What did you read in 2018?

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?