Less on top of this than I should have been, I also admit that I was trying to squeeze in a few more books before the new year.
I did not really have a reading program this time. I read a lot more things that I wanted to, read a fair few novellas and things in advance of my MFA thesis project, and generally tried to enjoy myself. I read one semi-big (The Savage Detectives) and one objectively big book (Life: a User Manual), and I found, late in the year, a couple of new semi-reading infatuations in Perec/the Oulipo more generally and Gertrude Stein, which I know is kind of a bad idea. I also did some re-reading, which I mean to do more of.
Speaking of re-reading, I was talking to the writer and poet Joe Torra in the hallway (as one does) and we got on about reading habits, and he mentioned something about how, when he was younger, he would find a writer or poet he liked and then would go and read everything that person had ever written, which I thought was pretty cool. I don’t think I’d done that, though, since maybe the Redwall books as a kid (and even then, I never really got into Jacques’s pirate ship novel, or whatever that way). So in addition to re-reading, I mean to read more deeply within a writer’s work whom I decide I like. I’ve accidentally started doing that anyway, but I think because I was so concerned with being “well read” which I took to mean “widely read,” I would read a writer’s “major work” and then move on: and so I know I’ve missed things.
So here’s to the next year of reading (clinks glass).
Below are the books I “completed” in 2019. This list does not include any articles, half-finished books, or anthologies out of which I read most things but not all. Many of the books I’m reading at this present moment or have recently finished (e.g., The Problem with Pleasure, Tender Buttons), were started in 2019 but I’ll count those towards 2020. For 2020 itself I had meant to read only (excepting things for school) books written since I’ve been born, as I feel less familiar with contemporary stuff than I mean to be, but I think I’ll still sneak in a few broad exception categories (nonfiction, poetry, oulipo, and “Jewish books,” broadly construed). But we’ll see what I actually end up doing.
So the list! This year again without commentary. Should you want to discuss one or hear more about it, please let me know. I like talking books. To borrow a phrase, “Some of the stuff I [liked] very much, some of the stuff I quite [liked] / And I don’t hate any of it.”
- Going Places by Leonard Michaels
- Virtual Muse by Charles O. Hartman
- #! by Nick Montfort
- From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
- The Rider by Tim Krabbé
- It’s All About the Bike by Robert Penn
- On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World by Elizabeth Kadetsky
- The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
- The Sensualist by Daniel Torday
- Spring and All by William Carlos Williams
- The Ethical Slut by Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton
- Justine by the Marquis de Sade
- The Empty Space by Peter Brook
- Women by Chloe Caldwell
- Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion
- Miss Loneleyhearts by Nathanial West
- Point Omega by Don Delillo
- By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño
- I Would Have Saved Them if I Could by Leonard Michaels
- Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
- The Waves by Virginia Woolf
- A Very Short Introduction to Islamic History by Adam J. Silverstein
- Exercises in Style by Raymond Quineau
- A Very Short Introduction to Comparative Literature by Ben Hutchinson
- Excellent Evidence of Human Activity (chapbook) by Sara Ryan
- Frankenstein (1818 ed.) by Mary Shelly
- Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren
- A Hurry of English (chapbook) by Mary Jean Chan
- Create Dangeously (a wildly over-marketed… essay?) by Albert Camus
- Life: A User Manual by Georges Perec
- The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
- The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes
- Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz
- The Dead and Other Stories by James Joyce
- Modern Technical Writing by Andrew Etter
- Ida by Gertrude Stein
- A Very Short Introduction to Decadence by David Weir
- Nightwood by Djuna Barnes