What did you read in 2021?

I should say, too, that one of the reasons why my numbers are so high is that there are entries that are chapbooks— 10-20 page little things. I include them because sometimes, those little books add up to more than much longer books, in terms of impact and time spent reading.

Two small kids don't leave much time in the evening for any media but I read for on average maybe 45 minutes every night almost every night. I used to sometimes take a break between books, this is the first year I've pretty much read non stop.

I don't speed read but I am a quick reader. I might have sped read a couple of books that were rubbish but I to find out how they ended.

i often wake up to find i managed only a page and a half the night before.

mornings are more useful for me, and those 2-3am between sleeps times.

Mornings are my best, too— I can often read 30-50 pages of a novel during my breakfast and coffee time.

Poetry depends on the poems, really.

I should say, too, that one of the reasons why my numbers are so high is that there are entries that are chapbooks— 10-20 page little things. I include them because sometimes, those little books add up to more than much longer books, in terms of impact and time spent reading.

Most of my reading this year was rereads, which I don’t include in my total. Also read a lot of short stories (not included) and so basically my actual list of new reads is pretty short at this point, but I hope to read more next year.

The Blue Ticket - Sophie Mackintosh
There Are Little Kingdoms - Kevin Barry
Tomie- Junji Ito
Abandon The Old In Tokyo - Yoshihiro Tastsumi
Tokyo Girls Bravo - Kyoko Okazaki
The Water Cure - Sophie Mackintosh
Vox - Christina Dalcher
Normal Sheeple - Ross O’Carroll-Kelly (this run of reads and rereads inspired by this essay, which was one of the best things I read this year)
Operation Trumpsformation - Ross O’Carroll-Kelly
Braywatch - Ross O’Carroll-Kelly
Schmidt Happens - Ross O’Carroll-Kelly
The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndham
The Silent Woman - Janet Malcolm

I thought chapbooks were 25-75 pages. All the ones I've seen were.

Christine, they can be quite long, or quite short.

gyac, I don't really care what you think.

Seeing as how a 30 page chapbook could take my three days to get through and a whole novel could take me an afternoon, and with the same amount of time spent reading, idea that my list is "cheating" is bollocks.

Sorry, not clear in that post, but whatever.

Yes, your post offended me, because it's wrong.

another year of retirement, another ridiculous assortment

3 Nicholas Blake novels
6 Andrea Camilleri novels
4 John Dickson Carr novels
4 Donna Leon novels
18 Ross Macdonald novels (a reread of the Lew Archer series)
2 Giorgio Scerbanenco novels
3 Simenon novels (completing a reread of the Maigret series)
3 Manuel Vázquez Montalbán novels
2 Seishi Yokomizo novels

Bosco, Death Going Down
Boucher, Rocket to the Morgue
Bude, Death Makes a Prophet
Burton, The Secret of High Eldersham
Clarke, Childhood’s End
Crispin, The Moving Toyshop
Goethe (tr. Luke), Faust Part 2
Green, The Circular Study
Hendrix, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires
Jodorowsky & Moebius, The Incal
Joshi (ed.), American Supernatural Tales
King, Firestarter
Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
Lodwick, Brother Death
Matsumoto, A Quiet Place
Metcalfe, The Feasting Dead
Meyrink, The Golem
Millar, Fire Will Freeze
Millar, The Devil Loves Me
Priestley, Salt Is Leaving
Priestley, Saturn Over the Water
Shimada, Murder in the Crooked House
Stevens (Bennett), The Heads of Cerberus

Alter & Cosman, A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal
Barthes, Mythologies
Benshoff (ed.), A Companion to the Horror Film
Brotherstone & Lawrence, Scarred for Life: Volume One, The 1970s
Cohen, Pathways of Karate Development
Garth, Tolkien and the Great War
Green & Svith (eds.), Martial Arts in the Modern World
Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism
Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles
Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon
Joshi, Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, vols. 1 and 2
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Mol, Classical Fighting Arts of Japan
Nakasone & Mabuni, An Introduction to Karate-do
Popoff, Who Invented Heavy Metal?
Rée & Urmson (eds.), The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy, 3rd ed.
Said, Orientalism
Stendhal, Love
Stendhal, Memoirs of Egotism
Stendhal, Rome, Naples and Florence
Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood
Young & Schmidt, All Gates Open: The Story of Can

no lime Tangier - I love those books by Strindberg. Very underrated writer of prose.

I can't believe Table cheated with his list. Stand in the corner and think about what you've done.

Fwiw, I wish I *could* be less dissolute and more systematic in my reading (and listening) but I ping and bounce all over the bloody place and that seems to be that.

I'm currently at 30 or 31, but will wait until year-end to post my list. I'm hoping I can read maybe one more.

Arlie Russell Hochschild - Strangers In Their Own Land
Mark Yarm - Everbody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge
James Ellroy - The Big Nowhere
Yanis Varoufakis - Another Now
Mohsin Hamid - The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Roisin Kiberd - The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through The Internet
Garth Ennis - Preacher: Book 5
Mark Harris - Pictures At A Revolution:Five Movies and The Birth of New Hollywood
Thomas Ligotti - My Work Is Not Yet Done
Anne Rice - The Vampire Lestat

Patrick Wyman - The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance and Forty Years That Shook The World 1490-1530

Lolly Willowes (O052) - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson (R)
The Card - Arnold Bennett
Shift - Hugh Howey
The Owl Service - Alan Garner
Dark Entries - Robert Aickman (+)
Seeds Of Time - John Wyndham
Slade House - David Mitchell (+)
The Last Day of a Condemned Man - Victor Hugo
The Man Who Was Thursday - G K Chesterton
Autumn - Ali Smith
Bleak House - Charles Dickens (R)
Ramble Book - Adam Buxton
XX - Ryan Hughes
The Old Man And The Sea - Earnest Hemingway (+)
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
The Sea Wolf - Jack London
Inverted World - Christopher Priest
The Story Of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang
One Thousand Ships - Natalie Haynes
Amber Fury - Natalie Haynes
Alcestis - Euripides
Agamemnon - Aeschylus
Death’s End - Cixin Liu
Children Of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn
Driftglass - Sam Delany
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
24 Jigsaw - Ed McBain
The Monarch Of The Glen - Neil Gaiman
Black Dog - Neil Gaiman
Body In The Library - Agatha Christie
An Event In Autumn - Mankell
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) - Thomas Hardy (+)
The Castle Of Otranto - Horace Walpole
O009 Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock
1848 Mary Barton - Elizabeth Gaskell
Small Island - Andrea Levy
Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler (R) (+)
The Honjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo
Anna Of The Five Towns - Arnold Bennett (+)
Slaughterhouse V - Kurt Vonnegut (R)
Sketches By Boz - Charles Dickens

(R) = reread
(+) = favourites, probably

<3 thomas love peacock, though i seem to recall he doesn't come out particularly well from the portrait meredith painted of him in the egoist.

xposts: the strindbergs are a revisit in light of reading the very good lagercrantz biography. i should really read more of his plays than i have done, but it is his fiction/quasi-fiction that i find myself most drawn towards.

re the runs of similar authors mentioned above: i guess that's always been my method? whether genre, epoch, theme, whathaveyou... never really given it much consideration ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

like the Otranto i had nightmare abbey down as early horror and like the Otranto it was nothing of the sort so was mostly disappointed.

i do notice i had a few duplicate authors myself including 2 where i read them back to back.

ha, yeah: apart from some of his settings there is very little gothic/horror about tlp!

Remain in Love by Chris Frantz

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Dazed and Confused by Melissa Maerz

A History of Bones by John Lurie

Please tell us about these!

Also, koogs meant to post about ed mcbain on here---my local library shop suddenly has a ton of him; how is he?

he pretty much invented the ensemble cast police thing like homicide and NYPD blue and each book reads like an episode of one of those (and i would love to see the TV adaptations they did in the 50s). they are of their time though, so sexist and racist language ahoy. I've been reading them mostly in order and this was about the 20th and i don't plan on stopping. nice quick reads too.

(the Martin Beck books that were posted, Roseanne etc, are the cool Swedish cousin of these)

Books:

Fatal Subtraction: How Hollywood Really Does Business - Pierce O'Donnell & Dennis McDougal 2/5
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov (Pevear & Volokhonsky translation) 4/5
The Wine Dark Sea - Robert Aickman 4/5
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.- Arthur Conan Doyle 4/5
The Forever War - Joe Haldeman 4/5
Thirteen - Steve Cavanagh 2/5
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler 4/5
Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director - Patrick McGilligan 3/5
Cotters' England - Christina Stead 3/5
A Man Lay Dead - Ngaio Marsh 2/5
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology - Gordon Van Gelder (editor) 4/5
The Woman in the Window - A J Finn 1/5
The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood - Sam Wasson 3/5
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 4/5
Guardians of Time - Poul Anderson 3/5
Fair Warning - Michael Connelly 2/5
More Than Human - Theodore Sturgeon 3/5
England's Hidden Reverse - David Keenan 4/5
Elric - Michael Moorcock (Fantasy Masterpieces collection) 4/5
Red Harvest - Dashiel Hammett 4/5
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties - Tom O'Neill 4/5
Rosemary's Baby - Michael Newton (BFI Film Classics) 3/5
Rosemary's Baby - Ira Levin 4/5
Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser - Harriet Vyner 4/5
At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror - H P Lovecraft 3/5
Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell - John Preston 3/5
The Law of Innocence - Michael Connelly 3/5
The Unlimited Dream Company - J G Ballard 4/5
The Hollow Man - John Dickson Carr 3/5
An English Murder - Cyril Hare 4/5

Graphic Novels:

Izngoud the Relentless - Goscinny & Tabary 3/5
izngoud Rockets to Stardom - Goscinny & Tabary 3/5
Essential Avengers 8 - Shooter, Byrne, Perez et al 3/5
Age of Ultron - Bendis & Hitch 3/5
Amazing Spider-Man: Election Day - Guggenheim, Romita Jr et al 2/5
Captain America: Reborn - Brubaker et al 3/5
Captain America Vol 2 - Brubaker & Davis 3/5
Iznogoud and the Jigsaw Turk - Goscinny & Tabary 3/5
Izngoud's Fairy Tale - Goscinny & Tabary 3/5
Iznogoud's Nightmares - Goscinny & Tabary 3/5
Iznogoud I Want to be Caliph Instead of the Caliph - Goscinny & Tabary 1/5
Daredevil: The Devil, Inside and Out - Brubaker & Lark 4/5
Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules - Sturm, Davis & Sikoryak 3/5
The Invaders: The Eve of Destruction -Stern, Manley et al 2/5
The Invincible Iron Man: The Five Nightmares - Fraction & Larocca 2/5
Ultimate Spider-man 14: Warriors - Bendis & Bagley 3/5
The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire 1 - Butterworth and Lawrence 4/5
Catwoman: Trail of the Catwoman - Brubaker & Cooke 4/5
Catwoman: Relentless - Brubaker, Stewart & Pulido 3/5
Morbius Epic Collection 1: The Living Vampire - Gerber, McGregor, Thomas, Conway, Kane et al 3/5
Ultimate X-Men 7: Blockbuster - Bendis & Finch 3/5
Ultimate x-Men 8: New Mutants - Bendis & Finch 3/5
Ultimate Spider-man 20: And His Amazing Friends - Bendis & Immonen 3/5
Ultimate Spider-man: Ultimatum - Bendis & Immonen 3/5
The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire 2 - Butterworth, Lawrence & Embleton 4/5
Ultimate Spider-man: Death of Spider-man - Bendis & Bagley 3/5
Ultimate Spider-man: United We Stand, Divided We Fall - Bendis, Marquez, Larraz 3/5
Spider-Men - Bendis & Pichelli 3/5
Uncanny X-Men: The Extremists - Brubaker, Larocca, Keith 2/5
Pulp - Brubaker & Phillips 3/5
Immortal Hulk 1: Or is he Both? - Ewing, Bennett et al 4/5 (UK collection)
Manhunter Deluxe Edition - Goodwin & Simonson 4/5

The Old Man And The Sea - Earnest Hemingway (+)
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
The Sea Wolf - Jack London

You should've added The Sea by John Banville in the middle here.

(xp to koogs)

ha, yeah, i said as much at the time. but a) it was too expensive and too unknown to do that for the small amount of lols and b) i tend do blocks of a month and the 3 filled the month as it was, the middle one being an especially slow read.

ira Levin has a good hit rate i think. his trick of putting the twist ending in the middle has served him well, it lets him write about the fallout of that for another 100 pages. i remember being amazed by the twist in A Kiss Before Dying.

the thing i remember of Rosemary's Baby is all the potential names they keep using for the unborn baby - andyordebbie

I read Michael Newton's new BFI monograph on Rosemary's Baby (slightly disappointing after his brilliant entry on Kind Hearts and Coronets) and then went back to the film, and then read the novel for the first time. The film really is one of the most faithful adaptations of a book, ever - nothing is added, and almost nothing taken away (just a tiny amount of non-essential backstory, really). The masterstroke of Rosemary's Baby the novel (and by extension the film) is the modern-day, even 'modish' setting, and the way that the Satanists are old and uncool - and lethal.

Agree that Levin's hit rate is pretty astonishing, and that the big twist in A Kiss Before Dying is all-time, although I can't find a good word to be said for his very late sequel to Rosemary's Baby.

I did a double-take for a moment there, thinking it said “Michael Nesmith’s new BFI monograph.” #onethread

I have a running list, I’ll post it in a few days.

My full list of 75 (including business/software books I read for work that are presumably of no interest) is on goodreads. Quite a lot fewer books than last year, mostly due to my reading two volumes of Caro on LBJ and the 1000+ pp Gotham.

Here's my favorites (in order read)

FICTION

Assembly by Natasha Brown
A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies
The King at the Edge of the World by Arthur Philips
Kudos by Rachel Cusk
Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler
A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
The Fisherman by John Langan
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Contact by Carl Sagan
Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Smiley's People by John le Carre
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
Transit by Rachel Cusk
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

NON-FICTION

Means of Ascent by Robert Caro
The Path to Power by Robert Caro
The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins
Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell
How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
Gotham by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace

my goodreads list https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2021/80167070

of those, the really good things that i didn't see anyone else here mention that i would pretty much unconditionally recommend are:

Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Assembly by Natasha Brown (caveat that i haven't lived in the UK for 12 years and haven't visited since 2018, both seemed very good on post brexit post colonial (?) britain)

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell (soothing?)

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies (highly recommended for parents).

mookieproof is right that Piranesi by Susanna Clarke doesn't quite spot the landing, but the first 5/6 are magical, wonderful narrator, and it would be a great christmas read imo.

Fiction

Autumn - Ali Smith
The Man with the Getaway Face - Richard Stark
Breakout - Richard Stark
Ask the Parrot - Richard Stark
Nobody Runs Forever - Richard Stark
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
The Road Back to Paris - A.J. Liebling
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
No One is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood
Nada - Jean-Patrick Manchette
The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914
Utopia Avenue - David Mitchell (worst book I read this year)
The Hearing Trumpet - Leonora Carrington
Unity - Elly Bangs
Get Rich Quick - Peter Doyle
The Burnt Orange Heresy - Charles Willeford
LA Confidential - James Ellroy
Temptation - Janos Szekely
Libra - Don Delillo
The Sibyl - Per Lagerkvist
The Ax - Donald Westlake
Kusamakura/The Three-Cornered World - Natsume Soseki
The Thin Red Line - James Jones
Wolf Among Wolves - Hans Fallada
Miss Pym Disposes - Josephine Tey
The Fourth Island - Sarah Tolmie
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon (re-read)

Non-Fiction

George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door - Graeme Thomson
Beeswing - Richard Thompson
The Jakarta Method - Vincent Bevins
The Road Back to Paris - A.J. Liebling
This is Your Mind on Plants - Michael Pollan
Everybody Loves Our Town - Mark Yarm
Dreamland - Sam Quinones
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls - Peter Biskind

With any luck/concentration should be able to finish The Tree With No Name by Drago Jančar and finish rereading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

Books I need to finish that I set aside
Stalingrad - Vasily Grossman (after like 600 pages, i don't know what's wrong with me)
Hawksmoor - Peter Ackroyd

and yeah, agree on Piranesi, I wanted a little bit more from it but once I got about 10 pages in it hooked me, kept a really nice balance where there was enough tension and suggestion of horror to be unsettling, but never so unpleasant that I needed a break from it.

Is that 2 different people read Everybody loves This Town this year. Was there a republishing of it or something?
I'm thinking I read it about 10 years ago but not thinking what else was on around the same time I read it.
Good book though.

actually did a better job this year than i assumed, though spring, summer, and fall were filled with gaps of not-reading. counting every volume of the george miles cycle because i can, only closer and period truly felt short

heavenly breakfast by samuel delany
lolita by vladimir nabokov
closer by dennis cooper
frisk by dennis cooper
try by dennis cooper
guide by dennis cooper
period by dennis cooper
women and other monsters by jess zimmerman
luster by raven leilani
sentimental education by gustave flaubert
the driver’s seat by muriel spark
malina by ingeborg bachmann
in a lonely place by dorothy b. hughes

will likely, finally be finishing in a lonely place today, giving me time to reread harriet the spy before the end of the year

first book of 2022: the hearing trumpet

gonna be in the upper 40s for new books -- the most in a long time -- plus maybe a dozen re-reads

of course they were mostly science fiction or something similarly escapist because that's all i can handle lately

The 52 books I read in 2021 (in the order that I finished them):

Chronicles, Jean Froissart (medieval history)
Massacred for Gold, R. Gregory Nokes (shameful Oregon history)
The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, Herman Melville
Hindoo Holiday, J. R. Ackerly
Trails of a Wilderness Wanderer, Andy Russell (re-read)
Crampton Hodnet, Barbara Pym
Maigret and the Wine Merchant, Georges Simenon
Song of the Lark, Willa Cather
A Journey Round My Skull, Frigyes Karinthy
Five T'ang Poets, selected and translated by David Young
Chess Story, Stefan Zweig
Psmith in the City, P.G. Wodehouse
My Dog Tulip, J.R. Ackerly
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
Gringos, Charles Portis
Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's, Barbara Comyns
The Monkey's Voyage, Alan de Queiroz (evolutionary biology)
Chinese Rhyme-Prose, translated by Burton Watson
The Catherine Wheel, Jean Stafford
The Means of Escape, Penelope Fitzgerald (short stories)
Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner
Strange Beauty, George Johnson (bio of Murray Gell-Mann)
Notes From an Apocalypse, Mark O'Connell
World Light, Halldor Laxness
World of Wonders, Robertson Davies
The 39 Steps, John Buchan
The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis (WWII memoir)
The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson (essays)
Rocannon's World, Ursula K. Le Guin
Maigret in Montmartre, Georges Simenon
A Voyage Long and Strange, Tony Horwitz (US pop history)
Desolation Island, Patrick O'Brian (re-read)
A Coffin for King Charles, C.V. Wedgewood
Open Doors & Three Novellas, Leonardo Sciascia
The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson
Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness (Penguin Classics compilation)
The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914, Béla Zombory-Moldován
The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington
Hons and Rebels, Jessica Mitford (re-read)
Quicksand, Nella Larsen
Highland Fling, Nancy Mitford
Kindred, Octavia Butler
Which Lie Did I Tell?, William Goldman (Hollywood insider memoir)
The Plague, Albert Camus (re-read)
The Madman of Bergerac, Georges Simenon
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Richard Wrangham
My Home is Far Away, Dawn Powell
The Ten Thousand Things, Maria Dermoût
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Eric Newby
Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household
Treason by the Book, Jonathan D. Spence (Chinese history)
The High Window, Raymond Chandler

Currently in progress:

The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

Misc Odds and Sods:

Misc short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
Misc short stories by Muriel Spark
Misc short stories by PG Wodehouse
Misc short sketches by Mark Twain
I also dabbled about in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton

Notable Fails/Rejections:

Lincoln in the Bardo, Geo. Saunders
Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, Lyall Watson
The Hot Gates, William Golding (assorted occasional pieces)
Love's Work, Gillian Rose
Reign of Terror, Spencer Ackerman (recap of decades-long political horror show)

Yeah, I don't know if I could make it through Saunders' novel either; I wasn't that into most of the stories in Tenth of December/. May try some of the nonfiction.
if you liked that Horwitz book, which I haven't read, maybe try Confederates in The Attic, based on his research, as a reader and traveler, into Civil War subcultures: it's entertaining, but also, he tries to come to grips, as much as anyone can, with the enduring weirdness of the CW era (part of its appeal, natch). Ta-nehisi Coates: "Don't say you know what you would have done then."

I read Confederates in the Attic many years back and liked it rather better than the 'Voyage' book I read this year, which wasn't a bad book but was awfully loose knit and lacked a center of gravity.

I got Lincoln in the Bardo the year it came out and never finished it. Every chapter feels like I've read it before. All of his short story collections are essential though.

I was looking at a copy in a charity shop a couple of weeks back. Thought I knew the name. Thought it was supposed to be good but don't think I grabbed it.

Most recently finished first:

Raymond Carver - Cathedral
Joshua Cohen - The Netanyahus
Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads
Annie Ernaux - A Girl’s Story
Miles Franklin - My Brilliant Career
Michel Houellebecq - Lanzarote
Evelyn Waugh - Scoop
Peter Biskind - My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles
Karl Ove Knausgård - The Morning Star
Eula Biss - On Immunity
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
Michel Houellebecq - Platform
Evelyn Waugh - Decline and Fall
Kurt Vonnegut - Armageddon In Retrospect
Raymond Carver - Fires
Julian Barnes - Metroland
Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View of Hills
Karl Ove Knausgård - Spring
Bri Lee - Who Gets To Be Smart
John Bell - Some Achieve Greatness: Lessons on Leadership and Character from Shakespeare
Meghan Daum - The Unspeakable, and Other Subjects of Discussion
Loudon Wainwright III - Liner Notes
Roisin Kiberd - The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet
Rachel Cusk - Second Place
Tina Fey - Bossypants
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
Pamela Paul - My Life with Bob
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Karl Ove Knausgård - In the Land of the Cyclops
Michel Houellebecq - The Map and The Territory
Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun
Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This
George Saunders - A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls: Part One
Steven Hyden - This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's Kid A...
John Steinbeck - East of Eden
L.P. Hartley - The Go-Between
Karl Ove Knausgård, Fredrik Ekelund - Home and Away
Jenny Erpenbeck - Not A Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections
Anne Helen Petersen - Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
Lauren Oyler - Fake Accounts
Martin Amis - Inside Story: A Novel
Tobias Wolff - This Boy's Life
Hari Kunzru - Red Pill
Bill Bryson - The Body
Kerry Egan - On Living
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations

Started and didn’t finish:

Michael Mohammed Ahmad - The Other Half of You
Lydia Davis - Can’t and Won’t
Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Karl Ove Knausgård - So Much Longing In So Little Space
Marilynne Robinson - What Are We Doing Here? Essays
Gustave Flaubert - Sentimental Education
Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Woody Allen - Apropos of Nothing

The most enjoyable experiences I had this year were in finally getting around to some classics: The Magic Mountain, Anna Karenina, East of Eden, and the Dickens and Waugh novels. Most of the 2021 releases I was looking forward to didn’t disappoint: Franzen, Knausgaard, Cusk, Cohen and Ishiguro were all satisfying. Lockwood’s novel was solid, but maybe not quite as good as I was expecting due to the high expectations I had from Priestdaddy and her essays. Oyler’s novel was a little disappointing, but I found enough in there to get me through to the end.

There were many other books I abandoned in addition to the list I’ve got here, but those are the ones I got a decent way into before giving up on for various reasons, sometimes because the book got boring, but mostly because of my waning attention span when work or life got particularly stressful.

so, David Copperfield or Great Expectations?

The first one.

Not sure if this si complete.
& may have a couple added by the end of this week

Books wot I have done read this year

Angela Saini Inferior
Ibram X kendi How To Be Anti-Racist
Mari Sandoz Crazy Horse:The Strange Man of the Oglalas
Cheyenne Autumn
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz An Indigenous People’s History of the United States
Charles C mann 1491
Paul Ortiiz An African American and LatinX History of the United States
Pragya Arghawal Sway
Alexander Mitchell New Jim Crow
Paolo Friere A Pedagogy Of Hope
Steven H Gardner Another Tuneless Racket vol 1
Raymond Queneau We Always Treat Women Too Well
Odile
Sarah Ahmed Living A Feminist Life
bell hooks Ain’t I A Woman
Arthur Miller Echoes Down The Corridor
Walter benjamin Illuminations
Merle haggard My House of Memories
Patrisse Khan-Cullors When They Call You A Terrorist
Nic Cheeseman How To Rig an Election
Kehinde Andrews New Age Of Empire
Alexandra Wilson In Black & White
Reni Eddo-Lodge Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
Robin DiAngelo White Fragility
David Olusoga The World’s War
Mark Mordue Boy On Fire
Clinton Walker Stranded
Octavia Butler Dawn
Deborah Frances White The Guilty Feminist
Richard Thompson Beeswing
James Fearnley Here Comes Everybody
Daniel Goldmark The Cartoon Music Book
Larry Kirwan Rocking The Bronx
Craig Werner A Change Is Going To Come
David Kerr African Popular Theatre
Audre Lorde The Cancer Journals
Ta Nehisi Coates Between The Buried and Me
Bob Gluck You’ll Know When You Get There
Kwame Anthony Appiah The Lies That Bind
Ken Kesey The Last Go Round
William Goldman Adventures In the Skin Trade
Matt Ruff Lovecraft Country
Mary Robinson Climate Justice.

currently reading Ibram X kendi Stamped from the Beginning which I will probably finish in a few days.
& Caste by Isabel Wilkerson which I will probably take longer to get through
Audre Lorde Compendium which I may get through too. collection of 3 of her books so may have Sister Outsider done at least
Cruel Britannia by Ian Cobain again not sure will be done by New Year.
& possibly about 100 others that I've started but need to find the right time for.

I need to read more Duras too.

I almost bought the Ocampo last week! NYRB rock.

dow, I strongly recommend Annie Ernaux. She's a memoirist. I avoid memoirs! But she is genuinely special -- there is something unrelenting in her self-examination. And addictive. I expect to read a bunch more of hers.

Intriguing---will def. check her out, thanks.

The Jakarta Method - Vincent Bevins
The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes
Nimona - Noelle Stevenson
1974 - David Peace
The Pear Field - Nana Ekvtimishvili
No One Is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood
Lying For Money - Dan Davies
Nordic Fauna - Andrea Lundgren
Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stewart
Summer Lightning - PG Wodehouse
The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
Age of Anger - Pankaj Mishra
Yesterday - Juan Emar
Sea of Ink - Richard Weihe
Love's Work - Gillian Rose
Darryl - Jackie Ess
The Hothouse by the East River - Muriel Spark
Tyll - Daniel Kehlmann
Novels in Three Lines - Félix Fénéon

Of this the best were No One Is Talking About This, Darryl and the Jakarta Method. The worst by some distance was Shuggie Bain, a however many hundred page book about a boy who loves his mammy where we learn nothing about the boy other than that he loves his mammy.

I don’t know how I manage to do this every year but I was weighing out some brewer’s yeast & suddenly remembered that last year I read & forgot to log:

Merlin Sheldrake - Entangled Life

& my brain would not let me let this go uncorrected

A week into 22 and I have not read a page so far, hopefully I get some sweet covid isolation time at some point

i didn't think shuggie bain was *that* bad but it wasn't great

I love both Marguerite Duras and Paul Celan! Joan Crawford Loves Chachi that's an impressive list with many writers I've been meaning to read, especially In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova.

calumerio, nice to see someone else read Rose. Glad you liked Jackie's book and the Jakarta Method, too.

The Mabinogion (tr. Sioned Davies)
Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan
Clark Ashton Smith - Zothique
Clark Ashton Smith - Poseidonis
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic
Kir Bulychev - Alice: The Girl From Earth
Kir Bulychev - Half a Life and Other Stories
Kir Bulychev - Gusliar Wonders
Yevgeny Zamyatin - We
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Kobo Abe - Inter Ice Age 4
Kate Wilhelm - Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
Ruth Park - Playing Beatie Bow
Ruth Park - The Harp in the South
Ruth Park - Poor Man's Orange
Bertrand Russell - What I Believe
Bertrand Russell - Why I Am Not a Christian
Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodríguez - Locke & Key: Keys to the Kingdom
Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodríguez - Locke & Key: Clockworks
Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodríguez - Locke & Key: Alpha & Omega
Benjamin Myers - Under the Rock (put down halfway through, will finish at some point)

I remember L&J being really solid and wishing there were more good, long, discrete contained stories like that (ignoring the rubbish spin offs)

Locke and key I mean.

I watched teh tv series last month, has been a while since I ead the comics which I enjoyed at teh time and was one reason I watched teh tv show. Think I continued cos I started. Don't think I enjoyed as much as the comic anyway. Might give tehm another look if I can find the fiels sinced i read it on cbr.

Love's Work was good, but demanded more of me than I was able to give, intellectually and emotionally. I will go back to it.

Shuggie Bain was super bad, a relentless honking airhorn of "we were poor... but dammit we were unhappy too", in sore need of two more drafts and an editor. I did do an actual lol at a very minor character being called "Kier Weir", though, a welcome absurdity.

I don't think I have ever actually *liked* a protagonist in a book as much as I liked Darryl.

Anyway, I will continue lurking here, pinching ideas from youse all, though this year's resolution is read the books that I bought in 2021, rather than buy any new ones.

this year's resolution is read the books that I bought in 2021, rather than buy any new ones.

I tried that a couple of years ago and, of course, failed. It was helpful, though. It did encourage me to cut back on purchases and clear some of the backlog of unread books, so on the whole I'm glad I made the resolution and consider it a success.

unregistered- how are the Kir Bulychev books?

unregistered- how are the Kir Bulychev books?

great! I'm not too well-versed in Soviet SFF, but I'd recommend all three of those Bulychev collections. the biggest highlight for me was the title story of Half a Life. at heart it's a narrative of a woman's acts of self-sacrifice as she comes to empathize with the weird sentient beings who are imprisoned with her on an alien research vessel. a little mawkish, maybe, but there's a compelling interplay between the sentimental and the cynical as a group of emotionally stunted astronauts struggle to make sense of the woman's story and the now abandoned vessel

I also really like the cycle of short stories that makes up the second half of Gusliar Wonders, in which a Russian village becomes an unlikely point of first contact with various aliens and wizards and time travelers. it's similar in premise to Simak's Way Station, only funnier and with less faith in human nature. overall Bulychev seems fixated on the way unimaginative egotists react when confronted with the alien or the supernatural, and he has an acute ear for irony

Alice's Travels (the first novel in that Alice collection) is a fun children's interplanetary mystery, concluding with a slightly hokey, Scooby Doo-ish confrontation with space pirates. the cartoon adaptation is apparently regarded as a classic, and Bulychev is best known in Russia for his Alice books/films. afaik few of his other works have been translated into English aside from the post-apocalyptic novel Those Who Survive and the novella "Another's Memory" (collected in Earth and Elsewhere. Half a Life and Gusliar Wonders are both available at the Open Library

I'm kinda tempted to start working my way through the non-Strugatsky entries in Ted Sturgeon's Best of Soviet Science Fiction series:

https://i.imgur.com/O5HLz7d.jpg

(full list here)