It has become a custom of mine to end the year with a blog post (who writes blog posts anymore? Who reads them??) about the books I read over the past year. These aren’t books that I read for any purpose other than pure pleasure and personal enlightenment. Thus, “guilty pleasure reading.”

I suppose some of my choices do relate to my academic interests but not necessarily in any direct way. As a champion of liberal education, I believe that even we “mentat academics” ought to read widely, not just carry out targeted reading for specific academic objectives or keep up with the state of our field (which admittedly I am not very good at doing these days). Nevertheless, I do feel a twinge of guilt when I look back at some of these tomes and wonder if my time wouldn’t be better spent writing more books of my own (I did publish one book this year, so I suppose I earned some relief time from writing). Still, one ought to be allowed some grace time to read for pure pleasure, especially if one has gone through some very challenging times, as I did this past year. Thus, without further ado, here are my guilty pleasure reads for 2023.

Sci Fi / Fantasy Fiction

I have admitted in previous posts to being a sci fi and fantasy addict, particularly in my teenage years, when I was reading a great deal of fantasy and sci-fi by authors such as Piers Anthony, Michael Moorcock, and my favorite writer in that genre, Stanislaw Lem. I was also a fan of Isaac Asimov, but I confess that I never got round to reading his Foundation Trilogy, until this year. Like many others, it was the release of the Foundation series on Apple TV that spurred me to go back to the source. Anybody who reads Asimov’s Foundation series must marvel at the sheer immensity of his vision, which has influenced just about every space-faring fantasy series since then, including Star Trek, Star Wars, and so many others. Stanislaw Lem was obviously inspired by Asimov as well. The made-for-TV series, though entertaining (who can resist Lee Pace as the Emperor Day?) hardly does justice to the original vision of Asimov, preferring to indulge in stories of characters with paranormal powers. That said, the Mole, one of the most memorable characters in the original series, had such powers. Yet most of the original story is grounded in scientific possibilities. The premise for the Foundation series is that a mathematician and scientist named Hari Selden can predict the future of the galactic empire at the heart of the story, a future disliked by those in power, and for this he is banished to the outer realms of the galaxy to compile an encyclopedia. Yet he and the community he establishes on an outlying world are helping to minimize the downfall of the galactic civilization and prevent centuries of war. The pace of the story is fast, and it develops over hundreds of years, focusing on key characters (unlike the TV series, Selden dies early in the story) and on episodes known as “Selden Crises” when the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance. This is a monster of a book series, and a must-read for any sci-fi fan. I’m glad I finally got around to reading it this past summer, and I found it to be quite the page turner. As for the TV show, I understand why they felt that they had to recraft it, as the book series would be near impossible to turn into engaging TV—or would it? Maybe someday a TV writer or filmmaker will do justice to the books.

Speaking of page turners, I finally polished off the Fire and Ice series that I started at the outset of the pandemic in 2020. Last year, I read books 2 and 3. This fall, I charged through books 4 and 5, hoping that Book 6 might be out soon. This is a hope shared with all fans of the series. C’mon J.R.R. Martin, you can do it! As usual, these books proved impossible to put down once I’d started them, and I devoured both like the wildfires that struck Canada this year (yes, it was another year of global disasters piling up on each other). As with many readers who began the journey after seeing the TV series known as Game of Thrones, part of me wished that I had read the books first. You can’t help seeing the TV characters in your mind, which I suppose is a testament to the power of the TV series and the choice of actors who performed the roles. Who can ever forget Peter Dinkler as Tyrion, hands down the most interesting lead character in the book and TV series? I must admit that I found Book 5 to be bewildering with its explosion of characters and stories, yet Martin has a knack of making them all hang together somehow. I have no idea how he will be able to resolve all the plot twists and developments of Book 5. And I can’t imagine how he would have the discipline not to add more characters and story lines to this immensely rich world he has conjured up in the five volumes. The book series is so much richer, deeper, and more rewarding than the TV series, which ended in a very disappointing way. The characters are so much more nuanced and interesting too. While Martin is inevitably compared to Tolkien, I see him more as the Stephen King of the fantasy world, churning out books that are so powerfully addictive they just suck you into their worlds until you pop out at the other end.

Obviously, I was in a fantasy groove over summer and fall. Basically, I was recovering from a terrible health crisis, and I needed some fantasy to help pull me through it. The same thing happened to me back in high school when I went through a death-defying period brought on by an accident and spent a few weeks in hospital. The power of reading to help heal body, soul, and mind is underestimated, I think. The next book was a happy accident. I bought Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree for my daughter, who is also a huge fan of fantasy fiction and TV. One of our enjoyments is to indulge in such TV series as Shadow and Bone, The Umbrella Academy, and others of that ilk, and yes, we also saw Foundation together. One day, intrigued by the bright orange cover, I picked up the book to see what it was about. Once I started it, I couldn’t stop reading. Written by a woman with a feminist perspective on fantasy fiction, the book focuses on strong female characters, who drive the entire story. The lead characters are warriors caught up in a global war involving dragons. In this world, the dragons are either evil, hell bent on dominating the world of human beings, or they are benevolent creatures working with humans to fight the evil dragons. There is an East-West alignment to this world, with the Western dragons being the evil ones—perhaps a metaphor for Western imperialism and capitalism and its baleful influence on the modern world. The Eastern dragons are closer to those of Chinese and Japanese mythology, and indeed the people of this part of the world bear strong cultural resemblances to East Asian societies. Meanwhile, the title of the book refers to a secret society of warrior priest-like women bound to a tree whose fruits give them superhuman powers. It all adds up to a delectable story at the heart of which blossoms a Sapphic romance. I will be keeping an eye on this author and would love to tackle the prequel to this book if I get a chance.

 Music

There are usually several books on my list focusing on music and musicians and this year was no exception. While I was in hospital this summer, I was deep diving into the catalog of the band Genesis. I grew up listening to this band by default, since they had become quite popular and their hit songs were always playing on the radio (I was a ‘70s-80s kid). Phil Collins was also a highlight of radio and TV, and was an ubiquitous presence. Then there was Peter Gabriel. I was a huge fan of his music throughout the 1980s. But I didn’t really investigate the earlier work of Genesis when Gabriel was the lead singer. For some reason I decided to do so while convalescing and needed a guide to their early work, so I downloaded Dave Thompson, Turn It On Again, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins & Genesis on Kindle. I was treated to whirlwind tour of the band’s formation and its various phases under Gabriel and later Collins. While Peter Gabriel was experimental and showy—he wrote long song-stories, and dressed up in funny costumes and masks while performing, as you can see if you watch Youtube videos of their early work—Phil Collins took the band in a more compact and soulful direction. At first there was some crossover between the two phases in the 1970s, but eventually Collins helped shape the band—which eventually was pared down to the trio with Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks—into a hit-making machine by the dawn of the 1980s. Gabriel was obviously meant for more of a solo career and had a brilliant one. Phil did both.

I’ve been a Tom Waits fan since the 1990s, when a friend introduced me to Swordfish Trombones. Like a bitter single malt Scotch, it was an acquired taste, but soon I was deep into his unique style of music-making, and I also picked up CDs of his albums Rain Dogs and Frank’s Wild Years, as well as a few others. Alex Harvey, Song Noir: Tom Waits and the City of Los Angeles provides many insights into the formation of Waits’s unique songwriting style and persona. The book delves into his early work when he was struggling in Los Angeles to make it on the music scene with his revival of what he calls “old man’s music.” I’ve been incorporating a few Tom Waits songs into my own repertoire of guitar songs, and it’s always helpful to get a sense of where the artist came from and why he wrote and performed as he did.

My focus this past year has been on Bob Dylan. I decided to make a consistent effort to memorize Dylan songs, and now have around 30 of them under my belt. Mostly these are his older tunes from the 1960s and ‘70s, with a few later ones thrown in for good measure. I’m still trying to digest some of his later stuff, which wasn’t on my radar screen until recently. In addition to listening to Dylan-focused podcasts such as Is It Rolling, Bob and Pod Dylan, I’ve been on a Dylan reading kick as well. Recently I read Tim Riley, Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary. I knew Tim Riley from his book on the Beatles, Tell Me Why, which I acquired back in high school. I liked his humorous style and admired his ability to write critically and insightfully about songs I’d been listening to since I could remember. He wasn’t afraid of poking fun at a band that the world has put on an Olympic pedestal. With Hard Rain, he does pretty much the same with Dylan’s work up to the 1990s. I’m now reading Richard Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters, which is a somewhat more academic analysis of Dylan’s work, connecting his songs to, among other things, ancient Greek and Roman literature. I find it convincing. After all, the man teaches a course on Dylan at Harvard. But if you want to get into Dylan’s mind, one of the best ways other than his songs is to read his own book, Bob Dylan, Chronicles Volume I. As Thomas points out, the book is part truthful autobiography and part showmanship and bluster, but every page is bristling with insights into Dylan’s influences, musical and otherwise, and his unique ability to take the stuff around him and churn it into archetypes for songs.

Fiction

While I tend to read a lot of nonfiction, I always try to have at least one work of fiction in my hands at any given time. This year I found Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale in a local bookstore in Shanghai. It’s an autobiography of sorts, which is a fine counterpoint to his works of fiction such as Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. It starts out with a deep account of an epic journey he took with his mother to the home of his childhood, which turns into a journey of memory and family stories. He moves on to discuss his transformation from a budding journalist into a writer of fiction. Like Dylan’s book, you can see how Marquez takes the material of his own life story and the people surrounding him, mythologizes them and turns them into fiction. As for this book, like Dylan’s Chronicles, I’d say it rests comfortably in the interzone between the spheres of fiction and nonfiction as many fine writers’ memoirs do.

Few fiction writers have reached the status of James Joyce, the godfather of modernism, who did for fiction what Picasso did for painting in the 20th century. I confess that I haven’t read Ulysses—every attempt to do so has ended in failure—but this year I read Kari Maher, The Paris Bookseller, which focuses on the story of Sylvia Beach, the American expatriate in 1920s Paris whose book shop, Shakespeare and Co., became a lodestone for expatriate writers such Ezra Pound, James Joyces, Ernest Hemingway, and their books. She also took on the responsibility of publishing Ulysses at a time when the book was considered scandalous, especially in the USA, for its candid portrayal of everyday life in Dublin. While you don’t learn a great deal about the contents of this towering work of fiction, you do learn how it was published and all the struggles and ordeals that Sylvia Beach went through to help get it out into the world. It’s an intimate story about writers, publishers, and booksellers, couched in an overstory of a Sapphic romance (that makes two of them in one year).

The 1920s holds a special fascination for me, and my own research on Shanghai offers many parallels to what was going on in Paris, New York, and Berlin at the time. In fact, I used to teach a course on these cities focusing on the theme of nightlife. Later I developed a course on documenting cities. While searching for some materials on Berlin, I found this graphic novel, Jason Lutes, Berlin. I don’t read many graphic novels, but I found this one to be compelling, both in terms of the story and characters and their graphic treatment. The illustrations are astonishingly good. I was able to download the novel on Kindle and read it panel by panel. It tells of the high times but also the growing darkness of the period when Fascism and Nazism were on the rise is Germany and in Europe. I learned a great deal about the urban culture and the politics of 1920s Berlin and especially the plight of the working classes. And in the midst of it was yet another Sapphic romance (that makes three!).

I don’t do a good job of keeping up with the latest fiction, but somehow Charles Frazier, The Trackers popped onto my radar screen. I remember enjoying his book Cold Mountain, about a Civil War soldier, and so I decided to give his latest novel a read. It also takes place in the period before World War II, focusing on an artist in Depression Era America who is hired to paint a mural for the post office in a town in Wyoming. Last year, I read about the mural painter Thomas Hart Benton (again, connecting to my course on documenting city life) and this proved to be a good counterpoint to the Henry Adams book Tom and Jack. In this novel, the key relationship that emerges is between the young artist and a wealthy resident who befriends him and provides housing for him on his ranch. He gets tangled in a relationship with the man’s wife after she disappears with a valuable painting, and he is sent out to find her. I think Cold Mountain was a sharper novel, but this one has its merits, as it paints a panoramic landscape of American society in that era.

Sanmao, Stories of the Saharah, was another work of semi-autobiographical literature that I enjoyed this year. I first encountered the adventuresome writer Sanmao in Taiwan when I was studying Chinese there in the late 1980s. It was a pleasure to return to her work and read this excellent translation of her stories about living in the Sahara with her Spanish husband, and their encounters and relationships with the local people. It’s a book that sits on the crossroads between fiction, autobiography, and ethnography. Though she certain was not an expert in the people and cultures of the place they lived, she does portray them in a vivid way. I haven’t read through all the stories but the ones I did read are evocative and hilarious in their own way. How expatriates survive in hostile environments that local people have spent centuries or millennia accommodating to is an interesting subject, and her eye for details makes it even more worthwhile. Is this Chinese literature? It was originally written (and I originally read a story or two) in Chinese language, so I suppose it qualifies. Yet it takes a refreshingly worldly perspective.

Another writer I first encountered while in Taiwan in the 1980s was Thomas Pynchon. While traveling to Hong Kong and in Mainland China for the first time, I read his novel Gravity’s Rainbow. I later reread that book a few times (it takes a few readings to appreciate the book, I think), and later tackled his other works, such as Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and Vineland. One book that eluded me was V. I attempted to start it a few times but couldn’t seem to get through the first chapter. This fall I determined to get through the book and succeeded in doing so. Like Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s a novel that could take a few reads to plumb its depths. I don’t find it as compelling as GR, which is an epic adventure story set in WWII and postwar Europe, with historical excursions to other parts of the world. V is set in 1950s America, with historical forays to Malta, Venice, South Africa, and a few other places. It’s a bit of a mystery novel, with the main conceit being that a man is pursuing a shadowy figure named V through time. The counterpart to Tyrone Slothrop in this novel is Benny Profane. I confess to not following the story in all its intricacy, but the literary quality of the novel is stunning, especially given that this was his first novel. Now there’s only one novel in the Pynchon oeuvre that I still need to tackle, his last novel Bleeding Edge. Perhaps next year.

This year I also dug into John Le Carre’s classic novels Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honorable Schoolboy. While far from the literary mysticism of Pynchon, Le Carre does share some qualities with Pynchon, including a penchant for convoluted mystery stories that range widely in time and place, carrying the reader around the world. And conspiracy looms in both the Pynchonian and Carrean worlds. Both writers explore the shadow worlds of governments and spies advancing different and conflicting ideological systems. Both involve picaresque, deeply flawed heroes (anti-heroes really) who deploy special and often hidden powers to crack the mysteries, including their sexual prowess. Honorable Schoolboy takes the reader into Hong Kong among other places. Apparently the author did his due diligence and comes up with a credible and convincing depiction of this part of the world. I had never read Le Carre before and I was surprised by the literary quality of his writing. I will certainly come back to him in the future.

Nonfiction and Philosophy

On the advice of a Russian colleague, I read Roger T. Ames, Human Becomings, a reinterpretation of the ancient Chinese works of philosophical and political thought that I’ve been teaching all these years. Ames retranslates many of the terms that we’ve come to take for granted in an attempt to remove some of the Christian influences on Chinese thought (the earliest translators and interpreters were Christian missionaries) and get at the heart of the original thinking behind these key concepts. I think I need to reread sections of this book, but it definitely gets you to rethink some of the core ideas of classical Chinese civilization.

On another note, I found Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization to be right up my alley. As a historian and scholar of nightlife and music, alcohol plays a big role in my research subject, and I think the author is on to something when he claims that alcohol has been a key aspect of human social development since prehistoric times. As somebody who has over-indulged in booze on many an occasion, and who has championed the role of nightlife in society, I am a longstanding member of the choir to which this book is preaching.