what did you read in 2016?

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