10 Extraclassical Books I Read in 2023
A rapid-fire list of reviews for things I read outside of the discipline throughout this past year.
So at the end of last year, I rushed out the 2022 version of this article because it’s an easy way to make everything that I’ve read up to that point worth something. Now I have the benefit of foresight, and I was able to write short reviews while these novels were still fresh in my mind like any of the other books I’ve written about for this blog. For a number of reasons the number in the title does not represent all the books I’ve finished this year, and certainly not all the books I started, but these are certainly my favorites that I haven’t talked about elsewhere. I hope you find something here that you agree is worth reading, and I’ll see you in the new year.
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
During the period where I reviewed The Secret History, I read a few interviews with Donna Tartt where she cited this book as an inspiration. Indeed, both novels revolve around an unsympathetic protagonist attempting to evade identification for crimes they were involved in. While Richard Papen merely aids and abets in murder, Tom Ripley has no moral qualms about killing. There’s a whole lot happening in this novel thematically, but I appreciate the portrayal of what an immature psychopath’s perception of what freedom may be. The scenario that Ripley finds himself in overlaps with Socrates’ arguments in the first two books of The Republic over whether it is better to live a moral or immoral life.1 In taking on Dickie Greenleaf’s identity like a Gygian ring, Ripley soon finds the limits of a life of crime. All of his movements henceforth must be planned out in a way that he cannot talk to the same people more than once as each of his personae, because if his deceit is uncovered he will have to face consequences. He monetarily profits from that cold-blooded murder, but the banks eventually discover his forgeries and it puts him in an awkward position. The police even impose empirical limits on his freedom at multiple points in the novel, and when they don’t explicitly tell him to not leave the Italian peninsula, he still fears their swooping in to arrest him at every port and café. Allegedly, there has been a Netflix adaptation of the entire series with Andrew Scott as the eponymous character in the works since before the pandemic. At time of writing, the only news I can find says it will either be out in late 2023 or early 2024. I haven’t seen any of the other media based on this book; I considered watching the 2005 movie starring Matt Damon, but I felt that waiting for this series would be worth my time (even if Netflix hasn’t had the best track record of finishing their stories recently).
True Grit by Charles Portis
I read this book just after Soldier of the Mist, and it was interesting to compare the different stylistic choices between one and the other. Portis wrote this book a year before the John Wayne movie adaptation came out, but I would describe the grammatical style as Red Badge of Courage-lite. I’ll admit that my knowledge of historical rural Southern dialects is lacking, but it did feel a little manufactured in my eyes. None of this took away from the story; vengeance is a great motivator, and Mattie Ross exemplifies that righteous anger. Cogburn and LaBoeuf have their own reasons for hunting down Tom Chaney, neither of which precisely amount to justice in the legal sense of the word, but certainly in the moral sense of the word. At the end of the day, I think it is absolutely appropriate to label Cogburn a hypocrite. He doesn’t really repent for his former life of crime as much as the straight-and-narrow path became the more profitable and less risky enterprise. His search to destroy cattle rustlers and the like is rooted in a desire to erase a part of himself that he doesn’t like. Fans of John Wayne’s portrayal of the character may disagree with this take, but I don’t necessarily think his acting does the best job of getting this attribute from the original story across. To be fair I haven’t seen either that or the 2010 Jeff Bridges remake in about a decade, but I seem to remember an overall glorification of the character that I didn’t find as prevalent in the book I read. Because of the time period, there are certain derogatory words used for black Americans that may turn readers off, but they’re mostly confined to the first quarter of the book. In every case, the narrator declares them to be inappropriate but for accuracy’s sake they remain in her account of events. If that’s something you can stomach, then I would greatly recommend this novel. The “Western,” to me, is a genre of movies; I hadn’t even heard of Zane Grey until recently, but this is a quick and fun little read if you need some cowboy action in your life.
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