What did you read in 2017?

Dava Sobel - The Glass Universe
Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
Zadie Smith - Swing Time
Zadie Smith - The Autograph Man
Ulysses S. Grant - Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant Volumes 1 & 2
Tana French - The Likeness
Dawn Powell - A Time To Be Born
Dawn Powell - Angels on Toast
Dawn Powell - Turn, Magic Wheel
Jan Willem vänder Wetterling - Hard Rain
Andrew Lownie - Stalin’s Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring
Nathan Hill - The Nix
David Hepworth - Never A Dull Moment: 1971 The Year That Rock Exploded
Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante - The Story of A New Name
Elena Ferrante - Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Behind
Elena Ferrante - The Story of the Lost Child
Norman Podhoretz - Making It
Michael Ruhlman - Grocery
Mary Gaitskill - The Mare
Mary Gaitskill - Somebody With A Little Hammer: Essays
Peter Mayle - A Year In Provence
Jeff Guinn - The Road To Jonestown: Jim Jones And Peoples Temple
Shiva Naipaul - Journey to Nowhere (reread)
Shiva Naipaul - Beyond The Dragon’s Mouth: Stories & Essays
Philip Roth - The Ghost Writer
Philip Roth - Zuckerman Unbound
Michael Connelly - Chasing The Dime
Michael Connelly - The Late Show
Michael Connelly - Two Kinds of Truth
Jo Nesbø - Nemesis
Jo Nesbø - The Devil’s Star
Jo Nesbø - The Thirst
Stefan Ahnhem - Victim Without A Face
John Williams - Stoner
J. Robert Lennon - Broken River
Don Winslow - The Force
Zeynep Tufecki - Twitter & Teargas
Richard Boch - The Mudd Club (twice)
Karin Fossum - The Drowned Boy
Karin Fossum - Hell Fire
Emma Clines - The Girls
John le Carre - The Night Manager
Hakan Ostlundh - The Intruder
Malin Persson Giolito - Quick Sand
Adam Gopnik - At The Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals In New York (HATEread)
Pauline Kael - I Lost It At The Movies
Arne Dahl - Misterioso
JD Vance - Hillbilly Elegy
Jussi Adler-Olsen - The Scarred Woman
Jennifer Egan - A Visit From The Goon Squad
Colson Whitehead - The Underground Railroad
Adam Sisman - John le Carre: The Biography
Johan Theorin - The Darkest Room

almost finished: Dawn Powell - The Diaries 1931-65
about to begin: Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

seasonal word-up y'all! cheers

Lots of comfort reading this year. Wonder why that was. Usually I breakup difficult stuff with easier reads, but this year was the other way around.

Many thanks to ILB for introducing me to Penelope Fitzgerald, my hot young find of 2017.

The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald
The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark
A Month In The Country, JL Carr
Patience, Daniel Clowes
Goldfinger, Ian Fleming
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Adelle Waldman
Judaism: A Very Short Introduction, Norman Solomon
The Crossing, Michael Connelly
The Beiderbecke Affair, Alan Plater
Thank You, Jeeves, PG Wodehouse
Crooked House, Agatha Christie
Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann
Superman: Phantom Zone, Steve Gerber
Conclave, Robert Harris
A Little History Of The World, E.H. Gombrich
Live and Let Die, Ian Fleming
Swag, Elmore Leonard
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
Ubik, Philip K. Dick
Funeral in Berlin, Len Deighton
In Therapy, Susie Orbach
Star Trek: New Frontier Books 1-4, Peter David
The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth
Angels Flight, Michael Connelly
Darkness Visible, William Styron
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
Holes, Louis Sachar
Human Voices, Penelope Fitzgerald
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Counselling for Toads, Robert De Board
How to Write Groundhog Day, Danny Rubin
The Adversary, Emmanuel Carrere
Leave It to Psmith, PG Wodehouse
Lord Edgware Dies, Agatha Christie
The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
Diamonds Are Forever, Ian Fleming
Northern Lights, Philip Pullman
The Subtle Knife, Philip Pullman
Smile, Raina Telgemeier
The Making of a Therapist, Louis Cozolino
James Bond: My Long And Etc., Len Deighton
Sisters, Raina Telgemeier
Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett

The only books I quit this year were Middlemarch (which I loved but wasn't in the mood for) and the Brexit book All Out War, which was well-written, but I realised I'm still too angry to read about these dangerous arseholes in a book that portrays them as characterful eccentrics

my favorites have asterisks. no re-reads this year.

fiction
Voltaire - Candide
anonymous - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Jeff VanderMeer - Annihilation*
Jeff VanderMeer - Authority
Mark Frost - The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016) -- boring writing
Sophie Kinsella - Finding Audrey (2016)
GRRM - A Game of Thrones
Denis Johnson - Jesus' Son
Strugatsky bros. - Roadside Picnic (audiobook)*
PKD - A Scanner Darkly (audiobook)*
Kim Thúy - Ru
Emma Cline - The Girls (2016)*
Gloria Ann Wesley - If This is Freedom

about 1/3rd of The Big Book of Science Fiction (eds. VanderMeers)
around half of Love in the Time of Cholera (decent but a slow read)
abandoned: Michael Robbins - Alien vs. Predator -- shit

uncollected shorts
Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper
Bob Shaw - Light of Other Days
Chiang - The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
Coetzee - The Dog (2017)
Roupenian - Cat Person (2017)

non-fiction
Mario Livio - Brilliant Blunders
Beryl Markham - West with the Night (audiobook)
Patton Oswalt - Silver Screen Fiend (audiobook)
Kory Stamper - Word by Word (audiobook) (2017)*
Errol Morris - Believing is Seeing
Janet Maybee - Aftershock -- local interest, regarding Halifax Explosion

comics
Vaughan and Whedon - Runaways V1-V8
Vaughan - The Hood: Blood From Stones
Vaughan - We Stand on Guard
Tezuka - Black Jack V2
Atwood - Angel Catbird V1 -- 1/10, awful
Ditko et al. - Iron Man Masterworks V1
Kirby et al. - Thor Masterworks V1
Ellis - Transmetropolitan V1
Claremont - X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills
Starlin - Infinity Gauntlet #1-#6*
Starlin - Thanos Quest
Starlin - The Death of Captain Marvel
Jared Axelrod - The Battle of Blood & Ink
various - Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle

abandoned: Michael Robbins - Alien vs. Predator -- shit

yeah i fucking hate this guy. even the title of this book pisses me off.

Surprised by so much dislike for Robbins’s poetry. I thought he was fun to read. Kind of a sleazier millennial Ashbery.

What I read in 2017.

I aimed to read 52 and I don't think I finished a single book. I probably bought 100 though.

quick, unchallenging reads for the most part:

Harlan Ellison ® - Angry Candy
Jack Vance - Cugel's Saga
Stanislaw Lem - The Invincible
Stanislaw Lem - Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
Stanislaw Lem - The Futurological Congress
Samuel Delany - Tales of Neveryon
Ursula Le Guin - The Beginning Place
Penelope Lively - A Stitch In Time
Penelope Lively - The House in Norham Gardens
Penelope Lively - The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy
Joan Robinson - When Marnie Was There
Mary Downing Hahn - Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls
Ursula Dubosarsky - The Golden Day
Robert Marasco - Burnt Offerings
Fritz Leiber - Our Lady of Darkness
Fritz Leiber - The Green Millennium
Fritz Leiber - Night Monsters
Margaret St. Clair - The Best of Margaret St. Clair
Amanda Petrusich - Do Not Sell At Any Price

How was The Best of Margaret St. Clair? Always refreshingly different in old anthologies---when there were *maybe* six or seven female writers permitted to be semi-regulars in fantasy and science fiction mags---but I've never come across a whole book of hers. A Wiccan of the 50s, right? But attutude more subtle than such a tag implies.

xxp - I aimed to read 52 as well and managed to read 49.

Books I read in 2017 that I can remember upon returning to work after a week off with a brain that not work so good no more:
James Baldwin - Collected Essays (Library of America)
Susan Wise Bauer - The History of the Ancient World: : From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome
Taylor Branch - Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63
Taylor Branch - Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65
Robert W. Chambers - The King in Yellow
Jack Handey - What I'd Say to the Martians: And Other Veiled Threats
William Hope Hodgson - The House on the Borderland
Sean Howe - Marvel Comics: The Untold Story
Stephen King - Revival
Steven Mithen - After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC
Rick Perlstein - Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
John Semley - This is a Book About the Kids in the Hall
Reed Tucker - Slugfest: Inside the Epic, 50-year Battle Between Marvel and DC
Isabel Wilkerson - The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

Books I started reading in 2017 and am still reading in 2018:
Robert Bellah - Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Wm. Theodore de Bary, Wing-tsit Chan - Sources of Chinese Tradition: From Earliest Times to 1600
Mircea Eliade - The History of Religious Ideas Vol. 1

Oh, I somehow missed that people were including comics in their lists. I'll just say that I also read approximately four times my body weight in comics and leave it at that.

only read 30 books last year, kinda slacked in the middle of the summer and never really hit a stride again. didn't have one big book like i did in 2016 (infinite jest), i'd like to do at least one this year but not sure which. have anna karenina sitting on my shelf but idk, haven't even read notes from the underground yet...

On Bowie — Rob Sheffield
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? — Thomas Frank
The Master Plan: ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory — Brian Fishman
Homesick for Another World — Ottessa Moshfegh
Universal Harvester — John Darnielle
Collected Poems & Stories — Mallory Whitten
The Broom of the System — David Foster Wallace
American Pastoral — Philip Roth
Firestarter — Stephen King
God Box — Mallory Whitten
Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany — Norman Ohler
A Colony in a Nation — Chris Hayes
literally show me a healthy person — Darcie Wilder
It — Stephen King
How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016 — P.J. O’Rourke
Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign — Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes
Cujo — Stephen King
The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood
Meet Me in the Bathroom — Lizzy Goodman
Private Citizens — Tony Tulathimutte
Touch — Courtney Maum
The Sarah Book — Scott McClanahan
Eileen — Ottessa Moshfegh
Kill All Normies — Angela Nagle
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? — Mark Fisher
All the Dirty Parts — Daniel Handler
No Is Not Enough — Naomi Klein
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip K. Dick
The Original Face — Guillaume Morissette
Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine — Joe Hagan
Hit So Hard — Patty Schemel

favorites were both books by Ottessa Moshfegh, It, Meet Me in the Bathroom, Universal Harvester, and Shattered.

lol sorry im mixing up my dour russians

oh American Pastoral was absolutely amazing but I read the majority of that on a trip in September 2016 but didn't finish until February

think i'll try to read 365 short stories this year.

gotta set yourself a microfiction rule

yeah i was thinking that reading stuff from flash fiction: very short stories would not satisfy.
my first rule is that anything in a collection of short stories not devoted to flash fiction counts.

Maybe a Chekhov a day? Wouldn't keep the doctor away, since he wss one, but prob good for what ails you (if nothing ails you, even better I say)

won't keep the typos away, nothing will.

ooh i should do that too

in a chaotic and confusing world, programmatic reading can remove the heavy burden of too much choice

Old Lunch, what is the Mircea Eliade like? I have enjoyed his fiction a lot.

Fairly dense but elucidating if (like me) you're relatively ignorant of where/how various religious ideas originated. Reading now about the variety of theological constructs from across Europe and India that sprang from the same proto-Indo-European origins. I had no idea.

Took me a little while to write this lot up but:

Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime & Punishment
Muriel Spark – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Kevin MacNeil – The Brilliant and Forever
Angela Carter – The Magic Toyshop
Ray Celestin – The Axeman’s Jazz
Paul Beatty – The Sellout
Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing
John Cheever – The Complete Stories
Joan Didion – Slouching Towards Bethlehem
John Dos Passos – USA
Michaelangelo Matos - The Underground Is Massive
Anita Brookner – Hotel du Lac
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Love In The Time of Cholera
Elmore Leonard – Freaky Deaky
Eimear McBride – The Lesser Bohemians
Barney Norris – Five Rivers Met On A Wooded Plane
Sana Krasikov – The Patriots
Julian Barnes – The Noise of Time
Rob Duncan – Psychedelia and Other Colours
Alan Sillitoe – Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
George Saunders – Lincoln In The Bardo
John Darnielle – Universal Harvester
Naomi Aldermann – The Power
Zadie Smith – On Beauty
Don DeLillo – Mao II
John Le Carre – Smiley’s People
David Stubbs – Future Days
Mariana Enriquez – Things We Lost In The Fire
Stephen King – The Stand
Danilo Kis – Hourglass
Emile Zola – La Bete Humaine
Tom Wolfe - Bonfire of the Vanities

Good year!

Some of you people are machines. The poster 'one way street' reading 129 books in 2017 is both awesome and insane. I think one year I read 52 books (one a week), but I was unemployed for half of the year. Now I barely average two books a month.

A chunk of those 129 appear to be graphic novels, if that makes any difference.

i only read 30 books last year & i feel like i was slacking

reading the Michael Wolff book now, v good fan fic

No more than 40. That's counting honest books only. Would have been more but July was lost.

(This month looks to be unimpressive too.)

By participating these "What did you read" threads for the past five years or so, I now know I recently average about 45 books a year.

I read >cough< about 250 books, no way am I typing all those up

How much time do you read per day, James?

Maybe 3-4 hours if it's a work day (public transport, lunch break, insomnia)

I believe I read much slower than the average person, which is depressing. There's no chance I'm reading a whole book in one sitting, no matter how light or easy it is.

I fear I might be incapable of reading as fast as the people I hope to catch up with.

I will read no more for ever

There's no chance I'm reading a whole book in one sitting, no matter how light or easy it is.

I seldom finish a book in one sitting. Its fine, this is not a competition.

read Hard to be a God this week, the translation was iffy and the conversion to ebook was shoddy but it's a fine piece of work

put it in your 2018 list :)

haha wasn't even checking thread titles :)

how tf can you finish a book in one sitting unless it's like <150 pages
i read Universal Harvester in two sittings in one day
read Noah Cicero's new (excellent) poetry collection in two sittings over two days, but that's one I could've easily read in one sitting
Darcie Wilder's book last year, I think that was three sittings?
idk

what have y'all read in one sitting? genuinely curious. and impressed. my bum would go numb

This one, as orig. posted on an ILM Eagles thread, think it's A Good Day In Hell:

Also I picked up Felder's hefty Between Heaven and Hell in the library, and read the whole thing that afternoon, which never happens. Gist: his father comes off as a self-made, self-righteous, self-torturing workaholic and skinflint, and Don follows suit during his Eagles years, with infinitely more bucks and perks than blue collar Dad ever had, of course. Furthermore, Dr. Phil, he somewhat recreates his own defiant-dependent teen relationship with Dad, now played by Henley and Frey.
When he finally gets his ass fired, after having papers served in the studio, he actually calls back, all crying---"Try to seek some higher ground in this, Fingers," Frey counsels, and the ex-Mrs. Felder fervently seconds.
So he does, with this book of excellent anecdotes (also careful references to ongoing litigation), from early years in Florida---girlfriend accuses him of stepping out with blondes, who turn out to be pre-facial hair, though tressed-for-success Gregg and Duane)[;"Tommy" Petty is his guitar student; Stephen Stills is "the funniest kid I ever met," passing through town while running away from military school, back to his parents (though every kid I knew back then who was sent to military school, was sent for a good reason); Bernie Leadon is his local connection to the budding El Lay country rock scene.
Also lots of good stuff about "The Gods," as everybody who worked with and for the Eagles called Henley and Frey; supposedly many of these--even the Gods themselves, individually---called Felder up to trade the latest atrocity stories.
But I also get, in terms of more perhaps unintended reveals, that the Gods were trying to keep their associates' and their own assholes-with-money tendencies somewhat in line, at least for the sake of making even more money (by keeping up the musical standards, for instance). Nevertheless, Felder and I are somewhat respectful of, for instance, Joe Walsh's working out his frustrations on whole floors of hotels (and he lasted longer than any non-God in the line-up, I think, so maybe the mayhem helped).

When he finally gets his ass fired, after having papers served in the studio, he actually calls back, all crying That is, Felder had papers served on Frey (for the first time).