Seven books to look out for in November

Upcoming history and non-fiction titles that have caught my eye

As with my previous posts of book recommendations, these are based on scouring the publishers’ catalogues for titles that I think look interesting. It’s inevitably a partial list, in both meanings of the word. There are undoubtedly many excellent books coming out in fields I have no interest in – which are many and various – and I will certainly have missed books even for fields which I was actively looking for. With the additional caveat that I haven’t read any of them yet, although I will be reviewing the first two mentioned, I offer this for your interest…

The Monastic World: a Thousand Year History
Andrew Jotischky; Yale University Press

Monasticism is still a little understood and all-too-often derided phenomenon, but it is impossible to understand the medieval world – and in many respects, therefore, the modern world too – without it. Jotischky promises to trace their history from their origins in the eremitic religious culture of the Near East through to the tumults of the sixteenth century, exploring their central roles in education and healthcare, in the preservation and dissemination of learning, and in developments in music and art, science and theology. With a canvas that encompasses both the Eastern and Western arms of Christendom, Jotischky’s ambition is great indeed. I’m hoping he can offer illumination and insight into the lives of generation after generation of extraordinary men and women.

Letters
Oliver Sacks; Picador

When the neurologist Oliver Sacks died in 2015 it felt as if the world lost one of its most humane and thoughtful explorers of human experience. For over 40 years he wrote books and essays, often based on his case work, that led readers through the uncharted and poorly understood territories of the damaged mind in ways that illuminated all human life with his wisdom and compassion. He was also a prolific letter writer, both to friends and peers in academia and the arts, and to many strangers who wrote to him with their symptoms and concerns. This selection of his letters, chosen by Kate Edgar, his longtime editor, comes in at a hefty 752 pages, but I strongly suspect that I will finish it wanting more.

Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
Edwin Frank; Fern Press (an imprint of Penguin Random House)

The sweeping survey of the novel feels like a little old-fashioned as a genre, but it’s the sort of thing – like collections of literary essays – that I very expect to much enjoy. Frank is the publisher at the New York Review of Books and in Stranger than Fiction he explores the way that the novel has evolved and changed with the world around it over the last 150 years. Taking Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, as his starting point, Frank casts his critics eye over everyone from Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway to Natsume Soseki and Chinua Achebe, from André Gide and Vasily Grossman to Marguerite Yourcenar and WG Sebald. I’m hoping to come away from it with a reading list as long as my arm!

Patria: Lost Countries of South America
Laurence Blair; Bodley Head

A mix of history, travelogue and reportage, Patria promises to examine the past, present and future of the continent through the prism of former nations and states that seem to have been erased from historical memory - if they ever had much of a foothold in global Anglophone memory at all. I tend to think it’s a fallacy to consider that the current arrangement of nation states around the world represents any kind of settled arrangement, and it sounds like Blair’s book is very live to the fluidity of national identities and political structures, and the eternal dynamics between stability and resistance, tradition and revolt, which are evident everywhere, but nowhere more so that South America.

What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost
Orlando Reade; Jonathan Cape

I first read Paradise Lost at school when we studied books nine and ten for A-level. The vertiginous power of Milton’s vision, the sinuous intellectual and verbal richness of his style, was overwhelming. I loved it. I studied it again at university and have gone back to it every few years or so since. My initial understanding of Milton was heavily influenced by the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, but of course I quickly learned how limiting that was. Orlando Reade’s new book - his first, I think - promises to explore how Milton’s ideas about liberty have influenced the work and thought of twelve close readers of the poem, among them Malcolm X, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, and Thomas Jefferson. It should be fascinating - and I hope, if nothing else, it sends new readers in Milton’s direction.

Hokusai’s Method
Kyoko Wada, Ryoko Matsuba, Katsushika Hokusai; Thames & Hudson

Katsushika Hokusai was an extraordinarily prolific artist, creating some 300,000 works over the course of his long life. But he also somehow found the time to write numerous drawing manuals known as ‘e-tehon’. This new book from Thames & Hudson gathers fifteen of them, which include over 800 illustrative drawings, with reproductions of every page. Taken together they should offer an unrivalled insight into the thinking and craft of unarguably one of the greatest and most influential artists Japan – if not the world – has ever produced.

In fact, Thames & Hudson has another book on Hokusai out in November which looks wonderful too. Titled Hokusai: A Life in Drawing, and written by Henri-Alexis Baatsch, it looks to be a career overview with aspects of biography, but it’s large format and priced at £95 and I’m reluctant to recommend anything at that price point unless I could be sure it was value for money!

Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe's Medieval Monuments
Diane Darke; Hurst

The central argument to Darke’s new book is that the architectural style we know as Romanesque, which dominated church building across Europe in the centuries before the development of what we call Gothic in the 12th century, was largely derived from Muslim expertise and Muslim craftsmen. Given the extent to which Christian learning generally in the period engaged with Islamic scholarship, I’m very intrigued to see what evidence Darke brings to this. It should be a fascinating book - and may perhaps prove an influential one.