A highlight of the year for me was Genese Grill’s wonderful collection of essays, Portals. Grill’s work translating and writing about Robert Musil has long been a source of great insight and inspiration for me, and her uncompromising thoughts on the purpose and function of art come as solace in these times. As do Noga Arikha’s historically-informed look at mental decline and Rens Bod’s ambitious theory of patterns in knowledge-seeking (which is admirably available free).
Portals: Reflections on the Spirit in Matter (Living Essays)
Grill, Genese (Author)
Splice
The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind
Arikha, Noga (Author)
Basic Books
World of Patterns: A Global History of Knowledge
Bod, Rens (Author), Buell, Leston (Translator)
Johns Hopkins University Press
The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason (Volume 76) (Sather Classical Lectures)
Ober, Josiah (Author)
University of California Press
The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (New York Review Books Classics)
Sewell, Elizabeth (Author), Schenck, David (Introduction)
NYRB Classics
Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present
Drucker, Johanna (Author)
University of Chicago Press
Chaos, Cosmos and Creation in Early Greek Theogonies: An Ontological Exploration (Classical Literature and Society)
Almqvist, Olaf (Author)
Bloomsbury Academic
Ming Dynasty Tales: A Guided Reader
Mair, Victor H. (Editor)
Bloomsbury Academic
The Lost Republic: Cicero's De oratore and De re publica
Zetzel, James E. G. (Author)
Oxford University Press
Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature (Thinking Literature)
Daniel, Professor Drew (Author)
University of Chicago Press
