is rich and must be read slowly. Surprisingly, the book has many jokes, some very childish, peppered throughout it. Those who are too intimidated to try Ulysses because of its reputation might bear this in mind and remember that it doesn’t have to be taken too seriously.

The book is famously divided into chapters loosely based on episodes from Homer’s The Odyssey, each in a different literary style. Some are more challenging than others, but I thoroughly enjoyed most of them, my favourite being Ithaca, towards the end of the book, where the mundane interactions between Bloom and Dedalus are broken down into an almost comically scientific investigation.

A classic, but definitely not for everyone.

I gave this book a 10/10, and I can’t wait to read Joyce’s other works now - even Finnegans Wake holds no fear.

ROBERT SHECKLEY - STORE OF THE WORLDS

Sheckley was an American writer of science fiction who clearly influenced Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide fame.

New York Review Books has put together a generous collection of his short stories, each perfectly written, realised and satisfying to the end. No large scale space opera here, just small wry, drily humorous tales about all too familiar characters in slightly odd futuristic settings. Genius.

This illustrates why I love New York Review Books - they specialise in publishing great works which have somehow fallen by the wayside. That and the fact that their tastefully designed paperbacks are made with the kind of luxury paper which doesn’t yellow with age (take note, Penguin and Oxford!)

GE FEI - PEACH BLOSSOM PARADISE

In 2022 I tried to branch out and explore some works from different countries. One of them was China, and I even waived my normal rule of avoiding anything current and dived in with this NYRB translation of a well-known author, Ge Fei.

I struck gold.

[The following text contains plot spoilers].

Peach Blossom Paradise is a profoundly moving story set in the Chinese countryside during the upheavals before the end of the monarchy in 1911.

Xiumi, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, first witnesses her deranged father get up and disappear one day, then a strange man visits, whose relation to her mother seems dubious. Later she finds out that he was a revolutionary planning an uprising, although he died in the attempt.

Xiumi gets abducted by bandits on her way to be married, and ends up on a tiny island as a prisoner with a nun. She is raped. Finally she escapes as the gang members end up killing each other.

Back in her home town her mother dies, and she sets up a revolutionary ‘academy’ planning an uprising, but one of her two female companions, Lilypad, unwittingly betrays her and troops arrive.

In the ensuing fight her child is killed. Xiumi is sent to prison, evading the death penalty, and is released after a year or two. She returns to her family home and lives there, mute, with her other companion, Magpie, until her death.

I cried my eyes out after reading this. Heart-breaking but magnicifent.

Without a doubt this, along with Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, is the best novel I have ever read.

EMILE ZOLA - DOCTOR PASCAL

Although this particular novel was very good, it wasn’t among the best reads of 2022: my reason to include it here is that it marks the final volume in Zola’s epic Rougon-Macquart series (1871-93). I read the first one when I was eighteen - and it’s taken thirty-eight years to get to this, the final and twentieth book.

Why did it take me so long? Well, that was because for many years there were no reliable English translations of many of the series. Oxford World Classics started to remedy that, and now you can enjoy the whole set from the master of French realism.

Zola set out to detail the effects of heredity on two branches of a French family throughout a span of years in the late nineteenth century. Each meticulously researched novel focuses on a different theme: murder, farming, railways, coal mines, art, food, religion, money, war etc. Most of them are superb, and even the one or two I didn’t like so much were still pretty good.

Anyone coming from nineteenth century English novels to Zola will be amazed at the realism: indeed, this is why the earlier translations freely available on the web are to be avoided since they had to be heavily bowdlerised to get past the English censors.

Standout novels in the series: Germinal, La Terre, L’Assommoir, Nana, Au Bonheur des Dames, La Joie de Vivre, La Bete Humaine, La Debacle.

JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE - IVORY PEARL

I’m quite a fan of Manchette’s noir novels of the 1970’s and 80’s and have read everything New York Review Books has put out by him. Ivory Pearl is something of a departure from the usual succinct bleak violence, with much more character development and depth.

The title of the novel is the nickname of a young orphan girl who emerges from the rubble of World War Two Europe, befriended by an older gay man connected to various secret services.

She later becomes a renowned war photographer.

Ending up in Cuba in 1956 as the revolution begins to kick off, she has become embroiled in a complex web of international espionage and skulduggery.

Sadly, this excellent novel, which was to be the first of a new series, was never finished by the author.

TEFFI - OTHER WORLDS

Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya (1872-1952) was a Russian writer of short stories and commentaries who went under the pseudonym of Teffi.

I don’t know why she has slipped through the cracks and is largely unknown in the West, but she is a writer of the highest calibre. Once again, New York Review Books has stepped in with three volumes of her work. The previous two concerned her meetings with various well-known personalities of the revolutionary age (including Lenin), the second a tale of her slow journey across Russia as she sought to leave after becoming disillusioned with the Bolsheviks. The third collection, this one, concerns the rich and mysterious world of Russian folk tales.

It doesn’t matter what she turns her hand to describing, it’s always a literary triumph. She has the gift of accomplishing her aims in the simplest of prose with the minimum of words. Hopefully one day she will be reinstated in the pantheon of Russian literary greats. We also need to add Vassily Grossmann and Andrei Platonov to that list, too.

ANNE BRONTE - THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL

I’d steered clear of Victorian literature for a long time, even though as a teenager I’d loved Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Austen’s Emma and Pride and Prejudice. Now I’m ready to dive in again, having started a year or two ago with some earlier works by authors such as Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe and then progressing on to Elizabeth Gaskell.

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights didn’t do much for me, but I really liked Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Anne’s Agnes Grey. The best of the lot (so far), however, is Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. This amazing novel was somehow overlooked (probably due to Charlotte refusing to allow it to be published again after her sister’s death) and still lives today in the shadow of the others, although it is a superb and bold study of domestic abuse and the breakdown of a marriage.

[Plot spoilers ahead!]

The plot revolves around a mysterious young woman (Helen) and her small boy who move in to a run-down hall in a small community. Slandered by wild rumours and alleged scandal, this does not stop Gilbert from falling in love with her, only to be rebuffed by her since she feels that the truth would repel him. One night he sees a man arm in arm with her and thinks that the rumours were true and he is heart broken. He confronts her and she gives him her journal where she has written her whole sad tale. The man Gilbert saw was her brother and she was in fact in hiding from her estranged and abusive husband. Later, after many trials and a long separation, Gilbert finally marries her after her husband dies.

The novel is unusual, not only for taking the side of a woman running away from her husband with her child (technically an abduction according to the laws of the day), but also for the story-within-a-story literary device, the first part being recounted through the eyes of Gilbert, but then the rest by way of Helen’s journal.

A great novel which is in need of admittance to the canon alongside those of Anne’s siblings.

THE COMPLETE LIST

No, that’s not the title of a novel, it’s the whole nerdy details as to my readings for 2022, including ratings. A pretty good batch on the whole, although slightly let down by Hugh Walpole and the godawful Samuel Beckett…

Aldous Huxley - Point Counterpoint (9/10) - January 2022
Pascal Garnier - Boxes (9/10) - January 2022
Samuel Beckett - All Strange Away (5/10) - January 2022
Simon Winchester - The Professor and the Madman (9/10) - January 2022
George Orwell - Burmese Days (9/10) - February 2022
Pascal Garnier - The Front Seat Passenger (9/10) - February 2022
Ivan Bunin - The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories (8/10) - February 2022
Zach Twamley - Matchlock and the Embassy (8/10) - February 2022
Poetry of the First World - (7/10) - February 2022
Pascal Garnier - The Islanders (8/10) - February 2022
Robert Sheckley - Store of the Worlds (10/10) - March 2022
Jean-Patrick Manchette - The N’Gustro Affair (9/10) - March 2022
Ge Fei - Peach Blossom Paradise (10/10) - March 2022
George Orwell - A Clergyman’s Daughter (9/10) - April 2022
Emile Zola - Doctor Pascal (8/10) - April 2022
Pascal Garnier - Moon in a Dead Eye (8/10) - May 2022
Lyndsey Davies - A Body in the Bathhouse (8/10) - May 2022
Hugh Walpole - The Castle of Otranto (6/10) - May 2022
Horace - The Complete Odes and Epodes (8/10) - May 2022
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces (9/10) - June 2022
Pascal Garnier - The Eskimo Solution (9/10) - June 2022
Victor Serge - Unforgiving Years (9/10) - July 2022
Ge Fei - The Invisibility Cloak (9/10) - July 2022
Stephen Morris - Record Play Pause (10/10) - August 2022
Jean-Patrick Manchette - Ivory Pearl (10/10) - August 2022
Frederik Pohl - Man Plus (9/10) - August 2022
Bobby Fischer - Teaches Chess (8/10) - August 2022
Teffi - Other Worlds (10/10) - August 2022
The Tale of Sinuhe and other Ancient Egyptian Poems (8/10) - August 2022
Mircea Cartarescu - Nostalgia (9/10) - September 2022
Pascal Garnier - Low Heights (8/10) - September 2022
Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre (9/10) - September 2022 - (audiobook)
James Tiptree Jr - 10,000 Light Years From Home (9/10) - September 2022
Yoko Ogawa - The Memory Police (9/10) - October 2022
Antal Szerb - Journey by Moonlight (8/10) - October 2022
William Beckford - Vathek (8/10) - October 2022
Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives and Daughters (8/10) - November 2022 - (audiobook)
George Eliot - Silas Marner (9/10) - November 2022 - (audiobook)
Anne Brontë - Agnes Grey (8/10) - November 2022 - (audiobook)
Anne Brontë - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (9/10) - November 2022
Pascal Garnier - Too Close to the Edge (8/10) - November 2022
James Joyce - Ulysses (10/10) - December 2022

BEST READS OF 2022