what all did you read in 2015

Looking back there appears to be #trends - i) reading a lot of female writers (that run of Lispector, Duras, Ginzburg, Yourcenar, plus plenty of one-offs that screwed with my head - Rhys, Highsmith, Haushofer - and I revisited Woolf and Spark, carrying all the way to Walsh's Hotel, the first main writer I've checked solely from twitter), ii) I am steadily building on that personal 18th century canon (Melville (Loving Moby-Dick currently, haven't finished at the time of writing this), Nerval, Pushkin, Leskov and iii) lotsa Latin American fiction towards the end. In that respect Bolano's In Parenthesis was key to hardening my resolve to read more. Reissues are helping - Casares, Ocampo and Arlt from NYRB (only read Casares but the others will happen in 2016), Alvaro Mutis was great but also painful (this massive thing hanging around that took me such a long time to finish due to work getting heavy - and kept digging at me until I actually did so), and finally Sergio Pitol, who is the best thing I found that I had no idea was coming to me at the beginning of the year.

For poetry Cavafy was best. De Sade was the joker (i.e. great and no sorta about it)

Kurt Tucholsky - Castle Grispholm: A Summer Story
Jean Rhys - Good Morning, Midnight
Elsa Morante - Arturo's Island
Wolfgang Borchett - A Man Outside (Play)
Josef Winkler - Natura Morta
Michele Bernstein - The Night
Clarice Lispector - Agua Viva
Gerard de Nerval - Selected Writings
Joan Mellen - In the Realm of the senses
Clarice Lispector - The Passion According to G.H
Alexander Pushkin - The Captain's Daughter
Clarice Lispector - Breath of Life
Paul Valery - Monsieur Teste
Muriel Spark - Memento Mori
Rene Daumal - A Night of Serious Drinking

Margerite Duras - The Rapture of Lol V. Stein
Natalia Ginzburg - Valentino and Sagittarius
Muriel Spark - Ballad of Peckham Rye
Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter
Herman Melville - The Confidence Man
Patricia Highsmith - Little Tales of Misogyny
Margerite Duras - Emily L.
Natalia Ginzburg - Little Virtues
Natalia Ginzburg - Family Sayings
Frank Wedekind - The Lulu Plays
Natalia Ginzburg - Voices in the Evening
Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway
Marlen Haushofer - The Wall
Assia Djebar - Seven Stories*

Marguerite Yourcenar - Memoirs of Hadrian
Victor Serge - Midnight in the Century
Virginia Woolf - Street Haunting and Other Essays
Marguerite Yourcenar - Mishima: A Vision of the Void
Roberto Bolano - Between Parnthesis: Essays, Articles and Speeches 1998-2003
Hilda Hilst - With my Dog's Eyes
Joseph Roth - Perlefter
Louis-Ferdinand Celine - Normance
Halldor Laxness - Independent People*
Enrique Villa-Matas - Bartleby & Co.
Joseph Roth - Flight Without End
Alejandro Zambra - Ways of Going Home
Carl Jung - Flying Saucers
Nikolai Leskov - Selected Tales
Marquis De Sade - 120 Days of Sodom

Junichiro Tanizaki - The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto's Mother
Various: The Existential Imagination - From de Sade to Sartre
Ingeborg Bachmann - Three Paths to the Lake
Juan Jose Saer - La Grande
Rodrigo De Souza Leao - All Dogs are Blue
Juan Jose Saer - Scars
Dag Solstad - Shyness and Dignity
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Demons
Han Kang - The Vegetarian
Josep Pla - Life Embitters
Sergio Pitol - Art of Flight
Miklos Szentkuthy - Towards the One and Only Metaphor
Andei Platonov - The Portable Platonov
Hjalmar Soderbergh - A Serious Game
Nadeszha Mandelstam - Hope Abandoned

Sergio Pitol - The Journey
Deszo Kosztolanyi - Kornel Esti: A Novel
Joseph Roth - What I Saw
Tarjei Vesaas - Spring Night
Joseph Roth - Job
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
Richard Weiner - Game for Real
Marguerite Duras - L'Amour
Alvaro Mutis - The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
Adolfo Bioy Casares - The Invention of Morel
Thomas Bernhard - The Voice Imitator
Yves Bonnefoy - Rue Traversiere
Joanna Walsh - Hotel

Poetry:

Wallace Stevens - Selected
Nazim Hikmet - Selected
Nicanor Parra - Poems and Anti-poems
Yannis Ritsos - Diaries of Exile
Cavafy - Complete
Baudelaire - Flowers of Evil
Apollinaire - Selected
Rovert Lowell - Selected
The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
Roberto Bolano - Romantic Dogs
Francois Villon - Selected
Dante - Inferno (tr. Steve Ellis)
Gunter Grass - Selected
Rimbaud - Complete
Zbiginew Herbert - Selected
Sandor Weores and Ferenc Juhasz - Selected
Hans Magnus Enzensberger - Moral Poems

* = didn't finish

did the yourcenar get reprinted this year?

Picked up Hadrian 2nd hand - copies about everywhere here. Her Mishima book was from the library - think that's out of print

One leopard, two birds, three wolves, a lot of Le Guin, and (at the end, just before the Ferrante which I should finish just under the wire) the reason my list may be shorter next year:

The Leopard - Guisepe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Stoner - John Williams
The House of Doctor Dee - Peter Ackryod
The Compass Rose - Ursula Le Guin
Good Morning Midnight - Jean Rhys
The Periodic Table - Primo Levi
Here - Richard McGuire
The Oxford book of Modern Science Writing - Various
Dear James - R O Blechman
colorless tsukuru tazaki and his years of pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
The Bostonians - Henry James
H is for Hawk - Helen MacDonald
Palestine - Joe Sacco
The Winds Twelve Quarters vol 2 - Ursula Le Guin
The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula Le Guin
Her Smoke Rose up Forever - James Tiptree Jr
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantell
Wolf in White Van - John Darnielle
Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse
Bring up the Bodies - Hilary Mantell
The Vorrh - Brian Catling
The Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu
Settled Wanderers - Various
Annihalation - Jeff Vandermeer
Threshold - Ursula Le Guin
The Rings of Saturn - WG Sebald
A Haunted House - Virginia Woolf
The Winds Twelve Quarters vol 1 - Ursula Le Guin
Ammonite - Nicola Griffith
Engine Summer - John Crowley
The Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
My Mother She Killed Me My Father He Ate Me - Various
The Story of Art - E H Gombrich
Dawn (Lilith's Brood Book One) - Octavia Butler
A Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James
The Influencing Machine - Mike Jay
Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei - Barnaby Martin
Rebel Footprints - David Rosenberg
The Worm forgives The Plough - John Stewart Collis
The Expectant Father - Armin Brott, Jennifer Ash
My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante

includes a bunch of stuff from comixology and borrowed batman GNs, and the odd short story.

2014.61 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
2015.01 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
2015.02 Volume 05: The Wife and others - Anton Chekhov
2015.03 The Red Inn - Honore de Balzac
2015.04 Batman 1: Court Of Owls (GN)
2015.05 Snow Country - KAWABATA Yasunari
2015.06 Batman 2: City of Owls (GN)
2015.07 Batman 3: Death Of The Family (GN)
2015.08 All Star Superman (GN)
2015.09 The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury
2015.10 A Desperate Character (Short) - Turgenev
2015.11 The Peripheral - William Gibson
2015.12 The Black Book - Ian Rankin
2015.13 04 The Con Man (1957) - Ed McBain
2015.14 Batman: Black Mirror (GN)
2015.15 Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
2015.16 Old Curiosity Shop - Charles Dickens
2015.17 The City and the Stars - Arthur C Clarke
2015.18 Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson
2015.19 A Study In Scarlet - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2015.20 Red Badge Of Courage - Stephen Crane
2015.21 Blood Relatives - Ed McBain
2015.22 Poseidon’s Wake - Alastair Reynolds
2015.23 Batman 4: (GN)
2015.24 Batman 5: (GN)
2015.25 Mortal Causes - Ian Rankin
2015.26 Flowers For Algernon - Daniel Keyes
2015.27 Thousand Cranes - KAWABATA Yasunari
2015.28 The Master And Margarita - Bulgakov
2015.29 Final Crisis (GN)
2015.30 Superman: Doomed (GN)
2015.31 Barnaby Rudge - Charles Dickens
2015.32 World Of Jeeves - P G Wodehouse (partial)
2015.33 Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - M R James
2015.34 More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - M R James
2015.35 The Great English Short-Story Writers, Volume 1 - Various (partial)
2015.36 Volume 06: The Witch - Anton Chekhov
2015.37 Age Of Ultron (GN)
2015.38 Joker: Death of the Family (GN)
2015.39 Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman
2015.40 Old Man's War - John Scalsi
2015.41 Time - Stephen Baxter
2015.42 Station 11 - Emily St John Mandel
2015.43 North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
2015.44 The Secret Adversary - Agatha Christie
2015.45 Hut Six Story - Gordon Welchman
2015.46 Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens (not yet finished)

shocking lack of female authors, must fix that in 2016.

Just as a note its something I noticed when compiling (and only the 2nd year I've done so) among a couple of other trends. I wouldn't force it - most of those female authors write and talk about things I am interested in.

I tried to read 50% women a couple of years ago but found it too restricting in the end. I seem to manage about 30% without forcing it.

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__.