What did you read in 2018?

I've reached the seventies this year, and mostly finished my pile, which I feel very good about. Two books I stopped (a fat Thiong'o and a fat Pynchon) and close to 25 highlights, which is what I'll post here (in order of reading). Titles in French where applicable. I'm a young reader so expect classics too.

Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Fukazawa - The Ballad of Narayama (untranslated in ENG iirc)
Bulgakov - Heart of a Dog*
James - A Brief History of Seven Killings*
Gyasi - Homegoing
Kourouma - Les Soleils des Indépendances
Miller - The Crucible
Emecheta - The Joys of Motherhood
Pushkin - Eugene Onegin
Plath - The Bell Jar
Ndibe - Arrows of Rain
Gray - Lanark: A Life in Four Books
Bulgakov - A Young Doctor's Notebook
Tolkien - The Hobbit (or There and Back Again)
O'Connor - A Good Man is Hard to Find
Mofolo - Chaka
Le Guin - The Dispossessed*
Tchekhov - Three Sisters
Hamidou Kane - L'aventure ambiguë
Strugatskis - Roadside Picnic
Huysmans - Là-bas
Sôseki - Botchan
Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea
Aragon - Le Con d'Irène
Kessel - Belle de Jour
Salih - Season of Migration to the North
Pushkin - The Captain's Daughter*

*top favorites

I read the Pushkin and the James this year too!

My profound respect to all multi-lingual ILBers. My unilingual brain seems unable to absorb more than the merest smattering of other languages.

I'm much the same. I studied English at a reasonably high level - got a degree in English lit ad a degree in Philosophy in which I focused on language. But for some reason I can't do other languages. Though, I was pleased to discover that I remember the polish Xmas greeting after learning it last year. But I lived in Berlin for 3 years as a kid, studied that at school, at uni I tried Ancient Greek, privately I've tried spanish, russian, scots Gaelic. I just don't have the head for it, for some reason.

i didn’t keep track of what i read this year, and i read regrettably little. i know i read the new ottessa moshfegh, i read talk by linda rosenkrantz, i read a bunch of the power broker but didn’t finish it. read a few short denis johnson novels i can’t temember the names of. im currently reading the vegetarian by han kang and it’s great

I think it's close enough to year's end now that I feel secure this list would, at most, lack the title of a partially-finished book on New Year's Eve. Of all the books I read this year, I think the one that gave me the most memorable pleasure was The Door, Magda Szabo. It was just outstanding in so many ways.

Books I read in 2018 (in the order I finished them):

A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr
The Bread of Those Early Years, Heinrich Böll
A Man's Head, Georges Simenon
James J. Hill: A Brief Biography, Stewart Holbrook
The Women at the Pump, Knut Hamsun
Julian, Gore Vidal (<- re-read)
Selected Short Stories, Guy de Maupassant (<- Penguin classics collection)
The Door, Magda Szabo
Tropic Moon, Georges Simenon
What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff (<-a silicon valley 'history')
The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben (<- botany)
A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor (<- memoir)
Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Willa Cather
A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889, Frederic Morton
Life of Alfred the Great, Asser the Monk (tr. Keynes)
Another Country, James Baldwin
Journey Into the Past, Stefan Zweig
Conquest of Constantinople, Geoffroy de Villehardouin
Nature, Man and Woman, Alan Watts
The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy
Emma, Jane Austen (<- re-read)
The Wizard and the Prophet, Charles Mann (<- global warming debate)
Around the World in Seventy Two Days and Other Writings, Nellie Bly
The Price of Admiralty, John Keegan (<- military history)
Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope
Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain
Aucassin & Nicolette and Other Tales, trans. Pauline Matarasso (<-Penguin Classics)
The Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery (<-natural history of a sort)
Democracy Reborn, Garrett Epps
Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton (<- essays)
The Aran Islands, J. M. Synge (<- re-read)
The Golden Spur, Dawn Powell
The Grand Babylon Hotel, Arnold Bennett
Watership Down, Richard Adams
Masters of Atlantis, Charles Portis
Gorgon, Peter D. Ward (<-about Permian mass extinction)
Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer
Turing's Cathedral, George Dyson
The Stalin Front, Gert Ledig
The Gate of Angels, Penelope Fitzgerald
Maigret Gets Angry, Georges Simenon
The Little Nugget, P. G. Wodehouse
Under the Glacier, Haldor Laxness
The Sicilian Vespers, Steven Runciman
A Time to Be Born, Dawn Powell
The Wet Engine, Brian Doyle
Raffles, Maurice Collis (<- a biography)
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
The Saga of the Volsungs, translator: Jesse Byock
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, Thomas Mann
Fair Play, Tove Jansson
Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay

Books I started, read about a third, but did not finish:

Crashed, Adam Tooze (->about the serial financial crises: 2008-2018)
Stoner, John Williams

The Door really is remarkable.

38 or so, including some graphic novels and omitting some other graphic novels for no particular reason. Can't post them all because I'm on my phone but the top two were probably

Les Miserables
The Iron Heel

Cannery Row too

and The Martian, which felt a lot like A C Clarke's Fall Of Moondust or similar.

Books I started, read about a third, but did not finish:

Stoner, John Williams

― A is for (Aimless), Monday, December 24, 2018 1:06 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

noooooo

I bought 6 Jeeves and Wooster books I haven't read or 50p each, so that'll do me until new year.

surprised you didn't like Crashed, Aimless

It fell at an awkward moment when I didn't have the attention or stamina for it.

Yeah it’s pretty brutal

ive heard rumours t0oze is gonna get #MeToo’d

A pathetic year, if you discount Asterix and books abandoned (I will finish the Lispector story collection before 2020 is out):
Michel Tournier - The Erl King.
John Preston - A Very English Scandal.
Samanta Schweblin - Fever Dream.
Ottessa Moshfegh - Eileen.
Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Ottessa Moshfegh - Homesick for Another World.
PG Wodehouse - Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves.
Christopher Hill - The World Turned Upside Down.
Brian Phillips - Impossible Owls.
Yukio Mishima - The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea.

Of this lot, the Erl King was the most intense, Eileen had the most powerful single image (frozen vomit) and Wodehouse had the best dialogue ("Blast all vegetables!").

I've read The Door this year as well, but couldn't accept the whiny narrator's near-religious obsession for Emerence, who was a very human character after all, a force of nature with qualities and flaws. The relation between them also became excessive or overdramatic in the climax. I do like books with dog characters (the Bulgakov <3 <3 <3).

Calumerio, if you started the year with Erl King I can see why you'd need some time to recover from the PTSD

Yes, with hindsight, a string of Wodehouse should have followed, as a mental sorbet. I think Fever Dream and Eileen felt mild in a way that they would otherwise not have.

My year probably best summed up by the fact that early on I started diligently updating a goodreads page for 2018, but it hasn't been updated since June lol - so everything after the koja anthology is from memory or from my audible history

Thomas Bernhard, Correction
Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You
Maggie Nelson, Bluets
Trey Ellis, Platitudes
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
William S Burroughs, Junky
Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan
Jennifer Egan, Look at Me
Joanna Walsh, Vertigo
Chris Petit, The Butchers of Berlin
JG Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend*
Paul Beatty, The Sellout
Robert McCrum, Every Third Thought
Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen
Stephen King, Gwendy’s Button Box
Joe Hill, The Fireman
Stephen King, Lisey’s Story (audiobook)
Stephen King, Duma Key (audiobook)
Jack Ketchum, Stranglehold
Jack Ketchum, Off Season
Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door
Jack Ketchum, The Lost
James Joyce, Dubliners
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
Mark Frost, The List of Seven
Stephen King & Joe Hill, In The Tall Grass
Stephen King, The Outsider (audiobook)
Toast on Toast (audiobook)
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and other stories
David Peace, Patient X
Leïla Sebbar, Confessions of a Madman
Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books
David Lynch, Room to Dream (audiobook)
Gyula Krúdy, Sunflower
Alice Munro, Dear Life
Joy Williams, 99 Stories of God
Jack Ketchum, Offspring
Lydia Davis, Collected Stories (unfinished, had to go back to the library)
Kathe Koja (ed), Year’s Best Weird Fiction 2 (unfinished, couldn’t be arsed)
Stephen King, The Tommyknockers* (audiobook)
Stephen King, either Skeleton Crew or Nightmares and Dreamscapes* (audiobook, on youtube when I was off sick)
Limmy, That’s Your Lot (audiobook)
John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes* (audiobook)
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five* (audiobook)
Stephen King, Full Dark, No Stars (audiobook)
Stephen King, The Talisman* (audiobook)
HP Lovecraft, Necronomicon (audiobook of his complete stories, think I’d read about half before)
Thomas Bernhard, Yes
Cristina Rivera Garza, The Iliac Crest
Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments
Joe Hill, NOS4R2
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
Stephen King, Elevation
Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Ramsey Campbell, Strange Companions
Stephen King, The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger*
Stephen King, The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger (Revised Edition)
Stephen King, The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three*
Stephen King, The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands*
Stephen King, The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass*
Stephen King, The Dark Tower V: The Wolves of the Calla* (might stop at this one idk)
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre*
Mark Sinker (ed), A Hidden Landscape Once a Week (about halfway through this, expect to finish it at some point on Jan 1st)

Asterisks indicate rereads as per ilx film thread convention (but, confusingly, not ilx this thread convention). Worst were the McCrum and some of the Kings & Ketchums, most of the rest I liked or loved

Add to my tally:
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Jerome Jerome - Three Men in a Boat
P. G. Wodehouse - Uncle Fred in the Springtime

And I picked up the second Folio classique volume of Comte of Monte-Cristo and that's what I'm reading.

I expected to really love Jerome but had trouble keeping my eyes on the page. Maybe I was just tired.

I read about 105 books in 2018, including a few second or third reads (The Waves), but these five new ones were best.

I expected to really love Jerome but had trouble keeping my eyes on the page. Maybe I was just tired.

― jmm, Monday, 31 December 2018 16:15 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i love my reading, i could watch it all day etc

Christopher Barzak - The Love We Share Without Knowing
Philippa Pearce - Tom's Midnight Garden
Jaroslav Kalfar - Spaceman of Bohemia
David Zindell - Neverness
Thomas Tryon - Harvest Home
Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar
Paul Park - Soldiers of Paradise
Paul Park - Sugar Rain
Paul Park - The Cult of Loving Kindness
Penelope Lively - Going Back
M. John Harrison - Viriconium Nights
M. John Harrison - In Viriconium
H. P. Lovecraft - The Shadow Out of Time
H.M. Hoover (RIP) - The Shepherd Moon

I gave up on Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia (stodgy/sexy Thoreauvean utopia) after 467 pages, but I might force myself to finish it in 2019. the sunk cost fallacy is a powerful motivator

This is all the fiction I read in 2018. Bolded titles are especially recommended. Some of the Dutch and German books haven't been translated in English, but I translated their titles for easier reading:

Gerard Reve, Werther Nieland
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Martha Batalha, The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao
Georges Perec, A Man Asleep
Verna B. Carleton, Back to Berlin: An Exile Returns
Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone
Maarten van der Graaff, Worms and Angels
Nikos Kazantzakis, Christ Recrucified
Jason Matthews, Red Sparrow
Jane Harper, The Dry
Maurits Mok, The Underground
Jason Matthews, Palace of Treason
Frank Martinus Arion, Double Play
Dennis Lehane, Since We Fell
Graeme Macrae Burnet, His Bloody Project
Stefan Brijs, The Angel Maker
Dan Simmons, Song of Kali
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
Robert Franquinet, Quicksand
Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl
Juli Zeh, Unterleuten
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
James Herbert, The Fog
T.E.D. Klein, The Ceremonies
Frans Coenen, Sunday Rest
Simon Vestdijk, Mr. Visser's Trip to Hell
Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart
Joost Zwagerman, Gimmick!
Peter Terrin, Post mortem
Stuart Turton, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
A.J. Finn, The Woman in the Window
Gerard Reve, The Evenings

only 1 more than last year...

As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner
Julia and the Bazooka — Anna Kavan
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House — Michael Wolff
Nature Documentary: Poems — Noah Cicero
Solaris — Stanislaw Lem
McGlue — Ottessa Moshfegh
Steps — Jerzy Kosinski
The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin
Twelve — Nick McDonell
An Expensive Education — Nick McDonell
Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change — Tao Lin
All About Love: New Visions — bell hooks
Natural Causes — Barbara Ehrenreich
The Breast — Philip Roth
The Seagull — Anton Chekhov
I Married a Communist — Philip Roth
My Year of Rest and Relaxation — Ottessa Moshfegh
Room to Dream — David Lynch and Kristine McKenna
The Chapo Guide to Revolution — Chapo Trap House
F*cked — Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson
The Ghost Writer — Philip Roth
Fear: Trump in the White House — Bob Woodward
Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë
The Zap Gun — Philip K. Dick
In the Blink of an Eye — Walter Murch
If Beale Street Could Talk — James Baldwin
That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound — Daryl Sanders
I Might Regret This — Abbi Jacobson
Notes on the Cinematograph — Robert Bresson
The Red and the Blue — Steve Kornacki
The Elementary Particles — Michel Houellebecq

I can remember reading, for the first time:

Paul Beatty, THE SELLOUT
Jonathan Lethem, MORE ALIVE AND LESS LONELY
Jonathan Lethem, THE FERAL DETECTIVE
Jonathan Lethem and Karl Rusnak (writers), OMEGA: THE UNKNOWN
Henry Roth, CALL IT SLEEP
Terry Eagleton, RADICAL SACRIFICE
Colm Toibin, MAD, BAD, DANGEROUS TO KNOW

All the above were good in their ways. Toibin the shallowest as a book, I suppose. Beatty a challenging blast. JL's occasional essays terrific. His new novel a return to form. His comic book thoughtful, artful, poignant. Roth the longest read but worthwhile. TE maybe coasting but can still make every other sentence an aphorism.

I might manage to read more books for the first time in 2019.

Books I started, read about a third, but did not finish:

Stoner, John Williams

― A is for (Aimless), Monday, December 24, 2018 1:06 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

noooooo

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Tuesday, December 25, 2018 9:39 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Mr. Jaq finished reading Stoner aloud to me on New Year's Eve. It felt a fitting end to a brutal year.

Here's wot I read, with * for favourites and ** for super bingo classics.

No real disappointments, but The Hobbit was a bit of a letdown (classic first half, mostly tedious second).

Amber Spyglass
Five Little Pigs
Offshore
Exit West
Faithful Place *
The Jewish Joke
My Brilliant Friend *
The Examined Life
The Big Sleep **
A Little History of Philosophy
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
Lords and Ladies *
The Pursuit of Love *
A Sting in the Tale *
Zuckerman Unbound
Leviathan Wakes
The Switch
La Belle Sauvage
The Three Musketeers **
The Day of the Doctor *
The Hot Rock
Thunderball
Asymmetry *
Uncle Fred in the Springtime
In a Lonely Place
Manhattan Beach *
The Hobbit
Traitorous Purse
The Story of a New Name **
How to Stop Brexit
Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
Right Ho Jeeves
Between Therapist and Client

Wins - did you like any of the Ketchum books especially?

Unregistered - I'm very much looking forward to Zindell, Park and MJ Harrison, any thoughts?

here's mine

Isis & Corrick (editors) Drowning In Beauty
Sebastian Wolfe (editor) - Little Book Of Horrors
Robert Aickman (editor) - Fontana Book Of Great Ghost Stories vol.1
Clark Ashton Smith - Collected Fantasies vol.1
William Hope Hodgson - Collected Fiction vol.1
Farah Rose Smith - The Visitor
Farah Rose Smith - The Almanac Of Dust
Farah Rose Smith - Eviscerator
Jayaprakash Satyamurthy - Weird Tales Of A Bangalorean
Jayaprakash Satyamurthy - A Volume Of Sleep
Karin Tidbeck - Jagannath
Aliette De Bodard - The Citadel Of Weeping Pearls
Aliya Whiteley - The Beauty
Tanith Lee - Tempting The Gods
MR James - Collected Ghost Stories
HP Lovecraft - Call Of Cthulhu (embarrassed how late I'm coming to some of these, I've had a lot of this stuff for well over a decade)

((nonfiction))
Broderick & Di Filippo - Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

((comics))
Ibrahim R Ineke - Eloise

Also read about eight books I haven't finished yet.

I had much reduced year I think, probably down to a reduced commute and more other distractions. Most of these seem to have been read out in the park, during the very long, very hot British summer. I seem to have read virtually nothing from Jan-Mar and Oct-Dec.

George Eliot – Middlemarch
Filip Springer – History of a Disappearance
Elif Batuman – The Idiot
Robert Musil – The Confusions of Young Torless
Denis Johnson – Tree of Smoke
Eimear McBride – A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing
Dan Hancox – Inner City Pressure
Ross Raisin – A Natural
Jon McGregor – Reservoir 13
William Gass – Omensetter’s Luck
Iris Murdoch – The Sea, The Sea
Ann Quin – Three
Nicole Krauss – Forest Dark
Thomas Pynchon – Vineland
Olivia Sudjic - Sympathy
John Updike – Rabbit Redux
Rosie Snajdr – The Hypocritical Reader
Guy Gunaratne – In Our Mad And Furious City
Will Eaves – Murmur
Alvaro Enrique – Sudden Death
Tim Weiner – Legacy of Ashes
Richard Ford – The Sportswriter
Mike McCormack – Solar Bones

how was Omensetter's Luck?

it's been a loooong time but I remember omensetter's luck being an odd one in that he hasn't yet gone full pomo as he would in his later two novels, it's strange/"difficult" but in a way that's more in line with something like Faulkner - iirc the thing that felt the most gassian to me was the character names (that and the fact that he chose to set it in 1890s Ohio because it was a place & time he knew nothing about, and wrote it without doing any research lol)

Robert, I'd hesitate to use the word "like"; you realise pretty quickly that ketchum isn't really trying to scare you so much as make you feel sick in your soul from relentless hopelessness and ugliness. This is most effective in the extremely fucked up and sad the girl next door, apparently based on a true case; but even with something like off season, which from its schlocky urban-legend cannibal hillbilly premise (not to mention a bunch of hilariously gratuitous sex scenes at the start) seems like it'll be this fun gory survival horror but is just grim and stomach-turning in its unpleasantness. Or the lost, a very tight thriller of JDs run amok in the 60s that ends with a really disgusting and racist prison rape fantasy - I have a feeling JK's politics were probably quite reactionary from reading these.

Those three are all pretty good tho, but after a while I was like ok I pretty much know what to expect from this guy now: extreme violence committed against (or perpetrated by) children, a parallel narrative of a world-weary ineffectual cop who arrives too late to save the day, birching (this is just a weirdly specific thing to keep showing up again and again, it's a bit yikes) - and the writing quality gets worse in the later books I read. Stranglehold is atrocious, manipulative tripe.

His short story "the box" is really good imo.

Also, as usual I missed a couple of books off my list: I also read out are the lights by Richard Laymon and our house by louise candlish. I found the Laymon on the "take a book, leave a book" shelf in our launderette and got excited because it has the half-remembered story I posted about here and later tried to look up but couldn't find any evidence that any such story existed. Laymon's an "extreme" horror merchant but much sillier than ketchum, all action and dialogue, one-sentence paragraphs and massive type, you can read a book of his in a couple of hours. The Candlish was me getting suckered by marketing, it was promoted with the hashtag #THATlastline & I was curious. It was ok, ymmv depending on how much you care about the anxieties of homeowners, the last line was completely unremarkable.

I've never been in a hurry to read Laymon as he's particularly known for gratuitous rape scenes but I feel obligated to try a few.

Girl Next Door and Off Season are the Ketchum fan favorites (haven't read any myself). I really don't know much about Ketchum's politics but he isn't one of those writers whose fans swing right or left.
There's a decent summary and biographical info in these links.

https://thebedlamfiles.com/commentary/jack-ketchum-1946-2018/
https://thebedlamfiles.com/nonfiction/book-of-souls/

The first piece is “Henry Miller and The Push,” a memoir of Ketchum’s mercifully brief 1970s-era tenure as a New York literary agent, with clients that included his longtime hero Henry Miller. After pushing an old woman to the ground in a rush to catch a taxi, an act that shocked him as much as it did the woman he pushed, Ketchum became determined to quit his job immediately—but not until after meeting his idol face to face. The tale’s final pages lovingly detail that meeting, with Henry Miller registering as “a living fucking saint.” I’ve read other recollections of Miller that paint a far less rosy picture, but Ketchum’s claims are persuasive. Certainly his account demonstrates the enormous influence Henry Miller had on Ketchum’s life and writing, starting with the title of the book under discussion, which was evidently inspired by that of Miller’s BOOK OF FRIENDS.

I never even heard of Ketchum until early last year when I went to this annual recital/birthday party given by a flamenco guitarist and he mentioned various friends who had recently passed including Jack Ketchum and Billy Joel's piano teacher Morton Estrin.

I loved Omensetter's Luck, but yes it did remind me more of Faulkner than anything by Barth or Gaddis or Pynchon, which was what I'd been expecting.

I’ve told the “what fun do monks have?” joke irl

Xp I shouldn’t make assumptions about politics really as I know horror is often about pushing those kinds of buttons. Re ketchum’s career as an agent, didn’t he use that to get an author signed who turned out to be himself under a pseudonym or something?