What did you read in 2021?

Thanks.

JANUARY

Ali Smith – Winter
Robert V. Remini – Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom
Graham Greene – The Comedians
Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar
John Le Carré – A Legacy of Spies
Shakespeare – Cymbeline
Garth Greenwell – Cleanness
Colin Tóibin – All a Novelist Needs
David S. Reynolds – Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times
Natalia Ginzburg – Happiness, As Such
Natalia Ginzburg – Valentine and Sagittarius
Daniel Mendelsohn – An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

FEBRUARY

Muriel Spark – The Bachelors
Hilary Holladay – The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography
Ali Smith – Spring
Wallace Shawn – The Designated Mourner
Karl Ove Knausgaard – My Struggle: Book Four
Lewis L. Gould – The First Modern Clash over Federal Power: Wilson versus Hughes in the Presidential Election of 1916
Naguib Mahfouz – The Thief and the Dogs
Scott Eyman – Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise
Melissa Maerz – Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused
Elizabeth Bowen – Friends and Relations
Craig Fehrman – Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote

MARCH

Walter Kempowski – Marrow and Bone
Jean Stafford – The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
Virginia Woolf – The Voyage Out
Ursula K. Le Guin – The Lathe of Heaven
Curzio Malaparte – The Skin
Tom Paulin – Minotaur
David Michaelis – Eleanor
William Gass – On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry
Beverly Cleary – Dear Mr. Henshaw…
* Jean Stafford – The Mountain Lion

APRIL

Robert Elder – John Calhoun
* Percy Bysshe Shelley – The Cenci
John Banville – Snow
Octavia Butler – Kindred
Grahame Greene – The Ministry of Fear
Mark Harris – Mike Nichols: A Life
Michel Foucault – The Uses of Pleasure
Damon Galgut – Arctic Summer
Roberto Bolaño – Distant Star

MAY

Edward White – The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock
Anthony Trollope – The Warden
Liva Baker – The Justice from Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Susan Howe – My Emily Dickinson
* E.M. Forster – Maurice
Thomas Bernhardt – The Loser
Annie Zaleski – Rio
* F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
Octavia Butler – Fledgling
Graham Greene – The Honorary Consul
* Shakespeare – Macbeth
Natalia Ginzberg – The Heat of the City
Joel Silbey – Party over Section: The Rough and Ready Presidential Election of 1848
Thomas Mann – Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man

JUNE

Teju Cole – Open City
Elizabeth Taylor – A Wreath of Roses
John Le Carré – A Most Wanted Man
Edith Wharton – The Touchstone
Michael Holt – By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876
Richard Greene – The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Green
Vladimir Nabokov – The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
James Lacey – The Washington War: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Power That Won World War II
Shakespeare – Henry IV, Part Two
Ralph Ellison – Juneteenth
Iris Murdoch – The Black Prince
Charles Mann – 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

JULY

Bill Goldstein – The World Broke in Two
Damon Galgut – The Promise
Lauren Berlant – Cruel Optimism
* Edith Wharton – The Custom of the Country
Jane Bowles – Two Serious Ladies
Sue Roe – The Private Lives of the Impressionists
Neil McCormick (editor) – U2 by U2
Paul Bowles – The Spider’s House
Serhii Plokhy – Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Jeremy D. Popkin – A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution
Karin Roffman – The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life
Ronald Firbank – Valmouth
J.C. Ackerley – We Think the World of You

AUGUST

Ruth Harris – Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century
Émile Zola – Thérèse Raquin
Jonathan M. Metzl – Death by Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland
Leonard Gardner – Fat City
Colm Tóibín – The Heather Blazing
V.S. Pritchett – The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev
Elena Ferrante – The Lost Daughter
Donald A. Richie – Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932
Stephen Kinzer – Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change
Sally Keane – Good Behaviour
Jon Savage – Teenage

SEPTEMBER

William Faulkner – Go Down, Moses (1942)
Elizabeth Taylor – Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971)
A.J. Baime – The Accidental President (2008)
Paul Mariani – The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane (1999)
Yuko Mishima – Confessions of a Mask (1949)
Diane Middlebrook – Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (2004)
Gail Crowther: Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton (2021)
* Saul Bellow – Herzog (1964)
Dorothy B. Hughes – In a Lonely Place (1947)
Charles Portis – True Grit (1971)
William di Canzio – Alec (2021)
Robert S. Levine – The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson (2021)

OCTOBER

Gordon Merrick – One for the Gods
Jay Wright – The Presentable Act of Reading Absence
Joy Williams – The Quick and the Dead
Joy Williams – Escapes
Colm Tóibín – The Magician
Janet Malcolm – Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers
Ingeborg Bachmann – Malina
Clinton Heylin – Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios
Jefferson Cowie – Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
Robert Walser – The Tanners
Adam Winkler – We the Corporations

NOVEMBER

Jefferson Cowie – The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics
Rachel Kushner – The Strange Case of Rachel K
Rachel Kushner – The Flamethrowers
John Hollander – Reflections on Espionage
* Toni Morrison – Beloved
Elena Ferrante – The Lying Lives of Adults
Christina Stead – Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife)
Allen C. Guelzo – Robert E. Lee: A Life
Rebecca West – Henry James
Geoffrey O’Brien – Sonata for Jukebox
Dwight MacDonald – Against the American Grain
J.D. Salinger – Franny and Zooey
Robert H. Jackson – That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt

DECEMBER

Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Clandestine in Chile
Shirley Hazzard – The Evening of the Holiday
Tony Judt – Ill Fares the Land
Shirley Hazzard – The Transit of Venus
Susan Butler – Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership
Anna Kavan – Ice
Rebecca West – Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Ada Ferrer – Cuba: An American Story
Adolfo Bioy Casares – The Invention of Morel
bell hooks – Here We Stand
Eve Babitz – Slow Days, Fast Company
* Ernest Hemingway – The Garden of Eden
Marc Morris – The Anglo-Saxons

What did you think of Franny and Zooey, Alfred?

Me:

Mort
Piranesi
Sometimes therapy is Awkward
Bee quest
The Year of Reading Dangerously
Me - Elton John
Big Sky
Why Therapy Works
Transcription
Miss Pym Disposes (gave up)
Ascension - Oliver Harris
How to change everything - Naomi Klein
A Wizard of Earthsea
Life the universe and everything
The Pigeon Tunnel
Tombs of Atuan
First love - Riley
Harriet the Sspy
Thursday Night murder club
The shadow of the torturer
Beautiful world where are you
The Long Secret
Weirdstone of Brisingamen
The High Window
The Man Who Died Twice

Read less this year because of being a stay-at-home dad with a toddler, migraines, and doing the 2nd year of an MSc (the essays, the essays)

Highlights:
- Probably the Elton John biog and the Harriet the Spy books
- Being impressed by Kate Atkinson and Gwendolyn Riley and excited to read more of their work - I wasn't expecting much from either
- Finally reading and loving Le Guin
- Regretting to inform you that Richard Osman's books are quite entertaining

What did you think of Franny and Zooey, Alfred?

― dow, Sunday, January 2, 2022 6:07 PM

A genuine surprise.

these 100+ lists are both impressive and scary.

A genuine surprise.

Ah! How so? (C'mon, spill.)

I've often seen Alfred's impressive cranium on WDYLL threads, so his lengthy list merely serves as an unnecessary confirmation of the self-evident. I shudder to think what breathtaking marvels would be revealed if James Morrison were to post to WDYLL!

I also have a pretty large head, fwiw.

Jorgenrique Adoum - Prepoems in PostSpanish
Rabih Alameddine - Koolaids
Sinan Antoon - The Baghdad Eucharist
Amiri Baraka - The System of Dante's Hell
Dodie Bellamy - Bee Reaved
Hassan Blasim - The Corpse Exhibition
Anne Boyer - My Common Heart
Molly Brodak - Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir
Julie Carr - 100 Notes on Violence
Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan
Mary Crow - Borders
Peter Culley - The Age of Briggs & Stratton
Peter Culley - Hammertown
Kevin Davies - The Golden Age of Paraphernalia
Samuel Delany - Dhalgren (reread)
Jim Dicksinson - I'm Just Dead, I'm Not Gone
Ge Fei - The Invisibility Cloak
Sesshu Foster - City of the Future (reread)
Sesshu Foster - Atomik Aztex
Federico Garcia Lorca - Selected Poems 
Andre Gide - Urien's Voyage
Johannes Göransson - Poetry Against All
Judy Grahn - love belongs to those who do the feeling
Linda Gregg - The Sacraments of Desire
Dorothea Grossman - Museum of Rain
Peter Handke - Three by Handke
Jim Harrison - Song of Unreason
Jim Harrison - The Essential Poems
Fanny Howe - The Quietist
Fanny Howe - Radical Love: 5 Novels
The Selected Poetry of Vicente Huidobro
Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun
Denis Johnson - The Name of the World
Denis Johnson - Train Dreams
Ronald Johnson - The Book of the Green Man
Hettie Jones - Drive
John Keene - Annotations
William Kennedy - Ironweed
John Koethe - rotc kills
Eugene Lim - Search History
Eugene Lim - Dear Cyborgs
Kelly Link - Get in Trouble: Stories
Bernadette Mayer - Sonnets
Joyelle McSweeney - Flet
Semezdin Mehmedinovic - My Heart
Dunya Mikhail - The War Works Hard
Sayaka Murata - Earthlings
Eileen Myles - Not Me
Alice Notley - Negativity's Kiss
Michael Ondaatje - The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Celia Paul - Self Portrait
Marge Piercy - Woman on the Edge of Time
Sam Riviere - Safe Mode
Camille Roy - Honey Mine
Frederick Seidel - Going Fast
Danzy Senna - Where Did You Sleep Last Night?
Choi Seungja - Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me
Gary Snyder - Earth House Hold
Magda Szabo - The Door
Jean Valentine - Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003
Ocean Vuong - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Nikki Wallschlaeger - Waterbaby
Nikki Wallschlaeger - Pizza and Warfare
Simone White - Dear Angel of Death
John Edgar Wideman - The Homewood Trilogy

(inclusion not necessarily an endorsement, of course)

Have already finished 3 or 4 books since teh start of teh year and started 4 or 5.
Will see if that goes anywhere.
But some great stuff anyway, more bell hooks, Anita Loos who I hadn't read before and think I missed a book by recently which now grates, George Schuyler who is amazingly against the tide and stuff.

No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood
War, So Much War, Merce Rodoreda
True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, Abraham Riesman
How Much of Thee Hills Is Gold, C. Pam Zhang
The Seven Veils of Seth, Ibrahim al-Koni
Conversations in Sicily, Elio Vittorini
Fever Dream, Samantha Schweblin
Eleven Sooty Dreams, Manuela Draeger
Compass, Mathias Énard
A House and Its Head, Ivy Compton-Burnett
The Invisibility Cloak, Ge Fei
Kin, Miljenko Jergovic
In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova
Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh, Slobodan Novak
A Girl's Story, Annie Ernaux
A Castle in Romagna, Igor Stiks
Götz and Meyer, David Albahari
Hammers on Bone, Cassandra Khaw
A Private Venus, Giorgio Scerbananco
The Cyclist Conspiracy, Svetislav Basara
Croatian War Nocturnal, Spomenka Stimek
Where There's Love, There's Hate, Adolfo Bioy Casares & Silvina Ocampo
EEG, Dasa Drndic
Voices in the Evening, Natalila Ginsburg
L'Amante Anglaise, Marguerite Duras
Nothing But Blackened Teeth, Cassandra Khaw
Between Life and Death, Yoram Kaniuk
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
I Belong to Vienna, Anna Goldenberg
A Woman's Story, Annie Ernaux
Fires on the Plain, Shohei Ooka
Nazi Literature in the Americas, Roberto Bolaño
My Heart, Semezdin Mehmedinovic
Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me, Choi Seunga
A Heritage and Its History, Ivy Compton-Burnett
Vanish in an Instant, Margaret Millar

Don't know most of those authors, but!---Ivy Compton-Burnett (twice), Adolfo Bioy Casares & Silvina Ocampo, Ursula K. LeGuin (and one of her stone cold classics at that), Roberto Bolaño, and Margaret Millar to boot (even Patricia Lockwood, whom I don't think I've ever read, but whose name somehow attached itself to a startling woman of authoritah in a recent dream)---that's my kind of list already---better check the other items on it---

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)