What did you read in 2020?

Didn't get through nearly as many pages as I would have liked this year, the result of new homeownership and a hundredfold increase in job stress cutting into reading time. But I also managed to take down some big game that I'd been after for a while like Dune, Ducks Newburyport and starting the Caro LBJ bios, so all in all a good year I suppose.

Banjo - Claude McKay
Dune - Frank Herbert
Beastie Boys Book
Actual Air - David Berman
Ducks, Newburyport - Lucy Ellmann
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland - Patrick Radden Keefe
Ward Six & Other Stories - Anton Chekhov
The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco
Alice Munro - Runaway
The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock - Charles White
The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo - Germano Almeida
The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson vol 1) - Robert Caro
Waiting - Ha Jin
Heart of a Dog - Mikhail Bulgakov
Wanderer - Sterling Hayden
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea - Yukio Mishima
Sister Carrie - Theodore Dreiser
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War - Tony Horwitz
And A Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails - Wayne Curtis
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
33 1/3: Tim Maia Racional Vols. 1 & 2 - Allen Thayer

The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes — Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Queer — William S. Burroughs
Hollywood Babylon — Kenneth Anger
Journey to the End of the Night — Louis-Ferdinand Céline
A Girl’s Got to Breathe: The Life of Teresa Wright — Donald Spoto
Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right — Michael Brooks
Death in Venice — Thomas Mann
I Curse the River of Time — Per Petterson
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said — Philip K. Dick
Tonio Kröger — Thomas Mann
Woodcutters — Thomas Bernhard
America — Jean Baudrillard
Vagablonde — Anna Dorn
The Crying of Lot 49 — Thomas Pynchon
Despair — Vladimir Nabokov
The Theater and its Double — Antonin Artaud
Death in Her Hands — Ottessa Moshfegh
Antkind — Charlie Kaufman
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography — Roland Barthes
Fraternity — Benjamin Nugent
Querelle de Brest — Jean Genet
The People, No — Thomas Frank
The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution — Scott Eyman
Rage — Bob Woodward
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls — Peter Biskind
Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford — Scott Eyman
V. — Thomas Pynchon

Claude Chabrol: Interviews — Christopher Beach
Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius — Christian Braad Thomsen
John Ford: Interviews — Gerald Peary
America in the Movies — Michael Wood
Daddy — Emma Cline
The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me — Lillian Gish
The Jakarta Method — Vincent Bevins
home body — Rupi Kaur
Correction — Thomas Bernhard
Death on the Installment Plan — Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Holy shit, how do you all find the time:

Gravity's Rainbow
Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983

something on one of these lists set off a memory so I logged into the bad and hated goodreads and sure enough, I don't know how every year I manage to miss something off but this year I also read a book for her by bridget christie - I always have a few of this sort of book that I read in a year so I can get rid of them & make space. The christie was... okay, I feel like the shows it was pulling from might have been better. ppl are very anti humour books but I should say the ayoade and dril books I read both made me laugh a lot

how do you all find the time

it's partly favorable circumstances, partly a matter of making time

Dickens - Great Expectations
Dickens - Hard Times
Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
Salinger - Nine Stories
Salinger - Franny & Zooey
Salinger - Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four

Holy shit, how do you all find the time:

Gravity's Rainbow

humblebrag hall of fame

lmfao

more time than ever this year

I'm at that point where reading feels like work because it literally is. These days I'd rather listen to music and play video games to unwind – merely browsing ILB is a source of stress tbh, whereas ILM remains evergreen. Anyway, I read less for non-academic purposes this year than I have in a very long time, which probably bespeaks a mild-ish burn-out.

Most non-work-related reading is 'reading for pleasure'. If reading gives you no pleasure and your pleasure lies elsewhere, it only makes sense to gravitate in that direction and away from books for a while.

It's a classic case of having one thing you love semi-ruined by the need to eke out a living through it, although I'm sure it will pass sooner or later. Perhaps I wouldn't enjoy music as much if I were a musician or a professional critic or a musicologist.

Apparently I didn't do much in 2020 except read.

FICTION

Arlen, Hell! Said the Duchess
Asimov, The Caves of Steel
Bachman (King), The Long Walk
Banville, Snow
Beckford, Vathek
Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book
Bester, The Demolished Man
Blackburn, A Beastly Business
Buchan, Witch Wood
Campbell, Born to the Dark
Campbell, The Searching Dead
Campbell, The Way of the Worm
Carr, Poison in Jest
Carr, The Lost Gallows
Cather, My Antonia
Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Chase, Black Wings Has My Angel
Clement, Mission of Gravity
Collins, The Moonstone
Davidson, The Chelsea Murders
Dickson (Carr), Death in 5 Boxes
Dickson (Carr), The Reader Is Warned
Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
Dumas, The Fencing Master
Gardner, 14 Perry Mason novels
Hand, Wylding Hall
Knight, The Fungus
Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
Machen, The Great God Pan, and The Inmost Light
Machen, The Red Hand
Machen, The Three Imposters
Machen, The White People
Manchette, Fatale
Manchette, The Prone Gunman
Manchette, Three to Kill
Merritt, Burn Witch Burn!
Merritt, Creep, Shadow!
Merritt, Dwellers in the Mirage
Peacock, Nightmare Abbey
Pushkin (tr. Nabokov), Eugene Onegin
Rogers, The Red Right Hand
Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Simenon, 17 Maigret novels
Stone, Dog Soldiers
Straub, Ghost Story
Sturgeon, More Than Human
Thomas, Briarpatch
Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Turgenev, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album
Wallace, The Fellowship of the Frog
Yurick, The Warriors

NON-FICTION

Adamic, Dynamite!
Anderson, The Realness of Things Past
Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen
Borges, Selected Non-Fiction
Chambers, The Campaigns of Napoleon
Clute, The Darkening Garden
Dregni, Rockabilly
Ducrot and Todorov (eds.), Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language
Edwards, The Golden Age of Murder
Faivre, Western Esotericism: A Concise History
Gleeson, Judo Inside Out
Hale, Cool Town
Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848
Horning, Chasing Sound
Juniper, Wabi Sabi
King, Danse Macabre
Lively, Oleander, Jacaranda
Miyazato, Okinawa Den Gojuryu Karate-do
Monleon, A Specter Is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic
Motobu, My Art and Skill of Karate
Nigten, Recorded Reflections
Sinker (ed.), A Hidden Landscape Once a Week
Standage, The Victorian Internet
Tosches, King of the Jews

having one thing you love semi-ruined by the need to eke out a living through it

one big reason why I never sought to work in a bookstore or library. i avoided academia, too, for somewhat similar reasons (but the enormous USA glut of advanced degree holders all looking for the same jobs was an even bigger deterrent).

You'll never know for sure, and neither will I, but it sounds like you made the right call from where I'm standing!

had no idea there was a dril book, thats going to straight the top of the list

There are two!

The first one is just a compilation of the tweets aiui, this is a bit more like a conventional tie-in humour book but the dril voice is v consistent in it

I found that working in a bookstore didn't dampen my love of reading, despite what Orwell says; it actually helped because I had to go through bins of donated books and I could take home any that were too beat up or obscure to sell. And there was at least one regular customer who had similar tastes in books and would lend me things he thought I'd like.

Hit the magic 52! That's with reading for about half an hour almost every night. Did not finish two or three including Ducks, Newburyport - good, but too much. Thanks to Daniel_Rf for his polls without which I may never have discovered the memorable Lud-in-the-Mist and The Black Spider, my pick of the year.

The Testaments - Margaret Atwood
Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo
Kudos - Rachel Cusk
Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor
Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong - Angela Saini
Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Big Jump - Leigh Brackett
Free Falling - Lois Mcmaster Bujold
Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones
Agent of Change - Shannon Lee & Steve Miller
Ancestral Night - Elizabeth Bear
The Giant's House - Elizabeth McCracken
The Black Spider - Jeremias Gotthelf
Infinite Powers - Steven Strogatz
2312 - Kim Stanley Robinson
Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout
Excellent Women - Barbara Pym
Superior: The Return of Race Science - Angela Saini
The Liars Club - Mary Karr
The Outside - Ada Hoffman
Nudibranch - Irenosen Okojie
Beneath the World, a Sea - Chris Beckett
Less than Angels - Barbara Pym
The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Middlemarch - George Eliot
People in Trouble - Sarah Schulman
Beasts - John Crowley
Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell
A Memory Called Empire - Arkady Martine
Exciting Times - Naoise Dolan
Reasons to be Cheerful - Nina Stibbe
The Deep - John Crowley
The Witchfinder's Sister - Beth Underdown
Olive, Again - Elizabeth Strout
That Thing around your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Our Spoons Came from Woolworths - Barbara Comyns
On Immunity - Eula Bliss
Love, Again - Doris Lessing
Elizabeth is Missing - Emma Healey
Primeval and Other Times - Olga Tokarczuk
The Lesson - Cadwell Turnbull
Ka - John Crowley
Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell
The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories vol 2 - Various
Educated - Tara Westover
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
400 Billion Stars - Paul J McAuley
Virtuoso - Yelena Moskvich
Transcendent Kingdom - Yaa Gyasi
Lud-in-the-Mist - Hope Mirrlees

> The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories vol 2

shit me, 17 volumes of these.

How was the Lee & Miller, Chris Beckett and McAuley?

shit, people read these lists! Lee & miller: rather facile space adventure romance; Beckett: better, shades of roadside picnic and annihilation but with a few more human characters than either of those; Mcauley: a bit planetbound given the title and handwavey in places but not bad for a debut, will try his latest next.

shit me, 17 volumes of these.

ikr, just trying to find some good non mr james ghost stories. only one in this volume.

Fiction:
Kurt Tucholsky - Castle Gripsholm
Elizabeth Bowen - The House In Paris *
Homer - The Odyssey (tr. Fagles)
Sally Rooney - Normal People
George Saunders - Civilwarland in Bad Decline
Multatuli - Max Havelaar
Driss Chraibi - The Simple Past
Daniel Defoe - Journal of the Plague Year
Albert Camus - The Plague ^
Michel Houellebecq - Submission
Thomas Mann - Dr Faustus +
Samuel Beckett - Malone Dies ^
Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles ^*
Jenny Offill - Weather
Willa Cather - Song of the Lark
Natalia Ginzburg - Valentino and Sagittarius *
Natalia Ginzburg - Happiness, As Such
Charles Portis - True Grit
Walter Kempowski - Marrow and Bone
William Faulkner - Selected Short Stories (Modern Library ed.)
Nell Zink - Doxology
Eric Vuillard - The Order of the Day
Nikolai Leskov - Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories *
Guido Morselli - Dissipatio H.G.

Nonfiction:
James and Kay Salter - Life is Meals
Mara Leveritt - Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three
J. Huizinga - The Waning of the Middle Ages
Max Weber - Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures
Ben Sonnenberg - Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy
Thomas Nagel - The View from Nowhere *
Daisy Dunn - The Shadow of Vesuvius: a Life of Pliny

Poetry:
Michael Hofmann - One Lark, One Horse *
Michael Hofmann - Approximately Nowhere
Rabindranath Tagore - Collected Poems and Plays +

* highly recommended
+ didn't finish
^ a re-read

> Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

Any good? Was the only thing that jumped out at me from this month's Kindle monthly deal, probably because you're the second person to mention it this week (and also, y'know, Piranesi)

I mentioned it in the sf thread: ThReads Must Roll: the new, improved rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread - in short, meh, but others have raved about it.

Still full price on the kobo site at the mo, will see if that changes. It's not like I don't have 2 years of reading in my to-do list anyway.

Without a daily commute, I lost a lot of my reading time this year. I also got bogged down for quite a while in Antony Beevor's mammoth history of the Second World War, something way outside my normal areas of interest; I got about half way through but eventually gave up out of sheer boredom. At least I discovered that military history - descriptions of troop formations, weaponry, manoeuvres etc etc - is really not my thing.

Nobody's Looking at You: Essays - Janet Malcolm 3/5
Cards on the Table - Agatha Christie 3/5 (Poirot)
Rusty Brown - Chris Ware 5/5
The Embedding - Ian Watson 3/5
The Palace of Eternity - Bob Shaw 2/5
Non-Stop - Brian Aldiss 4/5
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 4/5
Tau Zero - Poul Anderson 2/5
The Drowned World - J G Ballard 4/5
Inverted World - Christopher Priest 4/5
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury 2/5
Make Room! Make Room! - Harry Harrison 4/5
The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham 4/5 (this was surprisingly grim for a 'cosy catastrophe', but maybe it just seemed that way because it was what I was reading when we went into lockdown)
The Final Programme - Michael Moorcock 4/5 (Jerry Cornelius)
Venus Plus X - Theodore Sturgeon 3/5
The Mysterious Affair at Styles - Agatha Christie 4/5 (Poirot)
A Mirror for Observers - Edgar Pangborn 3/5
Diary of a Man in Despair - Reck-Malleczewen 4/5
The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndham 4/5
The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: 14th series - Lionel Davidson (ed) 3/5
Groo: Fray of the Gods - Aragones & Evanier 2/5
Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess 3/5
What Bloody Man is That? - Simon Brett 3/5 (Charles Paris)
A Series of Murders - Simon Brett 3/5 (Charles Paris)
The Dark Descent 1: The Color of Evil - David G Hartwell (ed) 4/5
The Dark Descent 2: The Medusa in the Shield - David G Hartwell (ed) 4/5
The Dark Descent 3: A Fabulous, Formless Darkness - David G Hartwell (ed) 4/5
Essential Avengers Vol 6 - Steve Englehart et al 4/5
Paul Goes Fishing - Michel Rabagliati 4/5
Orbitsville - Bob Shaw 3/5
Essential Avengers Vol 7 - Englehart et al 3/5
A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald - Errol Morris 3/5
Dubliners - James Joyce 5/5
The Year of the Quiet Sun - Wilson Tucker 4/5
The Night Fire - Michael Connelly 3/5 (Bosch/Ballard)
The Queen's Gambit - Walter Tevis 5/5

I have Stalingrad on my to-do list. (And also Stalingrad)

(Beevor's and Grossman's)

The Wyndham books that as well known as those two are also worth reading. Kraken was one of my faves of 2019.

Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian (re-read)
Bob Dylan - Chronicles
Elizabeth Taylor - Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont *
William Cobbett - Rural Rides
Paul Muldoon - The End of the Poem
Kathleen Jamie - Surfacing
William Styron - Darkness Visible
WH Auden - About the House
Seamus Heaney - Death of a Naturalist
Colm Toibin - The Blackwater Lightship
Elizabeth Bishop - North & South
Sally Rooney - Normal People
Elizabeth Bishop - A Cold Spring
Hilary Mantel - The Mirror and the Light *
Susan Cain - Quiet
Iris Murdoch - The Bell *
Janet Frame - To the Island
Gideon Haigh - On Warne
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
Magda Szabo - The Door
Mick Herron - Slow Horses
Carol Shields - The Stone Diaries
Hera Lindsay Bird - S/T
Max Porter - Lanny
John Berger - Ways of Seeing *
Willa Cather - O Pioneers! *
Dan Simmons - Hyperion
Susan Hill - The Woman in Black (re-read)
Ben Lerner - Leaving the Atocha Station
Seamus Heaney - Finders Keepers
Ben Macintyre - The Spy and the Traitor
Anthony Powell - A Question of Upbringing
Ta-Nehisi Coates - Between the World and Me *
Michel Houellebecq - Platform (awful pish)
Michael Chabon - Kavalier and Clay
Alberto Manguel - A History of Reading
Peter Biskind - Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
David Toop - Ocean of Sound (re-read) *
Kay Redfield Jamison - An Unquiet Mind
Dhanveer Singh Brar - Beefy's Tune: Dean Blunt Edit
Arkady Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic
Rafia Zakaria - Veil
John le Carre - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Barry Lopez - Arctic Dreams *

Not a bad year. I got 'stuck' around July/August time and couldn't read anything. I'm slowly making my way back from there. I'd like to read more poetry in 2021 (and avoid canonical texts, if I can).

* = the ones that really stood out.

Every year I swear I'll keep a better list, and every year I end up going back into my camera, journals, and library receipts to construct my list. So, more later.

Unsurprisingly, most of the books on this list are poetry books— some of them are very long, some are only fifty pages or so. There are 99 books in all. A '*' means that I've previously read the book and this occasion was a re-read, a '%' means that I only read sections of the book. Much of this reading comes on top of other reading necessary for work, though there is some overlap.

Mark Johnson, Sham Refugia
Mark Johnson, 800 JKS
Ken Belford, Internodes*
Erica Hunt, Veronica: A Suite in X Parts
Tyrone Williams, As iZ
Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread Beat and Blood*
Fred Moten, All That Beauty
Simone Browne, Dark Matters
Dambudzo Marechera, Black Sunlight
Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger*
Dambudzo Marechera, Scrapiron Blues
Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk
Lawrence Giffin, Christian Name
Lawrence Giffin, Untitled, 2004
Lawrence Giffin, Plato's Closet
J.H. Prynne, The White Stones*
Rebecca Kosick, Labor Day
Kit Schluter, Pierrot's Fingernails
Andy Sterling, Who Own's Primo's?
Emma Brown Sanders, Fallow Channel
Clara B. Jones, /masculine nature/
J. Gordon Faylor, Want
J. Gordon Faylor, The Antoecians %
Brandon Shimoda, The Grave on the Wall
Ed Steck, An Interface for a Fractal Landscape
Julia Bloch, The Sacramento of Desire
Sesshu Foster, City of the Future*
Sesshu Foster, City Terrace Field Manual
Jules Boykoff, Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge
Sara Larsen, The Riot Grrrl Thing
Norma Cole, Spinoza in Her Youth
Norma Cole, Mars
Norma Cole, Moira
Norma Cole, Do The Monkey
Norma Cole, Scout
Norma Cole, Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside
Norma Cole, To Be At Music: Essays & Talks
Jean Day, The Triumph of Life
Jean Day, Daydream
Jean Day, Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium*
Jean Day, The Literal World
Jean Day, A Young Recruit
Jean Day, The I and the You
Lyn Hejinian, Positions of the Sun
Lyn Hejinian, Writing is an Aid to Memory
Lyn Hejnian, A Border Comedy
Lyn Hejinian, Happiness
Lyn Hejinian, Slowly
Lyn Hejinian and Carla Harryman, The Wide Road
Lawrence Brathwaite, Wigger*
Rob Budde, Declining America
Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Redactive*
Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Ogress Oblige*
Anna Gurton-Wachter, Utopia Pipe Dream Memory
Denise Riley, Selected Poems
Denise Riley, Say Something Back/Time Lived, Without its Flow
Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet
Camille Roy, Swarm
Tom Raworth, Collected Poems %
Barbara Guest, Selected Poems
Barbara Guest, The Türler Losses
Gail Scott, Heroine
Nicole Brossard, Fences in Breathing
Nicole Brossard, Picture Theory
Nicole Brossard, Mauve Desert*
Nicole Brossard, Notebook of Roses and Civilization
Nicole Brossard, French Kiss
Brossard, Scott, et al, Theory, a Sunday
P. Inman, Per Se
Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish*
Robert Majzels, Kharlamov's Ankle
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black
Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You: Stories
Toni Cade Bambara, The Sea Birds Are Still Alive
ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love*
Steve Orth, The Life and Times of Steve Orth
Terry Bisson, Fire on the Mountain
Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth*
Grégoire Chamayou, Drone Theory
Grégoire Chamayou, Manhunts
Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics
Achille Mbembe, On the Post-Colony
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts
William T. Vollman, Rising Up and Rising Down %
Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus %
Spinoza, Ethics %*
Sophia Dahlin, Natch
Carlos Lara, Like Bismuth When I Enter
Asiya Wadud, Syncope*
Gina Myers, Some of the Times
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother
Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation
Jeff Vandermeer, Authority
Jennifer Soong, Near, At
Joyelle McSweeney, Toxicon & Arachne
Chris Nealon, The Shore

and chapbooks or pamphlets by Zan de Parry, Caleb Beckwith, Claudia La Rocco, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Buffy Cain, Bruce Andrews, Amandine André, Blanche Brown, and probably a few that I am forgetting.

And of course, I forgot one, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Wild Peach. So, an even 100!

pvmic but I read 314 books: these were the best ones
https://i.ibb.co/0DVWGYm/Eqh825x-UUAM3-VEH.jpg

Do you...read them all, or are you including audiobooks?

I think there were maybe 4 audiobooks in that lot? But it's a lot faster to read a real book than listen to it as an audiobook.

314 - I have so many questions!

I...just don't understand how anyone can read that much without it being their job. Even if I counted the manuscripts and parts of books I read this past year, it would add up to maaaaybe 150.

So how do you do it?

Plotinus - The Enneads Stephen Mackenna translation
Francis Yates - Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
Petronius - The Satyricon and Seneca The Apocolocyntosis
Ronald Hutton - The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700
Greek Lyric Poetry trans M.L. West
Boccaccio - The Decameron G.H. McWilliam translation
Comte de Lautréamont - Maldoror and Poems (well I didnt finish the poems as they were so dispiriting and conservative)
Thomas Browne - Pseudodoxia epidemica ed by Kevin Killeen
A Man Very Well Studyed: New Contexts for Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed
Francis Bacon - The Major Works OUP
Italo Calvino - If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
John Guy - Tudor England
Lawrence Manley - Literature and Culture in Early Modern London
Arthur Kinney ed - Rogues Vagabonds Sturdy Beggars
Lucian - Chattering Courtesans and Other Sardonic Sketches
Eamon Duffy - The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580
Virgil - The Eclogues and The Georgics
Thomas Nashe - The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works
Paul Griffiths ed - Londinopolis, c.1500 - c.1750: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London
Ben Jonson - Complete Poems OUP
John Stubbs - John Donne: The Reformed Soul
Dekker, Jonson etc - The Roaring Girl and Other City Comedies
Juvenal - The Satires OUP
Roger Chartier - The Order of Books
Brian Ogilvie - The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe
Edward Topsell - The History Of Four-footed Beasts And Serpents And Insects
Ian Donaldson - Ben Jonson A Life
Pico Della Mirandola: Oration on the Dignity of Man
Michael Hulse ed - The New Poetry
Gail Kern Paster - The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare

Plotinus - The Enneads Stephen Mackenna translation

Admirable! No matter how I approach the Enneads of Plotinus, I can't seem to find a friendly entry. I've consigned it, sadly, to the group of universally acknowledged classics I just can't seem to scale.

Insomnia, laziness, working part time, don't watch much telly, a magic monkey's paw

If you could locate the remainder of the monkey, I bet there'd be hot bidding for the other three, plus any other parts you could subdivide it into.

Lucian I only know for a very early Sci fi precursor which I always meant to read but never did. I think it was a from the earth to the moon type thing from the time of Greece or Rome.

Glumdalclitch was the name of a witch's familiar in a story in House Of Mystery when I was a preteen. May have been borrowed from somewhere though of course.

James - you must be one of the few who reads books when lazy.

Glumdalclitch was the name of the girl who owned Gulliver as a pet when he was among the Brobdingnagians.

Oh right. Yeah that rings a bell.

James, we don't own a television, so I also have that advantage. Still boggles my mind.

I read about 150 - these are my favourite 25 or so:

Simone de Beauvoir - Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Graham Swift - Waterland
Jack London - John Barleycorn
Albert Camus - The First Man
Gitta Sereny - Into That Darkness
Alberto Moravia - Conjugal Love
Hjalmar Soderberg - Doctor Glas
Paul Bailey - Chapman's Odyssey
Ernesto Sabato - The Tunnel
Sven Lindqvist - The Dead Do Not Die
Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood
Iris Murdoch - The Black Prince
Naguib Mahfouz - Palace Walk: Cairo Trilogy 1
Robin Maugham - Escape from the Shadows
Beverley Nichols - A Case of Human Bondage
Elias Canetti - The Tongue Set Free
José Saramago - Blindness
Leon Goldensohn - The Nuremberg Interviews
Charles Jackson - The Lost Weekend
Washington Irving - The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs Of An Anti-Semite
Emmanuel Bove - My Friends
Stephen Vizinczey - In Praise of Older Women
David Kidd - Peking Story
Russell Baker - Growing Up
Frank Tallis - The Incurable Romantic

John Farris - When Michael Calls
Carsten Jensen - We, The Drowned
R.W. Spryszak - Edju
William Morris - The Water of the Wondrous Isles
Andrew Michael Hurley - The Loney
Bernard Taylor - The Moorstone Sickness
Colin Wilson - The Mind Parasites
Colin Wilson - Super Consciousness: The Quest for the Peak Experience
Brian Aldiss - Hothouse
H. G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
Marta Randall - Islands
E.F. Benson - The Horror Horn And Other Stories
J. P. Martin - Uncle
Daphne du Maurier - Jamaica Inn
Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca
Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan
Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodríguez - Locke & Key (Vols. 1-3)
Mark Helprin - Winter's Tale
(dnf yet - I'm setting it aside for a while because I can only tolerate so much wide-eyed wonder in one calendar year. currently reading Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique tales)

+ Michelle Paver - Wakenhyrst

terrible year for reading, in what i thought would be a good year. factors:

• I thought covid lockdowns would be a positive space for productive thinking, reading and writing, and it started out that way but i got into bad habits, and it was like previous years but worse
• binge reading, comfort re-reading, unfinished books, relatively poor engagement with the books i did read
• shying away from emotional engagement with books because i found it too hard to unlock that area of myself. this meant i read a load of garbage basically

XX - Angela Chadwick (won an award, useful in that it made me realise I *really* don't like this sort of fiction)
All the Agatha Christie Poirots
All the Agatha Christie Miss Marples
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - JLC (reread)
A Perfect Spy - JLC (reread)
The Honourable Schoolboy - JLC (bad not good)
Mordew - Alex Pheby (a complicated indifference and mild dislike, also combined with the fact that the last book i really disliked was also galley beggar press made me wonder whether they've got a house style that i don't like. of this sort of book, reading Gormenghast for the world building and Mason and Dixon for the style. Oddly like reading a computer game at times. Not entirely without interest).
Reinhardt's Garden - Mark Haber (did not like)
Infinite Detail - Tim Maughan (liked mildly)
An Indifference of Birds - Richard Smyth (sort of liked i guess)
Theory of Bastards - Audrey Schulman (enjoyed but then ran out of interest)
The Four Books - Yan Lianke (struggled with but it's an interesting perspective on chinese history, and an interesting set of aesthetic and storytelling choices)
We Are Made of Diamond Stuff - Isabel Waidner (enjoyed, it was better than better books, fluid, interested in the scutty side of UK, sexually mutable)
The Black Swan - Nicholas Nassim Taleb (a weird brittle, bombastic man, this book provides a lot of sensible thinking around downside risk and not being stupidly scientistic about stuff. Taleb insistent, not without a certain amount of charm for an essentially charmless man, on 'Levantine Philosophy' as a thing.
The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi (after a reading a load of business type books this organic science fiction was like taking acid, and though that initial feeling wore off, and i got a bit bored, it remains an interesting portrayal of a city under siege and no characters really being able to fulfil their aims - agency is an interesting question in it. interesting that Bacigalupi regularly struggled writing this. It shows.)
Dune 1-3 - Frank Herbert (re-read)
The War of the Poor - Eric Vuillard (epistemically weird in the same vein, but much less good imo than Order of the Day. annoyingly thought provoking though with some good sentences and thoughts).
Anthony Price Stuff from Our Man in Camelot up to War Game. (all re-reads, didn't quite get to the '44 Vintage, a very weird somewhat pointless book. price's characters are all terrifically Tory, and like agatha christie's all go on about fucking tax the whole time).
Hag's Nook - John Dickson Carr (reread for about the 1000th time, total comfort reading)
Continued reading Jen Calleja, I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For (really enjoyed these short stories and looking forward to seeing more - believe there's a novel out this year)
The Liar's Dictionary - Eley Williams (oddly disappointing. lightweight, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. clearly a love letter to her partner, also nnabt. didn't enjoy it half as much as her short stories, but wondered if this is because i approached with the wrong expectations. still fun enough if you're looking for a light bagatelle. also wonder - see engagement point above - whether i missed some depths).
Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything (really good book on creating syllabuses, and how to learn and teach from them)
Exhalation - Ted Chiang (enjoyed these. right up my wheelhouse, so to speak. initially thought they might be a bit techbro, but have genuine emotional content and insight. very good).
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee (also enjoyed these essays - still interested to know why the table is not the table doesn't like him).
Because Internet: Understanding How Language Is Changing - Gretchen McCulloch (a relatively vanilla but interesting analysis of language usage on the internet and over the history of the internet. could have been terrible but is a good, clear set of thoughts about how our communications adapt to digital platforms and capabilities).
The Art and Craft of Feature Writing - William Blundell (almost as enjoyable reading the excerpts from pieces that are examples here as Blundell's thinking)
Casino Royale - Ian Fleming
Covering McKellen: An Understudy's Tale - David Weston (an entertaining enough luvvie account of a disastrous world tour under Trevor Nunn of Lear, with Ian McKellen. Written by his understudy.)
The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Tuchman (terrible theory behind it, but the general accounts of history are ok enough).
Like - AE Stallings (Curates egg of a poetry collection. some stuff very good indeed, some stuff seemed facile, but i'm terribly unpracticed at reading poetry and i may be approaching it a bit clumsily)
Against the Gods: The remarkable story of risk - Peter Bernstein (good)
The Story of the Stone vol 1 - Cao Xueqin (introduction, plus first book, currently a dnf but will be picking up later this year i hope)
Managing Britannia: Culture and Management in Modern Britain - Robert Protherough (dnf, part of my 'faster u fuckaz' obsession. this guy is v anti management bullshit and bullshit jobs, and tbh i'm not sure i agree and some of the tone these days is quite tedious imo, may write up further in thread)
The Accursed Share vol 1 - Georges Bataille (dnf, but keen to pick this up again, very enjoyable slightly ludicrous introduction, French theory at its finest - wild and boundary shifting assertions totally free of evidence. pure music to my ears)
How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking About Numbers - Tim Harford (a boring boring bastard imo, but sometimes right, and it's just about worth reading these things for #epistemic_health reasons)
Doctor Who: Day of the Doctor - Steven Moffat (almost unreadable in points of style, almost hysterical, immensely jarring, and totally incomprehensible to the extent that it replicated the experience of reading when seriously drunk. explained a lot about the tone of the TV programmes - tho i think moffat and indeed this episode is good not bad. dnf)
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (terrible awful garbage, maybe useful tips)
Clean: A Story of Addiction, Recovery and the Removal of Stubborn Stains - Michele Kirsch (really very good - funny and moving)
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes - Janet Malcolm (really excellent, nuanced approach of biography, death, testimony and memory)

sure there was more bits, stray fragments etc, but this covers it more or less i think

oh, the introduction and general content of Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food is wonderful.

oh and

Small Lives - Pierre Michon electrified me after a period of very tedious reading, reminding me the extraordinary perception and depths imaginative writing can have, really one of the most masterly writers there is at the moment. but i was so overcome with the intensity and richness of it, liking fotheringham-thomas, i had to put it down. it was like i was on acid, i was just going 'wow, this is just wow, man, you can see *everything*, and each word and sentence was mind-blowing with the consequence i just had to put it down because it was so full. last had this experience with Leskov. will definitely return this year for a less precious reading.

ledge! love that you liked lud-in-the-mist. what did you think of mrs palfrey at the Claremont? maybe you have already covered these things in the what are you reading thread. i've only been an intermittent visitor this year.

similarly if you posted on jocelyn brooke, no lime tangier, be interested to see what you thought.

Fizzles, tbh, it's just not my thing, but I also tend to have an issue with most mainstream queer stuff. It's just too middle class and polite for me.

(I also think he's a grifter).

on that subject, bit surprised to see no mention of real life by brandon taylor on anyone's list. i read it and thought it was very good on lab-based graduate school, with which i am tragically familiar, but was less sure about the relationship stuff.

Mrs Palfrey was fine, I have nothing to say against it and it had its moments but I couldn't really get on the same wavelength - I wonder if I have something of a blind spot for mid/mid-late female british lit fic given similar experiences with Pym, Lessing, Murdoch, even (gasp) Spark.

I bumped the 1926 poll thread hoping for your thoughts on lud-in-the-mist: Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1926

ah, so you did. will respond - agree on the 'fairy fruit as hard drug' bit though.

Similar to other weird preferences, I tend to shy away from "blistering coming of age story" hyperbole and stuff that's approved by the NY Times, at least as regards fiction. I find what passes for "mainstream" literary fiction these days to just bore me.

Non-fiction and memoirs? Different story, for some reason. I love and teach Kiese Laymon's "Heavy" all the time, for example.

Fizzles, tbh, it's just not my thing, but I also tend to have an issue with most mainstream queer stuff. It's just too middle class and polite for me.

(I also think he's a grifter).

for some reason i wanted to use the phrase “performative touchstones” wrt the grifter point - something about v neatly doing things that will earn gold stars. not fully formed.

I mean, Glück is nowhere near as well-known as he should be. Chee provides a blurb here: https://www.nyrb.com/products/margery-kempe?variant=29087445024820

That's the kind of thing I really love, Bob is an all-time hero and lovely person.

I think one of the things I dislike about Chee is that he basically learned everything from New Narrative and packaged it in a more marketable way, and there are some New Narrative people who should be much better known.