I read a lot less this year. Less than I have in a year since I started keeping these lists back in 2017. I…​ don’t feel bad about this, necessarily, although I do wish I would have read more. It was a busy year. A lot happened.[1] But I do sort of which I’d read more. I will say that my reading was a bit more varied this year, in part due to work and other things,[2] but I did read some pretty neat books, some long books, some very short books, and so on. I even reread, which is something I think I said I was going to do more of this year or last yer but didn’t really. Anyway, here’s the sometimes annotated list:[3]

  1. Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal by Daniel Friebe

  2. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf[4]

  3. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney[5]

  4. Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

  5. Distance Cycling by Dan Kehlenbach and John Hughes[6]

  6. Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau[7]

  7. Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys[8]

  8. Tmux 2 by Brian P Hogan[9]

  9. I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal[10]

  10. The House by Jane Unrue[11]

  11. The New House by David Leo Rice[12]

  12. Zero: Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife[13]

  13. La Maison de Rendez-vous by Alain Robbe-Grillet[14]

  14. Lanterne Rouge: The Last Man in the Tour de France by Max Leonard[15]

  15. Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey[16]

  16. How Late it Was, How Late by James Kelman[17]

  17. Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño[18]

  18. The Waterworks by E.L. Doctorow[19]

  19. The World Broke in Two by Bill Goldstein[20]

  20. Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg[21]

  21. Python Testing with Pytest by Brian Okken[22]

  22. Introducing Python by Bill Lubanovic[23]

  23. The People, Yes by Carl Sandburgfoodnote:[Have I gushed about this on this blog already? If not, it’s wonderful.]

  24. Learn Enough Ruby to be Dangerous by Michael Hartl[24]

  25. The Philosophical Programmer by Daniel Kohanski[25]

  26. Winter Stars by Larry Levis[26]

  27. Dead Souls by Gogol[27]

  28. Climbers by Peter Cossins[28]

  29. The King by Donald Barthelme[29]

  30. The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino[30]

1. See forthcoming "Another Year in Bullshit."
2. Again, see forthcoming bullshit.
3. In a perfect world I’d annotate all things, or write up a thing about each book I finish as I’ve read it, but Alia and I were having a discussion last night about social media and/vs. blogs and how you kind of can’t really have a blog without some social media if you want people to read it, but I don’t really care if anybody reads this or not (though: Hi Grandpa! Hi mom!), even if sometimes I put the link on Twitter like I’ll probably do today, and I guess the thing is that I do like to share with other people but for me the shouting into the void is fine and dandy and enough, even though at this point, yes, I could just keep a journal (I mean, I ripped out all the analytics on this site a few months ago so I genuinely have no idea if anybody reads it, which is kind of comforting), but I do keep a journal anyway, and sometimes it’s just nice to shout and shout in a dead-end alleyway because it’s somehow in the mid-50s on January 1st in Boston and sometimes it’s just nice to shout, you know? But suffice to say that I probably had more things (and more intelligent things) to say about many of these books right after I read them, but this is what I can remember now, and if you happen to have read them and want to talk to me about them I am all ears; I do love to prattle on about books…​
4. How I had not read this before I do not know; it’s a masterpiece and also a delight.
5. This was fun to read; I’d read a different version in high school. Also I am pretty fucking sure I reread John Gardner’s Grendel after this, but didn’t write it down on my list. So maybe I did read one more book this year. Or maybe more, even I don’t know; it wasn’t a great year for bookkeeping (pun intended).
6. This felt like required "rando" reading. It was…​ fine. I don’t know. I’m sure I learned something, but at the end of the day what worked for me was "just try to ride 100 miles every week total and you should be fit enough," and I was, more or less.
7. Thanks for giving this too me, Jac. I’m not surprised you didn’t like it, but I did! So it did find a good home.
8. So sad, so good.
9. I started reading another book by this guy and didn’t like it, but I did really appreciate this one and I really do mostly live in a terminal now, which is very fast and efficient if not also very nice.
10. I liked the other book of his I read this year a lot; I loved this one.
11. I love Jane. I need to reread this book though because while I did get a feeling I think I missed what might or might not have "happened." But this was to be expected if I’m honest.
12. See this.
13. In another life, I would have loved to have done more math.
14. This might be my favorite of his novels. I mean, it’s maybe not quite as much an obvious masterpiece as Jealousy, and maybe it’s a little…​ well, some parts didn’t age the best, but still: so fucking good.
15. Adam recommended this to me and it was a lot of fun.
16. I gave this to my friend’s kid for her birthday and we read it together and it was nice.
17. So, at the end of the day I don’t think this book earned its page count but I really enjoyed reading it nevertheless although I think the narrative lost steam and it just needed to end, which I get, and is fine. It was still quite the trip and a wonderful study in voice and breaking prose rules (while still being very strict about its own rules), and it was fun, it was fun. But and I like and have borrowed (probably annoyingly) some of the language ticks too, so.
18. As Jonny said when he lent this to me, you can see the seeds of a lot of the other stuff he’s written in here, even if it itself is a bit, I don’t know, "early."
19. This was a lot of fun; I need to read more of him though and have two books of his on my shelf for this upcoming year. I really liked Homer and Langley and "The Writer in the Family" is such a fucking good story, you know?
20. Good audiobook to have on while cleaning the house and also moving.
21. If you haven’t read Natalia Ginzburg for chrissakes go fucking read Natalia Ginzburg. I’ve read three or four of her books now and have been absolutely floored by all of them.
22. This was great and clear and instructive. Also, I really like the podcast he’s one.
23. I’d been reading this off and on for a few years and so decided to finally "finish it" as I found myself writing a lot of code this year.
24. "Meh" is how I feel both about this guy, this book, his "Rails Tutorial" which I’m about done with, and Ruby itself.
25. I found this at my local library and enjoyed it very much.
26. Fucking hell how long did it take me to finally read Levis? Why so long? Why is he so good??????
27. Another "why did it take me so long" but I loved it, and it was an almost-return to my dearly-missed book club because I read it with my really talented friend Lisa who was part of the OG book club, and then the slightly expanded book club, and then the open-house book club soon after which it all sort of fell apart. I hope that someday I can get a book club going again, but I don’t have the energy to start one and keep on top of unreliable people and I don’t have any reliable people who have time or energy to organize much these days.
28. Another great audiobook to listen to while cleaning and/or moving house.
29. Not the best Barthelme, but it was very nourishing to read, somehow. You see a lot of the old writer in Arthur, and elsewhere, and it just —
30. I’d been meaning to read this for a long time, especially since I was doing a similar sort of project all year when I was writing (again, see forthcoming "A Year in Bullshit"), and parts of it were sublime, parts just "okay," parts that felt too constrained or rather too exercise-driven, and parts that were so wonderful that although I did just finish the book I haven’t put it on the shelf yet because I want to reread these parts, kind of like how I’m glad Perec put his prologue into Life: A User Manual twice but you still go back and read it three or four times because it’s somehow the most perfect little essay about craft you’ve ever read.