What did you read in 2021?

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)