What did you read in 2019?

Lol every year I forget something itt - I finished Bodies of Summer by Martín Felipe Castagnet just the other day and still managed to omit it

My resolution is to read more - I started strong in 2019 but the year quickly went to shit and I was too busy and/or exhausted and/or drink to read much for a few months there - and to read longer books. Was given cancer ward for Xmas so will start there.

lol i started reading cancer ward a couple of years back and spent half the time thinking "what's this whiny goon actually making such a fuss about?"

then i got distracted by some nonsense i guess and misplaced it

All my time outside work until July was used almost entirely for catching up on sleep, and I forgot to start recording what I read until March, but here is my small list:

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
The Restraint of Beasts - Magnus Mills
The List - Moira Duff
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Hearing Trumpet - Leonora Carrington
Seeing Red - Lina Meruane
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? - Mindy Kaling
How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics - Michael Pollan
The Governesses - Anne Serre
Your Duck is My Duck - Deborah Eisenberg
The Red Parts - Maggie Nelson
Second Thoughts - Wilfred Bion
Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh
Crimson - Niviaq Korneliussen
The Maintenance of Headway - Magnus Mills
Supper Club - Lara Williams
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth - Chris Ware
Sleepless Nights - Elizabeth Hardwick
Whipping Girl - Julia Serano
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Conversations with Friends - Sally Rooney

Carrington, Maggie Nelson and Waugh leading the way out of that lot as favourites.

I didn't finish very much. Hoping next year will be more conducive to reading.

Alexandre Dumas – The Count of Monte-Cristo II
Marcel Proust – Sodom and Gomorrha
Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Karamazov Brothers
J. D. Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger – Franny and Zooey
P. G. Wodehouse – Very Good, Jeeves
Henry James – Washington Square
Richard Adams – Watership Down
J. R. R. Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings
Marcel Proust – The Prisoner
Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Demons
Germaine Bree – Marcel Proust and Deliverance From Time
Alfred Lansing – Endurance
Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

here you go. i'm reading more these days.

O'BRIEN at swim-two-birds [b]9.5 [so many glorious set-pieces but the bit where he goes for a bathroom break my god]
WILLIAMS stoner 7.5 [things that are boring but good amirite]
SPARK the prime of miss jean brodie 9 [she's a vicious one ffs, and all without hardly raising a finger]
GARNER the owl service 8 [the OG ancient-forces YA sensation]
BOLTON low country: brexit on the essex coast [was enjoying this but have left unfinished so no score assigned]
STANTON you're a bad man, mr gum 7.5 [kids' books are good books too!]
CARRINGTON the hearing trumpet 9.5 [seriously, you write ONE GODDAMN NOVEL and it's this good, what the hell leonora, you lived to like 94 and wrote one novel and it was this good, the cauldron scene fucking hell, also why hasn't this been made into a film yet, maybe the reprint will bring that about]
BOLANO 'the part about the critics' from 2666 [i give it 8 and promise to read 1 part a year henceforth]
MILLS the maintenance of headway 8.5 [BUS TIMETABLES THE NOVEL, the guy has the best punchlines in the business]
MILLS a cruel bird came to the nest and looked in 9.5 [might be his masterpiece, alongside restraint of beasts - a perfectly-imagined little comic realm with nothing extraneous and the most satisfyingly perplexing resolution]
SPARK four short stories compilation 7 [she's awesome innit, need to read more SPARK]
GUARESCHI don camillo's dilemma 8 [just the loveliest depictions of rural italian (dis)harmony; the devout traditionalists and godless commies as symbiotic frenemies; look it's hardly reinventing the wheel and at times a trifle retrograde but it's always wryly optimistic and i like that]
HARRISON all among the barley 9 [something from the contemporary bestseller shelves that, far from making me cringe at the superficial writing style, draws me in, weaves a gloriously stilted evocation of the lies that bind this country, and pulls the rug completely at the end - truly at the anti-pastoral vanguard of the pastoral explosion. only gets 9[/b] because i think she can do something even more ambitious]
COOPER the marbled swarm 8.5 [while gay s&m murder is the meat-stripped skeleton of this video nasty, there's something magical going on between the lines. not so much an unreliable narrator as one who's desperately trying to tell us what his truth really is, beyond all the transgression and the gore]
JACOB a late lark singing 9 [more of this below]
DARLING/BANERJEE weird maths 7 [a fine attempt to explain complex mathematics to laypeople and i love the tutor-with-student authorship, but a couple of things: it isn't for laypeople (i was able to understand most but certainly not all of it) and there's obviously more to say about all of its topics. a nice gateway]
ROBINSON housekeeping [in progress; no score assigned. v good so far though - really picks up after the first couple of chapters once the main dynamic is established, although the preamble serves a clear purpose]

despite the three 9.5s bringing that sweet timeless surreal brilliance, gonna award book of the year to NAOMI JACOB, whose A LATE LARK SINGING is the sort of wondrous discovery you can only make at a railway station's pick'n'mix bookshelf (see also: the SPARK compilation and the COOPER). JACOB was a born in yorkshire in 1884, grew up under victorian cultural duress, lived as a relatively open lesbian and wrote 70 books, of which this is a late work. it is little-known, but it does a few things i don't think i've seen before; it's in the lineage of dickens insofar as it's a morality tale about the hardships of a young victorian woman with a cruel husband and what appears to be a gallant wealthy admirer, but published in 1952 by someone who knew the dialect and culture intimately. it's able therefore to be quite daring, occasionally horrifying and brutally confrontational in its depiction of poverty & cruelty and its undisguised embrace of socialism & social justice. plus it's excellently-written, consistently exciting, and builds to an almighty moral quandary that threatens to devastate its protagonist right up until she is saved from having to make a decision by an unfortunate final-chapter cop-out that prevents me from assigning a yet higher score. and there's a (male) character who's obviously (but completely unspokenly) gay, which is nice & not really something many victorians not named oscar were keen to allude to. obviously utterly out of print but she is definitely the kind of semi-forgotten author i'd recommend hunting for

Bruno Schulz - The Street of Crocodiles
H. M. Hoover - Another Heaven, Another Earth
Leigh Brackett - Sea-Kings of Mars
Leigh Brackett - Queen of the Martian Catacombs
Doris Piserchia - Earthchild
Doris Piserchia - Spaceling
Doris Piserchia - Earth in Twilight
Doris Piserchia - Doomtime
Doris Piserchia - I, Zombie
Doris Piserchia - Blood County
William Sleator - House of Stairs
William Sleator - Singularity
Barry Hughart - Bridge of Birds
Ben Myers - The Gallows Pole
Daisy Ashford - The Young Visiters
Alan Dean Foster - Midworld
Alan Dean Foster - Nor Crystal Tears
Carsten Jensen - We, The Drowned
Barbara Newhall Follett - The House Without Windows
Robert Seethaler - A Whole Life
Horace Kephart - Our Southern Highlanders

Joshi, John Dickson Carr: A Critical Study
Knight, Slimer
Laing, The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck
Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly
McDowell, Blackwater
McDowell, The Amulet
Accelerando, Charles Stross
Mammoth book of sf stories by women, various
Slow River, Nicola Griffith
Galactic Derelict, Andre Norton
Hellspark, Janet Kagan
Pinion, Elizabeth Bear
Leigh Brackett - Sea-Kings of Mars
Leigh Brackett - Queen of the Martian Catacombs
Doris Piserchia - Earthchild
Doris Piserchia - Spaceling
Doris Piserchia - Earth in Twilight
Doris Piserchia - Doomtime
Doris Piserchia - I, Zombie
Doris Piserchia - Blood County
Barry Hughart - Bridge of Birds
Alan Dean Foster - Midworld

Opinions? I want to read some of these someday.

Joshi, John Dickson Carr: A Critical Study -- worth reading if you are already a fan of Carr, but I'd recommend Greene's biography more highly

Knight, Slimer -- fun trashy paperback-original horror, historically interesting for its introduction of genetic engineering tropes that have since been endlessly recycled; a novelized screenplay

Laing, The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck -- 1930s pulp horror written in Golden Age mystery style; it has a few unusually gruesome elements, but I didn't find it memorable

Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly -- an untouchable classic; Le Fanu is well-known but imo underrated; at his best, more frightening than M.R. James, and a far more innovative influence on subsequent horror

McDowell, Blackwater -- an essential six-book horror soap opera, refreshing as Southern Gothic that never fakes the Southern details; extra points for powerful feminist/queer vibes; a few terrifying scenes, but overall more weird than scary

McDowell, The Amulet -- ultra-black horror comedy that's mainly a succession of imaginative kills; good stuff, but if you want to read one volume of McDowell, a better choice is The Elementals, which is more frightening and closer to Blackwater in its queer/matriarchal themes

I was curious about the Carr study because Joshi can make baffling statements sometimes.

Gideon Wyck used to have a higher reputation but several recent readers have been disappointed, so I'm lowering its priority.

I love Le Fanu, he seems less formulaic and a better prose artist than James, but some say he has a higher percentage of dull stories. I'll see someday.

I wanted to start with McDowell's Elementals but somebody was championing Blackwater above all else recently.

Muriel Spark - The Driver's Seat
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark - The Girls of Slender Means
Albert Camus - L'Étranger
Charlotte Bronté - Jane Eyre
Anita Brookner - Hotel du Lac
Dan Hancox - Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime

My favourites were Jane Eyre and The Girls of Slender Means.

Tao Te Ching - Laozi 2/10

I love this rating.

my goodreads review was "i don't get it."

reminded taht I read the Jorma Kaukonen memoir Been So Long which I think must have been last year.
Would like to read similar from the other members, think I've read at least one of Grace's already.

Augusto Boal Theatre of the Oppressed too.

Enormously late but:
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea - Yuki Mishima
Ulrich Haarburste's Novel of Roy Orbison Wrapped in Clingfilm - Ulrich Haarburste
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson
Murmur - Will Eaves
The Spy and the Traior - Ben MacIntyre
White Jazz - James Ellroy
The Little Disturbances of Man - Grace Paley
Cromwell - CV Wedgwood
The Night Manager - John le Carré
The Bachelors - Muirel Spark
Mouthful of Birds - Samanta Schweblin
The Thirty Years War - CV Wedgwood
And the Wind Sees All - Gudmundur Andri Thorsson
I Think Therefore I Play - Andrea Pirlo
Maybe This Time - Alois Hotsching
The Tunnel - Ernesto Sabato
Chess - Stefan Zweig
The Continental Op - Dashiell Hammett
SPQR - Mary Beard
Reservoir 13 - Jon McGregor
The Line Becomes a River - Francisco Cantu