‘Tis the season of year-end lists, collections of top posts, top nines, top-halves heavy from holiday feasts. So, because I can never remember anything unless it’s written down, and because it’s sometimes fun to share, here is a list of books I read this year.

Not all of them are for school, though a good number of them are. I don’t think I distinguished this year like I did last year in my notebook, and so I won’t here, either.

I should scribble about some of these books someday, but for now, a list:

  1. Jews Without Money (Michael Gold)
  2. Six Memos from the Last Millennium (Joseph Skibell)
  3. Annotations (John Keene)
  4. Modernism: Evolution of an Idea
  5. The Secret Agent (Conrad)
  6. Howard’s End (Forster)
  7. The Good Solider (Ford)
  8. To the Lighthouse (Woolf) – can you tell I took a modernism course?
  9. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (Ozick)
  10. Counternarratives (selections, Keene)
  11. Dubliners (selections, Joyce)
  12. The Last September (Bowen)
  13. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Jackson)
  14. Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed (Cohen)
  15. How Fiction Works (Wood)
  16. Invisible Cities (Calvino)
  17. The Shape of Content (Shapiro)
  18. Irradiated Cities (Mariko Nagai)
  19. Dictée (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha)
  20. GeNtry!fication: Or, The Scene of the Crime (Chaun Webster)
  21. Silent Anatomies (Monica Ong)
  22. The Book (Amaranth Borsuk)
  23. Klee: Mutations (Tempohaus)
  24. Jewish Comedy: a Serious History (Jeremy Dauber)
  25. The Unseen World (Liz Moore)
  26. A Poetry Handbook (Oliver)
  27. About Trees (Katie Holten)
  28. Imaginary Explosions (Caitlin Berrigan)
  29. Life of a Star (Jane Unrue)
  30. The Manly Art of Knitting (Dave Fougner)
  31. The Problems of Philosophy (Russell)
  32. Kids These Days (Malcolm Harris)

So, fewer than last year, yes. I also tried again to read Ulysses, and got a lot farther than I ever have, but didn’t finish (again). I pick it up every now and again and read a chapter. I’m more than halfway through. I should try and finish it over break, maybe.

I’m also in the middle of Against Everything and Paper Dreams. Also some Leonard Michaels stuff.

Anyway, here’s to 2019.