What did you read in 2021?

ILBers seem to be champing at the bit to post their annual reading lists, so it must be time to initiate the traditional 'What did you read in 20xx?' thread. Have at it, or wait until January and all the returns are in. Your choice.

I will be adding mine on December 31st, most likely, since I mostly sit around and read during the winter break.

I'll have at it. List in reverse chronological order - I can see how, as the year got darker & darker, I took more & more refuge in music books & showbiz bios. Very little fiction this year.

On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed
Remain in Love by Chris Frantz
Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise by Scott Eyman
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
The Free World: Art & Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand
The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima
Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Dazed and Confused by Melissa Maerz
Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Paterson by William Carlos Williams
Shakey: Neil Young's Biography by Jimmy McDonough
Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson
A History of Bones by John Lurie
33 1/3: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
33 1/3: Tim Maia's Racional Vols 1 & 2 by Allen Clancy Thayer
Broadsword Calling Danny Boy by Geoff Dyer
It Never Ends by Tom Scharpling
The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson
Envy by Yury Olesha
Means of Ascent: Years of Lyndon Johnson vol 2 by Robert Caro
The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
But Beautiful by Geoff Dyer
On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Balthasar and Blimunda by Jose Saramago
A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet
Cat Sense by John Bradshaw
Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb

Reposting mine:

Arkady Martine - A Memory Called Empire
Hari Kunzru - Red Pill
Lorrie Moore - Birds of America
Wells Tower - Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Barrett Edward Swanson - Lost in Summerland (Essays)
Lorrie Moore - Bark
Patricia Lockwood - Nobody Is Talking About This
Natalie Zina Walschots - Hench
John le Carre - Little Drummer Girl
Rachel Cusk - Second Place
Meghan O’Gieblyn - God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
Patricia Lockwood - Priestdaddy
Robin Kelley - Thelonious Monk: The Life & Times of an American Original*
Lauren Groff - Matrix
Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea
Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads
Claire Vaye Watkins - I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness
Ayad Akhtar - American Dervish
Gary Shteryngart - Our Country Friends*
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamozov*
*still reading

Love that Mishima book, One Eye Open.

yeah i did too, so far probably my fav of his, of the half-dozen or so that i've read. i especially enjoyed the fact that the ending was happy.

I feel like I've written about this elsewhere on ILX, but I came across a book of his when I was very depressed, unemployed, and sort of "between" many emotional states a lot of the time. Anyway, it was the final book from the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, 'The Decay of the Angel.' I started there, not really caring that I was going out of sequence, then over the course of the next six months, I read everything else in his oeuvre. I kind of credit his work with pulling me out of that depression. His fashy tendencies are a little unnerving, but I still unreservedly love his writing.

I really should try to keep a log or something since i always forget a load.
LOads of antiracist and BLM related stuff and Black history .
Also various things on bias.
I'd guess somewhere between 30 & 40 over the year.
& way too many things at the same time.
But yeah not a bad year for the old reading like

Up until now, I've read 152 books of some sort or another. Golly.

How do you all find the time to read this much?

All I've read this year:

Borges - The Aleph and other Stories
Lockwood - No One is Talking About This
Johnstone - Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
Bolaño - By Night in Chile
Kleinsmith - B-17 Gunner
Wolfe - Shadow of the Torturer/Claw of the Conciliator*

*Still reading.

for my part, PBKR, I insist on time spent reading for my own mental health and well-being, plus I've just always been voracious.

wish I could cath up with everything I was buying though.
Probabl need to slow down the buying
Hope i do catch up with a lot of it though.

john le carre - tinker tailor soldier spy
john le carre - the honourable schoolboy
john le carre - smiley's people
eric ambler - epitaph for a spy
eric ambler - cause for alarm
nigel balchin - a sort of traitors
manning coles - drink to yesterday
john buchan - the power-house
john buchan - john macnab
john buchan - the dancing floor
john buchan - the gap the the curtain
john buchan - sick heart river
arthur conan doyle - a study in scarlet
arthur conan doyle - the sign of four
arthur conan doyle - the hound of the baskervilles
arthur conan doyle - the valley of fear
simenon - maigret meets a milord
simenon - maigret at the crossroads
simenon - maigret mystified
simenon - my friend maigret
simenon - maigret in court
simenon - to any lengths
simenon - the hatter's ghosts
sjöwall/wahlöö - roseanna
sjöwall/wahlöö - the man who went up in smoke
sjöwall/wahlöö - the fire engine that disappeared
sjöwall/wahlöö - the locked room
fassbinder - plays
arrabal - plays vol 3
jarry - selected works
roger shattuck - the banquet years
carl e. schorske - fin-de-siecle vienna
olof lagercrantz - strindberg
strindberg - a madman's defence
strindberg - by the open sea
strindberg - inferno/from an occult diary
swedenborg - the four doctrines
balzac - seraphita
gerard de nerval - selected writings
proust - jean santeuil
rilke - notebook of malte laurids brigge
denton welch - journals
denton welch - fragments of a life story
elizabeth taylor - complete short stories
christina stead - letty fox: her luck
christina stead - miss herbert (the suburban wife)
malcolm lowry - hear us o lord from heaven thy dwelling place
malcolm lowry - dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid
g.b. edwards - the book of ebenezer le page
dorothy carrington - granite island
d.h. lawrence - sea and sardinia
norman douglas - old calabria
norman douglas - south wind
compton mackenzie - sinister street
ford madox ford - the good soldier
henry james - the turn of the screw and other stories
charles dickens - the mystery of edwin dr00d

roger shattuck - the banquet years

I almost bought a copy of that today.

it was certainly worth the dollar i paid for it & provides a good survey of the period radiating out from the principle subjects but i remember there was something that bugged me about it, what that might have been i'm no longer quite sure (some of his critical opinions maybe?)

* = personal favorite

Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed
Jonathan Abrams - All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire
David Gerard - Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain
Tressie McMillan Cottom - Thick and other essays
Grady Hendrix - Paperbacks from Hell
* Vincent Bevins - The Jakarta Method
John Berger - The Red Tenda of Bologna
* Lilian Faderman - The Gay Revolution
Dan Davies - Lying for Money
Bart D. Ehrman - Misquoting Jesus
* Robert Caro - The Power Broker
Frederick Crews - Freud: The Making of an Illusion (currently reading)

* Charles Portis - Masters of Atlantis
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea
Magda Szabó - Abigail
Octavia E. Butler - Kindred
Martha Wells - All Systems Red
Jeff VanderMeer - Hummingbird Salamander (2021)
Jason Shiga - Demon
Harry Kemelman - Friday the Rabbi Slept Late
Paul Halter - The Seventh Hypothesis
Masako Togawa - The Master Key
Stefan Zweig - Chess
Daryl Gregory - The Album of Dr. Moreau (2021)
Mat Johnson - Pym
Nnedi Okorafor - Binti
Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This (2021)

I had a resolution to do 50 this year but I only made it to 27. No biggie.
goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2021/5253329

Have been adding books I bought to goodreads as Currently Reading since I actually possess them with that intention in mind. Not total long finger like Want To Read or some such.
So may be able to work out which is what for a change.
Though maybe do need to swap to a non Amazon related equivalent.

no lime tangier's list is the only one posted so far that i've EVER read anything from.

and is curious because of the runs of similar authors. i've never tried that (although already have plans for a reread of the bridge trilogy early in new year)

JUst bought Kindred yesterday cos it was cheap in the local bookseller. Got Parable of teh Sower a coupll eof weeks ago. & read Dawn the first part of her Xenogenesis trilogy earlier this year. Have it asanomnibus of the trilogy. Foun dit really good.
So not sure why I didn't get further into the book. Got a load of Toni Morrison this year too but didn't finish anything

& had read teh Jon Ronson though don't think it was last year.

I highly recommend going on runs of the same author. I like getting into their world a bit.

Closing in at 140 books.

yeah I binged on Natalia Ginzburg in the spring, my discovery of the year.

If I find an author I really like I prefer to stretch out over years the pleasure of discovering all their works.

Halfway through my 77th of the year, if I find some short ones I might make 80.

I usually like to have some recovery time from an author after 1 or 2 books.

I'll probably hit 57, plus a dozen or so graphic novels. I might have gotten to 60, but foolishly picked up a thousand-page Robert Jordan book to end the year.

I'm on 57 too - with hopefully a couple more before the year is out. One consequence of getting the rona was more time to read.

I used to read exclusively one author when I was a nipper but can't even countenance the idea these days. For better or worse, I much prefer to read sporadically and diffusely.

Is higher than like 40 or so at the expense of other media or do you speed read and still get the full enjoyment etc.

I love it all.

I'm also a bachelor and fancy free.

I've never been able to fathom reading 50 books in a year, one a month is my minimum to feel good about my life, so this was a good reading year for me (after a slow start).

I read pretty widely and diffusely, too, but I think that with poetry— especially more innovative or experimental work— there's more of a reason to stay with a writer for a string of books. With a novel or book of short stories, a reader can usually get a reasonable idea of a writer's style, preoccupations, etc. With many poets, one book doesn't get the reader as far. But maybe that's just my experience.

with poetry I don't even count the volumes among the books I've read; I often read a dozen or so before deciding to continue.

I should say, too, that one of the reasons why my numbers are so high is that there are entries that are chapbooks— 10-20 page little things. I include them because sometimes, those little books add up to more than much longer books, in terms of impact and time spent reading.

Two small kids don't leave much time in the evening for any media but I read for on average maybe 45 minutes every night almost every night. I used to sometimes take a break between books, this is the first year I've pretty much read non stop.

I don't speed read but I am a quick reader. I might have sped read a couple of books that were rubbish but I to find out how they ended.

i often wake up to find i managed only a page and a half the night before.

mornings are more useful for me, and those 2-3am between sleeps times.

Mornings are my best, too— I can often read 30-50 pages of a novel during my breakfast and coffee time.

Poetry depends on the poems, really.

I should say, too, that one of the reasons why my numbers are so high is that there are entries that are chapbooks— 10-20 page little things. I include them because sometimes, those little books add up to more than much longer books, in terms of impact and time spent reading.

Most of my reading this year was rereads, which I don’t include in my total. Also read a lot of short stories (not included) and so basically my actual list of new reads is pretty short at this point, but I hope to read more next year.

The Blue Ticket - Sophie Mackintosh
There Are Little Kingdoms - Kevin Barry
Tomie- Junji Ito
Abandon The Old In Tokyo - Yoshihiro Tastsumi
Tokyo Girls Bravo - Kyoko Okazaki
The Water Cure - Sophie Mackintosh
Vox - Christina Dalcher
Normal Sheeple - Ross O’Carroll-Kelly (this run of reads and rereads inspired by this essay, which was one of the best things I read this year)
Operation Trumpsformation - Ross O’Carroll-Kelly
Braywatch - Ross O’Carroll-Kelly
Schmidt Happens - Ross O’Carroll-Kelly
The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndham
The Silent Woman - Janet Malcolm

I thought chapbooks were 25-75 pages. All the ones I've seen were.

Christine, they can be quite long, or quite short.

gyac, I don't really care what you think.

Seeing as how a 30 page chapbook could take my three days to get through and a whole novel could take me an afternoon, and with the same amount of time spent reading, idea that my list is "cheating" is bollocks.

Sorry, not clear in that post, but whatever.

Yes, your post offended me, because it's wrong.

another year of retirement, another ridiculous assortment

3 Nicholas Blake novels
6 Andrea Camilleri novels
4 John Dickson Carr novels
4 Donna Leon novels
18 Ross Macdonald novels (a reread of the Lew Archer series)
2 Giorgio Scerbanenco novels
3 Simenon novels (completing a reread of the Maigret series)
3 Manuel Vázquez Montalbán novels
2 Seishi Yokomizo novels

Bosco, Death Going Down
Boucher, Rocket to the Morgue
Bude, Death Makes a Prophet
Burton, The Secret of High Eldersham
Clarke, Childhood’s End
Crispin, The Moving Toyshop
Goethe (tr. Luke), Faust Part 2
Green, The Circular Study
Hendrix, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires
Jodorowsky & Moebius, The Incal
Joshi (ed.), American Supernatural Tales
King, Firestarter
Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
Lodwick, Brother Death
Matsumoto, A Quiet Place
Metcalfe, The Feasting Dead
Meyrink, The Golem
Millar, Fire Will Freeze
Millar, The Devil Loves Me
Priestley, Salt Is Leaving
Priestley, Saturn Over the Water
Shimada, Murder in the Crooked House
Stevens (Bennett), The Heads of Cerberus

Alter & Cosman, A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal
Barthes, Mythologies
Benshoff (ed.), A Companion to the Horror Film
Brotherstone & Lawrence, Scarred for Life: Volume One, The 1970s
Cohen, Pathways of Karate Development
Garth, Tolkien and the Great War
Green & Svith (eds.), Martial Arts in the Modern World
Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism
Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles
Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon
Joshi, Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, vols. 1 and 2
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Mol, Classical Fighting Arts of Japan
Nakasone & Mabuni, An Introduction to Karate-do
Popoff, Who Invented Heavy Metal?
Rée & Urmson (eds.), The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy, 3rd ed.
Said, Orientalism
Stendhal, Love
Stendhal, Memoirs of Egotism
Stendhal, Rome, Naples and Florence
Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood
Young & Schmidt, All Gates Open: The Story of Can

no lime Tangier - I love those books by Strindberg. Very underrated writer of prose.

I can't believe Table cheated with his list. Stand in the corner and think about what you've done.

Fwiw, I wish I *could* be less dissolute and more systematic in my reading (and listening) but I ping and bounce all over the bloody place and that seems to be that.

I'm currently at 30 or 31, but will wait until year-end to post my list. I'm hoping I can read maybe one more.

Arlie Russell Hochschild - Strangers In Their Own Land
Mark Yarm - Everbody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge
James Ellroy - The Big Nowhere
Yanis Varoufakis - Another Now
Mohsin Hamid - The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Roisin Kiberd - The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through The Internet
Garth Ennis - Preacher: Book 5
Mark Harris - Pictures At A Revolution:Five Movies and The Birth of New Hollywood
Thomas Ligotti - My Work Is Not Yet Done
Anne Rice - The Vampire Lestat

Patrick Wyman - The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance and Forty Years That Shook The World 1490-1530

Lolly Willowes (O052) - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson (R)
The Card - Arnold Bennett
Shift - Hugh Howey
The Owl Service - Alan Garner
Dark Entries - Robert Aickman (+)
Seeds Of Time - John Wyndham
Slade House - David Mitchell (+)
The Last Day of a Condemned Man - Victor Hugo
The Man Who Was Thursday - G K Chesterton
Autumn - Ali Smith
Bleak House - Charles Dickens (R)
Ramble Book - Adam Buxton
XX - Ryan Hughes
The Old Man And The Sea - Earnest Hemingway (+)
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
The Sea Wolf - Jack London
Inverted World - Christopher Priest
The Story Of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang
One Thousand Ships - Natalie Haynes
Amber Fury - Natalie Haynes
Alcestis - Euripides
Agamemnon - Aeschylus
Death’s End - Cixin Liu
Children Of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn
Driftglass - Sam Delany
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
24 Jigsaw - Ed McBain
The Monarch Of The Glen - Neil Gaiman
Black Dog - Neil Gaiman
Body In The Library - Agatha Christie
An Event In Autumn - Mankell
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) - Thomas Hardy (+)
The Castle Of Otranto - Horace Walpole
O009 Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock
1848 Mary Barton - Elizabeth Gaskell
Small Island - Andrea Levy
Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler (R) (+)
The Honjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo
Anna Of The Five Towns - Arnold Bennett (+)
Slaughterhouse V - Kurt Vonnegut (R)
Sketches By Boz - Charles Dickens

(R) = reread
(+) = favourites, probably

<3 thomas love peacock, though i seem to recall he doesn't come out particularly well from the portrait meredith painted of him in the egoist.

xposts: the strindbergs are a revisit in light of reading the very good lagercrantz biography. i should really read more of his plays than i have done, but it is his fiction/quasi-fiction that i find myself most drawn towards.

re the runs of similar authors mentioned above: i guess that's always been my method? whether genre, epoch, theme, whathaveyou... never really given it much consideration ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

like the Otranto i had nightmare abbey down as early horror and like the Otranto it was nothing of the sort so was mostly disappointed.

i do notice i had a few duplicate authors myself including 2 where i read them back to back.

ha, yeah: apart from some of his settings there is very little gothic/horror about tlp!

Remain in Love by Chris Frantz

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Dazed and Confused by Melissa Maerz

A History of Bones by John Lurie

Please tell us about these!

Also, koogs meant to post about ed mcbain on here---my local library shop suddenly has a ton of him; how is he?

he pretty much invented the ensemble cast police thing like homicide and NYPD blue and each book reads like an episode of one of those (and i would love to see the TV adaptations they did in the 50s). they are of their time though, so sexist and racist language ahoy. I've been reading them mostly in order and this was about the 20th and i don't plan on stopping. nice quick reads too.

(the Martin Beck books that were posted, Roseanne etc, are the cool Swedish cousin of these)

Books:

Fatal Subtraction: How Hollywood Really Does Business - Pierce O'Donnell & Dennis McDougal 2/5
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov (Pevear & Volokhonsky translation) 4/5
The Wine Dark Sea - Robert Aickman 4/5
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.- Arthur Conan Doyle 4/5
The Forever War - Joe Haldeman 4/5
Thirteen - Steve Cavanagh 2/5
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler 4/5
Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director - Patrick McGilligan 3/5
Cotters' England - Christina Stead 3/5
A Man Lay Dead - Ngaio Marsh 2/5
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology - Gordon Van Gelder (editor) 4/5
The Woman in the Window - A J Finn 1/5
The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood - Sam Wasson 3/5
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 4/5
Guardians of Time - Poul Anderson 3/5
Fair Warning - Michael Connelly 2/5
More Than Human - Theodore Sturgeon 3/5
England's Hidden Reverse - David Keenan 4/5
Elric - Michael Moorcock (Fantasy Masterpieces collection) 4/5
Red Harvest - Dashiel Hammett 4/5
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties - Tom O'Neill 4/5
Rosemary's Baby - Michael Newton (BFI Film Classics) 3/5
Rosemary's Baby - Ira Levin 4/5
Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser - Harriet Vyner 4/5
At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror - H P Lovecraft 3/5
Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell - John Preston 3/5
The Law of Innocence - Michael Connelly 3/5
The Unlimited Dream Company - J G Ballard 4/5
The Hollow Man - John Dickson Carr 3/5
An English Murder - Cyril Hare 4/5

Graphic Novels:

Izngoud the Relentless - Goscinny & Tabary 3/5
izngoud Rockets to Stardom - Goscinny & Tabary 3/5
Essential Avengers 8 - Shooter, Byrne, Perez et al 3/5
Age of Ultron - Bendis & Hitch 3/5
Amazing Spider-Man: Election Day - Guggenheim, Romita Jr et al 2/5
Captain America: Reborn - Brubaker et al 3/5
Captain America Vol 2 - Brubaker & Davis 3/5
Iznogoud and the Jigsaw Turk - Goscinny & Tabary 3/5
Izngoud's Fairy Tale - Goscinny & Tabary 3/5
Iznogoud's Nightmares - Goscinny & Tabary 3/5
Iznogoud I Want to be Caliph Instead of the Caliph - Goscinny & Tabary 1/5
Daredevil: The Devil, Inside and Out - Brubaker & Lark 4/5
Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules - Sturm, Davis & Sikoryak 3/5
The Invaders: The Eve of Destruction -Stern, Manley et al 2/5
The Invincible Iron Man: The Five Nightmares - Fraction & Larocca 2/5
Ultimate Spider-man 14: Warriors - Bendis & Bagley 3/5
The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire 1 - Butterworth and Lawrence 4/5
Catwoman: Trail of the Catwoman - Brubaker & Cooke 4/5
Catwoman: Relentless - Brubaker, Stewart & Pulido 3/5
Morbius Epic Collection 1: The Living Vampire - Gerber, McGregor, Thomas, Conway, Kane et al 3/5
Ultimate X-Men 7: Blockbuster - Bendis & Finch 3/5
Ultimate x-Men 8: New Mutants - Bendis & Finch 3/5
Ultimate Spider-man 20: And His Amazing Friends - Bendis & Immonen 3/5
Ultimate Spider-man: Ultimatum - Bendis & Immonen 3/5
The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire 2 - Butterworth, Lawrence & Embleton 4/5
Ultimate Spider-man: Death of Spider-man - Bendis & Bagley 3/5
Ultimate Spider-man: United We Stand, Divided We Fall - Bendis, Marquez, Larraz 3/5
Spider-Men - Bendis & Pichelli 3/5
Uncanny X-Men: The Extremists - Brubaker, Larocca, Keith 2/5
Pulp - Brubaker & Phillips 3/5
Immortal Hulk 1: Or is he Both? - Ewing, Bennett et al 4/5 (UK collection)
Manhunter Deluxe Edition - Goodwin & Simonson 4/5

The Old Man And The Sea - Earnest Hemingway (+)
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
The Sea Wolf - Jack London

You should've added The Sea by John Banville in the middle here.

(xp to koogs)

ha, yeah, i said as much at the time. but a) it was too expensive and too unknown to do that for the small amount of lols and b) i tend do blocks of a month and the 3 filled the month as it was, the middle one being an especially slow read.

ira Levin has a good hit rate i think. his trick of putting the twist ending in the middle has served him well, it lets him write about the fallout of that for another 100 pages. i remember being amazed by the twist in A Kiss Before Dying.

the thing i remember of Rosemary's Baby is all the potential names they keep using for the unborn baby - andyordebbie

I read Michael Newton's new BFI monograph on Rosemary's Baby (slightly disappointing after his brilliant entry on Kind Hearts and Coronets) and then went back to the film, and then read the novel for the first time. The film really is one of the most faithful adaptations of a book, ever - nothing is added, and almost nothing taken away (just a tiny amount of non-essential backstory, really). The masterstroke of Rosemary's Baby the novel (and by extension the film) is the modern-day, even 'modish' setting, and the way that the Satanists are old and uncool - and lethal.

Agree that Levin's hit rate is pretty astonishing, and that the big twist in A Kiss Before Dying is all-time, although I can't find a good word to be said for his very late sequel to Rosemary's Baby.

I did a double-take for a moment there, thinking it said “Michael Nesmith’s new BFI monograph.” #onethread

I have a running list, I’ll post it in a few days.

My full list of 75 (including business/software books I read for work that are presumably of no interest) is on goodreads. Quite a lot fewer books than last year, mostly due to my reading two volumes of Caro on LBJ and the 1000+ pp Gotham.

Here's my favorites (in order read)

FICTION

Assembly by Natasha Brown
A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies
The King at the Edge of the World by Arthur Philips
Kudos by Rachel Cusk
Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler
A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
The Fisherman by John Langan
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Contact by Carl Sagan
Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Smiley's People by John le Carre
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
Transit by Rachel Cusk
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

NON-FICTION

Means of Ascent by Robert Caro
The Path to Power by Robert Caro
The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins
Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell
How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
Gotham by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace

my goodreads list https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2021/80167070

of those, the really good things that i didn't see anyone else here mention that i would pretty much unconditionally recommend are:

Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Assembly by Natasha Brown (caveat that i haven't lived in the UK for 12 years and haven't visited since 2018, both seemed very good on post brexit post colonial (?) britain)

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell (soothing?)

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies (highly recommended for parents).

mookieproof is right that Piranesi by Susanna Clarke doesn't quite spot the landing, but the first 5/6 are magical, wonderful narrator, and it would be a great christmas read imo.

Fiction

Autumn - Ali Smith
The Man with the Getaway Face - Richard Stark
Breakout - Richard Stark
Ask the Parrot - Richard Stark
Nobody Runs Forever - Richard Stark
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
The Road Back to Paris - A.J. Liebling
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
No One is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood
Nada - Jean-Patrick Manchette
The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914
Utopia Avenue - David Mitchell (worst book I read this year)
The Hearing Trumpet - Leonora Carrington
Unity - Elly Bangs
Get Rich Quick - Peter Doyle
The Burnt Orange Heresy - Charles Willeford
LA Confidential - James Ellroy
Temptation - Janos Szekely
Libra - Don Delillo
The Sibyl - Per Lagerkvist
The Ax - Donald Westlake
Kusamakura/The Three-Cornered World - Natsume Soseki
The Thin Red Line - James Jones
Wolf Among Wolves - Hans Fallada
Miss Pym Disposes - Josephine Tey
The Fourth Island - Sarah Tolmie
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon (re-read)

Non-Fiction

George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door - Graeme Thomson
Beeswing - Richard Thompson
The Jakarta Method - Vincent Bevins
The Road Back to Paris - A.J. Liebling
This is Your Mind on Plants - Michael Pollan
Everybody Loves Our Town - Mark Yarm
Dreamland - Sam Quinones
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls - Peter Biskind

With any luck/concentration should be able to finish The Tree With No Name by Drago Jančar and finish rereading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

Books I need to finish that I set aside
Stalingrad - Vasily Grossman (after like 600 pages, i don't know what's wrong with me)
Hawksmoor - Peter Ackroyd

and yeah, agree on Piranesi, I wanted a little bit more from it but once I got about 10 pages in it hooked me, kept a really nice balance where there was enough tension and suggestion of horror to be unsettling, but never so unpleasant that I needed a break from it.

Is that 2 different people read Everybody loves This Town this year. Was there a republishing of it or something?
I'm thinking I read it about 10 years ago but not thinking what else was on around the same time I read it.
Good book though.

actually did a better job this year than i assumed, though spring, summer, and fall were filled with gaps of not-reading. counting every volume of the george miles cycle because i can, only closer and period truly felt short

heavenly breakfast by samuel delany
lolita by vladimir nabokov
closer by dennis cooper
frisk by dennis cooper
try by dennis cooper
guide by dennis cooper
period by dennis cooper
women and other monsters by jess zimmerman
luster by raven leilani
sentimental education by gustave flaubert
the driver’s seat by muriel spark
malina by ingeborg bachmann
in a lonely place by dorothy b. hughes

will likely, finally be finishing in a lonely place today, giving me time to reread harriet the spy before the end of the year

first book of 2022: the hearing trumpet

gonna be in the upper 40s for new books -- the most in a long time -- plus maybe a dozen re-reads

of course they were mostly science fiction or something similarly escapist because that's all i can handle lately

The 52 books I read in 2021 (in the order that I finished them):

Chronicles, Jean Froissart (medieval history)
Massacred for Gold, R. Gregory Nokes (shameful Oregon history)
The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, Herman Melville
Hindoo Holiday, J. R. Ackerly
Trails of a Wilderness Wanderer, Andy Russell (re-read)
Crampton Hodnet, Barbara Pym
Maigret and the Wine Merchant, Georges Simenon
Song of the Lark, Willa Cather
A Journey Round My Skull, Frigyes Karinthy
Five T'ang Poets, selected and translated by David Young
Chess Story, Stefan Zweig
Psmith in the City, P.G. Wodehouse
My Dog Tulip, J.R. Ackerly
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
Gringos, Charles Portis
Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's, Barbara Comyns
The Monkey's Voyage, Alan de Queiroz (evolutionary biology)
Chinese Rhyme-Prose, translated by Burton Watson
The Catherine Wheel, Jean Stafford
The Means of Escape, Penelope Fitzgerald (short stories)
Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner
Strange Beauty, George Johnson (bio of Murray Gell-Mann)
Notes From an Apocalypse, Mark O'Connell
World Light, Halldor Laxness
World of Wonders, Robertson Davies
The 39 Steps, John Buchan
The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis (WWII memoir)
The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson (essays)
Rocannon's World, Ursula K. Le Guin
Maigret in Montmartre, Georges Simenon
A Voyage Long and Strange, Tony Horwitz (US pop history)
Desolation Island, Patrick O'Brian (re-read)
A Coffin for King Charles, C.V. Wedgewood
Open Doors & Three Novellas, Leonardo Sciascia
The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson
Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness (Penguin Classics compilation)
The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914, Béla Zombory-Moldován
The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington
Hons and Rebels, Jessica Mitford (re-read)
Quicksand, Nella Larsen
Highland Fling, Nancy Mitford
Kindred, Octavia Butler
Which Lie Did I Tell?, William Goldman (Hollywood insider memoir)
The Plague, Albert Camus (re-read)
The Madman of Bergerac, Georges Simenon
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Richard Wrangham
My Home is Far Away, Dawn Powell
The Ten Thousand Things, Maria Dermoût
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Eric Newby
Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household
Treason by the Book, Jonathan D. Spence (Chinese history)
The High Window, Raymond Chandler

Currently in progress:

The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

Misc Odds and Sods:

Misc short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
Misc short stories by Muriel Spark
Misc short stories by PG Wodehouse
Misc short sketches by Mark Twain
I also dabbled about in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton

Notable Fails/Rejections:

Lincoln in the Bardo, Geo. Saunders
Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, Lyall Watson
The Hot Gates, William Golding (assorted occasional pieces)
Love's Work, Gillian Rose
Reign of Terror, Spencer Ackerman (recap of decades-long political horror show)

Yeah, I don't know if I could make it through Saunders' novel either; I wasn't that into most of the stories in Tenth of December/. May try some of the nonfiction.
if you liked that Horwitz book, which I haven't read, maybe try Confederates in The Attic, based on his research, as a reader and traveler, into Civil War subcultures: it's entertaining, but also, he tries to come to grips, as much as anyone can, with the enduring weirdness of the CW era (part of its appeal, natch). Ta-nehisi Coates: "Don't say you know what you would have done then."

I read Confederates in the Attic many years back and liked it rather better than the 'Voyage' book I read this year, which wasn't a bad book but was awfully loose knit and lacked a center of gravity.

I got Lincoln in the Bardo the year it came out and never finished it. Every chapter feels like I've read it before. All of his short story collections are essential though.

I was looking at a copy in a charity shop a couple of weeks back. Thought I knew the name. Thought it was supposed to be good but don't think I grabbed it.

Most recently finished first:

Raymond Carver - Cathedral
Joshua Cohen - The Netanyahus
Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads
Annie Ernaux - A Girl’s Story
Miles Franklin - My Brilliant Career
Michel Houellebecq - Lanzarote
Evelyn Waugh - Scoop
Peter Biskind - My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles
Karl Ove Knausgård - The Morning Star
Eula Biss - On Immunity
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
Michel Houellebecq - Platform
Evelyn Waugh - Decline and Fall
Kurt Vonnegut - Armageddon In Retrospect
Raymond Carver - Fires
Julian Barnes - Metroland
Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View of Hills
Karl Ove Knausgård - Spring
Bri Lee - Who Gets To Be Smart
John Bell - Some Achieve Greatness: Lessons on Leadership and Character from Shakespeare
Meghan Daum - The Unspeakable, and Other Subjects of Discussion
Loudon Wainwright III - Liner Notes
Roisin Kiberd - The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet
Rachel Cusk - Second Place
Tina Fey - Bossypants
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
Pamela Paul - My Life with Bob
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Karl Ove Knausgård - In the Land of the Cyclops
Michel Houellebecq - The Map and The Territory
Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun
Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This
George Saunders - A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls: Part One
Steven Hyden - This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's Kid A...
John Steinbeck - East of Eden
L.P. Hartley - The Go-Between
Karl Ove Knausgård, Fredrik Ekelund - Home and Away
Jenny Erpenbeck - Not A Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections
Anne Helen Petersen - Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
Lauren Oyler - Fake Accounts
Martin Amis - Inside Story: A Novel
Tobias Wolff - This Boy's Life
Hari Kunzru - Red Pill
Bill Bryson - The Body
Kerry Egan - On Living
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations

Started and didn’t finish:

Michael Mohammed Ahmad - The Other Half of You
Lydia Davis - Can’t and Won’t
Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Karl Ove Knausgård - So Much Longing In So Little Space
Marilynne Robinson - What Are We Doing Here? Essays
Gustave Flaubert - Sentimental Education
Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Woody Allen - Apropos of Nothing

The most enjoyable experiences I had this year were in finally getting around to some classics: The Magic Mountain, Anna Karenina, East of Eden, and the Dickens and Waugh novels. Most of the 2021 releases I was looking forward to didn’t disappoint: Franzen, Knausgaard, Cusk, Cohen and Ishiguro were all satisfying. Lockwood’s novel was solid, but maybe not quite as good as I was expecting due to the high expectations I had from Priestdaddy and her essays. Oyler’s novel was a little disappointing, but I found enough in there to get me through to the end.

There were many other books I abandoned in addition to the list I’ve got here, but those are the ones I got a decent way into before giving up on for various reasons, sometimes because the book got boring, but mostly because of my waning attention span when work or life got particularly stressful.

so, David Copperfield or Great Expectations?

The first one.

Not sure if this si complete.
& may have a couple added by the end of this week

Books wot I have done read this year

Angela Saini Inferior
Ibram X kendi How To Be Anti-Racist
Mari Sandoz Crazy Horse:The Strange Man of the Oglalas
Cheyenne Autumn
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz An Indigenous People’s History of the United States
Charles C mann 1491
Paul Ortiiz An African American and LatinX History of the United States
Pragya Arghawal Sway
Alexander Mitchell New Jim Crow
Paolo Friere A Pedagogy Of Hope
Steven H Gardner Another Tuneless Racket vol 1
Raymond Queneau We Always Treat Women Too Well
Odile
Sarah Ahmed Living A Feminist Life
bell hooks Ain’t I A Woman
Arthur Miller Echoes Down The Corridor
Walter benjamin Illuminations
Merle haggard My House of Memories
Patrisse Khan-Cullors When They Call You A Terrorist
Nic Cheeseman How To Rig an Election
Kehinde Andrews New Age Of Empire
Alexandra Wilson In Black & White
Reni Eddo-Lodge Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
Robin DiAngelo White Fragility
David Olusoga The World’s War
Mark Mordue Boy On Fire
Clinton Walker Stranded
Octavia Butler Dawn
Deborah Frances White The Guilty Feminist
Richard Thompson Beeswing
James Fearnley Here Comes Everybody
Daniel Goldmark The Cartoon Music Book
Larry Kirwan Rocking The Bronx
Craig Werner A Change Is Going To Come
David Kerr African Popular Theatre
Audre Lorde The Cancer Journals
Ta Nehisi Coates Between The Buried and Me
Bob Gluck You’ll Know When You Get There
Kwame Anthony Appiah The Lies That Bind
Ken Kesey The Last Go Round
William Goldman Adventures In the Skin Trade
Matt Ruff Lovecraft Country
Mary Robinson Climate Justice.

currently reading Ibram X kendi Stamped from the Beginning which I will probably finish in a few days.
& Caste by Isabel Wilkerson which I will probably take longer to get through
Audre Lorde Compendium which I may get through too. collection of 3 of her books so may have Sister Outsider done at least
Cruel Britannia by Ian Cobain again not sure will be done by New Year.
& possibly about 100 others that I've started but need to find the right time for.

Also a long way into the Jane Jacobs book The Death and Life of Great American Cities
set up a number of orders from interlibrary loans several of which will hopefully come through on the 4th of January.
One already in the local library which is closed apart from a couple of days this week and came in a day after I was last in town
Anita Loos Gentlemen prefer Blondes /But Marry brunettes which i think is 2 different volumes of diary like entries by Lorelei .
Saw the film yesterday. Not sure if I was thinking it would inevitably be on over Xmas.

xpost, re: Dickens.

Loved both, but reading David Copperfield was the more enjoyable experience. The characters are better drawn and have more distinct voices. But mostly, it’s just funnier. Every section featuring Micawber is a riot.

pah!

This is a 1/3 of what I normally read in a year, but in some ways I made up that time to read some bulky books by Pontoppidan, Drnic, Sterne, Levrero and Eliot for the first time. Chaibi and Jaeggy also v good and it was finally great to get round to The Makioka Sisters, after reading everything else by Tanizaki. Poetry-wise I discovered Tamil poetry via Nammalvar.

Henrik Pontoppidan - Lucky Per
Joao Cabral de Melo Neto - Education by Stone
Giuseppe Ungaretti - Allegria
Juan Carlos Onetti - Complete Short Stories
Euripides - Grief Lessons: Four Plays (tr. Carson)
Laurence Sterne - Tristam Shandy
Dasa Drnic - EEG
Guillevic - Selected
Beowulf (tr.Heaney)
Fleur Jaeggy - Sweet days of Discipline
Osamu Dazai - No Longer Human
Junichiro Tanizaki - The Makioka Sisters
Driss Chaibi - The Simple Past
J. Rodolfo Wilcock - The Temple of Iconoclasts
George Eliot - Middlemarch
Natalia Ginzburg - Family and Borghesia
Sophie Collins - Who is Mary Sue?
Baudelaire - Intimate Journals
Mario Levrero - The Luminous Novel
Nammalvar - Endless Song
Johann Grimmelhausen - Simplicissimus

not the dudebro beowulf? how behind the times

What's that lol?

the headley translation, new this year. i think it's very silly.

https://i.imgur.com/Jc7ywEX.png

yeesh, that first line is painful to read.

WHY???

https://i.imgur.com/nLGQgoN.png

It’s no Skinhead Hamlet, that’s for sure.

joyce carol oates - carthage
joyce carol oates - breathe
joyce carol oates - beasts
joyce carol oates (as rosamund smith) - the barrens
updike - memories of the ford administration
eugene oneill - 6 short plays
eugene oneill - beyond the horizon
molly brodak - bandit
blake bailey - roth bio
patricia lockwood - no one is talking abt this
michael lewis - the 5th risk
rene stauffer - the roger federer story
john o'hara - the ewings
john o'hara - hope of heaven
murial spark - realities and dreams
david roberts - jean stafford bio
thomas mann - death in venice
frank macshane - john o'hara bio
anna wiener - uncanny valley
blake gopnik - warhol bio

abandoned:
james cain - career in c major
henry miller - tropic of cancer
arthur phillips - the king at the edge of the world
knut hamsen - hunger
jackie ess - darryl

Notable Fails/Rejections:

Lincoln in the Bardo, Geo. Saunders

Aimless did you ditch this bc you didnt like it or for external reasons? I was kind of surprised at how much it didnt work for me, considering that i generally was/am a fan. maybe i just grew out of his whole thing.

add me to this list of ppl who generally like(d) saunders work but tried and did not finish lincoln in the bardo

Aimless did you ditch this bc you didnt like it or for external reasons?

My reasons noted here: Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

abandoned:
jackie ess - darryl

noooo i loved this one

also the saunders book has a main character called HANS VOLLMAN which is too far for me and i liked the name kyle boot

saunders’ story collections before tenth of december still slap, i just think the overwhelming sentimentality of his recent work kinda neutralizes the whole effect. i didn’t finish bardo either

if you reread “adams” i’m sure you’ll find it’s still dope

yeah im sure youre right. after all the hype bardo got when it came out i felt like the only person in the world who wasnt charmed by it, this is validating. it was just disappointing bc it felt like such a classic case of a short story person extending their very familiar & well-honed bag of short story tricks to novel length and it not working due to the obvious reason that novels are more than just long short stories, and i assumed saunders was be smart enough not to fall into that trap but i guess not.

"was be smart enough" = "would be" ffs, lol

xpost Yeah, I vaguely recall a review of Bobbie Ann Mason's debut (maybe only) novel, starting with a sympathetic comment about Creative Writing writers being under the same pressure as anybody coming up through what's left of the popular press: that book publishers (and literary agents) really really really want you to emit a novel, otherwise you're considered prestige loss leader at best, unless you stick to/are stuck to the smalltime publishers, and even they would like a novel, probably. Reviewer went to describe the stretch from her short stories to the novel...And she seemed to pretty much fade away after that, not that I keep up all that well, but used to come across new stories pretty easily.
George Saunders - A Swim in a Pond in the Rain How is this?? Seems like it might be good, since he's a teacher, hopefully using some of this (about Russian novels) in his classes.

I have a colleague who is using that Saunders book (About the Russians) to teach some shorter Russian novels to high schoolers this spring. Sounds like it will be perfect for that purpose!

I'm also interested in why/how someone could drop Darryl, but I'm severely biased because Jackie is a pal

I found swim in the pond in the rain a bit of a joyless slog for me read back to back but it did seem like a great teaching tool if you’re dipping in and out.

re: Bobbie Ann Mason, I thought In Country was pretty good! Not perfect, and with some cheesy YA novel moments, but I liked it. They made an ok movie out of it too iirc (or maybe I just liked it because it had Bruce Willis in a major role and a Bruce Springsteen soundtrack, and I can't say no to a movie with double Bruce.)

Thanks, Lily Dale, will check library for that (book, since my DVD drive has given out)---the review was not totally neg, but made me a bit sad, like here was a fairly accomplished short story writer starting over, and being obliged to, in reviewer's take---so I just wandered on, as might well have anyway.
Xpost Yeah, could see Saunders' book as useful in between reading/re-reading of the novels themselves, and I think he includes excerpts, extensive quotes---?

(Grace Paley and Alice Munro seem like leading examples of good short story writers who made it through whole careers w 0 novels---Paley said she started one, threw it away, dunno about Munro, but wouldn't be surprised if she didn't even bother to start one, knowing she was on an extended roll w the stories.)

re: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

I enjoyed it. Mostly for the excellent short stories themselves (which are included in full), all of which I’d not yet read, except for one of the Chekhov ones. After (or during) each one, Saunders analyses why the stories work, or where they fall short. There’s plenty of helpful advice for fiction writers, but I think it’s also a helpful tool for criticism and getting better at articulating your own response to a work. I’ve often struggled to put why I do or don’t like something into words, but there’s some great examples here on how to best approach that process.

Sounds good, thanks!

think this is about it

nick pinkerton - goodbye, dragon inn
robert walser - walser on painting
sebald - a place in the country
gaskell - north and south
hebel - the treasure chest of rhinish tales
le carre - the honourable schoolboy
le carre - smiley's people
katherine angel - tomorrow sex will be good again
jean rhys - wide sargasso sea
balzac - a gondreville mystery
balzac - pere goriot
balzac - vicar of tours (and other stories)
walser - the tanners
walser - the assistant
sontag - illness as a metaphor
stendhal - the scarlet and the black
seelig - walks with walser
tolstoy - resurrection
gottfried keller - a village romeo and juliet
gottfried keller - green henry
gottfried keller - three tales of seldywa
amia srinisvan - the right to sex
patricia lockwood - no one is talking about this
nan shepherd - the living mountain
anne carson - autobiography of red
pavese - the moon and the bonfire
euripidies/anne carson - grief lessons
hardy - the woodlanders
hardy - jude the obscure
raymond williams - english novel from dickens to lawrence
hardy - tess of the d'urbervilles

did finish Stamped From The Very beginning by Ibram X kendi
& read about 3/4s of I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin which is pretty short and mainly poetry so will probably be revisited.
Must get into some more of his work.

Haven't listed any of teh titles i got heaviljy into that I didn't finish cos they got lost into the pile and stuff.
including
Ta Nahesi Coates We Were Eight Years In Power
Richard Wiseman Paranormality
Ian Cobain Cruel Britannia

Aerea in the Forests of Manhattan - Emmanuel Hocquard
Les Chants de Maldoror - Comte de Lautréamont
Mezza Voce - Anne-Marie Albiach
The Hélène Cixous Reader
Dubliners - James Joyce

Also a lot of Francis Ponge and Emmanuel Levinas

are Jude and Tess the two most miserable Hardys? is there anything else as good? I've read a bunch now, still have a bunch to go, and whilst I've enjoyed them, they've been pretty light.

Far from the Madding Crowd is maybe more miserable and my favorite

xp

these have been my first endeavour into hardy country so not qualified to say!

woodlanders is certainly not without its sadness, but def not the inexorable sinking of jude or the earthly rupture of tess. where it really shines is in the elegiac colouring of the intertwined social (in a romantic and marxist sense) and ecological relationships.

yeah, have read both of those, did Madding for o-level, got a d 8(, and read it again a couple of years ago. he does suffer from cliffhangers in some of the serialised stuff, but i enjoyed the one i read this year, Under the Greenwood Tree, just as a plain romance really.

Plenty of misery in Return of the Native, if memory serves

i dont have a great answer for why i tapped out of darryl, i liked the voice but idk i think i got kinda bored w it

Far From the Madding Crowd is prob my favorite but I liked The Mayor of Casterbridge a lot as well.

xposts: i've had denise levertov's translations of guillevic sitting waiting to be read for so long now

a slight addition after getting through the dickens faster than i thought i would:

charles brockden brown - memoirs of carwin, the biloquist & wieland; or, the transformation: an american tale

Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington - Leonora Carrington
Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece - Michael Benson
Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 - Ryan H. Walsh
Crying in H Mart - Michelle Zauner
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
The Time Machine Did It - John Swartzwelder
The Last Good Kiss (C.W. Sughrue, #1) - James Crumley
Beautiful World, Where Are You - Sally Rooney
The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World - Vincent Bevins
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance - Hanif Abdurraqib
The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco - Julie Salamon
The Hearing Trumpet - Leonora Carrington
Vineland - Thomas Pynchon
It Never Ends: A Memoir with Nice Memories! - Tom Scharpling
The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 - Rachel Kushner
Battle Cry of Freedom - James M. McPherson
The Exploding Detective - John Swartzwelder
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel - Amy Hempel
Two Serious Ladies - Jane Bowles
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking - Brendan I. Koerner
In Defense of Plants: An Exploration into the Wonder of Plants - Matt Candeias
Opening Wednesday at a Theater Or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American 1970s - Charles Taylor
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II - Svetlana Alexievich
No One Is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood
Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra - John Szwed
The Black Mass of Brother Springer - Charles Willeford
Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 - Rick Perlstein

Pretty good year of crossing off things I've been meaning to read for a long time; I'd had a copy of Under the Volcano waiting for over 20 years. Audiobooks have helped a lot in this regard.

ha wow, like a dozen of those have been sitting on my to-read list for a long time, incl Under the Volcano. I've always been intrigued by the idea of those Swartzwelder books, are they funny?

They are funny on pretty much every page; he basically repurposed Homer as a detective.

I think I’m done.

In order of completion. Rereads = *

Ursula K. Le Guin - Tehanu
Richard Stark - The Handle*
Richard Stark - The Damsel*
P. G. Wodehouse - The Code of the Woosters*
Gene Wolfe - The Urth of the New Sun
Donald E. Westlake - Help I Am Being Held Prisoner
Stephen R. Donaldson - The Wounded Land
Robin Hobb - Assassin’s Apprentice
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
Djuna Barnes - Nightwood
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed
Robin Hobb - Royal Assassin
Anne McCaffrey - Dragonflight
Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman - Dragons of Autumn Twilight*
Peter S. Beagle - The Last Unicorn
Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman - Dragons of Winter Night*
Stephen R. Donaldson - The One Tree
Walter M. Miller, Jr. - A Canticle for Leibowitz
Marcel Proust - Un amour de Swann/Noms de pays : le nom*
Germaine Brée (tr. C. J. Richards, A. D. Truitt) - Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time*
William C. Carter - Marcel Proust: A Life
Robin Hobb - Assassin's Quest
Stephen R. Donaldson - White Gold Wielder
Patricia A. McKillip - The Riddle-Master of Hed
Roger Zelazny - Nine Princes in Amber
Patricia A. McKillip - Heir of Sea and Fire
Patricia A. McKillip - Harpist in the Wind
Roger Zelazny - The Guns of Avalon
John le Carré - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Robert Jordan - The Eye of the World*
Samuel Beckett - Proust
Roger Shattuck - Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time
Joseph Czapski - Proust contre la déchéance
Henry James - The Wings of the Dove
Stendhal (tr. R. Gard) - The Red and the Black
Robert Jordan - The Great Hunt*
Roger Zelazny - Sign of the Unicorn
Roger Zelazny - The Hand of Oberon
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (tr. D. Magarshack) - The Idiot
Junichirō Tanizaki (tr. E. G. Seidensticker) - The Makioka Sisters
Robert E. Howard - Conan the Barbarian: Complete Collection
Richard Stark - The Black Ice Score*
Robert Jordan - Conan the Invincible
Lord Dunsany - The King of Elfland’s Daughter
Marcel Proust - À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs*
Clive James - Gates of Lilac: A Verse Commentary on Proust
Robert Jordan - The Dragon Reborn
Roger Zelazny - The Courts of Chaos
Louise Fitzhugh - Harriet the Spy
Gene Wolfe - Nightside the Long Sun
Gene Wolfe - Lake of the Long Sun
Dorothy L. Sayers - Whose Body?
Dorothy L. Sayers - Clouds of Witness
Marcel Proust - Le Côté de Guermantes I*
Louise Fitzhugh - The Long Secret
Robert Jordan - The Shadow Rising

Also parts of:
Christopher Clark - The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914*
Miguel Tamen - What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books*
Malcolm Bowie - Proust Among the Stars*
Richard Moran - The Philosophical Imagination

Comics:
Junji Ito - Fragments of Horror, Venus in the Blind Spot
Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières - Valérian et Laureline, l’intégrale, vol. 4-6
François Boucq and Alejandro Jodorowsky - Face de Lune, vol. 1-2
Christophe Arleston and Adrien Floch - Les Naufragés d’Ythaq, premier voyage
Philippe Ogaki - Terra Prime, vol. 1-4
Ryoichi Ikegami - Yuko: Extraits de littérature japonaise
Enki Bilal - Bug, vol. 1-2
Frank Miller - Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

Charles Dickens - Our Mutual Friend
P.G. Wodehouse - Right Ho, Jeeves
Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime & Punishment
Muriel Spark - A Far Cry From Kensington
John Darnielle - Master of Reality*
Charles Dickens - Bleak House
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel - Bring Up The Bodies
Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities
Philip Roth - American Pastoral
Ian MacDonald - Revolution in the Head
W.G. Sebald - Austerlitz
Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend

*reread

Marcel Proust - Un amour de Swann/Noms de pays : le nom*

These are the second halves of the first two volumes, correct? I can understand Swann in Love but how did the other one happen?

Those are the last two sections of the first volume. The last section of the second volume is "Noms de pays : le pays," where the title is supposed to indicate that the narrator has gone from dreaming about certain place-names (like Balbec) to seeing the place itself. I started the first volume in 2020, so I didn't want to list it as a whole.

Ah. Got it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman - With Her in Ourland
Raymond Chandler - Big Sleep,The ✌
China Miéville - October
Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Herland
David Eagleman - Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Frankenstein ✌
Tessa Norton - Excavate!: The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall
Alexander Solzhenitsyn - Cancer Ward
Stephen King,Richard Chizmar - Gwendy's Button Box: (The Button Box Series) ✌
K. Ferrari - Like Flies from Afar
Raymond Queneau - The Sunday of Life
Alan Connor - Two Girls One On Each Knee
Annie Ernaux - The Years
Richard Stark - The Jugger (Parker, #6)
G.K. Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday
Giovanni Boccaccio,Wayne A Rebhorn - The Decameron
Xiaolu Guo - A Lover's Discourse
Christina Sweeney-Baird - The End of Men
Liza Cody - BUCKET NUT
Amos Tutuola - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Thomas Bernhard - Victor Halfwit: A Winter's Tale
Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This
William H. Gass - The William H. Gass Reader 🐌
Satoshi Kon - Satoshi Kon's: Opus
Sara Gran - Come Closer
H G Wells - The Invisible Man
Jean Cocteau - Opium: The Diary of His Cure
The Penguin Charles Addams
Paul Tremblay - The Little Sleep: A Novel
Mark Steven - Splatter Capital
Richard Stark - The Mourner (Parker, #4)
Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories ✌
William Melvin Kelley - A Different Drummer
Bell Hooks - All About Love
Giulia Enders - Gut: the inside story of our body's most under-rated organ
Alberto Manguel - Black Water: The Flamingo Anthology Of Fantastic Literature
Stephen King,Peter Straub - Black House ✌
Richard Bachman,Stephen King - The Long Walk ✌
David Bushman - Conversations With Mark Frost
Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper
Nelson Algren's book of lonesome monsters ✌
Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber ✌
Michelle McNamara - I'll Be Gone in the Dark
Richard Chizmar - Gwendy's Magic Feather
Richard Stark - The Score (Parker, #5)
Brigid Brophy - Flesh
Franz Kafka - The Trial
Naomi Klein - This Changes Everything
Eimear McBride - Mouthpieces
John Bew - Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee
H. G. Wells - The Island of Dr. Moreau
P.G. Wodehouse - Thank You, Jeeves
Richard Stark - The Outfit (Parker, #3)
Mike Ashley - Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird
Max Porter - The Death of Francis Bacon
Richard Stark - The Man With The Getaway Face (Parker, #2)
Walter Abish - Alphabetical Africa
Stephen King - Rage ✌
Stephen King - Later
Daisy Butcher - Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic
Rudolph Wurlitzer - Slow Fade
Mike Davis - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu 🐔
Cormac McCarthy - No Country For Old Men
Eimear McBride - Strange Hotel
Ian Burrows - Shakespeare for Snowflakes: On Slapstick and Sympathy
Alexandra Kollontai - A Great Love
Mike Davis - The Monster Enters 🐔
Erasmus - The Praise of Folly
Olivia Laing - Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency
Paul Tremblay - A Head Full of Ghosts
Richard Thompson - Beeswing: Fairport, Folk Rock and Finding My Voice, 1967 - 75
H G Wells - The War of the Worlds
Wystan Hugh Auden - A Certain World
Cullen Bunn - The Empty Man
James Herbert - The Fog
Elizabeth Hardwick - Sleepless nights
Muriel Spark - The Takeover
Sophie Mackintosh - Blue Ticket
Kathe Koja - The Cipher
Stephen King - Billy Summers
H. G. Wells - The Time Machine
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Mexican Gothic
Stephen King - Roadwork ✌
Amos Tutuola - The Palm Wine Drinkard
Bram Stoker - Dracula ✌
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman ✌

This is not the order I read these, the free book shelf app I use jumbles them up when you export to csv - still better than being on goodreads imo.

✌ denotes reread
🐔 I got the 2020 mike davis book after reading the monster at the door, not realising it is actually just an edited down reprint of the latter with a new chapter on covid, so this is really one book
🐌 I think I started reading the gass reader in the summer & only finished it this week. Arguably a reread as I'd read pretty much all of it before in other books

definitely some cheats here, picture books & things of that nature. once again the worst things I read by a long chalk were those stephen king gwendy books and I will read the new one too when it comes out. I think the only things I didn't finish were drawn & qusrtered by em cioran (put it down & never went back to it) and red shift by alan garner (somehow lost my copy)

Tesla - Margaret Cheney
* Exhalation - Ted Chiang
To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
War of the Maps - Paul J McAuley
The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson
The Secret City - Carol Emshwiller
The Travelling Grave and Other Stories - L.P. Hartley
* The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Hyperion - Dan Simmons
* The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West
Little Eyes - Samanta Schweblin
No-one Is Talking about This - Patricia Lockwood
The Lying Life of Adults - Elena Ferrante
The Hour of the Star - Clarice Lispector
Kindred - Octavia Butler
Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
Acadie - Dave Hutchinson
* What Maisie Knew - Henry James
Territory of Light - Yuko Tsushima
The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy
A Favourite of the Gods - Sybille Bedford
* The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
Broken Stars - Various
Remnant Population - Elizabeth Moon
Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking - Susan Cain
Dept. of Speculation - Jenny Offill
Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man is Hard to Find
* Alice Munro - Open Secrets
* The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience - Matthew Cobb
Nophek Gloss - Essa Hansen
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
The Necromancer, or The Tale of the Black Forest - Karl Friedrich Kahlert
The Telling - Ursula Le Guin
The Coming Insurrection - The Invisible Committee
The Old Drift - Namwali Serpell
The Fourth Island - Sarah Tolmie
Breasts and Eggs - Mieko Kawakami
Provenance - Ann Leckie
The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead
Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald
Oroonoko - Aphra Benn
The Dead Mountaineer's Inn - Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
How Should a Person Be? - Sheila Heti
Altai - Wu Ming
Otter Country - Miriam Darlington
The Quantum Thief - Hannu Rajaniemi
Happiness - Aminatta Forna
The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Form
* Circe - Madeline Miller
One of Them - Musa Okwonga
A Coin in Nine Hands - Marguerite Yourcenar
* The Gospel According to Jesus Christ - Jose Saramago
Tea from an Empty Cup - Pat Cadigan
Brightness Falls from the Air - James Tiptree Jr.
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths - Natalie Haynes
The Gate to Women's Country - Sherri S Tepper
The Sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe
Summerwater - Sarah Moss
A Door Into Ocean - Joan Slonczewski
Light - M John Harrison
The King at the Edge of the World - Arthur Phillips
The Shadow Constant - AJ Scudiere
* Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men - Caroline Criado Pérez
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
* Ducks, Newburyport - Lucy Ellmann (started this two years ago then inexplicably abandoned it halfway through)
Far from the Light of Heaven - Tade Thomson
The Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
* The Blue Flower - Penelope Fitzgerald
A Month in the Country - J.L. Carr
A Strange and Brilliant Light - Eli Lee
The Country Life - Rachel Cusk
Women's Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940 - Various
The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot
Blindness - Jose Saramago
The Employees - Olga Ravn
Ghost Wall - Sarah Moss
The Incal - Moebius/Jodorowsky

No rereads, favourites asterisked. Five or so shared with caek iirc. Might slow down and do some re-reading next year.

In reverse chronological order:

I Alone Can Fix It: Donald Trump's Disastrous Final Year, by Carol Leonnig and Phillip Rucker
Judge Anderson: Year One, by Alec Worley
Sodom and Gomorrah, by Marcel Proust
Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
Leviathan Wakes, by James S.A. Corey
Architects of Memory, by Karen Osborne
A Long Petal of the Sea, by Isabel Allende
Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger, by Soraya Chemaly
Snake Agent, by Liz Williams
The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin
Music for Torching, by A.M. Homes
L.A. Noire, by Megan Abbott (ed.)
The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett
Interference, by Brad Parks
Old Rendering Plant, by Wolfgang Hilbig
Blacktop Wasteland, by S.A. Cosby
Blackthorn Winter, by Liz Williams
The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust
The Vanished Birds, by Simon Jimenez
Woman in the Water, by Katerina Diamond
Comet Weather, by Liz Williams
Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

It's the 31st so I guess I'll go ahead and post my list. I'm still reading "Fog" but I've included it.

nonfiction:
J.R. Pierce - Symbols, Signals and Noise
Robert Christgau - Going to the City
Geoff Dyer - But Beautiful
Ed Ward - History of Rock and Roll Vol 1: 1920-1963
Patrick Leigh Fermor - A Time of Gifts
Benjamin Labatut - When We Cease To Understand the World
Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes - The Caesar's Palace Coup

fiction:
Pascal Garnier - The A26, How's the Pain, Panda Theory **
Henri Bosco - Malicroix
P.G. Wodehouse - The Code of the Woosters
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Early Short Stories (Dover Thrift) **
Graham Greene - Brighton Rock
Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt **
Jim Thompson - The Killer Inside Me
Saul Bellow - Herzog *
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse *
Natalia Ginzberg - Family and Borghesia **
Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House
Kazuo Ishiguro - Remains of the Day
Rumaan Alam - Leave the World Behind
Paul Beatty - The Sellout
Nicholson Baker - The Anthologist
Jean Stafford - The Mountain Lion
Susan Taubes - Divorcing **
Helen Dewitt - Some Trick
Sigrid Nunez - The Friend
Miguel de Unamuno - Fog

poetry:
Michael Robbins - Walkman
Juvenal - Satires (tr. by Rolfe Humphries) **

key:
* - rereads
** - favorites

Happy new year all.
My list:

Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Of Forests and of Farms: on Faculty & Failure †
Afrizal Marna, Document Shredding Museum (tran. Daniel Owen)
Akilah Oliver, the she said dialogues: flesh memory
Alan Davies, Odes & Fragments
Alfred Starr Hamilton, A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind *
Andy Martrich, Agri-tech R&D Heroics †
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World
Annabel Lee, Minnesota Drift †
Barbara Guest, Quill, Solitary, 'Apparition'
Benjamin Roylance, The Chymical Wedding of Benjamin Roylance
Blanca Varela, Rough Song (trans. Carlos Lara)
Brett Price, Ordinary Dissonance ^
Broc Rossell, Alameda
Bruce Andrews, Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened
Bruce Andrews, Tizzy Boost
Camille Roy, Honey Mine
Carlos Lara, Subconscious Colossus
Carlos Lara, The Green Record
Chelsea Hogue, Ethel †
Chris Sylvester, BOOK ABT FANTASY *
Christa Wolf, No Place on Earth
Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T.
Clark Coolidge, Solution Passage
Clint Burnham, White Lie
Cody-Rose Clevidence, Listen, My Friend...
D.S. Marriott, Hoodoo Voodoo
Daniel Davidson and Tom Mandel, Absence Sensorium
Daniel Davidson, Culture *
Daniel Owen, Ceilngak-Celinguk
Daniel Owen, Points of Amperture †
Danielle Collobert, It Then (trans. Norma Cole)
Danielle Collobert, Murder (trans. Nathanael)
Dennis Cooper, I Wished
Dennis Cooper, The Sluts *
Diarmuid Hester, Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper
Dodie Bellamy, Bee Reaved
Driss Chraibi, The Simple Past
Duncan MacNaughton, A Passage of Saint Devil
Ed Steck and Adam Marnie, The Rose
Elizabeth Fodaski, fracas
Erick Saenz, Lucid Traversal
Flora Yin-Wong, Liturgy
Gabriel Kruis, Acid Virga
Gabrielle Daniels, Something Else Again
Gail Scott, The Obituary
George Albon, Brief Capital of Disturbances
George Albon, Momentary Songs
George Eliot, Silas Marner *
Gerald Burns, Shorter Poems
Gilda Musa, Total Memory (trans. Nicole Trigg) †
Gillian Rose, Love's Work
Holly Melgard, Divisions of Labor
Hugh Tribbey, EF Zero
Ian Dreiblatt, Forget Thee
J. Gordon Faylor, Phone & Pencil
J.H. Prynne, Aquatic Hocquets †
J.H. Prynne, Athwart Apron Snaps †
J.H. Prynne, Duets Infer Duty †
J.H. Prynne, Efflux Reference †
J.H. Prynne, Enchanter's Nightshade †
J.H. Prynne, Her Air Fallen †
J.H. Prynne, Kernels in Vernal Silence †
J.H. Prynne, Memory Working: Impromptus I-X †
J.H. Prynne, Memory Working: Impromptus XI-XVII †
J.H. Prynne, None Yet More Willing Told †
J.H. Prynne, Of Better Scrap
J.H. Prynne, Otherhood Imminent Profusion †
J.H. Prynne, Parkland †
J.H. Prynne, Passing Grass Parnassus †
J.H. Prynne, See By So †
J.H. Prynne, Squeezed White Noise
J.H. Prynne, The Fever's End †
J.H. Prynne, Torrid Auspicious Quartz †
Jack Spicer, 15 False Propositions Against God †*
Jack Spicer, After Lorca *
Jackie Ess, Darryl
Jackie Wang, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void
Jacqueline Waters, Commodore
Jamie Townsend, Sex Machines
Jason Morris, Low Life †
Jean Day, Late Human
Jean Day, Linear C †
Jeff Van der Meer, Acceptance
Jennifer Soong, Contempt †
Jennifer Soong, When I Ask My Friend †
Jeremy Hoevenaar, Cold Mountain Mirror Displacement †
Jeremy Hoevenaar, Insolvency, Insolvency! †
JL Carr, A Month in the Country
Joan Brossa, El Saltamarti (The Tumbler) (trans. Cameron Griffiths)
Joel Steven Kuszai, Accidency
Joey Yearous-Algozin, A Feeling Called Heaven
John Paetsch, Ctasy
John Rufo, Unowned Pleasures †
John Wieners, Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike *
Josef Kaplan, Loser
Joseph Mosconi, Occupational Elegies †
Julia Drescher, Disarticulation
kari edwards, having been blue for charity
Kenneth Irby, Antiphonal and Fall to Fall †
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, SIR
Kevin Davies, FPO
Kimberly Alidio, :once teeth bones coral:
Kimberly Alidio, Why Letter Ellipsis
Kyle Schlesinger (ed.), A Poetics of the Press
Lara Durback, Rust Moves †
Laura Elrick, What This Breathing
Leslie Scalapino, Objects in the Terrifying Tense/Longing from Taking Place
Lewis Freedman, Am Perhaps Yet †
Liz Waldner, A Point is That Which Has No Part
Liz Waldner, Dark Would (the missing person)
Liz Waldner, Etym(bi)ology
Lonely Christopher, Double Rainbow
Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino, Hearing
Lyn Hejinian, The Book of a Thousand Eyes
Lyn Hejinian, from WALL (A Hundred Posters) †
Lynn Xu, Tournesol †
M. Elizabeth Scott, Blue Dahlia & 12 Other Poems †
Mark Francis Johnson, Poor Fridge
Mark Francis Johnson, Treatise on Luck
Matthew Hodges & Zan de Parry, Austerity Brunch
Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence *
Michael Gottlieb, The River Road
Michael Klausman, Aeolian Darts †
N.H. Pritchard, The Matrix: Poems 1960-1970
Nicole Raziya Fong, 7 Series, Iterated by Colour †
Noah Ross, Types
Norma Cole & Marina Adams, Actualities
Norma Cole, Fate News
Oki Sogumi, Their Gravity †
Omar Berrada, Clonal Hum †
Phil Demise, What I Don't Know for Sure †
Philip Whalen, Self-Portrait from Another Direction †
Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
Rabih Alameddine, KOOLAIDS
Renée Green, Camino Rd.
Rick Bass, Winter
Rindon Johnson, The Law of Large Numbers
Rob Halpern, Fertility †
Rod Roland, No Right Words †
Rosie Stockton, Permanent Volta
Ruth Gilmore Wilson, The Golden Gulag
Ryan Fitzpatrick, Fake Math
S*an D. Henry-Smith, Wild Peach
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Sara Larsen, Starved Crew †
Sesshu Foster & Arturo Romo, ELADATL
Stephen Rodefer, Four More Lectures †
Stephen Rodefer, Mon Canard
Steven Zultanski, Relief
Sunday Fall, Subway Poems
Sunday Fall, Fever †
Tan Lin, Heath Course Pak
Taylor Brady, In the Red
Ted Dodson, An Orange
Thomas Meyer, The Umbrella of Aesculapius
Ulf Stolterfoht, Nine Drugs †
Violet Spurlock, Unalloyed Bliss †
Zan de Parry, Achievements of the Unlocked †

key:
*= re-read
†= chapbook

Already finishe danothe rcouple of books, or did i say that and starteda few more.
HIt town yesterday and picked up a few more interlibrary loans
notably
Anita Loos Gentlemwen Prefer blondes/ Buit marry Brunettes
really hoping to read a load of her. I think i just missed something in a charity shop cos I didn't fully know the name.
& her introduction to this reads really well so I think I will be looking for her much later memoirs

Nell Irvin painter
The History of teh White People
Who I need to consciously take on board is a black female writer called Nell not a white patriarchal guy called Neil but maybe that's the state of my head last night and i will be more aware of. So far been reading about Greek takes on the Scythians

There ain't No Black IN the Union Jack Paul gilroy

Light Years - James Salter
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
Upgrade Soul - Ezra Claytan Daniels
Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee
The Black Spider - Jeremias Gotthelf
Lake Success - Gary Shteyngart
Europe in Winter - Dave Hutchinson
The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake - Breece D'J Pancake
Winter Mythologies and Abbots - Pierre Michon
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
All Among The Barley - Melissa Harrison
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon - David Grann
The Flower Beneath the Foot: Being a Record of the Early Life of St. Laura de Nazianzi - Ronald Firbank
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster - Jon Krakauer
*The Ballad of Peckham Rye - Muriel Spark
Groupie - Jenny Fabian
Pietr the Latvian (Maigret #1) - Georges Simenon
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration - David Wojnarowicz
The Post-Office Girl - Stefan Zweig
The Professor's House - Willa Cather
7 Gothic Tales - Isak Dinesen
The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels #2) - Elena Ferrante
Eeeee Eee Eeee - Tao Lin
Ghachar Ghochar - Vivek Shanbhag
Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel
Mood Indigo - Boris Vian
The Unseen - Roy Jacobsen
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
The Hypocrisy of Disco - Clane Hayward
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York - Luc Sante
Great Granny Webster - Caroline Blackwood
Chronicles: Volume One - Bob Dylan
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
The Invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares
Among the Thugs - Bill Buford
The Towers of Trebizond - Rose Macaulay
The Night of Wenceslas - Lionel Davidson
True Blue: The Oxford Boat Race Mutiny - Daniel Topolski
Regeneration - Pat Barker
The Assistant - Robert Walser
Be Not Content: A Subterranean Journal - William J. Craddock
The Driver's Seat - Muriel Spark
Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
Enter Naomi: SST, L.A. and All That... - Joe Carducci
The Hearing Trumpet - Leonora Carrington
The Street - Mordecai Richler
The Doorman - Reinaldo Arenas
Take a Girl Like You - Kingsley Amis
Madness Has a Moment and Then Vanishes Before Returning Again - Benjamin DeVos
Peanuts Dell Archive - Charles M. Schulz
What Hetty Did - J.L. Carr
Post Office - Charles Bukowski
Bruno, Chief of Police (Bruno, Chief of Police, #1) - Martin Walker
Wind, Sand and Stars (Harbrace Modern Classics 18) - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Clemmie - John D. MacDonald
Alone in Berlin - Hans Fallada
Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures - Yvan Alagbé
Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures (33 1/3 Book 9) - Chris Ott
The Overstory - Richard Powers
King, Queen, Knave - Vladimir Nabokov
The Atrocity Exhibition - J.G. Ballard
The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin
Just Kids - Patti Smith
A Chelsea Concerto - Frances Faviell
Jacket Weather - Mike DeCapite
Jernigan - David Gates
*Living - Henry Green
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop - Dave Rimmer
Sexing the Cherry - Jeanette Winterson
West Coast Blues - Jacques Tardi and Jean-Patrick Manchette
The Mad and the Bad - Jean-Patrick Manchette
Peter and the Wolves - Adele Bertei
Le Grand Meaulnes - Alain-Fournier
Dancer From The Dance - Andrew Holleran
*By Night in Chile - Roberto Bolaño
Heads and Straights: The Circle Line - Lucy Wadham
Clandestine In Chile: The Adventures Of Miguel Littin - Asa Zatz
The Road into the Open - Arthur Schnitzler
England, Their England - A.G. Macdonell

Good, pandemic-assisted year. Try to have at least one "monument" (last year: Gravity's Rainbow) but didn't happen this year. Currently: Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain and Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

After not reading much at all in 2020, I made up for it a bit in 2021 with a lot of escapism

Finished:

Natalie Zina Walschots - Hench
Erin Hunter - Warriors: Fire and Ice
Jenny Odell - How to Do Nothing
Gabor Mate - Scattered
Erin Hunter - Warriors: Forest of Secrets
Erin Hunter - Warriors: Rising Storm
Tiffany Pitts - Parallax
Martha Wells - All Systems Red
Martha Wells - Artificial Condition
Martha Wells - Rogue Protocol
Martha Wells - Exit Strategy
Martha Wells - Network Effect
Violet McNeal - Four White Horses and a Brass Band
Philip Pullman - The Secret Commonwealth
Michaelangelo Matos - Can't Slow Down
Jonathan Meiburg - A Most Remarkable Creature
Nancy Mace - The 36-hour Day
Rose Szabo - What Big Teeth
Oliver James - Contented Dementia
David Hill - The Vapors
Kevin Wilson - The Family Fang
Martha Wells - Fugitive Telemetry
Elissa Altman - Motherland
Russell Barkley - When an Adult You Love Has ADHD
Anita Robertson - ADHD & Us
Connie Willis - Take a Look At the Five and Ten
John Steinbeck - Cannery Row*
John Steinbeck - Sweet Thursday*
Jen Gunter - The Menopause Manifesto
Haven Kimmel - She Got Up Off the Couch
Edward Hallowell - Driven to Distraction
Arielle Schwartz - A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD
KC Davis - How to Keep House While Drowning
Russell Barkley - Taking Charge of Adult ADHD
Haven Kimmel - The Used World
Naomi Kritzer - Catfishing on CatNet
Naomi Kritzer - Chaos on CatNet
Amanda Montell - Wordslut
K.J. Parker - Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City
Francine Shapiro - Getting Past Your Past
Adam Chandler - Drive-Thru Dreams
Melissa Orlov - The ADHD Effect on Marriage
Steven Petrow - Stupid Things I Won't Do When I Get Old
Grady Hendrix - The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires
Rachel Miller - The Art of Showing Up
Grady Hendrix - My Best Friend's Exorcism
Jackson Galaxy - Total Cat Mojo
Harriet Lerner - Why Won't You Apologize
Shankar Vedantam - The Hidden Brain
Naomi Kritzer - Little Free Library
Grady Hendrix - The Final Girl Support Group
Carmen Maria Machado - In the Dream House
Jackson Galaxy - Cat Daddy
Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World
Amaryllis Fox - Life Undercover
Grady Hendrix - Horrorstor
Amanda Montell - Cultish
Jimmy Carter - The Virtues of Aging
Laura Parnell - Tapping In
Mary Roach - Fuzz
Grady Hendrix - Paperbacks from Hell
Deborah Copaken - Ladyparts
Stephen Porges - The Pocket Guide to Polyvagal Theory
Calvin Kasulke - Several People Are Typing
K Eason - How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse
Crystal Fleming - How to Be Less Stupid about Race
Grady Hendrix - We Sold Our Souls
Nedra Tawwab - Set Boundaries, Find Peace
Alan Floyd - Vagus Nerve and Polyvagal Theory
Candace Gorham - On Death, Dying, and Disbelief
Catherynne Valente - Comfort Me with Apples
Richard Powers - The Overstory
Tove Jansson - The True Deceiver
J B MacKinnon - The Day the World Stops Shopping
Louise Fitzhugh - Harriet the Spy

Stalled:

Gary Taubes - The Case for Keto
Alison Weir - Mistress of the Monarchy
Kevin Roose - Futureproof
Becky Chambers - The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
China Mieville - Three Moments of Explosion
Naomi Kritzer - Cat Pictures Please and other stories
Tara Branch - Radical Compassion
Faith Harper - Unfuck Your Brain
Ken Wilbur - The Spectrum of Consciousness

Bailed:

Linda Abbit - The Conscious Caregiver
Arielle Schwartz - The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook
Clayton Christensen - How Will You Measure Your Life
Russ Harris - The Confidence Gap

*reread

"The Road into the Open - Arthur Schnitzler"

Didn't know this was a novel - how was it?

I thought it was a great read, capturing Viennese twilight culture, antisemitism and debates within the Jewish community with nuance. Really effective at creating a tone for the period. The dilettante aristocrat composer protagonist is unsympathetic, but well drawn.

Thanks.

JANUARY

Ali Smith – Winter
Robert V. Remini – Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom
Graham Greene – The Comedians
Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar
John Le Carré – A Legacy of Spies
Shakespeare – Cymbeline
Garth Greenwell – Cleanness
Colin Tóibin – All a Novelist Needs
David S. Reynolds – Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times
Natalia Ginzburg – Happiness, As Such
Natalia Ginzburg – Valentine and Sagittarius
Daniel Mendelsohn – An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

FEBRUARY

Muriel Spark – The Bachelors
Hilary Holladay – The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography
Ali Smith – Spring
Wallace Shawn – The Designated Mourner
Karl Ove Knausgaard – My Struggle: Book Four
Lewis L. Gould – The First Modern Clash over Federal Power: Wilson versus Hughes in the Presidential Election of 1916
Naguib Mahfouz – The Thief and the Dogs
Scott Eyman – Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise
Melissa Maerz – Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused
Elizabeth Bowen – Friends and Relations
Craig Fehrman – Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote

MARCH

Walter Kempowski – Marrow and Bone
Jean Stafford – The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
Virginia Woolf – The Voyage Out
Ursula K. Le Guin – The Lathe of Heaven
Curzio Malaparte – The Skin
Tom Paulin – Minotaur
David Michaelis – Eleanor
William Gass – On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry
Beverly Cleary – Dear Mr. Henshaw…
* Jean Stafford – The Mountain Lion

APRIL

Robert Elder – John Calhoun
* Percy Bysshe Shelley – The Cenci
John Banville – Snow
Octavia Butler – Kindred
Grahame Greene – The Ministry of Fear
Mark Harris – Mike Nichols: A Life
Michel Foucault – The Uses of Pleasure
Damon Galgut – Arctic Summer
Roberto Bolaño – Distant Star

MAY

Edward White – The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock
Anthony Trollope – The Warden
Liva Baker – The Justice from Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Susan Howe – My Emily Dickinson
* E.M. Forster – Maurice
Thomas Bernhardt – The Loser
Annie Zaleski – Rio
* F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
Octavia Butler – Fledgling
Graham Greene – The Honorary Consul
* Shakespeare – Macbeth
Natalia Ginzberg – The Heat of the City
Joel Silbey – Party over Section: The Rough and Ready Presidential Election of 1848
Thomas Mann – Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man

JUNE

Teju Cole – Open City
Elizabeth Taylor – A Wreath of Roses
John Le Carré – A Most Wanted Man
Edith Wharton – The Touchstone
Michael Holt – By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876
Richard Greene – The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Green
Vladimir Nabokov – The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
James Lacey – The Washington War: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Power That Won World War II
Shakespeare – Henry IV, Part Two
Ralph Ellison – Juneteenth
Iris Murdoch – The Black Prince
Charles Mann – 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

JULY

Bill Goldstein – The World Broke in Two
Damon Galgut – The Promise
Lauren Berlant – Cruel Optimism
* Edith Wharton – The Custom of the Country
Jane Bowles – Two Serious Ladies
Sue Roe – The Private Lives of the Impressionists
Neil McCormick (editor) – U2 by U2
Paul Bowles – The Spider’s House
Serhii Plokhy – Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Jeremy D. Popkin – A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution
Karin Roffman – The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life
Ronald Firbank – Valmouth
J.C. Ackerley – We Think the World of You

AUGUST

Ruth Harris – Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century
Émile Zola – Thérèse Raquin
Jonathan M. Metzl – Death by Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland
Leonard Gardner – Fat City
Colm Tóibín – The Heather Blazing
V.S. Pritchett – The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev
Elena Ferrante – The Lost Daughter
Donald A. Richie – Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932
Stephen Kinzer – Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change
Sally Keane – Good Behaviour
Jon Savage – Teenage

SEPTEMBER

William Faulkner – Go Down, Moses (1942)
Elizabeth Taylor – Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971)
A.J. Baime – The Accidental President (2008)
Paul Mariani – The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane (1999)
Yuko Mishima – Confessions of a Mask (1949)
Diane Middlebrook – Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (2004)
Gail Crowther: Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton (2021)
* Saul Bellow – Herzog (1964)
Dorothy B. Hughes – In a Lonely Place (1947)
Charles Portis – True Grit (1971)
William di Canzio – Alec (2021)
Robert S. Levine – The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson (2021)

OCTOBER

Gordon Merrick – One for the Gods
Jay Wright – The Presentable Act of Reading Absence
Joy Williams – The Quick and the Dead
Joy Williams – Escapes
Colm Tóibín – The Magician
Janet Malcolm – Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers
Ingeborg Bachmann – Malina
Clinton Heylin – Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios
Jefferson Cowie – Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
Robert Walser – The Tanners
Adam Winkler – We the Corporations

NOVEMBER

Jefferson Cowie – The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics
Rachel Kushner – The Strange Case of Rachel K
Rachel Kushner – The Flamethrowers
John Hollander – Reflections on Espionage
* Toni Morrison – Beloved
Elena Ferrante – The Lying Lives of Adults
Christina Stead – Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife)
Allen C. Guelzo – Robert E. Lee: A Life
Rebecca West – Henry James
Geoffrey O’Brien – Sonata for Jukebox
Dwight MacDonald – Against the American Grain
J.D. Salinger – Franny and Zooey
Robert H. Jackson – That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt

DECEMBER

Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Clandestine in Chile
Shirley Hazzard – The Evening of the Holiday
Tony Judt – Ill Fares the Land
Shirley Hazzard – The Transit of Venus
Susan Butler – Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership
Anna Kavan – Ice
Rebecca West – Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Ada Ferrer – Cuba: An American Story
Adolfo Bioy Casares – The Invention of Morel
bell hooks – Here We Stand
Eve Babitz – Slow Days, Fast Company
* Ernest Hemingway – The Garden of Eden
Marc Morris – The Anglo-Saxons

What did you think of Franny and Zooey, Alfred?

Me:

Mort
Piranesi
Sometimes therapy is Awkward
Bee quest
The Year of Reading Dangerously
Me - Elton John
Big Sky
Why Therapy Works
Transcription
Miss Pym Disposes (gave up)
Ascension - Oliver Harris
How to change everything - Naomi Klein
A Wizard of Earthsea
Life the universe and everything
The Pigeon Tunnel
Tombs of Atuan
First love - Riley
Harriet the Sspy
Thursday Night murder club
The shadow of the torturer
Beautiful world where are you
The Long Secret
Weirdstone of Brisingamen
The High Window
The Man Who Died Twice

Read less this year because of being a stay-at-home dad with a toddler, migraines, and doing the 2nd year of an MSc (the essays, the essays)

Highlights:
- Probably the Elton John biog and the Harriet the Spy books
- Being impressed by Kate Atkinson and Gwendolyn Riley and excited to read more of their work - I wasn't expecting much from either
- Finally reading and loving Le Guin
- Regretting to inform you that Richard Osman's books are quite entertaining

What did you think of Franny and Zooey, Alfred?

― dow, Sunday, January 2, 2022 6:07 PM

A genuine surprise.

these 100+ lists are both impressive and scary.

A genuine surprise.

Ah! How so? (C'mon, spill.)

I've often seen Alfred's impressive cranium on WDYLL threads, so his lengthy list merely serves as an unnecessary confirmation of the self-evident. I shudder to think what breathtaking marvels would be revealed if James Morrison were to post to WDYLL!

I also have a pretty large head, fwiw.

Jorgenrique Adoum - Prepoems in PostSpanish
Rabih Alameddine - Koolaids
Sinan Antoon - The Baghdad Eucharist
Amiri Baraka - The System of Dante's Hell
Dodie Bellamy - Bee Reaved
Hassan Blasim - The Corpse Exhibition
Anne Boyer - My Common Heart
Molly Brodak - Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir
Julie Carr - 100 Notes on Violence
Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan
Mary Crow - Borders
Peter Culley - The Age of Briggs & Stratton
Peter Culley - Hammertown
Kevin Davies - The Golden Age of Paraphernalia
Samuel Delany - Dhalgren (reread)
Jim Dicksinson - I'm Just Dead, I'm Not Gone
Ge Fei - The Invisibility Cloak
Sesshu Foster - City of the Future (reread)
Sesshu Foster - Atomik Aztex
Federico Garcia Lorca - Selected Poems 
Andre Gide - Urien's Voyage
Johannes Göransson - Poetry Against All
Judy Grahn - love belongs to those who do the feeling
Linda Gregg - The Sacraments of Desire
Dorothea Grossman - Museum of Rain
Peter Handke - Three by Handke
Jim Harrison - Song of Unreason
Jim Harrison - The Essential Poems
Fanny Howe - The Quietist
Fanny Howe - Radical Love: 5 Novels
The Selected Poetry of Vicente Huidobro
Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun
Denis Johnson - The Name of the World
Denis Johnson - Train Dreams
Ronald Johnson - The Book of the Green Man
Hettie Jones - Drive
John Keene - Annotations
William Kennedy - Ironweed
John Koethe - rotc kills
Eugene Lim - Search History
Eugene Lim - Dear Cyborgs
Kelly Link - Get in Trouble: Stories
Bernadette Mayer - Sonnets
Joyelle McSweeney - Flet
Semezdin Mehmedinovic - My Heart
Dunya Mikhail - The War Works Hard
Sayaka Murata - Earthlings
Eileen Myles - Not Me
Alice Notley - Negativity's Kiss
Michael Ondaatje - The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Celia Paul - Self Portrait
Marge Piercy - Woman on the Edge of Time
Sam Riviere - Safe Mode
Camille Roy - Honey Mine
Frederick Seidel - Going Fast
Danzy Senna - Where Did You Sleep Last Night?
Choi Seungja - Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me
Gary Snyder - Earth House Hold
Magda Szabo - The Door
Jean Valentine - Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003
Ocean Vuong - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Nikki Wallschlaeger - Waterbaby
Nikki Wallschlaeger - Pizza and Warfare
Simone White - Dear Angel of Death
John Edgar Wideman - The Homewood Trilogy

(inclusion not necessarily an endorsement, of course)

Have already finished 3 or 4 books since teh start of teh year and started 4 or 5.
Will see if that goes anywhere.
But some great stuff anyway, more bell hooks, Anita Loos who I hadn't read before and think I missed a book by recently which now grates, George Schuyler who is amazingly against the tide and stuff.

No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood
War, So Much War, Merce Rodoreda
True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, Abraham Riesman
How Much of Thee Hills Is Gold, C. Pam Zhang
The Seven Veils of Seth, Ibrahim al-Koni
Conversations in Sicily, Elio Vittorini
Fever Dream, Samantha Schweblin
Eleven Sooty Dreams, Manuela Draeger
Compass, Mathias Énard
A House and Its Head, Ivy Compton-Burnett
The Invisibility Cloak, Ge Fei
Kin, Miljenko Jergovic
In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova
Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh, Slobodan Novak
A Girl's Story, Annie Ernaux
A Castle in Romagna, Igor Stiks
Götz and Meyer, David Albahari
Hammers on Bone, Cassandra Khaw
A Private Venus, Giorgio Scerbananco
The Cyclist Conspiracy, Svetislav Basara
Croatian War Nocturnal, Spomenka Stimek
Where There's Love, There's Hate, Adolfo Bioy Casares & Silvina Ocampo
EEG, Dasa Drndic
Voices in the Evening, Natalila Ginsburg
L'Amante Anglaise, Marguerite Duras
Nothing But Blackened Teeth, Cassandra Khaw
Between Life and Death, Yoram Kaniuk
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
I Belong to Vienna, Anna Goldenberg
A Woman's Story, Annie Ernaux
Fires on the Plain, Shohei Ooka
Nazi Literature in the Americas, Roberto Bolaño
My Heart, Semezdin Mehmedinovic
Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me, Choi Seunga
A Heritage and Its History, Ivy Compton-Burnett
Vanish in an Instant, Margaret Millar

Don't know most of those authors, but!---Ivy Compton-Burnett (twice), Adolfo Bioy Casares & Silvina Ocampo, Ursula K. LeGuin (and one of her stone cold classics at that), Roberto Bolaño, and Margaret Millar to boot (even Patricia Lockwood, whom I don't think I've ever read, but whose name somehow attached itself to a startling woman of authoritah in a recent dream)---that's my kind of list already---better check the other items on it---

I need to read more Duras too.

I almost bought the Ocampo last week! NYRB rock.

dow, I strongly recommend Annie Ernaux. She's a memoirist. I avoid memoirs! But she is genuinely special -- there is something unrelenting in her self-examination. And addictive. I expect to read a bunch more of hers.

Intriguing---will def. check her out, thanks.

The Jakarta Method - Vincent Bevins
The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes
Nimona - Noelle Stevenson
1974 - David Peace
The Pear Field - Nana Ekvtimishvili
No One Is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood
Lying For Money - Dan Davies
Nordic Fauna - Andrea Lundgren
Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stewart
Summer Lightning - PG Wodehouse
The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
Age of Anger - Pankaj Mishra
Yesterday - Juan Emar
Sea of Ink - Richard Weihe
Love's Work - Gillian Rose
Darryl - Jackie Ess
The Hothouse by the East River - Muriel Spark
Tyll - Daniel Kehlmann
Novels in Three Lines - Félix Fénéon

Of this the best were No One Is Talking About This, Darryl and the Jakarta Method. The worst by some distance was Shuggie Bain, a however many hundred page book about a boy who loves his mammy where we learn nothing about the boy other than that he loves his mammy.

I don’t know how I manage to do this every year but I was weighing out some brewer’s yeast & suddenly remembered that last year I read & forgot to log:

Merlin Sheldrake - Entangled Life

& my brain would not let me let this go uncorrected

A week into 22 and I have not read a page so far, hopefully I get some sweet covid isolation time at some point

i didn't think shuggie bain was *that* bad but it wasn't great

I love both Marguerite Duras and Paul Celan! Joan Crawford Loves Chachi that's an impressive list with many writers I've been meaning to read, especially In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova.

calumerio, nice to see someone else read Rose. Glad you liked Jackie's book and the Jakarta Method, too.

The Mabinogion (tr. Sioned Davies)
Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan
Clark Ashton Smith - Zothique
Clark Ashton Smith - Poseidonis
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic
Kir Bulychev - Alice: The Girl From Earth
Kir Bulychev - Half a Life and Other Stories
Kir Bulychev - Gusliar Wonders
Yevgeny Zamyatin - We
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Kobo Abe - Inter Ice Age 4
Kate Wilhelm - Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
Ruth Park - Playing Beatie Bow
Ruth Park - The Harp in the South
Ruth Park - Poor Man's Orange
Bertrand Russell - What I Believe
Bertrand Russell - Why I Am Not a Christian
Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodríguez - Locke & Key: Keys to the Kingdom
Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodríguez - Locke & Key: Clockworks
Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodríguez - Locke & Key: Alpha & Omega
Benjamin Myers - Under the Rock (put down halfway through, will finish at some point)

I remember L&J being really solid and wishing there were more good, long, discrete contained stories like that (ignoring the rubbish spin offs)

Locke and key I mean.

I watched teh tv series last month, has been a while since I ead the comics which I enjoyed at teh time and was one reason I watched teh tv show. Think I continued cos I started. Don't think I enjoyed as much as the comic anyway. Might give tehm another look if I can find the fiels sinced i read it on cbr.

Love's Work was good, but demanded more of me than I was able to give, intellectually and emotionally. I will go back to it.

Shuggie Bain was super bad, a relentless honking airhorn of "we were poor... but dammit we were unhappy too", in sore need of two more drafts and an editor. I did do an actual lol at a very minor character being called "Kier Weir", though, a welcome absurdity.

I don't think I have ever actually *liked* a protagonist in a book as much as I liked Darryl.

Anyway, I will continue lurking here, pinching ideas from youse all, though this year's resolution is read the books that I bought in 2021, rather than buy any new ones.

this year's resolution is read the books that I bought in 2021, rather than buy any new ones.

I tried that a couple of years ago and, of course, failed. It was helpful, though. It did encourage me to cut back on purchases and clear some of the backlog of unread books, so on the whole I'm glad I made the resolution and consider it a success.

unregistered- how are the Kir Bulychev books?

unregistered- how are the Kir Bulychev books?

great! I'm not too well-versed in Soviet SFF, but I'd recommend all three of those Bulychev collections. the biggest highlight for me was the title story of Half a Life. at heart it's a narrative of a woman's acts of self-sacrifice as she comes to empathize with the weird sentient beings who are imprisoned with her on an alien research vessel. a little mawkish, maybe, but there's a compelling interplay between the sentimental and the cynical as a group of emotionally stunted astronauts struggle to make sense of the woman's story and the now abandoned vessel

I also really like the cycle of short stories that makes up the second half of Gusliar Wonders, in which a Russian village becomes an unlikely point of first contact with various aliens and wizards and time travelers. it's similar in premise to Simak's Way Station, only funnier and with less faith in human nature. overall Bulychev seems fixated on the way unimaginative egotists react when confronted with the alien or the supernatural, and he has an acute ear for irony

Alice's Travels (the first novel in that Alice collection) is a fun children's interplanetary mystery, concluding with a slightly hokey, Scooby Doo-ish confrontation with space pirates. the cartoon adaptation is apparently regarded as a classic, and Bulychev is best known in Russia for his Alice books/films. afaik few of his other works have been translated into English aside from the post-apocalyptic novel Those Who Survive and the novella "Another's Memory" (collected in Earth and Elsewhere. Half a Life and Gusliar Wonders are both available at the Open Library

I'm kinda tempted to start working my way through the non-Strugatsky entries in Ted Sturgeon's Best of Soviet Science Fiction series:

https://i.imgur.com/O5HLz7d.jpg

(full list here)