As every year at this time, the TLS asked its contributors what their favorite books of the past year were. Here are a few of the titles:
Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, Leo Damrosch, Yale (William Boyd).
The Benson Diary 1885-1925, edited by Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam, Pallas Athene (Richard Davenport-Hines).
Thomas Mann: Ein Leben, Tilmann Lahme, dtv (Timothy Garton Ash). Not yet translated. Here is an excerpt from the back cover: “He is the literary magician of the twentieth century: Nobel Prize winner and celebrated genius, a member of the upper bourgeoisie and a family man, joined to his wife Katia by decades of marriage, and yet as unhappy as a person can be. He loves and is not allowed to love; the notions of his era rise up in his path. What a source of inspiration for great literature – and what a painful life. (…) Tilmann Lahme tells us this biography as it has never been told before: with new perspectives and previously unseen sources, unknown passages from diaries and letters sent to his closest childhood friend, with that friend’s recollections, and with Susan Sontag’s never-published essay At Thomas Mann’s. In this way he offers us what we had long been waiting for: at last, Thomas Mann in his full entirety.”
And I’ll end with the recommendations of Peter Parker, which I quote in full:
Simon Goldhill’s Queer Cambridge (CUP) packs a huge amount into an admirably short and entertaining book. It describes a supportive network of gay men (some less than admirable) that thrived at King’s College in particular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not all of them understood, let alone embraced, their sexuality, and several would have felt no affinity with Oscar Wilde in the wake of his conviction for “gross indecency” in 1895. After Oscar by Merlin Holland (Europa Editions) describes the devastating and long-lasting and effects of Wilde’s downfall on his family friends – in particular his two sons, one of whom was the author’s father. Engrossing and touchingly self-questioning, this is not only a fascinating work of family history that induces sorrow and anger; it also provides a highly detailed and extremely valuable refutation of the many fabrications about Wilde that have been unquestioningly repeated by generations of biographers.