What did you read in 2023?

graphic novel re-reads certainly count!

This year I finally accomplished a silly goal I set for myself a long time ago: an A-Z reading list (listed by order completed).

Stay True - Hua Hsu
Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard - Richard Brody
The Thirty Years War - C.V. Wedgwood
Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm - Dan Charnas
Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo
Night Boat to Tangier - Kevin Barry
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity - David Graeber
Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. - Eve Babitz
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943 - Antony Beevor
Cutter and Bone - Newton Thornburg
Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 - Harald Jähner
Mrs. Caliban - Rachel Ingalls
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World - Mike Davis
The Years - Annie Ernaux
Birnam Wood - Eleanor Catton
Simple Passion - Annie Ernaux
Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin
Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors - Ian Penman
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI - David Grann
J R - William Gaddis
A Woman's Story - Annie Ernaux
Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America - Abraham Riesman
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - Audre Lorde
Xala - Ousmane Sembène
I Am Not Ashamed - Barbara Payton
Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America - Annie Jacobsen
Happening - Annie Ernaux
The Quick and the Dead - Joy Williams
Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 - Max Hastings
Up in the Old Hotel - Joseph Mitchell
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017 - Rashid Khalidi
This Bloody Mary is the Last Thing I Own: A Journey to the End of Boxing - Jonathan Rendall
Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members - Ray Padgett
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor
Lou Reed: The King of New York - Will Hermes

I’m gonna have to read that Lou Reed book.

One of my 2024 reading goals is to *only* read things I’ve never read before. (Same for movies/TV.)

*Especially enjoyed
Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy-Casares:
Six Problems For Don Isidro Parodi (half good)

Pat Cadigan: Patterns (science fiction, her early stories, scary problems/adaptations)

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities (half good)

Truman Capote:
The Early Stories of Truman Capote (half good, promising)
Other Voices, Other Rooms (maybe half good, disappointing)

Bob Dylan: *The Philosophy of Modern Song ( good, excellent, disappointing, occasionally bad, and shit comments, much of it like skywriting, in ink on paper or canvas, also worth perusing for actual pix alone, uncredited art director/staff deserving of medals)

Timothy Egan: *Short Nights Of The Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life
And Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis

Nicole Flattery: *Show Them A Good Time (my pick on a previous WAYR, thanks to gyac for her 2022 take)

F. Scott Fitzgerald: *The Great Gatsby (re-read)

Ronald Firbank: Five Novels (ugh)

E.M. Forster: A Room With A View (good parts, Model-A modern)

Karen Joy Fowler: Booth: A Novel (John Wilkes & family, thee Bootheverse, just another part of America)(props to expert adventurer KJF for not getting lost in Civil War etc. factoids)

David Grann: *Killers of The Flower Moon: The Osage Killers
And The Birth of The FBI (eventually, the Osage get obscured by clouds of White men fighting, but the author never loses track, and eventually appears in narrative with contemporary Osage---I won't tell you what they're up to)

Henry Green:
*Blindness
*Living
*Party Going
*Pack My Bag
*Caught
*Loving

Patrick Nielsen Hayden ((ed.): Starlight 2
(science fiction x fantasy:prestige express, but often gives out of steam
—exceptions: Susanna Clarke, *“Mrs. Mabb,” Jonathan Letham, *”Access Fantasy,” Martha Soukoup,*”The House of Expectations”)

B.S. Johnson: The Unfortunates (his mortal friend is an expert on Boswell, which hopefully helped him deal with this Johnson, who is somewhat like a thirtysomething version of the London Journal late adolescent Boswell, congenial, inquisitive, and high-maintenance)

Mary Karr: *The Art of Memoir (writer-teacher, fair and tough, including on self)(re-read)

Marvin Kaye (ed.): *The Fair Folk frequently startling(fantasy, incl. Tanith Lee, Jane Yolen/Midori Snyder, Meghan Lindholm)

Stephen King: Danse Macabre (had to get used to his Cujo-frisky digressions etc. all over again, but v. genre-informative and makes some good/intriguing points about writers he admires)(re-read)

Erik Larson: Isaac’s Storm (science, politics, weather, Galveston, spoler: cock-ups—EL doesn’t quite have his Timothy Eganesque multi-dimensional panorama juggling act together yet, but mostly)

Don Noble (ed.): Alabama Noir (commissions—uneven, but the few highs swing purple high and low, noir-propriately—though one high, by Winston [Forest Gump[ is more a calm, cuet little fucker, would be good on Alfred Hitchcock Presents)

Naomi Novik: Spinning Silver (increasingly hectic girl-to-woman-power fantasy to some)

Flann O’Brien: At Swim-Two-Birds (*lost mad sufferin’ king poet Sweeney and some other elements, crowd o’ talkers all my bum)

Philip Roth: Exit Ghost (one of his last novels, good enough to be frustrating)

Mary Doria Russell:
*Doc
*Epitaph—A Novel of the OK Corral
(Sophisticated modern historicals w delving, yarn-spinning, shoot-’em up style: RIYL Oakley Hall)

John Updike: Just Looking: Essays on Art

Daniel Wallace:
Big Fish ( novel, uneven)
This Doesn’t End Well (memoir, kind of a rope ladder of difficult choices re family context/self-disclosure, but mostly about his talented, charismatic, generously-compulsive;y problem-solving, driving and driven brother-in-law, best known for his illustrated maps of dangerous rivers—also, as we’re told up front, a suicide—*best when author re-traces brother-in-law’s investigation of the murder of a mutual friend, when b-in-law was accompanied by and sometimes confided some things to whom he considered the prime suspect)

Damn--that should be "Winston (Forrest Gump) Groom."

I should say that Wallace's contribution to xpost Alabama Noir is stone cold indelible snapshot literature, empty ashtrays on a whole other level.

Sorry, forgot this one!

Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived In The Castle (Sisters so perfectly complementary that they seem more and more like a true dream team—so tight I fear spoiling, but also see biographical aspects of Lethem’s afterword—-there should be more afterwords, fewer forewords) Moment to moment, pressing down, moving on, tracing.

And these, from Jan-Feb 2023:

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.:
*The Sirens of Titan (fave! Passionately inventive, sometimes unexpectedly touching, also funnier than usual)

Player Piano (early 50s Executive Drama, with some satire, from his time with General Electric: in the Future, AI is taking over, assisted by these white-collar Golden Boys, high normcore getting all shook up, with the re-assigned blue collars are seething)

Mother Night (good on selective self-awareness of surviving Nazis etc, but then eh Cold War cold water flat thriller moves, a bit too earnest melodrama?)
Slaughterhouse-Five (best in space and especially the parts based on his actual experiences in WWII, though these can still be an odd, slightly fumbly fit in present context, even though he’s written brief nonfiction about his wartime----also there are shticky, dated-even-in-the-60s Plastic Suburbia Republican normcore bits)

Cat’s-Cradle (re-read: still like the *”God Made Mud” sequence and a little more, but really some of his worst,most affectless stuff that I’ve come across, mercifully forgotten from first read in college)

(Maybe also see our Vonnegut discussion last winter on Rolling Speculative etc.)

> i'm actually 75% through Crying Freeman

turns out there were 3 more books in the humble bundle i bought last year that i hadn't downloaded. so i'm now 40% of the way through, 1200 pages left...

"The Wounded Age / Eastern Tales - Ferit Edgu *"

Been meaning to get hold of this!

not much this year for me

Ellen Raskin - The Tattooed Potato and other clues
Andy Weir - Project Hail Mary
Natalie Zemon Davis - The Return of Martin Guerre
Tamsyn Muir - Harrow the Ninth
The Devotion of Suspect X
Quentin Tarantino - Cinema Speculation

david mamet - speed the plow
joyce carol oates - the gravedigger's daughter
joyce carol oates - little bird of heaven
joyce carol oates - the assignation
joyce carol oates - ill take you there
charlie kaufman - antkind
tao lin - leave society
kris newby - bitten
jeanine basinger & sam wasson - hollywood: the oral history
pierce o'donnell & dennis mcdougal - fatal subtraction
yolanda hadid - believe me
jena friedman - not funny
lorrie moore - i am homeless if this is not my home
richard yates - disturbing the peace
rick moody - hotels of north america
henry louis gates jr - colored people
lauren oyler - fake accounts
susan orlean - the library book
evan hunter - last summer
maria bamford - sure i'll join your cult
michael lewis - going infinite
daniel clowes - monica
greg jackson - dimensions of a cave
billy walters - secrets from a life at risk
illeana douglas - connecticut in the movies

Savage, This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else
Thompson, Escape from Model Land
Bosch, "You Are Not Expected to Understand This"
Soden, Jeoffry: The Poet's Cat
Gosse, Gossip In A Library
Podhoretz, Ex-Friends
Sudjic, Norman Foster
Nadis, A History in Sum
Wilson, The Difference Between God And Larry Ellison
Polchinski, Memories of a Theoretical Physicist
Meier, The Lost Spy
Murphy, Miles to Go
Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing
Ransmayr, The Last World
Sooke, Roy Lichtenstein
Kincaid, Brian W. Aldiss
Slifkin, The New Monuments and the End of Man
Winters, The Early Poems
Threadgill, Easily Slip into Another World
Larson, Where the Heart Beats
Bertei, Peter and the Wolves
Does, Do Not Look Away
Roberts, Lemady
Amis ed., Philip Larkin Poems
Carr, Fire in the Belly
Neale, Closing the Gap
O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube
McMichael, Four Good Things
Parisi, In a Flight of Starlings
Phillips, Terrors and Experts
Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins
Pontzen, The Universe in a Box
qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division
Zelazny, A Night In The Lonesome October
Garnett, Lady into Fox
Misak, Frank Ramsey

I read a few things in 2023.

Exceptional list, Lord Sotosyn. Two minor remarks:

I failed to find where you explained the meaning of the asterisk marking some titles, so my curiosity about that remains unsatisfied.

As for the side question you tossed into your prologue, I would theorize that the muscularity of late 18th century prose compared to the late 19th century arises from the differing preoccupations of those periods, with the former age grappling with the application of intellect to address broad political, social and practical problems and the latter post-Romantic era being more fascinated with questions of individual genius and its actualization within society. But I could easily be wrong.

The asterices mark books I've read before.

I would hazard to think, re your second point, that in an increasing democratic era politicians and judges thought they had to write prose to match Their Lofty Sentiments. That's my glib first response at any rate.

Ah, I understood your comment to apply to prose productions across the board, not just political prose. In the USA at least I expect your speculation has tremendous validity.

Super interesting lists. Here's what I managed.

Molière – Le Tartuffe
Marcel Proust – La Prisonnière, Albertine disparue, Le Temps retrouvé, Swann’s Way (tr. C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
Robin Wood – The Apu Trilogy
Ted Cohen – Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor, Serious Larks: The Philosophy of Ted Cohen
Michael Moorcock – The Vanishing Tower, The Bane of the Black Sword, Stormbringer
Guy Gavriel Kay – Sailing to Sarantium, Lord of Emperors
Junji Ito – Tomie, The Liminal Zone
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
Mervyn Peake – Gormenghast, Titus Alone
Fritz Leiber – Swords and Deviltry, Swords Against Death, Swords in the Mist
Robert E. Howard, Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp – Conan
C. L. Moore – Jirel of Joiry
Saul Friedländer – Proustian Uncertainties: On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time
Glen Cook – The Black Company, Shadows Linger, The White Rose
William H. Gass – On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry
J. R. R. Tolkien (tr. F. Ledoux) – Bilbo, le hobbit
Joseph Conrad – Nostromo
Robert Jordan – Conan the Defender, Lord of Chaos
Gene Wolfe – Soldier of the Mist, The Shadow of the Torturer, On Blue’s Waters, In Green’s Jungles
Malcolm Bowie – Proust Among the Stars
Christopher Clark – The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
Susan Cooper – The Dark is Rising, Greenwitch
Ursula K. Le Guin – The Word for World is Forest
Dan Simmons – Hyperion
William Shakespeare – Othello
M. John Harrison – The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium
Peter S. Beagle – The Last Unicorn
Carmen Carter – Dreams of the Raven (Star Trek #34)

DNF but read substantial parts:

Alexandre Dumas – Le Comte de Monte-Cristo
Alexander Sesonske – Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939
Stanley Cavell – Emerson’s Transcendental Études, The Claim of Reason (Part IV)
Yuriko Saito – Everyday Aesthetics
Noël Carroll – Beyond Aesthetics: Selected Essays
Richard Moran – The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony, and Intersubjectivity
William C. Carter – The Proustian Quest
Malcolm Bowie – Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction
John Keegan – The First World War
A. C. Bradley – Shakespearean Tragedy
G. Wilson Knight – The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy

Here is my list.

All * indicate chapbooks, which are an essential element of poetic circulation, but which are not "books" per se. Some are very short, some are ~50-60 pages in length.

All ^ indicate re-reads or titles read twice within the year for a variety of reasons.

Adorno, Minima Moralia ^
Ali, The Voice of Sheila Chandra ^
Benick, Don't Rely on the Strrength of My Image*
Benick, Farce Poetica*
Birch, The Bird Trade*
Boone, My Walk With Bob ^
Boyd, Split
Calveyra, Letters So That Happiness
Carey, Landescape
Castillo, Not-I
Castillo, SALMON
Chejfec, Notes Toward a Pamphlet (trans. Whitney DeVos)
Clark, Heaven on Earth
Clark, The Sight of Death
Coletti, Attachment Simply*
Comitta, The Nature Book
Coolidge, Alien Tatters
Coolidge, Mesh
Coolidge, Sound as Thought
Coolidge, The Land of All Time
Cooper and Blake, Jerk*
Culley, Twenty One
D'Amerique, No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace (trans. Conor Bracken
Day, A Bronzino*
De Parry, Put It In See What It Does
Delahaye, Fa Sol La Mi
Delgado, Adjacent Islands (trans. Urayoan Noel)
DeWitt, 2020 Pretzels*
Dobran, Reagent*
ebs, Intimacies That Did Not Destroy Us*
Fong, Flight Mode in the City*
Forrest-Thomson, The Collected Poems of...
Freedman, Eternal Balsamic Contract*
Garofalo, After the Blue Rush
Gerrity & Huberman eds, Dodie Bellamy Is On Our Mind
Gluck, About Ed
Gluck, Elements ^
Gluck, I, Boombox
Goldsborough, The Western
Gray, Scattered Brains
Hamdan, Live Audio Essays
Heames, Sonnets (January '23)
Hill, High in the Sky*
Hill, I Decide to Wrap Up My Family
Hill, Slave Days
Hjorth, Is Mother Dead
Hjorth, Will & Testament
Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire ^
Javier, Maybe the Sweet Honey Pours
Jefferson, The Book of Senses
Johnson, Can of Human Heat ^
Johnson, Diary of a String ^
Johnson, Earthbound Chap
Johnson, The Destiny of Rations
Kazemi, New Millenium Boyz
Kennedy, Metamorphoses
Killian, I Cry Like a Baby
Killian, Santa*
Killian, Wow Wow Wow Wow*
Larsen, Detonated Mirror
Lawrence, About to Be Young
Lin, Fern Rose Bibliography *
Lotterman, A Reaction to Someone Coming In
Mabb, Double Address to Hoof Sedition College Graduating Caste of 2091
MacSweeney, Wolf Tongue
Malmude, Lifeguard*
Martin, Marking a Salt Ridge
Mayer & Coolidge, The Cave
Mayer, Memory ^
Mayer, Sonnets ^
Morris, Different Darkness
Morris, Levon Helm
Muller, 2009: An Autopsy
Negroni, Exilium
Ng, All I Want*
Olson, The Maximus Poems
Prynne, Acrylic Tips*
Prynne, Biting the Air*
Prynne, Blue Slides at Rest*^
Prynne, For the Monogram *
Prynne, Her Weasels Wild Returning *
Prynne, Jie Ban Mi Shi Hu *
Prynne, Not-You *
Prynne, Pearls That Were*
Prynne, Red D Gypsum *
Prynne, Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage/Artesian*
Prynne, Sub Songs*^
Prynne, To Pollen*
Prynne, Triodes*
Prynne, Unanswering Rational Shore*
Prynne, Word Order *
Purdy, In a Shallow Grave
Purdy, The Nephew
Rasula, American Poetry Wax Museum
Requena, Outside Texts (trans. Guillermo Parra)*
Resnikoff, A Raisin in Every Bite*
Riding, The Close Chaplet
Roberson, Aquarium Works
Salmonhunter, Underbelly of the Ancient Cube Trick*
Schluter, Erosion-Thousand Flies of Unadulterated Bliss*
Sigo & Wolf, Occasional Objects
Sigo, Saint of the Abyss*
Silone, Blood & Wine
Sinclair, Mental Travailers*
Skrabalak, Autoerotic Swirlys*
Skrabalak, Donna*
Sledmere & Spoliar, Sans Soleil*
Smith, 8x8x7
Sneathen, Don't Leave Me This Way ^
Steck, A Place Beyond Shame ^
Steck, Sleep as Information/The Fountain is a Water Feature
Stolterfoht, Lingos I-IX
Taggart, Loop
Vallejo, Trilce
Van Dyck, People I Met from the Internet
Waldrop, Light While There Is Light
Zenia & Nasser, Black Bedouin
Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim, James Baldwin's Lungs in the 80s
Zenia, Tel Aviv

Don Delillo - Underworld
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
John Le Carré - The Looking Glass War
John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van*
John Darnielle - Universal Harvester*
Muriel Spark - The Ballad of Peckham Rye
Georges Simenon - The Carter of La Providence
Georges Simenon - The Late Monsieur Gallet
Georges Simenon - The Yellow Dog
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot

*rereads

Etel Adnan - In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country
Etel Adnan - Sitt Marie Rose
Cesar Aira - An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
A. R. Ammons - Tape for the Turn of the Year
Lynda Barry - Cruddy (re-read)
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge - I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems
Rachel Cusk - Kudos
Rachel Cusk - Transit
Rachel Cusk - Outline
Michael Davidson - Post Hoc
Christopher Dewdney - Children of the Outer Dark : the Poetry of Christopher Dewdney
Marguerite Duras - The Lover
Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man
Stanley Elkin - Boswell: A Modern Comedy
Elaine Equi - The Intangibles
Emily Kendal Frey - Lovability
William H. Gass - In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
Juan Goytisolo - Forbidden Territory
Dave Hickey - Air Guitar
Fanny Howe - Forty Whacks
Elaine Kahn - Romance or The End
László Krasznahorkai - The World Goes On
Anthony Madrid - Whatever's Forbidden the Wise
Alain Mabanckou - Broken Glass
Nathaniel Mackey - Bedouin Hornbook
Lorrie Moore - Anagrams
Lorrie Moore - I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
Jason Morris - Levon Helm
Miguel Murphy - Shoreditch
Reza Negarestani - CYCLONOPEDIA: complicity with anonymous materials
John Frederick Nims - The Six-Cornered Snowflake and Other Poems
Jena Osman - Public Figures
Albert Saijo - OUTSPEAKS - A RHAPSODY
Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan - An Ode and Arcadia
Wallace Stegner - Crossing to Safety
Ulf Stolterfoht - Lingos I-IX
Stacy Szymaszek - Famous Hermits
Rabindranath Tagore - Broken Ties: and Other Stories
Antoine Volodine - Writers
Catherine Wagner - Miss America
Sylvia Townsend Warner - The Corner That Held Them
C. D. Wright - Rising, Falling, Hovering
Adam Zagajewski - True Life

Jotted down books as I started them but now not sure where the notebook went. Well will hopefully find later.
Taking a pile of books back to the library.

Antarctica - Claire Keegan
The House on the Brink - John Gordon
The Winter Book - Tove Jansson
The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold - Sam Knight
The Quarry - Iain Banks
The Forever War - Joe Haldeman
Kristin Lavransdatter - Sigrid Undset
Under the Blue - Oana Aristide
Debt: The First 5,000 Years - David Graeber
Stranger Things Happen - Kelly Link
In Ascension - Martin McInnes
When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamin Labatut
Intimacies - Katie Kitamura
The Road to En-dor - EH Jones
Grand Hotel - Vicki Baum
Memories of the Future - Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Homesick - Jennifer Croft
A Wreath for Udomo - Peter Abrahams
Traveller of the Century - Andrés Neuman
Jenny - Sigrid Undset
Mirage Men - Mark Pilkington
The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin
Humble Pi - Matt Parker
Roots - Alex Haley
The Affirmation - Christopher Priest
Country Girls - Edna O'Brien
The Lonely Girl - Edna O'Brien
Girls in their Married Bliss - Edna O'Brien
Yesterday's Kin - Nancy Kress
Solaris Rising 1.5 - Various
The Very Slow Time Machine - Ian Watson
Probability Moon - Nancy Kress
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty - Patrick Radden Keefe
Matrix - Lauren Groff
Famous Modern Ghost Stories - (ed) Dorothy Scarborough
The Swimming-Pool Library - Alan Hollinghurst
The Incendiaries - R.O. Kwon
The Cipher - Kathe Koja
Recursion - Blake Crouch
The Enchanted April - Elizabeth von Arnim
The Fraud - Zadie Smith
My Antonia - Willa Cather
I who Have Never Known Men - Jacqueline Harpman
The Man who Would Be King - Rudyard Kipling
The Gendered Brain - Gina Rippon

That's a very nice wide-ranging assortment, ledge.

thank you - that's a kinder assessment than my own, a magpie's haul of whatever shiny rubbish caught my eye at the time! maybe a third I could say I'm genuinely glad I read, less than ten I'd rather not have bothered with - I guess that's not too bad.

How did Grand Hotel strike you?

Max Ernst - Une Semaine de Bonté
The Song of Roland
Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
August Strindberg - Three Plays: The Father, Easter & Miss Julia
Waugh, Evelyn - Vile Bodies
Ashe, Geoffrey - Mythology of the British Isles Ashe
Boardman, John - The Oxford History of Classical Art
Khalidi, Rashid - The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017
Villon, François - The Testament of Francois Villon, translated by Anthony Mortimer
The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes
Parenti, Michael - History as Mystery
Hoskyns, Barney - Across the Great Divide
Defoe, Daniel - Moll Flanders
Thacker, Eugene - In the Dust of This Planet (Horror of Philosophy, #1)
Eliade, Mircea - The Myth of Eternal Return
Harpur, Patrick The Philosophers’ Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination
Stendhal - The Red and the Black
Li Po and Tu Fu: Poems
Timmins, Nicholas - The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State
Ellmann, Richard - James Joyce
Clark, T.J. - If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present
Pindar - The Complete Odes, translated by Anthony Verity
Tragically I Was an Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook
Trollope, Anthony - The Warden (Chronicles of Barsetshire, #1)
Borges, Jorge Luis - Selected Poems 1923-1967 (20th Century Classics)
Edward Thomas - Collected Poems
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Evans, Richard J. - In Defense of History
Harvey, David - A Brief History of Neoliberalism
Edgeworth, Maria - Castle Rackrent
Holmes, Richard - Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage
Celan, Paul - Poems of Paul Celan trans by Michael Hamburger
Beevor, Antony - Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943
Sacks, David - The Alphabet
Racine, Jean - Iphigenia / Phaedra / Athaliah
Godfrey-Smith, Peter - Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Judah, Ben - This is London: Life and Death in the World City
Collins, Wilkie - The Woman in White

Bridge books:
Hatherley, Owen - A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain
The Verso Book of Dissent: Revolutionary Words from Three Millennia of Rebellion and Resistance
Beauvoir, Simone de - The Second Sex
Bukofzer, Manfred F. - Music in the Baroque Era

How did Grand Hotel strike you?

one of the good ones! a great set of characters and full of empathy for them.

These lists are amazingly diverse.

Alfred, yours is intimidating. I read as much as, or more than, anyone I know, and I could not achieve the levels you're achieving. You said last year that you even read while walking, but still. Of course, it's not just the quantity, it's also the quality of your list.

Thanks, jimbeaux. Bachelorhood helps too.

including the one I finished on Jan 1st

Ben Blatt, Nabokov's Favourite Word is Mauve
Stanley Elkin, Mrs. Ted Bliss
Dante Alighieri, HELL: Dante's Divine Trilogy Part One. Decorated and Englished in Prosaic Verse by Alasdair Gray
Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence
Damian Catani, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Fran Ross, Oreo
Derek Pell, Assassination Rhapsosy
Jean Rhys, Tigers Are Better Looking: With A Selection From The Left Bank: Stories
Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies
Fernanda Melchor, Paradais
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Suspicion
Colin Wilson, The Space Vampires
Shumona Sinha, Down with the Poor!
Louis Paul Boon, My Little War
Rudy von Bitter Rucker,Peter Lamborn Wilson,Robert Anton Wilson, Semiotext(e) SF
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Judge and His Hangman
Brigid Brophy, Black and White
John Barth, Postscripts
Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees
William Melvin Kelley, Dunfords Travels Everywheres
Ian Penman, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors
Joanna Walsh, Girl Online
Frances Newman, The Hard-boiled Virgin
Wilson Harris, Carnival
Elmore Leonard, City Primeval: High Noon in Detoit
Alejo Carpentier, The Chase
Felipe Alfau, Locos: A Comedy of Gestures
Emmanuelle Pagano, Trysting
Lore Segal, Ladies' Lunch
Eric LaRocca, The Trees Grew Because I Bled There: Collected Stories
Franz Fühmann, The Beloved of the Dawn
Don Marquis, Archy's Life of Mehitabel
Éric Vuillard, Sorrow of the Earth
Brigid Brophy, In Transit
Han Kang, Greek Lessons
Marguerite Duras, The Darkroom
Stephen King, Holly
Gertrude Stein, Every Day is To-Day
Matei Calinescu, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter
George Steiner, Real Presences
Joseph Roth, The White Cities
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger
Alan Partridge, Alan Partridge: Big Beacon
Cristina Rivera Garza, Liliana's Invincible Summer
Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory
Vladislav Vančura, Summer of Caprice
Dubravka Ugresic, Thank You For Not Reading
Daniel Kraus, Whalefall
Raymond Queneau, We Always Treat Women Too Well

Only one reread there, the Frances Newman. Need to try and up that this year

Moonflower Murders - Anthony Horowitz
Cold Hand in Mine - Robert Hickman
Essential Fantastic Four Vol 9 - Len Wein, George Perez et al
Smallbone Deceased - Michael Gilbert
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe - Agatha Christie
Destroy All Monsters - Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips
Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter
Berg - Ann Quin
From a View to a Death - Anthony Powell
What's So Funny - Donald Westlake
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - Vladimir Nabokov
The Ghastly One: the 42nd Street Netherworld of Director Andy Milligan - Jimmy McDonough
I Was Dora Suarez - Derek Raymond
Cinema Speculation - Quentin Tarantino
Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century - Orson Scott Card (ed)
Asterix and the Black Gold - Goscinny and Uderzo
High Noon: the Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic - Glenn Frankel
Super Cannes - J G Ballard
An Expert in Murder - Nicola Upson
Unscripted: the Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy - James B Stewart, Rachel Abrams
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Appointment with Death - Agatha Christie
The Adventures of Sindbad - Gyula Krudy
The Killer Inside Me - Jim Thompson
Absolute Promethea Book One - Alan Moore, J H Williams III
Wild Seed - Octavia E Butler
Murder Unprompted - Simon Brett
Desert Star - Michael Connelly
The Institute - Stephen King
The Door into Summer - Robert Heinlein
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution - Nicolas Meyer
Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix - Brian Doherty
Killers of the Flower Moon - David Grann
Fairy Tale - Stephen King
Document And Eyewitness: An Intimate History of Rough Trade - Neil Spencer
Essential Amazing Spider-Man Vol 7 - Gerry Conway, Ross Andru et al
The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil
The Human Target Vol 1 - Tom King, Greg Smallwood
The Herring Seller's Apprentice - L C Tyler
Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine - Joe Hagan
The Sound of His Horn - Sarban
Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors - Ian Penman
Beast in View - Margaret Millar
Invaders Classic Vol 1 - Roy Thomas, Frank Robbins et al
The Hungry Moon - Ramsey Campbell
Madwoman of the Sacred Heart - Jodorowsky and Moebius
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John le Carre
Woodcutters - Thomas Bernhard
Invincible Vol 1: Family Matters - Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker
Invincible Vol 2: Eight is Enough - Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker
Invincible Vol 3: Perfect Strangers - Robert Kirkman, Ryan Ottley
Horror for Christmas - Richard Dalby (ed)

It was a slow reading year for me, but I particularly enjoyed Jon Fosse’s Septology, Knausgaard’s My Struggle #2 & #3, and Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus.

Great lists from all, will be picking some of these for 2024

"The Adventures of Sindbad - Gyula Krudy"

A favourite.

Dubravka Ugresic, Thank You For Not Reading

I need to read more of her work. I loved Fox.

One to add to my list:

Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark 12.31.23

Here's mine.

1 star = especially enjoyed
2 stars = best things I read this year

Westing Game
The Bullet That Missed *
Treacle Walker
Let it Bleed (Rankin)
Couch Fiction
When Will there be Good News? *
Refugees: A very short intro
Amulet of Samarkand
Artist of the Floating World
And then there were none *
My Mess is a Bit of a Life
The Vet's Daughter **
The Person-centred Counselling Primer
The Wave
From the Mixed-up files of Basil e. Frankweiler
Matilda *
Really Good Actually *
Archer's Goon **
Started Early Took My Dog
Tales of the City (reread)
Charmed Life *
Left Hand of Darkness **
Peril at End House *
Rock and Hard Place (TNG Novel by Peter David) *
Pyramids (Pratchett)
Goodbye Columbus *
Wolves of Willoughby Chase
The Dark is Rising
The Last Devil to Die

Didn't finish: Wolf Hall, Lonesome Dove, Score!, The Tresspasser

Barely scraped 40 this year. * = enjoyed; ** = favourites of the year

Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land
Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace*
John Suiter, Poets and the Peaks**
Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass
Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again
Nick Tosches, Hellfire*
Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things
Tracey Thorn, Bedsit Disco Queen*
Lee Child, The Visitor
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North*
William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It*
Brad Warner, Hardcore Zen
Dennis O'Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney**
David Toop, Sinister Resonance
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence*
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty**
Edmund White, The Flaneur
Nina Coltart, Slouching Toward Bethlehem*
James Wood, How Fiction Works
Guy de Maupassant, The Horla
Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence
Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show
Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.*
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley
Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed**
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar**
Lee Child, The Enemy
Hilaire Belloc, The Old Road: From Winchester to Canterbury
Nic Pizzolato, Galveston
Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart
James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss
Max Porter, Grief is the Thing With Feathers
Dashiel Hammett, Red Harvest
Hector Tobar, Deep Down Dark
Lawrence Block, The Sins of the Fathers
Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

Here's what I read in 2023, ranked from favorite to least favorite in each category (and two that got away):

fiction

Rona Jaffe - The Best of Everything
Elizabeth Taylor - Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
Karl Ove Knausgaard - My Struggle (Book 5)
Anna Seghers - Transit
Patricia Highsmith - Those Who Walk Away
Willa Cather - O Pioneers!
Elif Batuman - Either/Or
Luigi Pirandello - The Late Mattia Pascal
E.L. Doctorow - Ragtime
Henry James - Daisy Miller and Other Stories
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Marlen Haushofer - The Wall
Leonardo Sciascia - The Day of the Owl
Ian Rankin - Fleshmarket Close
Saul Bellow - Henderson the Rain King
William S. Burroughs - The Western Lands
Jorge Amado - Captains of the Sands

nonfiction

William James - Principles of Psychology
Robert Richardson - William James
Keith Richards - Life
Donald Fagen - Eminent Hipsters
Bart Ehrman - The Triumph of Christianity
John Fogerty - Fortunate Son

abandoned

Sheila Heti - Motherhood
Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Books read 2023
Howard Zinn A People’s History of the United States9think I may have finished this right around the New Year)
Hallie Rubenhold The Five
Raj Patel A History Of The World In 7 Cheap Things
Charles Mills Black Rights, White Wrongs
John Leland Hip, the history
J. H. Kwabena Nketia
JCH King Blood and Land
Deutscher Through The Language Glass
Langston Hughes Not Without Laughter
Graham Lock Thrivin On A Riff
Wallace Thurman Blacker The Berry
Claudio Saunt West Of The Revolution
Dylan Jones Sweet Dreams
Patti Smith Year Of The Monkey
David Anderson History Of The Hanged
Margaret Blount Animal Land
Robin Diangeko Nice Racism
Tim Lawrence Love Saves The Day
Gerry Johnstone A Restorative Justice Reader
Carl Benedict Frey Technology Trap :capital, labor, and power in the age of automation
W.E.B du Bois Souls Of Black Folk
Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
David Okusoga The Kaiser’s Holocaust
Ha-Joon Chang 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism
Martin Hayes Shared Notes
John Nigg Fabulous Beasts
Daniel Chamovitz What A plant Knows
Walter Rodney Decolonial Marxism
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz Not A Nation Of Immigrants
Immanuel Velikovsky Earth In Upheaval
Louis Aragon The Libertine
Martin Bulmer Racism
Dipo Fayolin Africa Is Not A Country
Francis Davis A History Of The Blues
Joanna Russ How To Suppress Women’s Writing
Augusto Boal Legislative Theatre
Eric Yong An Immense World: how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us
Caroline Dodds Pennock, On savage shores : how Indigenous Americans discovered Europe
Robert Conquest The dragons of expectation : reality and delusion in the course of history
Brian J Robb Timeless Adventures: how Doctor Who conquered TV
Neil Gaiman The Eternals
Marcus Hearn Doctor Who The Vault
David Roediger How Race Survived U.S. History
Nathalie Rothstein 400 Years Of Fashion
Linda Nochlin Why Are There No Great Women Artists
“ “ “ “ Women Artists A Linda Nochlin Reader
Sara Ahmed The Feminist Killjoy’s Handbook
Arlie Russell Hochschild The Managed Heart
Lydia Edwards How To Read A Suit
Sylvia Federici Caliban and The Witch
Ted Gioia How To Listen To Jazz
Willett Cunningham Handbook Of 19th Century Costume
David Graeber Bullshit Jobs
Therese O’Donohoe Ireland at the crossroads : Lisdoonvarna, Direct Provision and the far right
Tony Russell Country Music Originals Legends Lost & Found
Kenan Malik Not So Black and White
Anne,Llewellyn Barstow Witchcraze
Paul Gilroy Darker Than Blue
Wesley Lowery American Whitelash
John Parker Great Kingdoms Of Africa
Norman Cohn Warrant For Genocide The Myth Of The Jewish World Conspiracy
David King The Commissar Vanishes
Neil Gaiman Welcome To The Cheap Seats
Heather C McGhee The Sum Of Us : what racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together
Elizabeth Badinter The myth of motherhood : an historical view of the maternal instinct
Peter Stanfield A band with built-in hate : The Who from pop art to punk
Bob Dylan The Philosophy Of Modern Music
John Hunwick Boyle Treasures of Timbuktu
Michael Ignatieff Human Rights As Politics & Idolatry
Irving Finkel Writing On The Stone
Diana Wynne Jones Dogsbody
“ “ ““ " " Howl’s Moving Castle
Bruno Bettelheim The Uses Of Enchantment
August Meier From Plantation To Ghetto
Hope Mirrlees Lud-In-The-Mist
Nick Cave & Sean Hagan Fear, Hope + Carnage
Wilson Brown The Many Not The Few: an illustrated history of Britain shaped by the people
Toni Morrison Mouthful Of Blood
Paul Crooks Ancestors
Viorica Marian The Power Of Language: Multilingualism, Self & Society
Richard Morton Jack Nick Drake: The Life
David Olusoga Black & British
Suzanne Smith Dancing In The Street: Motown and the cultural politics of Detroit
Ilan Pappe The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine
Angela Saini The patriarchs : how men came to rule
Michael O’haodha Insubordinate Irish: Travellers In The Text
Terry Jones Medieval Lives
Elaine Mokhtefi Algiers, Third World capital : Black Panthers, freedom fighters, revolutionaries
Rich Marshall America’s Great Comic Strip Artists
Paul Gordon Lauren The evolution of international human rights : visions seen
Wolfgang Sachs Fair future : limited resources and global justice
Alfred Melraux Voodoo in Haiti
Don McGregor, Rich Buckler, Black Panther
Billy Graham, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby
Alice Harman Benin 900-1897 CE
Vashti Bunyan Wayward: Just Another Life To Live
Nick Soulsby Thurston Moore : we sing a new language
Joe Sacco Palestine
“ “ “ “ Footnotes In Gaza
Etta James Rage To Survive
David Cronin Balfour’s Shadow: a century of British support for Zionism and Israel
Kehinde Andrews Psychosis Of Whiteness
Richard Hell I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp
Neil Faulkner Creeping fascism : Brexit, Trump, and the rise of the Far Right

I think I finished these just after the New year
Ilan Pappe The biggest prison on earth : a history of the Occupied Territories
Shlomo Sand The invention of the Jewish people

and am a long way into these
Christopher Ehret The Civilizations of Africa : a history to 1800
Jeffrey Ostler Surviving Genocide
Michael Herenti Blackshirts & reds : rational fascism and the overthrow of communism
John Heneghan, Mary Moriarty, Travellers and the settled community : a shared future
Michael O hAodha,
Kim E Neilsen A disability history of the United States
Mark Andrews Paint My Name in Black and Gold: The rise of the Sisters of Mercy
Therese Smith Ancestral imprints : histories of Irish traditional music and dance

have these set up to go
Billy Bragg Roots, radicals and rockers : how skiffle changed the world
Nur Masalha Palestine : a four thousand year history
Lucy Costigan Strangest genius : the stained glass of Harry Clarke

Forgot this which I'm about 1/2 way through
Hungry Beat: The Scottish Independent Pop Underground Movement (1977-1984)
by Douglas Macintyre,
Grant McPhee,
Ian Rankin

and is pretty great so I need to get back to.