What did you read in 2022?

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.