Weird year.

I read a lot of books that were recommended to me, a few on loan from friends, many on loan from the library. I read multiple books by the same author a couple different times (Nathalie Sarraute, Beverley Nichols, I thought there was one more but I guess not), which I don’t typically do (except for M.F.K. Fisher, I suppose, whose books I’m running out of). I did a fair bit of rereading, looking back. Some of that was for book club, some of that was to feel close to some former friends and mentors. I read books by new friends, whether they realize they are now my friend or not (Utopians in Love, Good Grief, Hammer Head, The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies), and old (All the Wasted Beauty of the World, The Squimbop Condition). Two of which I then proceeded to do interviews about (here and forthcoming in minor literature[s] in, I think, February). The end of the year included some arty not-quite-self-help not-quite-actual-business-advice books because I needed audiobooks to listen to while cleaning the house for holiday hosting. The book club selections this year were excellent. I didn’t read as much poetry as maybe I’d want to read but looking back I did read a reasonable amount. The only "big book" I read was That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, but that feels fine, because after having it on my shelves for well over a decade, I finally read Fiction and Metaphysics cover to cover. There were some "wordless novels" in there, though I still have the big Lynd Ward book from the library that I want to finish. There were some other very non-characteristic books in here, some of which were wonderful and others less so. I read a couple cycling books. I was delighted to snag a copy of Coover’s The Grand Hotels at Brattle St. Books and read it (I am always on the look out for Burning Deck books). I read a lot of books about art.

I read less than last year but also a lot, and I tried some new genres and things, and our town’s new library is set to open mid-January. I think I’m maybe happiest about having read so many books by new and old friends.

And so the year in reading:

  1. The Third Lie by Ágota Kristóf

  2. Quartet by Jean Rhys

  3. The Use of Speech by Nathalie Sarraute

  4. Monad + Monadnock by Karen Donovan

  5. Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  6. The Age of Suspicion by Nathalie Sarraute

  7. The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir

  8. Utopians in Love by Bob Sykora

  9. Boulder by Eva Baltasar, trans. Julia Sanches

  10. How Music Works by David Byrne

  11. The House by Jane Unrue

  12. The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher

  13. Slaying the Badger by Richard Moore

  14. Ice by Anna Kavan

  15. The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn

  16. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson

  17. Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter by E.B. Bartels

  18. Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols

  19. Daily Rituals: Women at Work by Mason Currey

  20. Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino, trans. Geoffrey Brock

  21. Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter by Nina MacLaughlin

  22. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou

  23. Erasure by Percival Everett

  24. The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies by Maggie Cooper

  25. The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe

  26. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick

  27. Silent Anatomies by Monica Ong

  28. The Voice of Things by Francis Ponge trans. Beth Archer

  29. All the Wasted Beauty of the World by Richard Newman

  30. A Thatched Roof by Beverley Nichols

  31. Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker

  32. That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda, trans. William Weaver

  33. The Squimbop Condition by David Leo Rice

  34. Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

  35. Forest Primeval by Vievee Francis

  36. The Master Letters by Lucie Brock-Broido

  37. The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, trans Ken Knabb

  38. Fiction and Metaphysics by Amie L. Thomasson

  39. Gods' Man by Lynd Ward

  40. Destiny, a novel in pictures by Nückel Otto

  41. Wintering by Katherine May

  42. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

  43. Le Fric: Family, Power and Money: The Business of the Tour de France by Alex Duff

  44. The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

  45. A Physical Education by Casey Johnston

  46. The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

  47. I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken

  48. The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) by Robert Coover

  49. Art, Inc. by Lisa Congdon

  50. Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec, trans. David Bellos

  51. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

  52. How to Make a Living with Your Writing by Joanna Penn