What did you read in 2022?

Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Don Delillo - White Noise
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
John Darnielle - Devil House
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
John Le Carré - The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
John Le Carré - Call For The Dead
John Le Carré - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Fellowship of the Ring
Graham Greene - Our Man In Havana
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita

Great thread, really interesting and eclectic lists

i never really go back and think about what i enjoyed or change what i read to match that. i probably should.

from my list casterbridge, two cities, sight of you, and autumn.

is there a new year's resolution thread for reading? everything on mine feels soooo long.

I'm mostly a lurker here, but I've really enjoyed reading these lists, and past years' lists, for recommendations. I read more in 2022 than any previous year; finally got into a good daily rhythm of finding time in the evenings, and avoiding getting sucked into watching TV or scrolling Twitter. Books with * are ones I particularly enjoyed.

Charles Willeford - The Burnt Orange Heresy
Aaron Copland - What to Listen for in Music
John le Carré - The Spy Who Came In from the Cold*
Kim Stanley Robinson - New York 2140
Jack Viertel - The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built
Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea
Muriel Spark - The Driver's Seat
Henry Jaglom - My Lunches with Orson
Robert Simonson - 3-Ingredient Cocktails: An Opinionated Guide to the Most Enduring Drinks in the Cocktail Canon
George Eliot - Middlemarch*
Patrick Wyman - The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World
Muriel Spark - Symposium
Agatha Christie - A Murder Is Announced

David Graeber & David Wengrow - The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity*
John Franklin Bardin - The Deadly Percheron
Scott Eyman - Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise
P.G. Wodehouse - Something Fresh
Dava Sobel - Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
Patrick O'Brian - Master and Commander
Graham Greene - The Comedians
Carlo Ginzburg - The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
John Dickson Carr - The Hollow Man
Joan Didion - Where I Was From
Evelyn Waugh - Scoop
Elmore Leonard - City Primeval

Walter M. Miller Jr. - A Canticle for Leibowitz
Adam Tooze - The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931
Rex Stout - Where There's a Will
Jeff Tweedy - How to Write One Song
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Tombs of Atuan*
Agatha Christie - Murder on the Orient Express
Elmore Leonard - 52 Pickup
Antal Szerb - Journey by Moonlight
Charles Willeford - Sideswipe
George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Farthest Shore 

Otto Friedrich - City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's
Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn
Elizabeth Taylor - Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
David Graeber - Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Chester Himes - A Rage in Harlem
Ursula K. Le Guin - Tehanu*
Rex Stout - Gambit
Helen DeWitt - Lightning Rods
John Williams - Stoner
Sarah Orne Jewett - The Country of the Pointed Firs
Francis Spufford - Red Plenty*
Barbara Comyns - Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
Elmore Leonard - Glitz
David Grann - Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

Dorothy B. Hughes - Ride the Pink Horse
Ned Sublette - Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo*
Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This
Ursula K. Le Guin - Tales from Earthsea 
John Wyndham - The Day of the Triffids
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic*
Bethany C. Morrow - Mem
John Williams - Butcher's Crossing*
Alec Nevala-Lee - Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction

Ross Macdonald - The Chill
Greg Milner - Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music
George Eliot - Silas Marner
Philip K. Dick - Time Out of Joint
Jean Rhys - After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
Simon Garfield - Just My Type: A Book about Fonts
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Other Wind 

Patrick O'Brian - Post Captain*
Seishi Yokomizo - The Honjin Murders 
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing - The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Agatha Christie - Lord Edgware Dies
Steve Swayne - How Sondheim Found His Sound
Patrick O'Brian - H. M. S. Surprise 
Elmore Leonard - Stick
George R. Stewart - Earth Abides
William Gibson - Pattern Recognition

John McPhee - The Control of Nature
Max Salazar - Mambo Kingdom: Latin Music in New York
Patrick O'Brian - The Mauritius Command
Otto Friedrich - The End of the World: A History
C.V. Wedgwood - The Thirty Years War*
Josephine Tey - Brat Farrar
Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai

Louise Fitzhugh - Harriet the Spy
Ursula K. Le Guin - Dancing at the Edge of the World
Caroline Criado Pérez - Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Patrick O'Brian - Desolation Island
David Maurer - The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man
Eliott Chaze - Black Wings Has My Angel*
Eric Hobsbawm - The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848
Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall*
Barbara Pym - Less Than Angels

Ursula Le Guin - Rocannon's World
Jim Thompson - Pop. 1280
Agatha Christie - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Patrick O'Brian - The Fortune of War*
Chester Himes - The Real Cool Killers
Hilary Mantel - Bring Up the Bodies*
Evelyn Waugh - A Handful of Dust
Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars
Gary Giddins - Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star, The War Years 1940-1946
Elmore Leonard - Swag
Jim Thompson - The Killer Inside Me
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Donald Westlake - The Ax*
Mike Davis - City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
Patrick O'Brian - The Surgeon's Mate
Pierre Bayard - Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery
Ursula Le Guin - Planet of Exile
Margaret Millar - Beast in View
Kim Stanley Robinson - Green Mars
John Le Carre - Call for the Dead
Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling
Daniel Davies - Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World
Ellen Willis - Out of the Vinyl Deeps: On Rock Music
Stanislaw Lem - The Star Diaries

Elmore Leonard - The Switch
Patrick O'Brian - The Ionian Mission
Donald Westlake - Somebody Owes Me Money
Patricia Highsmith - The Cry of the Owl
Kim Stanley Robinson - Blue Mars*
Ursula Le Guin - City of Illusions
Colson Whitehead - The Nickel Boys*
Lawrence Block - The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza
Dorothy B. Hughes - The Expendable Man
John Le Carre - A Murder of Quality
Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence

^that's one sweet list!

Indeed. Looks like you may have just won ILB!

yeah that's inspiring for sure

a bunch of big books, a slew of smaller ones, a couple of rereads and even a few knocked off my to-read pile:

cervantes - don quixote
ariosto - orlando furioso
malory - le morte darthur
john cowper powys - a glastonbury romance
wyndham lewis - the human age
aldous huxley - ape & essence
hg wells - the island of doctor moreau
olaf stapledon - sirius
olaf stapledon - odd john
olaf stapledon - the flames
john wyndham - consider her ways & others
john wyndham - the seeds of time
ray bradbury - the illustrated man
ray bradbury - the golden apples of the sun
ray bradbury - the machineries of joy
alfred bester - the dark side of the earth
robert sheckley - the robert sheckley omnibus
roger zelanzy - this immortal
richard brautigan - dreaming of babylon
chandler/parker - poodle springs
raymond chandler - playback
raymond chandler - the little sister
raymond chandler - the big sleep
thomas pynchon - inherent vice
frank norris - mcteague
george gissing - the nether world
liam o'flaherty - skerrett
oxford classic irish short stories
elizabeth bowen - the heat of the day
ivy compton-burnett - more women than men
henry green - blindness
michael innes - there came both mist and snow
michael innes - appleby on ararat
michael innes - a private view
michael innes - the gay phoenix
michael innes - honeybath's haven
josephine tey - brat farrar
josephine bell - the port of london murders
freeman wills crofts - the cask
freeman wills crofts - the cheyne mystery
freeman wills crofts - the loss of the jane vosper
e phillips oppenheim - moran chambers smiled
e phillips oppenheim - the strange boarders of palace crescent
simenon - the shadow falls
alain robbe-grillet - the erasers
allain/souvestre - fantomas
gombrowicz - pornografia
kundera - the farewell party
jiří gruša - the questionnaire
adolfo bioy casares - asleep in the sun
pinget - mahu, or the material
pinget - the inquisitory
perec - three
perec - "53 days"
andré gide - the counterfeiters
thomas mann - stories of three decades
katherine mansfield - the complete stories of
anna kavan's new zealand

& closing out the year with christina stead's otherwise uncollected shorter fiction ocean of story

i think it was you who last year extolled the virtues of reading multiple books by the same author together. hence the slew of hardy in mine.

Despite having a pretty horrendous year at work, I did OK with reading. But still, holy crap at whenuweremine's list.

** = re-reads.

Laura Mulvey - Citizen Kane
David Crystal - Rediscover Grammar
Derek Raymond - I Was Dora Suarez
Greg Tate - Flyboy in the Buttermilk
Paul Shepheard - What is Architecture?**
JB Priestley - English Journey
Patricia Lockwood - No One is Talking About This
Luis Bunuel - My Last Sigh
Audrey Schulman - Theory of Bastards
Adam Thorpe - On Silbury Hill
Mark Lanegan - Sing Backwards and Weep
James Shapiro - 1599
Patricia Lockwood - Priestdaddy
Kushwant Singh - Train to Pakistan
Ian Nairn - Outrage
TS Eliot - Four Quartets**
JB Priestley - Bright Day
William Goldman - Adventures in the Screentrade
Yvonne Tasker - Silence of the Lambs
David Thomson - The Big Sleep
Jeff Tweedy - Let's Go (So We Can Come Back)
Jim Thompson - The Getaway
Lee Child - Die Trying
Robin Wall Kimmerer - Gathering Moss
James Shapiro - The Year of Lear**
Antony Sher - Year of the King
Hannah Gadsby - 10 Steps to Nanette
Lee Child - Tripwire
Harriet Walter - Actors on Shakespeare
Edward St. Aubyn - Never Mind
Ed Guerrero - Do the Right Thing
Han Kang - The Vegetarian
Simon Callow - Being an Actor
Edward St. Aubyn - Bad News
Bohumil Hrabal - I Served the King of England
Richard Stark - The Man with the Getaway Face
Tim Winton - Dirt Music
Cicely Berry - The Actor and the Text
Edward St. Aubyn - Some Hope
Paul Theroux - The Kingdom By the Sea**
Joe Moran - If You Should Fail
Donald E. Westlake - The Ax
Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
David Winner - Brilliant Orange
Rivka Galchen - Little Labours
Edward St. Aubyn - Mother's Milk
Edward St. Aubyn - At Last
Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast
Warren Ellis - Nina Simone's Gum
Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Jekyll & Hyde**
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men**
Robert Macfarlane - The Old Ways**
Geoff Dyer - Paris Trance
Shunryu Suzuki - Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Sean Carroll - The Big Picture
Mark Epstein - Thoughts Without A Thinker
Jonathon Green - Days in the Life
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night
Vajragupta - The Triratna Story

just recently found my missing copy of the bunuel autobiography... needs a revisit!

xpost: more a habit than anything else, though i often find value sticking with an author for a multi-book run. two of your listed hardys i've yet to read, then no more new hardy for me.

Ari’s list would take approximately 4 1/2 years of my life. It’s a drag being a slow reader.

cervantes - don quixote
ariosto - orlando furioso
malory - le morte darthur

Dang, that is a hefty start to the year

I suppose I should have included the books I "read" by listening to them read in their entirety on Phobe Judge's excellent podcast, "Phoebe Reads a Mystery":

Agatha Christie/The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Arthur Conan Doyle/The Hound of the Baskervilles
Wilkie Collins/The Moonstone
Agatha Christie/The Murder on the Links
Anna Katherine Green/The Leavenworth Case
Bram Stoker/Dracula
Agatha Christie/The Secret Adversary

I have a $50 gift card to spend and am carefully reading this thread for inspirations. Might drop it on an overpriced Junji Ito book, idk.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing - Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene
Plutarch - The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives
Goethe - Elective Affinities
Christopher Hill - The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries
Michael Inwood - Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction
Lauren Berlant - Cruel Optimism
Goethe - Italian Journey
Lytton Strachey - Eminent Victorians
Edward Gibbon - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume II
Tacitus - The Histories
Peter Wohlleben - The Inner Life of Animals
John Boardman - The Oxford History of Classical Art
Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth
Osip Mandelshtam - Selected Poems
Andreas Malm - How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Procopius - The Secret History
The Quest of the Holy Grail (Prose Launcelot)
David Crystal - The Stories of English
Lucretius - On the Nature of the Universe, Ronald Melville Translator
Will Eisner - A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories
The Epic of Gilgamesh (Prose and Verse translations in Penguin)
D.H. Lawrence, - Women in Love
William Hazlitt - Selected Writings (Penguin ed from 1970s including scandalous Liber Amoris)
Jonathan Barnes, - Early Greek Philosophy
Christopher Marlowe - The Complete Plays
Joe Sacco - Palestine
JS Mill - On Liberty
William Carlos Williams - The Collected Poems, Vol. 1: 1909-1939
Tom Paulin - The Day Star Of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style
Paul Woods - The Curious life and work of Scott Walker
Anne Baring - The Myth of the Goddess
Thomas Love Peacock - Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle
Michael Brooks - 13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
Ben Judah, - This is London: Life and Death in the World City
Anton Chekhov - The Essential Tales of Chekhov

Max Aub - Field of Honour
Jesse K. Baer - Midwestern Infinity Doctrine
Andrei Bely - Petersburg
Daniel Benjamin & Eric Sneathen (ed.) - The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture
Thomas Bernhard - Correction
Adolfo Bioy Casares - The Invention of Morel and Other Stories
Karel Čapek - Travels in the North
Karel Čapek - War with the Newts
Victoria Chang - Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief
Amit Chaudhuri - Odysseus Abroad
Rafael Chirbes - Cremation
Norma Cole - Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems, 1988-2008
Wanda Coleman - Heart First Into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets
Cid Corman - Livingdying
Marie Darrieussecq - Pig Tales
Marie Darrieussecq - Being Here Is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker
Jeremy M. Davies - Fancy
Lydia Davis - The End of the Story
Natalie Diaz - Postcolonial Love Poem
Dasa Drndic - EEG
Tongo Eisen-Martin - Heaven is All Goodbyes
Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show
Stanley Elkin - Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers
Annie Ernaux - A Woman's Story
Sesshu Foster - World Ball Notebook
Renee Gladman - The Activist
Renee Gladman - Calamities
Juan Goytisolo - Quarantine
Judy Grahn - The Judy Grahn Reader
Jim Harrison - The Theory and Practice of Rivers and New Poems
Terrance Hayes - Lighthead
Harmony Holiday - Negro League Baseball
Fanny Howe - London-rose
Fanny Howe - Night Philosophy
Hua Hsu - Stay True
Kenneth Irby - Orexis
Kenneth Irby - Catalpa
Tove Jansson - Fair Play
Elfriede Jelinek - The Piano Teacher
Noelle Kocot - God's Green Earth
Clarice Lispector - Soulstorm: Stories
Garielle Lutz - The Gotham Grammarian
Garielle Lutz - Divorcer
Sabrina Orah Mark - Wild Milk
Bernadette Mayer - Work and Days
Patrick Modiano - Honeymoon
Geoffrey G. O'Brien - Experience in Groups
Pier Paolo Pasolini - Roman Poems
Georges Perec - W, or the Memory of Childhood
Sarah Schulman - After Delores
Sarah Schulman - Empathy
Sarah Schulman - Rat Bohemia
Isaac Bashevis Singer - A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories
Wole Soyinka - Shuttle in the Crypt
Maria Stepanova - In Memory of Memory
Martine Syms - Shame Space
Stacy Szymaszek - The Pasolini Book
Stacy Szymaszek - three novenas
Yoko Tawada - Memoirs of a Polar Bear
Olga Tokarczuk - The Books of Jacob
Nick Twemlow - Palm Trees
Jean Valentine - Home Deep Blue: New and Selected Poems
Elio Vittorini - Conversations in Sicily
Lewis Warsh - One Foot Out the Door: The Collected Stories of Lewis Warsh
Jonathan Williams - Amen Huzza Selah
Joy Williams - Harrow
Alejandro Zambra - Bonsai

for a second i thought this was the ILM tracks/albums of 2022 nomination thread and i was very confused

Non-Fiction

Ackroyd, Wilkie Collins
Arendt, Between Past and Future
Arendt, On Revolution
Arendt, The Human Condition
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Ascati, A Counter-History of Crime Fiction
Benjamin, Illuminations
Bloom (ed.), Gothic Horror
Callaghan, Assigned: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Sapphire and Steel
Christie, An Autobiography
Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws
Daniels, Living in Fear
Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song
Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie
Hendrix & Poggiali, These Fists Break Bricks
Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital
Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire
Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes
Howarth, So Deadly, So Perverse, v. 1
Howarth, So Deadly, So Perverse, v. 3
Hutton, The Witch
Jarnow, Big Day Coming
Kannas, Giallo!
Koven, La Dolce Morte
Kröger and Anderson, Monster, She Wrote
Rzepka, Detective Fiction
Spade, Mutual Aid
Standage, The Writing on the Wall
Twigger, Angry White Pyjamas
Warner, No Go the Bogeyman

Mystery Novels

Allingham, Death of a Ghost
Allingham, Flowers for the Judge
Allingham, The Fashion in Shrouds
Brackett, No Good From a Corpse
Brand, Fog of Doubt
Brand, Green for Danger
Brand, Heads You Lose
Brand, The Crooked Wreath
Brand, Tour de Force
Carr, Hag’s Nook
Carr, The Bowstring Murders
Carr, The Mad Hatter Mystery
Carr, The Plague Court Murders
Christie, An Appointment with Death
Christie, And Then There Were None
Christie, Cards on the Table
Christie, Death in the Clouds
Christie, Five Little Pigs
Christie, Hallowe’en Party
Christie, Lord Edgware Dies
Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia
Christie, Murder is Easy
Christie, One Two Buckle My Shoe
Christie, Peril at End House
Christie, Poirot Investigates
Christie, Sad Cypress
Christie, The Moving Finger
Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Christie, The Murder on the Links
Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Christie, The Sittaford Mystery
Mitchell, The Saltmarsh Murders
Punshon, Death Comes to Cambers
Punshon, The Dusky Hour
Queen, The Greek Coffin Mystery
Roscoe, Murder on the Way!
Van Dine, The Bishop Murder Case
Van Dine, The Greene Murder Case
Van Dine, The Scarab Murder Case
Vázquez Montalbán, Off Side
Vázquez Montalbán, South Seas

Other Novels

Amis, The Green Man
Brackett and Bradbury, Lorelei of the Red Mist
Collins, The Haunted Hotel
Conrad, Victory
Hodgson, The Ghost Pirates
Masterton, Charnel House
Masterton, Family Portrait
Masterton, The Manitou
Masterton, The Pariah
Masterton, The Wells of Hell
McDowell, Cold Moon over Babylon
Rampo, The Hunter of the Grotesque
Ray, Malpertius
Simenon, The People Opposite

Short Story Collections and Anthologies

Anderson (ed.), The Women of Weird Tales
Benson, A,C. and Benson, R.H., Ghosts in the House
Benson, E.F., Night Terrors
Burrage, The Waxwork and Other Stories
Crawford, For the Blood Is the Life and Other Stories
Dalby and Pardoe (eds.), Ghosts and Scholars
de la Mare, Out of the Deep
Doyle, The Best Horror Stories of Arthur Conan Doyle
Edwards (ed.), Foreign Bodies
Ernst, Doctor Satan
Gilchrist, I Am Stone
Grabinski, The Dark Domain
Hartley, The Travelling Grave and Other Stories
James, M.R., Collected Ghost Stories
James, The Ghost Stories of Henry James
Kipling, Tales of Horror and Fantasy
Lawrence, Nights of the Round Table
Lee, Hauntings
Lewis, Tales of the Grotesque
Malden, Nine Ghosts
Manwaring (ed.), Heavy Weather: Tempestuous Tales of Stranger Climes
Miller (ed.), Weird Woods: Tales from the Haunted Forests of Britain
Rampo, The Black Lizard and Beast in the Shadows
Rampo, The Early Cases of Akechi Kogoro
Rampo, The Edogawa Rampo Reader
Ray, Ghouls in My Grave
Ray, My Own Private Spectres
Ray, Seven Tales
Rolt, Sleep No More
Scott, Randalls Round
Swain, The Stoneground Ghost Tales
Wakefield, They Return at Evening

Goddamn, man! I love it.

That’s the kind of reading I wanna do next year. (The Volume.)

Chronologically:

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Joan Didion, Where I Was From
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
Frank Conroy, Stop-Time
John Darnielle, Devil House
Robert Gottlieb, Garbo
Brad Watson, Miss Jane
Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust
Gail Stekelee and Randy Frost: Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and The Meaning of Things
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Donald A. Wollheim, Arthur Sara (ed.), The 1981 World's Best SF
Patti Smith, M Train
Tim Lawrence, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992
The Best of Margaret St. Clair
Ones I haven't yet mentioned on ILB:
Helen Rappaport, After The Romanovs
Lucy Woodhead, Shopping, Seduction and Mr. Selfridge
Henry Finder, Giles Harvey (ed.) The 40s--The Story of A Decade (New Yorker anthology)
Back to ones I've mentioned on ILB:
Michaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds
Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song

D'oh! How could I leave out
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

I finished Holy Ghost by Richard Koloda last night. Very recommended. Plus got to see most of My Name Is Albert Ayler though could do with Swedish subtitles.

Started another thing a couple of days ago Through The Language Glass by Guy Deutscher but will be a while before I finish it.

& forgot a few which weren't in the list I copied out but were on the library site under loan history or on shelves I passed so not sure why they were skipped.
Eric Charry Mande Music
Damo Suzuki I Am Damo Suzuki
bell hooks Communion

go ahead. tell me how many books you read this year. take a lil artful photo of your bookstack. upload a screenshot of a notes app listing your fave reads of 2022 pic.twitter.com/WMdHkhkdhk

— jeremy poxon (@JeremyPoxon) December 30, 2022

Here's what I got through November:

January

Janet Malcolm - In the Freud Archives
Albert Cosser - Proud Beggars
Wallace Stegner - Crossing to Safety
Robert Bresson - Notes on the Cinematographer
Patrick Modiano - Such Fine Boys
Alpheus Thomas Mason - The Supreme Court from Taft to Warren
Dylan Jones - Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics
Lyndall Gordon - Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life
Denis Donaghue - Speaking of Beauty
James Wilcox - Guest of a Sinner
Joan Didion - Play It As It Lays
Denis Donaghue - Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls
Thomas Savage - The Power of the Dog

February

Matthew Sturgis - Oscar Wilde: A Life
* Oscar Wilde - An Ideal Husband
W.G. Sebald - Vertigo
Victor Sebestyen - 1946: The Making of the Modern World
Shirley Hazzard - The Bay of Noon
Viet Thanh Nguyen - The Sympathizer
Robert Gottlieb - Garbo
Thomas Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd
Renata Adler - Speedboat
Deirdre Adair - Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir
Deirdre Adair - Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography

March

George Meredith - Diana of the Crossways
Jay Parini - Borges and Me: An Encounter
Martin Amis - Inside Story
Garrett M. Graff - Watergate: A New History
Harold Bloom - Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism
Italo Calvino - The Watcher
Louis Menand - The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
Bobbie Ann Mason - In Country
Jeffrey Frank: The Trials of Harry S. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953
James M. Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice
Barbara Pym - Quartet in Autumn
Kembrew McLeod - Parallel Lines
Hanif Abdurraqib - A Little Devil in America

April

John Le Carré - Silverview
Stephen Spender - Love-Hate Relations
Joan Richardson - How to Live, What to Do: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens
Nigel Williamson - Borges: A Life
Alejandro Zamba - Ways of Going Home
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Heat and Dust
Roger Lowenstein - Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War
* Henry James - The American
Ron Brownstein - Rock Me on the Water: The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics
Henry Green - Blindness
Jeremy Atherton Lin - Gay Bar: Why We Went Out
E.M. Forster - Three Cheers for Democracy
Daniel Mendelsohn - Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones

May

Andrew Holleran - Nights in Aruba
* William Shakespeare - Twelfth Night
Manuel Rivas - The Carpenter's Pencil
Julia Briggs - Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life
Volker Ullrich - Hitler: Volume II: Downfall 1939-45
Julia Briggs - Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life
Gwendoline Riley - Sick Notes
John Dryden -- All For Love
Kingsley Amis - The Alteration
Michael Koresky - Films of Endearment
Lytton Strachey - Eminent Victorians
Sarah Bakewell - How to Live, or a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer
Jeremy Peters - Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted

June

Albert Murray - The Omni-Americans
Siegfried Sassoon - Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
Sebastian Barry - Days Without End
Sylvia Townsend Warner - Mr. Fortune's Maggot
V.S. Pritchett - Chekhov
Carol Polsgrove - It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, But Didn't We Have Fun?
Bob Spitz - Led Zeppelin
* James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Sherwood Anderson - Poor White
Steven Hahn - A Nation Under Our Feet
* Henry James - The Aspern Papers

July

William Shakespeare - Richard III
Christopher Isherwood - Christopher and His Kind
Roy Foster - On Seamus Heaney
David Cantwell - The Running Kind: Listening to Merle Haggard
Peter S. Canellos - The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero
Edmund White - A Previous Life
J.C. Ackerley - My Father and Myself
Colette - The Pure and the Impure
Andrew Marantz - Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation
John Rechy - After the Blue Hour
* Alexandre Dumas père - The Count of Monte Cristo
Josephine Wilkinson - Louis XIV: The Power and the Glory
David Levering Lewis - The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order

August

Elizabeth Sewell - The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History
Isabelle Eberhardt - The Oblivion Seekers
Christopher Hibbert - The Borgias and Their Enemies: 1431-1519
Gavin Lambert - The Goodbye People
William Shakespeare - King John
Edmund White - The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading
Elizabeth Taylor - The Soul of Kindness
Tété-Michel Kpomassie - An African Goes to Greenland
e.e. cummings - The Enormous Room
N. D. B. Connolly - A World More Concrete
Nick Seabrook - One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America
Penelope Fitzgerald - Innocence
Junichiro Tanizaki - Some Prefer Nettles
Ottessa Moshfegh - Lapvona

September

Tim Lawrence - Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983
* Thomas Hardy - Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Hannah Arendt - Men in Dark Times
Geoff Dyer - The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings
Walter Stahr - Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival
Jean Rhys - Good Morning, Midnight
Javier Marías - All Souls
Javier Marías - The Infatuations
Christopher Ricks - Tennyson
Richard Brody - Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard
Hilary Mantel - Fludd

October

Hilary Mantel - A Place of Greater Safety
Greil Marcus - Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby
Pat Barker - The Women of Troy
Beowulf (Seamus Heaney)
Annie Ernaux - A Man's Place
Annie Ernaux - Happening
Dorothy Baker - Cassandra at the Wedding
* Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth
Philip Roth - I Married a Communist
Luke Mogelson - The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible
Javier Marías - A Heart So White
Gay Talese - Thy Neighbor's Wife
Lorrie Moore - Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

November

Timothy D. Snyder - The Road to Unfreedom
Elizabeth Bowen - The Little Girls
Robert Crawford - Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land
Leonard Sciascia - The Day of the Owl
Bob Dylan - The Philosophy of Bob Dylan
Wallace Stegner - Crossing to Safety
Hilary Mantel - A Change of Climate
Tom Breihan - The Number Ones
Maggie O'Farrell - Hamnet
Peter Brooks - Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative
Colette - Chéri and The End of Chéri
William Shakespeare - Cymbeline

That's good going. I was thinking A Place Of Greater Safety was 700 pp+ cos I have a copy I need to read. & I think a few others there are similar length. So getting them done with others in the same month is good going. x10.
I think I was taking great chunks of nights through a lot of the year to read this year. & slowed down massively when i started getting up early for the course.

I am in awe of the number of books some of you manage to read in a year.

I'm single and walk a lot.

That in itself is impressive to me. If I regularly read while walking I'd be in constant danger of tripping or running into things.

Yeah, remember what happened to Stephen King. Alfred's probably smarter about it, since he hasn't mentioned any accidents yet.
One more I forgot, added because it's well worth mentioning anyway: JL Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, as translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni. My take was posted on a thread well worth mentioning anyway: Borges translation?

So that makes 21 in 52 weeks. I like the pace, but looking at my Collier Brothers pile, figuring my likely lifespan, h'mm.

And several of those weren't even from the pile, but the library, and personal loans.

i once ran the numbers on the rough number of books i would be able to read in my remaining years and to cut to the chase i dont recommend doing that

Aaand current discussion of music bios on WAYR? finally reminds me that I also should have listed Willie Nelson and Bobbie Nelson's Me and Sister Bobbie, with each life story told in alternating chapters, building some suspense, though Willie's dispatches are often deft rehash from his many previous books, far as I can tell. Hers are almost complete unknowns to me, and often startling at the very least.

Yeah, remember what happened to Stephen King. Alfred's probably smarter about it, since he hasn't mentioned any accidents yet.

6:20 a.m., few cars, residential neighborhood with cul-de-sacs.

I though you meant you were listening to audiobooks

never have

That is somehow much more charming

The Philosophy of Modern Song - Bob Dylan
The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland - Fintan O'Toole
Memento Mori - Muriel Spark
Slayground - Richard Stark
Sideswipe - Charles Willeford
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets - Svetlana Alexievich
Cuba: An American History - Ada Ferrer
The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector
The Invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares
Teenager - Bud Smith
Either/Or - Elif Batuman
Norco '80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History - Peter Houlahan
Normal People - Sally Rooney
The Regency Years: During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, and Britain Becomes Modern - Robert Morrison
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York - Lucy Sante
Deadwood - Pete Dexter
Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom - Derecka Purnell
Kudos - Rachel Cusk
Cockfighter - Charles Willeford
Eve's Hollywood - Eve Babitz
Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon
Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century - Dana Stevens
Transit - Rachel Cusk
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music - Alex Ross
When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjami­n Labatut
Outline - Rachel Cusk
Harlem Shuffle - Colson Whitehead
Arctic Dreams - Barry Lopez

The nice discoveries: Bei Dao (just a few pages to finish), Heine's prose, Starnone's fiction, Aubrey's portraits, and I have 'discovered' Shakespeare after being mis-taught it at school. On the boil Latin American fiction (via Onetti and Di Benedetto) is a thing you can never go wrong with (as oposed to Vargas Llosa, the only book that really bored me). I didn't read lots but I read big at times (it informed this poll: Like the 20th Century Never Happened) and right now I am finishing part two of Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries, which is really wonderful, one of the finest books ever bought out by NYRB.

Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep
John Aubrey - Brief Lives
Joseph Conrad - The Secret Agent
Ursula Le Guin - The Dispossesed
Domenico Starnone - Ties
Natalia Ginzburg - The Dry Heart
William Congreve - Incognita
The Poems of Wilfred Owen
Antonio Lobo Antunes - Act of the Dammed
Hazlitt - On Theatre
William Shakespeare - Othello
Wolfgang Hilbig - The Interim
William Shakespeare - Antony and Cleopatra
Various - The Tragic History of the Sea
Antonio Moresco - Distant Light
Juan Carlos Onetti - The Shipyard
William Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Antonio Di Benedetto - The Silentiary
Vasily Grossman - Life & Fate
Cesare Pavese - The Beautiful Summer
Homer - War Music (tr Christopher Logue)
Xavier de Maistre - Journey Around my Room
Peter Stamm - The Sweet Indifference of the World
Wole Soyinka - A Shutter in the Crypt
Mario Vargas Llosa - Conversation in the Cathedral*
Hermann Burger - Brenner
Halldor Laxness - Indepedent People
Joy Williams - Harrow
Vladimir Sharov - Before & During
Christina Stead - The Man Who Loved Children
Pat Califia - Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex
Helen DeWitt - The English Understand Wool
Heinrich Heine - Travel Pictures
Bei Dao - City Gate, Open Up*
Uwe Johnson - Anniversaries Part Two*

* unfinished/to finish

Brenner is also lovely, a one of a kind book.

I have Brenner and keep meaning to put it in the queue. Stoked to see Life & Fate on your list -- I think I read it eleven years ago or so and that long set piece where they're defending House 6/1 never leaves me, what a book

Experiments in Imagining Otherwise Lola Olufemi
The Moon in Its Flight Gilbert Sorrentino
The Twilight Zone Nona Fernández
Role Models John Waters
Begin Again: Collected Poems Grace Paley
What Belongs to You Garth Greenwell
Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation Nuar Alsadir
Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome Garth Marenghi
The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky Vaslav Nijinsky
Reader for Hire Raymond Jean
You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] Andrew Hankinson
Fairy Tale Stephen King
Silences Tillie Olsen
The Road to the City Natalia Ginzburg
The Enchanted Glass Tom Nairn
Ulysses James Joyce
Devil House John Darnielle
Chavs Owen Jones
Bad Behavior Mary Gaitskill
Manhunt Gretchen Felker-Martin
The Impostor Silvina Ocampo
Frantz Fanon’s Uneven Ribs Taban Lo Liyong
Twenty-two Days or Half a Lifetime Franz Fühmann
The Harpy Megan Hunter
Party im Blitz Elias Canetti
The Cheap-Eaters Thomas Bernhard
Three Lives Gertrude Stein
Tender Buttons Gertrude Stein
Cain's Jawbone E. Powys Mathers
Terminal Boredom Izumi Suzuki
Bird in a Cage Frédéric Dard
Powers of Darkness Valdimar Asmundsson,Bram Stoker,Hans De Roos
Girl, Woman, Other Bernardine Evaristo
Beowulf A New Translation Seamus Heaney
Station Eleven Emily St John Mandel
Harrow Joy Williams
The Changeling Joy Williams
+Vols 1 & 2 of the complete original stories of Maupassant

Sorry for horrible formatting, I’m on phone & can’t fix. Managed about half what I’ve been used to reading these last few years — obv the numbers don’t matter except insofar as they reflect less time for reading, which in this case directly stems from dismal life shit — nonetheless a v good year for reading if nothing else, I will remember this summer for the heatwave and finally reading Ulysses

No rereads on the list which I feel can’t be right but I guess it is (audiobooks in bed don’t count else Stephen King’s cell would appear 50 times)

I didn’t finish the descent by Jeff long or Paul Morley’s Dylan book; I’ll go back to the latter at some point probably

Also this list is backwards, experiments in imagining otherwise is the last thing I read and in many ways the perfect thing to read going into a new year, although in other ways the new year thing is antithetical to what it’s about

lorrie moore - anagrams
lonnie elder iii - ceremonies in dark old men
roth - the human stain
judd apatow - sicker in the head
meghan o'rourke - the invisible kingdom
michael eric dyson - jay-z: made in america
calvin trillin - remembering denny
scarlett thomas - 41-love
noel coward - private lives
joyce carol oates - sexy
joyce carol oates - the (other) you
joyce carol oates - the tattooed girl
joyce carol oates - because it is bitter, and because it is my heart
donna tartt - the secret history
chris clarey - federer bio
adam levin - mount chi
porchista khakpour - sick
shawn levy - de niro bio
the realm of appearances -matthew wong art book
ross douhat - the deep places
anne tyler - a slipping down life

C&P from my end of year blog, hope you don't mind.

PG Wodehouse - Heavy Weather (1933) **** (amazing that this and Summer Lightning take place within two weeks, such intricate, flawless plotting)
Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism (2009) **** (still essential, wish he were around to give us an update)
David Nobbs - Pratt à Manger (2006) **½ (dregs of the Henry Pratt series, still worth reading)
Jonathan Coe - Middle England (2018) *** (diminishing returns in the Rotters Club series, some parts excellent, some parts should have been cut)
Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan (1946) ****½ (yes, I should have read this years ago, I know)
Eric Hobsbawm - Age of Extremes The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (1994) ****
Taylor Downing - 1942: Britain at the Brink (2022) ** (just not what I was looking for here)
Terry Teachout - Duke (2013) ** (some parts are excellent, unfortunately spoiled by his bizarre insistence on tutting at Ellington for not being a classical composer)
PG Wodehouse - Blandings Castle and Elsewhere (1935) **** (some of the best Blandings stories, Mr Mulliner stories are fine but not up to same standard)
Ted Gioia - The History of Jazz, Second Edition (2021) **½ (interesting as an overview of what the consensus (to be challenged) is, devoting more of the book to Winton Marsalis than all non-US Jazz is pretty inexcusable, also he is very sniffy about free jazz and has apparent contempt for hip-hop)
Alex Ross - The Rest Is Noise (2007) ***½ (very good overview of 21st century classical music, which I am still not really into after reading)
PG Wodehouse - Lord Emsworth and Others (1937) ***½ (some stories are excellent, not enough Blandings for me though)
Louis Menand - The Free World (2021) **** (excellent primer on cold war era culture and thought, have just finished this and am letting it sink in)
Edward Joffe - Hancock's Last Stand (1998) *½ (on Tony Hancock's last months from someone who was there, would expect any showbiz memoir to be more engaging than this)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGZbT2jp97A

"Stoked to see Life & Fate on your list" -- your enthusiasm for W&P was also lovely to see, and since L&F is modelled on it..

Fatal Vision - Joe McGinniss
The 1975 Annual World's Best SF - Donald A Wollheim ed
Slow Horses - Mick Herron
Sadie When She Died - Ed McBain
Consider Phlebas - Iain M Banks
A Morbid Taste for Bones - Ellis Peters
The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M Cain
The Death of Grass - John Christopher
Deep Water - Patricia Highsmith
The Moving Toyshop - Edmund Crispin
Denim and Leather: The Rise and Fall of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal - Michael Hand
Time Unchained - Ivan Howard ed
My Face for the World to See - Alfred Hayes
Astounding: John Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A Heinlein, L. Ron Hiubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction - Alec Nevala-Lee
True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee - Abraham Riesman
The Player of Games - Iain M Banks
The Dark Hours - Michael Connelly
A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & The 1970s - Mike Barnes
The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag and other stories - Robert A. Heinlein
All of the Marvels - Douglas Wolk
The Daughter of Time - Josephine They
Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life - George Saunders et al
All Out War: The Full Story of Brexit - Tim Shipman
Maigret in Court - Georges Simenon
Songs of Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe - Thomas Ligotti
The Unsettled Dust - Robert Aickman
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiel Hammett
Cop Hater - Ed McBain
The Simulacra - Philip K Dick
Magpie Murders - Anthony Horowitz
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Poisoned Chocolates Case - Anthony Berkeley
A Very English Scandal - John Preston
Looking Backwards, from the Year 2000 - Mack Reynolds

Only a few 'graphic novels' this year:
The Eternals Omnibus - Jack Kirby
X-Men: Grand Design Vols 1-3 - Ed Piskor
Fantastic Four: Grand Design - Tom Scioli
Esther's Notebooks: Tales from my ten-year-old Life - Riad Sattouf
The Amazing Spider-Man: New Ways to Die - Waid, Slott, Romita Jr et al
Saga Vols 1-5 - Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
The Suicide Squad: Trial by Fire - John Ostrander, Luke McDonnell et al
Reckless - Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
Reckless: A friend of the Devil - Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
Essential Fantastic Four Vol 6 - Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway, John Buscema, Joe Sinnott et al
Essential Fantastic Four Vol 7 - Gerry Conway, Len Wein, Rich Buckler, John Buscema, Joe Sinnott et al
Essential Fantastic Four Vol 8 - Roy Thomas, Bill Mantlo, Gerry Conway, Rich Buckler, John Buscema, Joe Sinnott et al
Alay-Oop - William Gropper

Michael HANN
Josephine TEY

Stoked to see Life & Fate on your list

Just purchased this recently. Looking forward to it.

A star for the ones I really liked

Schwob - Imaginary Lives*
Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
Laxness - Iceland's Bell*
Machado de Assis - Dom Casmurro*
Jane Austen - Emma
Sebald - Austerlitz
Soseki - Kokoro*
Lem - The Cyberiad
Vargas Llosa - La Casa Verde*
Hardy - Tess of the d'Urbervilles*
Kadaré - The Three-Arched Bridge
Schwob - Le Livre de Monelle
Flaubert - Salammbô*
Carrington - The Hearing Trumpet*
Robinson - Lila
Huysmans - À Rebours*
Shakespeare - Macbeth*
Carr - A month in the country*
Miyazawa - Les Astres Jumeaux
Faber - Under the Skin
Williams - Butcher's Crossing*
Saer - El Entenado
Chaze - Black Wings Has My Angel*
Lampedusa - The Leopard*
Kadaré - The Palace of Dreams
Kerouac - Big Sur
Kristof - L'analphabète
Mann - The Magic Mountain (re-read)

Not counting 3 non-fiction things (Michela Wong, Rebecca Solnit, Lucille Peytavin)

Magic Mountain obviously many stars

just finished the Howard Zinn A People's History of The United States so definitely got that counted as 2022. Liminal time etc.
Quite enjoyed it and will be looking at what I can get from its bibliography.

Harriet the Spy - Louise Fitzhugh
The Corner That Held Them - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
Foster - Claire Keegan
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Ways of Living - Gemma Seltzer
Elder Race - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Kim Jiyoung Born 1982 - Nam-Joo Cho
Mona - Pola Oloixarac
Maigret Travels South - Georges Simenon
Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do - Eberhardt, Jennifer L.
Machine - Elizabeth Bear
The Island of Missing Trees - Elif Shafak
By the Sea - Abdulrazak Gurnah
The Books of Jacob - Olga Tokarczuk
Kokoro - Natsume Sōseki
Go, Went, Gone - Jenny Erpenbeck
Gun, with Occasional Music - Jonathan Lethem
The Custom of the Country - Edith Wharton
Notes from the Burning Age - Claire North
Beyond the Hallowed Sky - Ken Macleod
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity - David Graeber and David Wengrow
Semiosis - Sue Burke
Songs of a Dead Dreamer - Thomas Ligotti
Black Spartacus - Sudhir Hazareesingh
The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler
Galaxias - Stephen Baxter
Mother of Invention - Katrine Marçal
Red Shift - Alan Garner
The Dutch House - Ann Patchett
O Caledonia - Elspeth Barker
April in Spain - John Banville
The Anomaly - Hervé Le Tellier
The Means of Escape - Penelope Fitzgerald
Seeing - Jose Saramago
The Blazing World - Siri Hustvedt
Second Place - Rachel Cusk
Purgatory Mount - Adam Roberts
Burntcoat - Sarah Hall
Black Teacher - Beryl Gilroy
The Wall - Marlen Haushofer
Mrs March - Virginia Feito
The Thing Itself - Adam Roberts
All Souls - Javier Marías
The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another - Ainissa Ramirez
How Do You Live? - Genzaburo Yoshino
He, She and It - Marge Piercy
Eversion - Alasdair Reynolds
Sea of Tranquility - Emily St John Mandel
What Are You Going Through - Sigrid Nunez
Shards of Earth - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Assembly - Natasha Brown
The Friend - Sigrid Nunez

In progess:
Debt - David Graeber

Did not finish:
The Famished Road - Ben Okri

I've only obsessively catalogued my reads since 2008 but adding what I can remember from before then, in october I offically passed the milestone of 1000 books. I plan on doing more re-reading from now on.

turns out i've missed a couple. not sure how.

Pandora's Jar
Mother Of Invention

will double check its not just two

do wish that Mother of Invention was subtler and less overtly agendaed. might have got the message across better.I meant to read some of the source books from the bibliography to see if they were better argued.

As usual this year I failed to develop any disciplined reading patterns and spent too much time dissociating on the internet. But I did manage to read:

Osman, The Man Who Died Twice
Riley, Cold Water
Franzen, Crossroads
Stafford, Counselling Skills in Action
Baddiel, Jews Don’t Count
Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
Pratchett, Reaper Man
Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Higgins, Kennedy for the Defense
McIntyre, The Entropy Effect
Riley, My Phantoms
Amis, The Green Man
Fitzgerald, Men’s of Escape
Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
Le Guin, Tehanu
Block, 8 Million Ways To Die
Atkinson, Case Histories
Atkinson, One Good Turn
Tolkien, Fellowship of yadda yadda
Christie, After the Funeral
Harris, A Season in Exile
Rosen, How to make children laugh
Hammett, The Thin Man (unfinished due to boredom)
Rimmer, Like Punk Never Happened
Raskin, The Westing Game

Unsentimental best: My Phantoms
Sentimental best: Tehanu
Had a chapter that caused me to cry more than any other book I’ve read: Case Histories

nonfiction:
Slavoj Zizek - Living in the End Times
Jerome Carcopino - Daily Life in Ancient Rome
Anne Hyde - Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West
Terry Teachout - Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong
Simon Winder - Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History
J. Storrs Hall - Where Is My Flying Car?
Arthur Schopenhauer - The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims

fiction:
Sally Rooney - Beautiful World, Where Are You?
Ursula Le Guin - Left Hand of Darkness
James M. Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice
James M. Cain - Double Indemnity
Joshua Cohen - The Netanyahus
Karl Ove Knausgaard - My Struggle: Volume 4
Elif Batuman - The Idiot
Patrick Modiano - Paris Nocturne
John Darnielle - Universal Harvester
Rainer Maria Rilke - The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
John Wyndham - The Outward Urge
Valeria Luiselli - Lost Children Archive
Leonardo Sciascia - To Each His Own
Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms
Sam Selvon - The Housing Lark
Patricia Highsmith - The Blunderer
Machado de Assis - The Alienist and Other Stories of 19th Century Brazil

poetry:
Jimmy Santiago Baca - Martin & Meditations on the South Valley
Philip Levine - The Simple Truth
Robinson Jeffers - Tamar
Dante - Inferno (trans. Robert Pinsky)

Machado de Assis - The Alienist and Other Stories of 19th Century Brazil

I liked it. I would like to read more by him. I added his novel "The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas" to my wish list after finishing this one. The longest story "The Alienist" may have been one of the weaker ones, IMO. Or at least it seems to be the one that feels the most dated. It's a satire of the scientific pretensions of psychiatry in its early days, which from a contemporary perspective seems a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. It was probably more stinging at the time. The other shorter pieces were interesting, well-observed tales of society and psychology with a gentle satirical edge.

My resolution to not buy any more books lasted about 3 days. Just 'popped into' my local Oxfam book store and left with a bag-full: a couple of Antonia Whites, Antony Sher's Year of the King, Beryl Gilroy's Black Teacher, Marshall Berman's All That's Solid, Rose Macaulay's World is my Wilderness and, uh, the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

Going into Oxfam after new year's is probably the last thing I'd do if I wanted to stop buying books.

Resistance is futile.

yeah was running through my head to slow down buying books.But somehow wound up making the usual rounds. Did get some interesting stuff though

The Humble Bundle deals are death for me.

Marshall Berman's All That's Solid

I've never read it. Even when I was doing my lit degree I managed to avoid it, somehow. Glad to finally have it.

Amazing book.