Following my annual practice, I have listed here my “novel” reading for 2023. This is a way of documenting what I get through in a year’s worth of reading on the commute to work, in the evenings after work, and while travelling outside of my “normal” academic reading. My use of the term “novel” reading is loosely adopted, as you will see from the list to include fiction and then really important non-fiction work I get excited to read in my spare time. As you will see, my novel reading shifted away from novels to much more academic reading in my “free time” and then back again. But that approach has been richly rewarding. One of the preoccupations was the monstrosity of capitalism and the monster-stories in the making of capital, combining political economy and literary theory.
1) Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger (Picador, 2022) [read twice].
2) Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris (Picador, 2022) [read twice].
3) Hernán Díaz, Trust (Picador, 2022).
4) Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (Picador, 1992) [re-read]
5) Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (Picador, 1994) [re-read].
6) Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (Picador, 1998) [re-read].
7) José Emilio Pacheco, Battles in the Desert & Other Stories, trans. Katherine Silver (New Directions, 1987).
8) Italo Calvino, Collection of Sand, trans. Martin McLaughlin [1984] (Penguin, 2013).
9) Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Blackwell Publishers, 1990).
10) Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Cornell University Press, 2015).
11) Aaron Gwyn, All God’s Children (Europa Editions, 2020).
12) Bram Stoker, Dracula [1897] (Penguin, 2003).
13) Agustina Bazterrica, Tender is the Flesh [Cadáver Exquisito], trans. Sarah Moses (Pushkin Press, 2020).
14) Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (Routledge, 1946).
15) Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Verso, 2023).
16) Nancy Folbre, The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy (Verso, 2021).
17) Ludovico Silva, Marx’s Literary Style [El estilo literario de Marx, 1975], trans. Paco Brito Núñez (Verso, 2023).
18) Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time [L’ordine del tiempo, 2017], trans. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell (Penguin, 2018).
19) Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander and the Nature of Science [Anaximandre de Milet, ou la naissance de la pensée scientifique, 2009] (Penguin, 2023).
20) Mark Steven, Class War: A Literary History (Verso, 2023).
21) J. Frank Dobie, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver [1928] (University of Texas Press, 1985).
22) S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature [1976] (Verso, 2011).
23) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part I [1808], trans. David Constantine (Penguin, 2005).
24) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part II [1832], trans. David Constantine (Penguin, 2009).
25) Noreen Masud, A Flat Place (Penguin, 2023).
26) Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian [1985] (Picador, 2015) [re-read].
27) David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2012).
28) David Shrubsole, Who Owns England? How We Lost Our Land and How to Take it Back (Harper Collins, 2020).
29) John Steinbeck, The Pearl [1947] (Penguin, 1994).
30) Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life [1846] (Penguin, 1996).
31) Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man [1857] (Penguin, 1990).
32) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1976).
33) Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Das Boot / The Boat [1973] (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999).
34) Vasily Grossman, The People Immortal [1942], trans. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler (New York Review of Books, 2022).
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