Reading List

The Boston Globe has published its annual list of recommended reading. A year ago, I used the occasion to create my own Reading List. So how did I do?  I did read about half the books on my list.  I have any number of excuses for not doing better. For one, a couple of massive books came out after I created my list : Tony Judt's Postwar and James Carroll's House of War. A side-trip to Vermont piqued my interest in Carl Zuckmayer, and I had to read his exquisite 600-page autobiography Als wär's ein Stück von mir (english: A Part of Myself). Quite often a book can take you on a new and unexpected journey: I did, in fact, read Gottfried Benn's collected poems, which was on my list, but that led me to his autobiographical Doppelleben, in which he includes his infamous address to German writers who fled Hitler: Antwort an die literarischen Emigranten.  This, in turn, has ignited an interest in exile literature. Who knows where this might lead?

For next year I hope to do more writing than reading, so my list is modest. Baron Wormser is poet who lives not too far from me in Maine. His memoir The Road Washes Out in Spring  recounts his twenty years living "off the grid" in a house without plumbing or electricity, where he and his wife raised two sons.  Hilde Domin was an exile poet who spent a brief period in Maine; I plan to read her Gesammelte Gedichte as well has her last  volume of poetry, Ein Baum blüht trotzdem, published when she was 90- years old. My most ambitious literary project is to read Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Virgil (english: Death of Virgil), a book he started writing in a Nazi prison cell and completed under great hardship in America. Finally, after all the controversy,there is no avoiding reading Günter Grass's autobiography Beim Häuten der Zwiebel.

As always, recommendations are greatly appreciated.

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[2020]

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MR NICE

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