Michael鈥檚 Year in Books

What did you read this year?

Go to previous year

2024

10,101

pages read

books read

Michael Austin

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Shortest Book

151

pages

Longest Book

848

pages

Average book length in 2024

360

pages

Most Shelved

1,381,707

people also shelved

Least Shelved

1,972

people also shelved

Michael鈥檚 average rating for 2024

4.4

Highest Rated on 欧宝娱乐

4.60 average

Michael鈥檚 first review of the year

it was amazing

In 1997, soon after finishing a Ph.D. in 18th-century British literature and accepting a teaching position that mainly involved teaching world literature to non-majors, I decided that it was time to become one of those people who had read the Iliad. I turned to Robert Fagels鈥� newish translation (1990) and settled into the long haul.

It was not quite a transformative experience, but it was an amazing one. I was enticed by Fagels鈥� scholarly eruditio In 1997, soon after finishing a Ph.D. in 18th-century British literature and accepting a teaching position that mainly involved teaching world literature to non-majors, I decided that it was time to become one of those people who had read the Iliad. I turned to Robert Fagels鈥� newish translation (1990) and settled into the long haul.

It was not quite a transformative experience, but it was an amazing one. I was enticed by Fagels鈥� scholarly erudition and his magnificent translation. I was swept away into an ancient world that I barely understood, but Fagels鈥� translation and notes were a perfect guide. A few years later, I read Fagels鈥� translation of the Aeneid and felt much the same way. I never became a fan of his Odyssey, though, because of my lifetime love of Robert Fitzgerald鈥檚 1965 translation that I first read in high school and taught every semester between 1997 and 2008. But I was not really in the market for a new Iliad; Fagels seemed up to the task.

I have not yet read Wilson鈥檚 Odyssey (see 鈥淔itzgerald, Robert,鈥� above), but I read enough enthusiastic reviews of it that it was on my radar screen. When her Iliad came out, I decided that 27 years was long enough to wait to read the Iliad again, so I took the plunge. I鈥檓 glad I did. Wilson uses (what seems to me to be) a very different translation strategy. I don鈥檛 see one as better than the other; I am glad to have read both. To put the difference in a short and very reductive sentence, it goes like this: Fagels produces a great poem that foregrounds the conventions of the original Greek, while Wilson produces an equally great English poem.

Now I have to backtrack. Both translators are excellent English poets, and both have deep knowledge of Greek language and culture. The difference are around the edges. Fagels uses a higher and somewhat more archaic register. His meter is closer to (but not at all the same as) the Greek Dactylic Hexameter. And he scrupulously avoids calling the Greeks 鈥淕reeks鈥�--a word that did not describe the collective city-states until the Roman conquest--preferring the more accurate terms 鈥淎rcheans,鈥� 鈥淎rgives,鈥� and 鈥淒anaans.鈥�

Wilson embraces familiar English terms. She calls the Greeks 鈥淕reeks鈥� because that is what we call them in English. Her register is earthier, more colloquial, and, at times, more shocking. And she uses the most common English meter, iambic pentameter, throughout. Her poem feels more comfortable and less alienating to English readers. That is a good thing in some ways and a problematic thing in other ways. But it is definitely a thing.

Overall, I am very glad to have read both translations. I think that Fagels' translation does a better job of representing the epic sweep and style of the Iliad, and that is important. Without these qualities, it would not have lasted for 2500 years. But Wilson does a better job of capturing the brutality of its world and the genuine pettiness and unlikability of its major characters. Her Achilles comes off as the crybaby and bully that he was, and her Agamemnon comes off as arrogant and often foolish. Her shorter lines and more common words are appropriate to a world where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

One added benefit of the Wilson translation is that its corresponding audiobook is narrated by the incomparable Audra McDonald. I purchased both the print and audiobook versions and read about half of the chapters while also listening to the text read out loud by an accomplished actor. Given that the Iliad was originally conceived as a story to be told rather than a text to be read, this added a dimension to the text that I had not experienced before. I highly recommend the experience. ...more

惭滨颁贬础贰尝鈥橲 2024 BOOKS

it was amazing

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

it was amazing

Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton by G.K. Chesterton

The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson

it was amazing

King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard

That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart

really liked it

Michael鈥檚 last review of the year

really liked it

OK, I will just admit up front that I am one of the tens of thousands of people in the world who had never heard of Han Kang before she won the Nobel Prize this week and that I downloaded and read The Vegetarian because I like to think of myself as the sort of person who reads books that have been deemed to be important. And nothing deems louder than the Nobel Prize for Literature.

So, having said that, I will also say that I enjoyed the book but OK, I will just admit up front that I am one of the tens of thousands of people in the world who had never heard of Han Kang before she won the Nobel Prize this week and that I downloaded and read The Vegetarian because I like to think of myself as the sort of person who reads books that have been deemed to be important. And nothing deems louder than the Nobel Prize for Literature.

So, having said that, I will also say that I enjoyed the book but was not overwhelmed by it. It was good, but not great. But it was good. And disturbing. Really, really disturbing. But in a good (but not great) way.

The Vegetarian is probably better described as three connected novellas rather than one integrated novel. In much the same way that The Sound and the Fury is four distinct narratives with different perspectives about the same basic set of facts. These three novellas, though, were published separately and can stand (but not well) alone without the others.

The first novella is called "The Vegetarian," just like the book. Indeed, it is the only section of the book in which vegetarianism plays a major role. In this section, a man describes the consequences for his family when his wife, a woman named Yeong-hye, announces that she will no longer eat meat. He is furious, because this will embarrass him in public, so he tries to browbeat her into eating meat. He involves her parents, especially her father, in trying to force her to reconvert to her carnivorous ways. But she holds firm and suffers real abuse, including spousal rape, physical beatings (from her father), and deception (from her mother). The novel ends with her in the hospital about to be committed to a mental health clinic.

The second novel, "The Mongolian Mark" is the most disturbing and significant of the three. In this section, Yeong-hye's brother-in-law, her sister's husband, becomes sexually obsessed with Yeong-hye. The man is never named, but he and his wife (Yeong-hye's sister In-hye) support her and house her after her husband divorces her. The husband is a video artist whose work walks the line between art and pornography, as he films people having sex. He becomes obsessed with filming Yeong-hye after painting her with flowers, and, surprisingly, she agrees. Ultimately, he ends up painting himself with flowers and becoming her partner in a film that his wife immediately discovers. We learn in this section, though, that it is not sexuality that attracts Yeong-hye; it is being painted with flowers. This supports her view of herself as somebody who is becoming a plant.

In section three, "Flaming Trees," Yeong-hye has given up eating altogether and prefers to stand naked in the rain and soak up the water (like a tree). She is institutionalized for the entire story, which soon abandons her altogether and becomes the story of In-hye, who experiences a set of transitions very similar to those of her sister. We come to understand that she has experienced trauma, abuse, and domination all of her life, and the kind of shutting down that her sister is doing becomes her only response to a life that has never been lived and only endured. In all of the story, we never get anything from Yeong-hye's perspective other than a few descriptions of graphic dreams in the first novella. By the end of the book, this omission becomes overwhelmingly problematic, as though the author joins the three narrators in turning Yeong-hye into some kind of object.

A lot of the Nobel press releases compare Han Kang to Kafka. This is appropriate, but not in the ways that one would first imagine. The narrative does not have any of the magical realism of "The Metamorphosis," or the absurdity of "The Castle" or "The Trial." And whereas these novels all tell their story from the protagonist's point of view, The Vegetarian never gives us the perspective of, well, the vegetarian.

Still, I was reminded of "The Metamorphosis" throughout the novel. Gregor Samsa turns into an insect as a sort of external manifestation of the fact that he has never lived as a man. He has always lived for other people and never made choices for himself. Both Yeong-hye and In-hye fall into the same category, and turning into trees (in their minds) becomes their way to make decisions about their own bodies that nobody else approves. Yeong-hye, in particular, is a sort of inverse Gregor Samsa. Gregor is a bug who thinks he is human; Yeong-hye is a human who thinks that she is a tree. Both are responses to trauma, domination, and a life lived for something other than themselves. ...more

What did you read this year?