Reading Roundup: January 2023

Reading Roundup — January 2023 Reads

Reading becomes more and more important to me every day. Earlier this year, I dropped an essay that listed the top ten books I read in 2022. This year, I will be continuing my monthly series reflecting on my reading list throughout 2023.

[embed]Top Ten Books I Read in 2022 Collecting the top ten books I read in 2022, with short reviews, along with the full list of 120 books from last year.jdobzynski.medium.com

A Word on Method I average about two hours of reading per day. One hour I usually spend reading works from Martin Seymour-Smith’s The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, beginning in 2023 with Plutarch’s Lives once I finish a full draft of a novel. Another hour is spent at night before bed, reading from a stack of books on my nightstand I replenish as needed. Each stack contains about thirteen regular authors I’m reading chronologically, and seven other works from whatever I happened to find in used bookstores or thrift shops or has been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read for a long time.

Books Read Here are the two books I finished in January 2023, although you’ll shortly see why.

Imani Perry — South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (2022) One of two books my spouse gave me for the holidays last year. Imani Perry takes the reader on a journey through the American South and the Caribbean to reflect on how the black experience has been shaped by this country, and how the country has been shaped by the black experience within it. South to America is an intensely personal reflection from Perry, which uses geography as a stepping off point to discuss the past, present, and future of many communities. Most important was highlighting the continuing rise of the Black South, despite generations of oppression, segregation, and discrimination. While the book ultimately doesn’t draw many new conclusions, it does demonstrate those conclusions throughout the journey and places them into a contemporary context.

James Joyce — Ulysses (1922) The other book I read this month was Ulysses by James Joyce, which comes in somewhere around 265,000 words. I unfinished reading this about twenty years ago, when I got stuck about halfway through after realizing that I didn’t know enough about enough to really understand what I was reading. Joyce’s modernist novel follows the life of Leopold Bloom on a regular day in his life, structured and told in such a way to draw parallels between Bloom’s Day (celebrated as a literary holiday) and the journey of Odysseus/Ulysses as depicted by Homer, with the help of Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist from Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Coming back to this work, after becoming more well-read helped me hold on for this linguistic ride through the modernist era. I felt like I finally knew enough about his influences (Homer, Aristotle) and his contemporaries/legacy (Woolf, Kerouac, Burroughs) to appreciate what was being done. In fact, nearly everything I thought was unique about Woolf (stream of consciousness), Kerouac (word jazz and neologisms), and Burroughs (graphic sexual obscenities and social commentary) are found throughout this work. I spent three weeks reading this, roughly two hours a day, and I found the experience immensely fascinating and rewarding. But I was also troubled by the casual antisemitism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry embedded into the story, however accurate to the characters and as a reflection of its time. For the literarily minded, or those who like a good reading challenge.

Next Month Next month I’ll be finishing out another stack of books, including the second book I received as a gift from my spouse entitled Kabaddi by Nature by Vivek Chaudhary, followed by T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, Christopher Moore’s Noir, another Robert E. Howard novel, and then whatever happens to make its way into my next stack of books, time permitting.