what did you read in 2016?

Continuing from last year's thread....

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
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, December 18, 2016 7:00 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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.
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, December 18, 2016 7:07 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This has been a relatively light reading year for me, mostly due to depression, and one more narrowly focused on contemporary writers; I've starred the books that especially stood out for me.

viv albertine / clothes clothes clothes music music music boys boys boys
anna akhmatova / selected poems *
elena ferrante / story of the lost child *
elizabeth hardwick / sleepless nights *
honore de balzac / old goriot *
juliana spahr / that winter the wolf came
elizabeth hardwick / seduction and betrayal: women and literature
alex mar / witches of america
michelle alexander / the new jim crow *
toni morrison / sula *
tennessee williams / cat on a hot tin roof
sophie campbell / wet moon, v. 1-2
angela davis / abolition democracy
eileen myles / chelsea girls *
samuel delany / about writing
sarah schulman / stagestruck: theater, aids, and the marketing of gay america
miriam toews / all my puny sorrows
jason lutes / jar of fools
carson mccullers / ballad of the small cafe and other stories
patricia highsmith / the price of salt *
ta-nehesi coates / between the world and me *
sylvia plath / the bell jar
gail scott / my paris
jamie berrout / incomplete short stories and essays
mary gaitskill / because they wanted to
dodie bellamy / when the sick rule the world *
merritt kopas / internet murder revenge fantasy *
wayne koestenbaum / my 1980s
sarah schulman / the cosmopolitans
wayne koestenbaum / andy warhol
kathy acker and mackenzie wark / i'm very into you: correspondence 1995-1996
octavia butler / lilith's brood (dawn *, adulthood rites, imago)
sarah schulman / the gentrification of the mind *
mary gaitskill / don't cry *
kate bornstein / hello cruel world: 101 alternatives to suicide
tove jansson / the true deceiver
helle helle / this should be written in the present tense
susan sontag / as consciousness is harnessed to flesh *
anne sexton / all my pretty ones
karl ove knausgaard / my struggle: book 4
torrey peters / the masker
christopher isherwood / mr norris changes trains
danielle dutton / margaret the first
adrian tomine / killing and dying
mavis gallant / home truths
patrick modiano / in the cafe of lost youth
vivek shraya / she of the mountains
alejandra pizarnik / extracting the stone of madness *
clarice lispector / agua viva
robert glück / communal nude *
eli clare / exile and pride: disability, queerness, and liberation
neil gaiman / the sandman: overture
ocean vuong / night sky with exit wounds
karl ove knausgaard / my struggle: book 5
terrie sultan, ed. / chantal akerman: moving through time and space
dodie bellamy / letters of mina harker
essex hemphill / ceremonies *
sam d'allesandro / the wild creatures: collected stories
rivka galchen / little labors
torrey peters / infect your friends and loved ones
tove jansson / fair play
jaime and gilbert hernandez / love and rockets: new stories #8
wislawa szymborska / poems new and collected *
brian k vaughn / paper girls v. 1
eduardo corral / slow lightning
annie dillard / the writing life
emily brontë / wuthering heights *
yuri herrera / signs preceding the end of the world
tom king / the vision v. 1-2 *
kevin barry / dark lies the island
ivone margulies / nothing happens: chantal akerman's hyperrealist everyday
alejandro zambra / multiple choice
helen dewitt / the last samurai *
matt fraction / hawkeye v. 3-4
sacha mardou / sky in stereo
marjorie liu / monstress v. 1
olivia laing / the lonely city
octavia butler / parable of the talents
mary gaitskill / the mare *
mary ruefle / indeed i was pleased with the world
tony kushner / angels in america: a gay fantasia on national themes
joe keatinge / shutter v. 1
kieron gillen / the wicked + the divine v. 3-4
cookie mueller / ask dr mueller: the writings of cookie mueller *
michelle tea / how to grow up
richard siken / crush
annie dillard / pilgrim at tinker creek
barbara stok / vincent
christopher isherwood / a single man *
bernadette mayer / works and days
mary ruefle / my private property
kurt hollander, ed. / low rent: a decade of prose and photographs from the portable lower east side
brenda shaughnessy / so much synth
patti smith / m train

olivia laing / the lonely city

were you not so into this? I didn't manage to read it yet but it is kind of my ideal book at the moment

someone else mentioned the herrera recently, that's another one that was on my list that I didn't get to; it's a sign of how appallingly little I've read this year that I haven't got round to the easy reads 😞

I enjoyed The Lonely City, and I respect Laing's attempt to combine memoir with cultural criticism, but there was something a little too tentative about the synthesis on both sides; I don't need that kind of writing to be confessional, exactly, but Laing seems to move too quickly over the most complicated parts of her own narrative (such as growing up in a queer family under Thatcher, or coming to identify as nonbinary) and none of her chapters on (mostly male) individual artists really significantly challenged the way I already thought about them (though the passages on Nan Goldin and on Wojnarowicz's diaries are striking). I wonder if I would have enjoyed the book more if my own cultural investments were further from Laing's own, but it's certainly worth reading.

one way street, what did you think of that xpost Anna Akhmatova collection? Haven't read it, but I want to, having been struck by The Trackless Woods, where Iris DeMent employs A.'s poems (translated by Babette Deutsch and Lyn Coffin) as lyrics. Two distinctive voices, as written and sung---the results are like nothing else I've heard, though sometimes reminding me of---a certain tough-talking visionary from elsewhere in contemporary lit (something I've read, but not heard, see? Yeah).

The specific collection I read was the Bloodaxe edition of Richard McKeon's translations; I haven't compared it to many other versions, but I think it's reliable, though I always wonder what didn't make it through the sluice of translation. "Tough-talking visionary" is a good way to put it, dow; Akhmatova's poetry doesn't seem quite as oblique or wild in its leaps between images as Mandelstam's, but as a form of bearing witness to historical violence it has an equal gravity and vividness. I'll have to look out for that DeMent album.

not much, certainly not much completely, i just read to teach and reread over and over for writing projects, mainly these this year

johnson - the idea of lyric
culler - theory of the lyric
genette - narrative discourse, narrative discourse revisited
cohn - the distinction of fiction
pascal - the dual voice
kenner - joyce's voices
gracq - reading writing

but also chunks or more of these, mainly

shaftesbury - soliloquy
locke - essay
hume - dialogues concerning natural religion
kierkegaard - repetition
christowska - matches
zweig - montaigne
chamfort - maxims
dillard - the writing life
büchner - lenz
beckett - molloy
sarrauthe - tropisms
flaubert - sentimental education
baudelaire - paris spleen
elizabeth willis - alive
reverdy - nyrb poets selection
horace - odes and epodes
horace - satires and epistles
lesage - gil blas
hemingway - for whom the bell tolls
robbe-grillet - jealousy
joyce - portrait
modiano - afterimage

and whatever, i haven't kept track really.

off the top of my head:

pynchon - against the day (the last 300 or so pages)
simenon - maigret & the wine merchant
simenon - maigret's boyhood friend
simenon - big bob
simenon - november
simenon - the prison
simenon - the rich man
dürrenmatt - the judge and his hangman
dürrenmatt - the quarry
dürrenmatt - once a greek
dürrenmatt - a dangerous game
dürrenmatt - the pledge
cortázar - the winners
cortázar - a change of light & other stories
bolaño - the skating rink
bolaño - nazi literature in the americas
perec - things, a story of the sixties
perec - a man asleep
sarraute - the planetarium
butor - passing time
r.c. kenedy - annabel fast
aidan higgins - balcony of europe
alexander trocchi - cain's book
alasdair gray - the fall of kelvin walker: a fable of the sixties
j.p. donleavy - the ginger man
flann o'brien - the hard life: an exegesis of squalor
flann o'brien - the dalkey archive
flann o'brien - the third policeman
flann o'brien - the poor mouth
flann o'brien - at swim-two-birds
beckett - dream of fair to middling women
beckett - more pricks than kicks
beckett - echo's bones
anna kavan - my madness: selected writings
ballard - the drought
ballard - the wind from nowhere
ballard - the terminal beach
ballard - the four-dimensional nightmare
ballard - the day of forever
ballard - the disaster area
adrian mitchell - the bodyguard
peter currell brown - smallcreep's day
russell hoban - kleinzeit
russell hoban - the lion of boaz-jachin and jachin-boaz
john gardner - grendel
walter abish - in the future perfect
harry mathews - 20 lines a day
perec - life a user's manual
villiers de l'isle-adam - tomorrow's eve
andrei bely - complete short stories
khlebnikov - the king of time: selected writings of the russian futurian
zamyatin - we
zamyatin - the dragon & other stories
babel - the complete works
bashevis singer - satan in goray
kafka - diaries 1910-1923
walter benjamin - selected writings volume one 1913-1926 (ongoing...)

quite a few things in there i first read in my teens/early twenties & revisited this year for some obscure reason

here's my small list with ratings out of 10, 5 being a good score. book club books marked with a ✝.

fiction
Simak - Way Station (1963) 4
Alexis - Fifteen Dogs 5
Snicket - Who Could That Be at This Hour? 2
Stephenson - Seveneves (2015) 4
Novik - Uprooted (2015) 5
Christie - Curtain (pub. 1975) 7
Shakespeare - As You Like It (1599) 4
Calvino - Cosmicomics (1965) 6
Lafcadio Hearn - Kwaidan (1904) 6
✝Crewe - Kin (2012) 3
✝Jonasson - The 100 Year Old Man… (2009) 1
✝*Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird 6
✝Zevin - The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry (2014) 6
✝Kidd, Sue Monk - The Invention of Wings 3

non-fiction
Patrik Ouředník - Europeana (2005) 5
Yandell - The Honors Class (2001) 3
Alexievich - Voices from Chernobyl (1997) 8
Chris Smith - The Daily Show: The Audiobook 7
✝Buttriss - My Secret Sister 2

ows answering your question here. Thanks for putting this thread together

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

― one way street, Sunday, 18 December 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It was a while ago but one thing I want to do more of is read several titles by one author in one go: I did that with Duras and Rhys and had the happiest time doing so. Really feel like doing that with all of Quin's books where I felt a whole terrain opening up of a specific type of disintegration that is very female-based. Think I'll only get somewhere with this kind of thought if I read the whole lot.

Loved Baldwin, great rhythm to the sentences and an expression of being Other to your family, race, to your gender, and then even when you find other people that are more on your side. The pain hits - don't think he'd be a novelist I'd like somehow, the vision is almost too personal. Then again its a prejudice I have where essayists are good at that and never at novels. I should try something by him though.

olivia laing / the lonely city

Not that interested in Lang but I am reminded that I do want to read a Maeve Breenan instead. One of the few bits of New Yorker fiction that is appealing to me.

you people and your massive reading lists

david thomson - how to watch a movie
Kieran Keohane -Collision Culture: Transformations in Everyday Life in Ireland
Paul Verhaeghe - Identieit
Cynthia True - American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story
TC Boyle - Drop City
Ursula Le Guin - The Left Hand Of Darkness
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 100 years of solitude
Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
Richard Brautigan - Trout Fishing in America
Samuel Beckett - Murphy
Andy Warhol - The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
Simon Reynolds - Blissed Out
Richard Ford - The Sportswriter
John Jeremiah Sullivan - Pulphead
Declan Lynch - The Ponzi Man
Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run

i loved the brautigan, beckett, warhol, sullivan and springsteen books.

Not gunna list everything here, would take too long to type up (bragging), but the best stuff I read this year is:

http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/best-books-of-2016ish-1-of-4.html
http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/best-books-of-2016ish-2-of-4.html
http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/best-books-of-2016ish-3-of-3.html

300 books is nuts.

One book blogger I find interesting at year-end list time is Steve Donoghue, since he apparently reads about 800 books a year.

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/

Though he reads a LOT of trash, like romance novels by the bucket

the yr I read 10+ jco books (which are ordered by fav > least fav below fyi) & some other things too:

jc oates - you must remember this
jc oates - the lost landscape: a writer's coming of age
jc oates - the falls
jc oates - marya
jc oates - black girl/white girl
jc oates - i'll take you there
jc oates - the hostile sun: the poetry of dh Lawrence
jc oates - the rise of life on earth
jc oates - foxfire: confessions of a girl gang
jc oates - the poisoned kiss and other stories from the Portuguese
jc oates - beasts
jc oates - invisible woman: new & selected poems (70-82)

james Baldwin - the fire next time
joe waumbaugh - echoes in the darkness
jimmy Connors autobio
Agassi autobio
cal trillan - about alice
updike - of the farm
joe nocera - indentured: the inside story of the rebellion against the ncaa
didion - a book of common prayer
greg Jackson - prodigals
rupinder gill - on the outside looking indian
dan clowes - patience; ice haven
chris bachelder - the throwback special
Rodney rothman - early bird: a memoir of premature retirement
Robert Patrick - Kennedy's children
liz strout - olive kitteridge
capote - answered prayers
Eugene o'neill - long day's journey / strange interlude
dean young - shock by shock
rivka galchen - little labours
Curtis sittenfeld - eligible
kosinski - being there
sackler - the great white hope
Nathaniel west - the day of the locust
William a clark - the girl on the Volkswagen floor
ben lerner - 10:04
piernico solinas - ultimate porno
jay Caspian kang - the dead do not improve
hal ashby bio
loree rackstraw - Vonnegut book
jr thornton - beautiful country
Andrew porter - in between days
james salter - cassada
kate Christensen - blue plate special

Not gunna list everything here, would take too long to type up (bragging), but the best stuff I read this year is:

House of Fame! I think you put me on to these - I enjoyed the first two (and we'd recommend to others!), but thought this one was abominable :(

infinite jest - david foster wallace
the divine invasion - philip k. dick
the transmigration of timothy archer - philip k. dick
so sad today - melissa broder
the nix - nathan hill
hunger makes me a modern girl - carrie brownstein
supremacist - david shapiro
twilight of the elites - christopher hayes
crisis of character - gary byrne
indignation - philip roth
everyman - philip roth
deception - philip roth
american pastoral - philip roth
age of folly - lewis h. lapham
misery - stephen king
carrie - stephen king
xtc: chalkhills and children - chris twomey
the beast side - d. watkins
venus drive - sam lipsyte

I read:

Colin Winnette, Haints Stay
Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World
Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus
Carter Scholz, Gypsy
Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others
Greg Jackson, Prodigals
Charles Portis, Norwood
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name
Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

Still reading:

Jace Clayton, Uproot (Travels in 21st Century Music and Digital Culture)
Elena Ferrante, Story of the Lost Child
Zadie Smith, Swing Time

Michael Lewis - The Big Short
Anne Hébert - Kamouraska
Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Bohumil Hrabal - Too Loud A Solitude
Bohumil Hrabal - Closely Watched Trains
Elliott Chaze - Black Wings Has My Angel
John Huston - Fat City
John Williams - Stoner
Neal Stephenson - Necronomicon
Muriel Spark - Peckham Rye
David Grann - The Lost City of Z
Brad deLong & Steve Cohen - Concrete Economics
Gareth James et al - Introduction to Statistical Learning
Itzhak Gilboa - Introduction to Decision Under Certainty
James Bessen - Patent Failure
John Wyndham - The Chrysalids
Rivka Calchen - Atmospheric Disturbances
Stefan Zweig - Chess Story
Cynthia Ozick - Puttermesser Papers
Bob Gordon - The Rise and Fall of American Growth
Joe Henrich - The Secret of our Success
James Schuyler - Alfred & Guinevere
Martin Weitzman - The Share Economy
Cathy O'Neill - Weapons of Math Destruction
J.R. Ackerley - We Think The World of You
Alfredo Bioy Casares - The Invention of Morel
Caroline Blackwood - Great Granny Webster
Jay McInerney - Bright Lights, Big City
Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai

Books I read in 2016:

Ulysses, Hugh Kenner (lit crit)
Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Giles Milton (history)
Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories, Anton Chekhov
Passing, Netta Larsen
A Majority of Scoundrels, Don Berry
The Places In Between, Rory Stewart
The Light That Failed, Rudyard Kipling
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
The Last Thing He Wanted, Joan Didion
The War in the Air, H.G. Wells
The Return of Eva Peron etc., V.S. Naipul
The Big Short, Michael Lewis
The Banditti of the Plains, A.S. Mercer
Blindness, Henry Green
A Hero of Our Times, Mikhail Lermentov
SPQR, Mary Beard
The Third Reich, Roberto Bolano
Voices From Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexeivich
The Farfarers, Farley Mowat
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
Hollywood, Gore Vidal
The Warden, Anthony Trollope
Symposium, Muriel Spark
Motherless Brooklyn, Johnathan Lethem
The Search for Vulcan, Thomas Levenson (history of science)
Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer
Rome and Italy (Books VI-X), Titus Livius (aka Livy)
Classics Revisited, Kenneth Rexroth
Tristam Shandy, Laurence Sterne
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes
Monsieur Monde Vanishes, Georges Simenon
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Peter Handke
The Nothing Man, Jim Thompson
1493, Charles Mann
The Widow, Georges Simenon
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, Robert A. Caro
The Professor's House, Willa Cather
On the Nature of the Universe, Lucretius (Melville translation)
The Man Without Qualities: Volume 1, Robert Musil
The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald (started it on Dec.20)

Assorted short pieces by:

Isaac Bashevis Singer
Edith Wharton
Thomas Carlyle
Plutarch
Robert Louis Stevenson

Books started, but not finished:

The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy, Peter Wilson
Confessio Amantis, John Gower

No one needs to be told how good PG Wodehouse, Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming are - except me, apparently, because I just started reading them this year. I'd always assumed Fleming was a bad writer, but the three Bonds I read (plus short stories) were all a total joy. Wodehouse too - again, I'd always assumed he was "amusing" and wasn't expecting so many actual lols. Idiot.

My next year in obviousness: need to finally read Ferrante and Patrick O'Brian, and also less stuff by men.

Christie - Cards on the Table, The Body in the Library, Pocketful of Rye, Hercule Poirot's Christmas
Malcolm - In the Freud Archives
Stevenson - Kidnapped
Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm
King - Shawshank Redemption Yalom - Love's Executioner
Fleming - Casino Royale, Moonraker, Octopussy and The Living Daylights, From Russia with Love, For Your Eyes Only
Kastner - Emil and the Detectives
French - Broken harbour
Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
David - Star Trek: TNG: Vendetta: The Giant Novel
Wodehouse - The Code of the Woosters, Summer Lightning, Joy in the Morning
Gaiman - Nothing o Clock
Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Leonard - Mr Majestyk, Killshot
Price - The Whites
James - The turn of the screw
McBain - Let's hear it for the deaf man
Harris - The House of Fame
Gourevitch - A Cold Case
Portis - True Grit
Diaz - This is How You Lose Her
Doyle - The Sign of Four
Franzen - Purity
Aubyn - Lost For Words
Comics - Thor, Southern Bastards, Saga, lots O'Neill/Adams era Batman, Leo's Aldebaran/Betelgeuse/Antares, Phonogram, WicDiv, Green River Killer, Ex Machina, Black Widow

I started keeping a GoodReads list at the start of May, and this is what I've read since then:

The Chill - Ross MacDonald 4/5
A Wreath of Roses - Elizabeth Taylor 4/5
Bill the Galactic Hero - Harry Harrison 3/5
Cry of the Owl - Patricia Highsmith 3/5
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe - Chris Taylor 3/5
Remainder - Tom McCarthy 4/5
A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K LeGuin 4/5
The Dog of the South - Charles Portis 5/5
Patience - Dan Clowes 4/5
Finders Keepers - Stephen King 3/5
Amazing Spiderman: Worldwide - Dan Slott & Giuseppe Camuncoli 1/5
The Big Clock - Kenneth Fearing 4/5
The Engagement - Georges Simenon 3/5
Fade Out Act One - Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips 4/5
A Hero of our Time - Mikhail Lermontov 4/5
The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss 2/5
The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano 5/5
Outcast Vol 1 - Robert Kirkman & Paul Azaceta 2/5
My Lunches With Orson - Henry Jaglom, Peter Biskind 3/5
Point Omega - Don DeLillo 3/5
The Driver's Seat - Muriel Spark 5/5 (an ILB recommendation that really hit the spot)
The Penultimate Truth Philip K Dick 4/5
Ingrid Bergman - David Thomson 3/5
Fade Out Act Two - Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips 4/5
Fade Out Act Three - Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips 4/5
Small Town Talk - Barney Hoskyns 3/5
Purity - Jonathan Franzen 3/5
Stoner - John Williams 4/5 (count me in the 'pro' camp)
Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins 1/5
The Song Machine - John Seabrook 2/5
AAMA: The Smell of Warm Dust - Frederick Peeters 4/5
AAMA: The Invisible Throng - Frederick Peeters 4/5
AMMA: The Desert of Mirrors - Frederick Peeters 3/5
AAMA: You Will be Glorious, My Daughter - Frederick Peets 3/5
Starlight - Mark Millar & Goran Parlov 2/5
Chrononauts - Mark Millar & Sean Gordon Murphy 1/5
The Crossing - Michael Connelly 3/5
Hunger - Knut Hamsun 5/5
Worlds of Wonder - Robert Silverberg (ed) 5/5
The Golden Child - Penelope Fitzgerald 2/5
Very Naughty Boys - Robert Sellers 4/5
The Digger's Game - George V Higgins 4/5
Birth School Metallica Death Vol 1 - Paul Brannigan & Ian Winwood 2/5
Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe - Mick Wall 2/5
Best Served Cold - Joe Abercrombie 1/5
The Space Merchants - Frederik Pohl & C M Kornbluth 4/5
Twilight Children - Gilbert Hernandez & Darwyn Cooke 3/5

Wow, highsmith gets the same middling score as king and franzen. That's cold.

I'm a Highsmith fan, but I didn't think that one was top tier.

Fizzles, I also thought House of Fame was a letdown after the first two. Harris is still a cracking writer - but plots get out of hand and over-herringed. Deep Shelter had same issues but much more intriguing plot.

Hanya Yanagihara – A Little Life
Harry Mathews – The Conversions
Richard Gott – Britain’s Empire
Joseph Conrad – Lord Jim
Elena Ferrante – The Story Of A New NAme
Nicole Krauss – The History of Love
DH Lawrence – Sons And Lovers
Patrick Modiano – Missing Person
Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway
Michael Cunningham – The Hours
Lucia Berlin – A Manual For Cleaning Women
EM Forster – A Passage To India
Elena Ferrante – Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay
Lisa Mc Inerney – The Glorious Heresies
Evelyn Waugh – Vile Bodies
Graham Greene – Brighton Rock
Henry Green – Caught
Megan Mayhew Berman – Birds Of A Lesser Paradise
John Braine - Room At The Top
Shirley Jackson – We Have Always Lived In The Castle
Ann Quin – Berg
Angela Carter – Several Perceptions
Margaret Drabble - The Ice Age
Alan Warner – Their Lips Talk Of Mischief
David Mitchell – Slade House
Elena Ferrante – The Story Of The Lost Child
Kazuo Ishiguro – The Buried Giant (unfinished)
Chester Himes – A Rage In Harlem
Mary Gaitskill - Veronica
Nell Freudenberger – The Newlyweds
Richard Price – Clockers
Michaelangelo Matos – The Underground Is Massive
Martin Amis – Money
John Barth – The Sot-Weed Factor
Hanif Kureshi – The Buddha of Suburbia
Julian Barnes – England, England

I read a lot of canonical English stuff this year - a deliberate move to try and fill in a particular blind spot of mine. So the project was to try and read the British 20th Century decade-by-decade, and it certainly took on a new flavour after Brexit. There was a lot of stuff in there I didn't know much about and loved (Henry Green, Ann Quin, Angela Carter), a few things I expected to love and did (Woolf, John Braine), and some books I expected to hate and did (Lord Jim, Sons & Lovers and most of all Money, but there is no more 1980s book so I went with it). Of the rest, the Ferrantes obviously stand out, as does Veronica, which was devastating on more than one level.

If it wasn't for the Buddha of Suburbia, which I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I did, the whole project would have fallen completely off a cliff after 1970.

How'd you find Little Life? Sounds punishing. I

Yeah, beyond all the gothic overdrive of the protagonist's backstory, it just seems perverse to write a novel about a group of queer male friends over multiple decades but leave the historical period so vague, given how drastically and often the conditions of life for gay people have changed over the last few generations. I want to give the novel a chance eventually, but most of what I've read about it sounds distinctly unpromising.

I didn't think it was very good, and the vagueness of the historical period was one reason why, possibly because it threw open a load of concerns that the writer was looking to dodge. People seem to have mobile phones from fairly early on though so maybe it was projecting into future decades.

It generally has the sense of a novel where the author decided to change direction midway, without rewriting any of the earlier sections. Whole chapters are dedicated to characters who are more or less abandoned half way through (extremely casually in one case). And I don't think I've ever read a novel read by a woman with so little interest in its female characters, like they've been included because you need some women around but they're barely even ciphers. One character meets an extremely violent and horrific end and is essentially disposed with in one sentence.

The handling of the central character is pretty good and the book would have benefited from having a lot of its surplus material skimmed off and more focus in general.

jl carr - a month in the country
amy hempel - reasons to live
sam quinones - dreamland
colin barrett - young skins
joan didion - play it as it lays
e nesbitt - horror stories
gary indiana - three month fever
mary gaitskill - bad behaviour
ray bradbury - something wicked this way comes
sam lipsyte - venus drive
richard yates - eleven kinds of loneliness
barry hannah - long lost happy
carson mccullers - collected short stories
stuart dybek - paper lantern: love stories
karl-ove knausgaard - my struggle book 1
raymond queneau - exercises in style
muriel spark - the driver's seat
denis johnson - jesus' son

lots of journals and stuff also, the stinging fly, the moth, granta, and a good few short story collections which i dipped into from time to time without entirely finishing.

richard yates - eleven kinds of loneliness

How was this? I love "Revolutionary Road".

almost perfect - it's a set of short stories, i p much loved it start to finish. if you like cheever, carver etc, ,you will enjoy.

in my list i forgot mike mccormack's solar bones, to name one, a great book.

Christopher Hitchens - And Yet: Essays
Brian Moore - The Mangan Inheritance
Stacy Schiff - The Witches: Salem 1692
Mary Gatskill - Veronica
Anna Bikont - The Crime and The Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne
Asa Larsson - The Black Path
Patti Smith - M Train
Owen Gleiberman - Movie Freak
Don Winslow - The Cartel
Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog
Jo Nesbo - Midnight Son
Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart
Peter Guralnick - Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock & Roll
Douglas Brinkley & Luke A. Nichter - The Nixon Tapes: 1973
Arnaldur Indriðason - Reykjavik Nights
Arnaldur Indriðason - Into Oblivion
Arnaldur Indriðason - Operation Napoleon
Jane Mayer - Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
Helene Tursten - Night Rounds
Helene Tursten - The Treacherous Net
Helene Tursten - The Golden Calf
Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time
Leif GW Persson - He Who Kills The Dragon
Leif GW Persson - Linda, As In The Linda Murder
Mons Kallentoft - Autumn Killing
Molly Prentiss - Tuesday Nights In 1980
Erik Larson - Thunderstruck
Erik Larson - Isaac’s Storm
Olivia Lang - Alone In The City
Philip Jenkins - Decade of Nightmares (reread)
Dave Rimmer - Like Punk Never Happened (reread)
Simon Callow - Orson Welles Volume 3: One Man Band
Alan Furst - A Hero of France
Jhumpa Lahiri - Interpreter of Maladies
Barney Hoskins - Small Town Talk
Patricia Highsmith - Deep Water
Patricia Highsmith - Cry of the Owl
Patricia Highsmith - People Who Knock On The Door
Zadie Smith - White Teeth
Zadie Smith - NW
Zadie Smith - On Beauty
Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run
Jussi Adler-Olson - The Purity of Vengeance
John Le Carre - The Pigeon Tunnel
John Le Carre - Our Kind of Traitor
Tim Lawrence - Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor 1980-83
Charles Beaumont - The Intruder
Ian MacEwan - Nutshell
Helen MacDonald - H is for Hawk
Michael Connelly - The Wrong Side of Goodbye

just starting to read: Dava Sobel - The Glass Universe and Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

cheers!

a few free-floating opinions:

Veronica & White Teeth were the best novels I read this year while The Crime And The Silence was the best non-fiction

liked H is for Hawk better than Alone in the City, thought both ran out of steam after very promising starts. appreciated the psychoanalytic piece in both

The books I enjoyed most in 2016 and would recommend, in no order :

Henry James- portrait of a lady
Thomas Mann - buddenbrooks
Joseph Roth - the radetzky march
Jm Coetzee - the life and times of Michael k
Tim Lawrence - lid and death on the New York dance floor
Robert caro - the power broker (still finishing)
Julio Cortazar- hopscotch
Adolfo Bioy Casares - the invention of morel
Penelope Fitzgerald - the blue flower
Helen DeWitt - the last samurai
Arno Mayer - the persistence of the old regime
Jm Bernstein- Adorno
Maggie Nelson - the argonauts
Marguerite Duras - the malady of death
Michelle Alexander - the new Jim Crow
WG Sebald - Austerlitz
David Kishik - The Manhattan Project

In 2017, I'm hoping to get better at putting away books I'm not enjoying and or not getting much or anything out of. I definitely hate-read the latter part of a few books.

Indeed. I've gotten so good at that that these days I rarely even finish books I like.

At this point I am living vicariously through James Morrison and Aimless.

If not Alfred and xxyyzz

Just credit ILB generally and you won't put your foot wrong.

B-b-but where would the fun be in that?

I was just cleaning porridge out of a 3yo's hair, not sure that is the vicarious experience you're after

Hey, this board is ILB, please take that over to I Love People-Making!

Have been creeping about the WAYR threads pinching other people's good ideas for books to read. I experimented with other sources of suggestions (mostly fb friends) this year with, eh, mixed results. Anyway, I didn't manage to read much this year, primarily due to (a) being the busiest I have ever been at work and (b) the arrival of child #4.

Eric Hobsbawm - Age of Extremes. More scattered and less convincing than the previous volumes.
Cristopher Isherwood - A Single Man. Excellent.
Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings. Like American Tabloid, except that it opens out from a shooting, rather than closing in on one.
John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van. Would not have read this but for ilx. Still intermittently roiling around the at-core impenetrability of the main character, still enjoying being denied the answers.
Muriel Spark - The Driver's Seat. A re-read, this time around it made more sense and consequently seemed somehow less callous.
Svetlana Alexievich - Voices from Chernobyl. The worst book to be reading while your wife is heavily pregnant.
Jean Rhys - Sleep It Off, Lady. Struggling to remember much about it other than the Saki ref (I had laid the complete short stories of Saki down to read up).
MR Carey - The Girl With All the Gifts. A recommendation from fb friends. Not great.
John Wyndham - The Chrysalids. The cruelty of the deux ex machina-y ending more than compensated for the deus ex machina-yness of the ending.
Christopher Moore - Lamb. Another fb recommendation. Shaolin Jesus concept wasted with weak joeks. Felt like it was written in a hurry.
Peter May - The Blackhouse. Competent enough. Lots of vomiting, iirc. Enjoyed the guga-harvesting passages.
JG Ballard - Concrete Island. JGB being my go to for a book I know I will enjoy so I don't get put off reading by a poor run of previous books.
Jonathan Schell - The Time of Illusion. Picked up following being told in front of my peers that my Myers Biggs personality type was "Richard Nixon". Given my propensity for carpet bombing SE Asia, I should have seen the parallels before. Book itself was lucid and a good overview of the period I was interested in. I don't have the depth of knowledge to make any sensible comment tbh.
Beryl Bainbridge - The Bottle Factory Outing. Fourth attempt at this one, finally cracked it. My first by BB. Reminded me of Spark or Martin Amis except that I felt that BB has more sympathy for her characters, which makes what happens to them all the more bleak. Suspect I will not have the mental strength to binge on Beryl.

Anyway, thanks to all on ILB for the impact you've had on my reading. I will continue to skulk about the ILB shadows in 2017.

Re Bainbridge: her later historical fictions tend to be less bleak, but this is not a hard and fast rule

Here's what I read in 2016: http://wp.me/pzXeC-5MF

Ursula Vernon - Digger: The Complete Omnibus Edition
Michael McDowell - Blackwater VI: The Flood
Margo Lanagan - Sea Hearts
Susan Cooper - Seawise
Michael Moorcock - Behold the Man
Jose Saramago - Cain
C.L. Moore - Jirel of Joiry
Jack Vance - Eyes of the Overworld
Geoff Ryman - Unconquered Countries
Robert McCammon - Boy's Life
J.G. Ballard - The Venus Hunters
Tao Lin - Richard Yates
Tao Lin - Eeeee Eee Eeee
Tao Lin - Shoplifting from American Apparel
Tao Lin - Bed
Lydia Davis - Break It Down
Charles De Lint - Waifs and Strays
Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human
Caitlin Kiernan - The Drowning Girl
Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster
Caitlin Kiernan - Threshold
Faith Erin Hicks - The Nameless City
Christopher Barzak - Wonders of the Invisible World
Alan Moore - Watchmen
Robert Dunbar - Willy
Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others
Michael McDowell - Cold Moon Over Babylon
George MacDonald - The Wise Woman
Rebecca Rush - Kelroy
Alex London - Proxy
Jeff Smith - Bone
Thomas Ligotti - The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
E.M. Cioran - On the Heights of Despair
David Benatar - Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
Thomas Ligotti - Songs of a Dead Dreamer
Cordelia Fine - Delusions of Gender (in progress)
Andrea Dworkin - Woman Hating
Julia Serano - Whipping Girl
Gene Wolfe - Peace (in progress)

would advise the whole world to read: Sea Hearts; Eyes of the Overworld; the Blackwater saga

would advise the whole world to avoid: Proxy (and probably most dystopian YA SFF)

meant to read in 2016, but didn't: The Book of the New Sun and a couple more classic feminist texts (Sexual Politics; The Female Eunuch). I'm a little burnt out on books, so I figure I'll finish the Wolfe and the Fine and then take a break from looongreads for a bit.

Fiction:
Amos Oz - To Know a Woman
Michelle Cohen Corasanti - The Almond Tree
Keigo Higashino - The Devotion of Suspect X
David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into a Bar
Yasmina Khadra - The Attack
Ann Leckie - Ancillary Justice
William Sutcliffe - The Wall
Leo Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Ilyich
S. Yizhar - Khirbet Khizeh
Marco Lodoli - Cloud
Franca Treur - Threshing Floor Full of Confetti
Marlen Haushofer - The Wall
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Marcellus Emants - A Posthumous Confession
Dave Eggers - The Circle
Lauren Beukes - Broken Monsters
Matt Bell - Scrapper
Iain Reid - I'm Thinking of Ending Things
Sébastien Japrisot - A Very Long Engagement
Georges Simenon - The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien
Jenny Erpenbeck - The End of Days
Tarjei Vesaas - The Ice Palace
Sten Nadolny - The Discovery of Slowness
Noah Hawley - Before the Fall
Basma Abdel Aziz - The Queue
Kim Stanley Robinson - Green Earth
Yolanda Entius - The Cabinet of the Staal Family
William Golding - The Spire
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Christo (in progress)

Children's books read to my daughter:
Neil Gaiman - Coraline
Randall Jerrell - The Animal Family
L. Frank Baum - The Wizard of Oz
Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island (Geronimo Stilton version)
J.M. Barrie - Peter Pan
Laura Ingalls Wilder - Little House in the Big Woods (in progress)

Non-fiction:
Greil Marcus - The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs
Thomas Jerome Seabrook - Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town
Patrick Lencioni - Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable
Lars Mytting - The Man and the Wood
John Vaillant - The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
Henno Martin - The Sheltering Desert
Ryan Holiday - Ego Is the Enemy
Kevin Kelly - The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
George Packer - The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
Nick Lane - The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life
Robert Lustig - Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

Children's books read to my daughter

Secretly the reason I'm most excited to have kids one day...

As assembled by searching ILB posts, this is what I read in 2016:

The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann
Poems of Nazim Hikmet (translated by Blasing and Konuk)
Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi
The First Bad Man by Miranda July
Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History by John Patrick Diggins
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe by Fernando Pessoa
The Country Road by Regina Ullmann
Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
F by Daniel Kehlmann
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
Vox by Nicholson Baker
Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon
Stoner by John Williams
Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle

Think I have come to the conclusion that hating on Stoner is futile, like hating The Dead or The Doors.

_Children's books read to my daughter_

Secretly the reason I'm most excited to have kids one day...

But then you can buy them books, and use these purchases to sneak books for yourself into the house

My chronological reading list from 2016. Starred books are wildly recommended:

Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea
Karrie Fransman - The House That Groaned
Kay Redfield Jamison - An Unquiet Mind
Edward Ross - Filmish
Carol Tyler - Late Bloomer
Juan Rulfo - Pedro Paramo *
Roberto Bolaño - Woes of the True Policeman
Rachael Ball - The Inflatable Woman
Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
Nicola Streeten - Billy, Me & You
Ariel Schrag - Awkward
Ariel Schrag - Definition
Ariel Schrag - Potential
Ali Smith - The Accidental
Stevie Smith - Novel on Yellow Paper *
Sheila Heti - How Should a Person Be?
Muriel Spark - The Driver's Seat
Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo - Where There's Love There's Hate
Patrick Süskind - Perfume
Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard Heygate - The Book of English Magic
John Matthews - The Secret Lore of London
Herman Melville - Billy Budd, Bartleby and Other Stories
Owen Davies - Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History
Don DeLillo - The Body Artist
César Aira - 3 Novels by César Aira
Ariel Schrag - Likewise
Luigi Serafini - Codex Seraphinianus
Allie Brosh - Hyperbole and a Half *
R. D. Laing - The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise **
Kathy Acker - Empire of the Senseless *
David Adams Leeming - The Oxford Companion to World Mythology
Diana L. Paxson - Taking Up The Runes
Nancy B. Watson - Practical Solitary Magic
Hermann Hesse - Siddartha
Richard Kennedy - A Boy at the Hogarth Press
Various - Granta 129: Fate
Haruki Murakami - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Roberto Bolaño - The Unknown University
Sarah Kane - Sarah Kane Complete Plays **
B.S. Johnson - Albert Angelo
Miranda July - No One Belongs Here More Than You

A fair few of these are graphic novels in a bid to make it to 52 books by the end of the year (and out of a genuine love of the medium, of course), but sadly this target was not met due to assorted catastrophe, negligence and dysphoria.

This year I just want to read more psychoanalysis and non-fiction in general as I can feel my brain rusting over. I'm also looking forward to more ILB finds and maybe trying the 'read a lot of books by one author' method that a lot of you seem to advocate.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon

how was this? i read about it, i think in the new yorker, and it sounded interesting.

I'm actually cheating a bit to include it on this list, since I haven't completely finished it yet. I've just finished the 2nd of the 3 parts. The first part, on changes in quality of life from 1870-1940 is fascinating, or was to me at least. It probably helps to be the kind of person who would be interested in an exhibit on the development of the local sewer system in your town. It reads a bit like a text book at times, but includes a huge amount of information that helps to quantify and put in perspective how people's daily lives changed. The second part is the same type of survey for 1940-the present. This is bit more familiar ground so it wasn't quite as fascinating. The third part I believe is more of an economic analysis and prescriptions for reversing the trend of slowing productivity growth.

Alfred, what did you think of Joseph and his Brothers?

first third of the Robert Gordon (thick description of how awful/itchy/stinky/short/&c&c life was in 1870, and how all of the small and under-appreciated innovations delivered us the cozy clean domestic life we now take for granted) is amazing, rest is ok