what all did you read in 2015

Walsh's Hotel,

this arrived yesterday, really looking forward to it, I read an extract and thought it was great. may try read it in a hotel.

Try a year of reading only female authors. It seems an eye-opening exercise for people who actually do it.

I'm bad at writing down PDFs I read on my phone so this may be incomplete:

Octavia Butler - Parable of the Sower *
Roland Barthes Reader (the one edited by Susan Sontag)
David J Haskins - Who Killed Mr Moonlight
Donald Robertson - Stoicism and the Art of Happiness
Bret Easton Ellis - The Rules of Attraction ~
Sara Maitland - How To Be Alone
Lloyd Bradley - Sounds Like London
Andrea Dworkin - Intercourse
Marianne Faithfull - Memories, Dreams and Reflections
Michel Foucault - History of Sexuality Volume 1 (I did also read 2 & 3 at some point but didn't write them down)
Sinclair MacKay - Ramble On
Shiri Eisner - Notes For A Bisexual Revolution
Jean Cocteau - The Difficulty of Being
A.S. Byatt - Portraits in Fiction
John Carey - What Good Are The Arts ~
Ivan Bunin - The Village
Viv Albertine - Clothes Music Boys *
Poppy Z Brite - Courtney Love The Real Story
Mary Midgley - Science and Poetry
Debra Fine - The Fine Art of Small Talk
Deborah Cameron - The Myth of Mars and Venus
Jill Dudley - Gods In Britain ~
J. Jack Halberstam - Gaga Feminism
Robert Dellar - Splitting In Two
Ferdinand de Saussure - Course In General LInguistics (re-read)
Robert Weiss & Jennifer Schneider - Closer Together; Further Apart ~
David R Brake - Sharing Our Lives Online
David Buckley - Kraftwerkpublikation
Lynne Hume - The Religious Life of Dress
Melissa Harrison - Clay *
Dan Gardner - Risk; The Politics and Science of Fear
Rebecca Solnit - A Field Guide To Getting Lost *
Catherine Arnold - Necropolis *
Philip Marsden - Rising Ground
Daphne du Maurier - My Cousin Rachel
Wolfgang Flür - I Was A Robot (re-read)
Tanith Lee - Silver Metal Lover *
Judith (Jack) Halberstam - Female Masculinity *
Leslie Feinberg - Stone Butch Blues
Bernard Sumner - Chapter and Verse
Simon Reynolds - Retromania ~
Steve Silberman - Neurotribes
Mary Midgley - Are You An Illusion?
Melissa Harrison - At Hawthorn Time
Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl ~
Margaret Atwood - Lady Oracle

"*' for things I really loved; "~' for things I utterly hated but I thought was probably good for me to read something I disagreed with so thoroughly,

Joyce Carol Oates - The Accursed
Hilary Mantel - Bring Up The Bodies
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita (reread)
Donna Tartt - The Secret History
John Darnielle - Wolf In White Van
Raymond Carver - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Emma Healey - Elizabeth Is Missing
Marshall Berman - All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
Thomas Mann - Dr Faustus
Alan Warner - The Man Who Walks
Junot Diaz - The Brief Wonderous Life Of Oscar Wao
Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty
Ali Smith - How To Be Both
Lazslo Krasznahorkai - Satantango
Richard Flanagan - The Narrow Road To The Deep North
Steve Erickson - The Sea Came In At Midnight
Albertine Sarrazin - Astragal
Patrick Modiano - The Night Watch
Haruki Murakami - Hear The Wind Sing
John Cheever - The Wapshot Scandal
Philip K Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich
David Nicholls - Us
Karen Joy Fowler - The Case of The Imaginary Detective
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
Elmore Leonard - Killshot
Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited
Toni Morrison - Jazz
Marcel Proust - Swann's Way
Michael Chabon - Wonder Boys
Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend
Paul Mason - Postcapitalism
Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings
EL Doctorow - Billy Bathgate
Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

I'm pretty sure there are two or three I've forgotten in there as well. Feel like I read a lot of amazing stuff this year but also a reasonably large proportion of crap, of which the worst was unsurprisingly that David Nicholls thing I read on holiday. The Accursed was probably the biggest disappointment - Joyce Carol Oates does 19th Century gothic was one of those ideas much better in theory than practice. I also think I just outright dislike Ali Smith's writing.

If you filter out the obvious classics, Wolf In White Van probably represents my single most enjoyable reading experience of the year, in no small part because I read it in one sitting by a fire in a pub in Cumbria one afternoon. Albertine Sarrazin's Astragal is also astonishing (as was the Ferrante and the Marlon James, but everyone's raving about them).

These lists are just reiterating my embarrassment at not having yet read Wolf in White Van.

Updating this for 2016 - had some bad indifferent patches of reading little because life got in the way (I think much of this was from the first four months of the year). On the other hand I am learning not to finish if I'm bored or even indifferent. I do need to finish less (looking at the list I see books I was indifferent that I just finished). Real sense of wants and needs. What will fulfill, add. Tell yourself to allow a few bits of the new but not too much.

New voices I hadn't come across before that wrote books 4 life: Raduan Nassar, Wolfgang Hilbig, Goncourt Bros. and Maggie Nelson. For poetry I will keep travelling alongside Arseny Tarkovsky and Arun Kolatkar.

Herman Melville - Moby-Dick
Ernesto Sabato - The Tunnel
Georges Simenon - Tropic Moon
Vasily Grossman - Armenian Sketch
Vasily Grossman - The Road
Marcel Schwob - The King in the Golden Mask*
Clarence Lispector - Hour of the Star
Raduan Nassar - A Cup of Rage
Peter Stamm - All Days are Night
Elena Ferrante - Story of the Lost Child
Svetlana Alexievich - Voices from Chernobyl
Josef Winkler - When the Time Comes
Margerite Duras - The Vice-Consul
Han Kang - Human Acts
Edmond and Jules De Goncourt - Pages from the Goncourt Journals

Jean Rhys - Voyage in the Dark
Margerite Duras - Summer Rain
Cesare Pavese - Told in Confidence and Other Stories
Ann Quin - Passages
Mairtin O Cadhain - The Dirty Dust
Wolfgang Hilbig - Sleep of the Righteous
Cesare Pavese - Festivaal Night and Other Stories
Marguerite Duras - Outside (Selected Writings)
Jean Rhys - After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
Juan Jose Saer - The Witness
Junichiro Tanizaki - In Praise of Shadows
Jean Rhys - Tigers are Better Looking
Jean Rhys - Sleep it Off Lady
Marguerite Duras - Destroy
Marguerite Duras - The Afternoon of Monsieur Andesmas

Clarice Lispector - The Complete Short Stories
Roberto Bolano - The Return
Juan Carlos Onetti - The Shipyard
Roberto Bolano - Secret Evil
Alberto Moravia - Agostino
Adolfo Bioy Casares - Asleep in the Sun
Ozamu Dazai - The Setting Sun
Joseph Roth - Complete Short Fiction
Svetlana Alexievich - Zinky Boys
James Baldwin - The Fire Next Time
Alvaro Enrigue - Sudden Death*
Bertolt Brecht - Collected Short Stories*
Pere Gimferrer - Fortuny
Hrabal - Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
James Baldwin - Notes of a Native Son

Antonio Tabucchi - Time Ages in a Hurry
Rainer Maria Rilke - Letters 1910-1926
Heinrich Von Kleist - The Prince of Homburg
Silvina Ocampo - Thus were their Faces*
Dag Solstad - Professor Andersen's Night
Bohumil Hrabal: The Little Town where Time Stood Still/Cutting it Short
BKS Iyengar - Light on Yoga*
Elsa Morante - Arcoeli
August Strindberg - The Defence of a Madman
László Krasznahorkai - Seibo There Below
Chris Kraus - I Love Dick
Vincent Van Gogh - Letters
Yasunari Kawabata - The Lake
Erich Heller - Kafka
Thomas Bernhard - Yes

Joseph Roth - Tarabas
Marie Ndiaye - Self-Portrait in Green
Flann O'Brien - The Best of Myles
Maggie Nelson - The Argonauts
W.H.Auden - Dyer's Hand
Boris & Arkady Strugatsky - Hard to be a God
Miroslav Holub - The Dimension of the Present Moment and Other Essays

Poetry:

Gerard de Nerval - Chimeras
Arun Kolatkar - Complete
Mahmoud Darwish - A River Dies of Thirst
Hans Magnus Ensensberger - The Sinking of the Titanic
Mahmoud Darwish - Why did you Leave the Horse Alone?
Friedrich Holderlin - Selected
Fernando Pessoa - Selected
Silvina Ocampo - Seleted
Petrarch - Canzionere
Speaking of Siva
William Empson - Complete
Gottfried Benn - Impromptus
Sakutaro Hagowara - Cat Town*
Arseny Tarkovsky - I Burned at the Feast (Selected Poems)
Cesare Pavese - Disaffections: Poems 1930-1950

* didn't finish

Pere Gimferrer was the oddest of books, kinda brilliant and unique. I'll re-read and talk about it on the poetry/prose thread sometime. With Seibo There Below it felt like I was reading Krasznahorkai for the first time. Baldwin was the one well known writer I hadn't got round to till this year and I'm glad I did.

For simplicity's sake, I've started a new thread for 2016 here.

I'm curious what you thought about Baldwin and Passages, xyzzzz__.