It’s December 31, and the probability of my finishing the two-and-a-half books I’ve got in the hopper before midnight are diminishing rapidly. One I only started yesterday (The Third Lie), one is poems and I like to take my time with poems (Monad+Monadnock), and the half is a book club book (The Shape of Content), and I’ve found that it’s better if I read the chapters closer to book club when we do book club. All of which is to say that, despite the apparent trend towards late November/early December "wrapped"-like things, what follows is an accurate and complete list of the books I’ve finished this year.

The primary observation from this "year of reading" is that I read a heckuva lot more than most years. It’s the highest "count" (not that the number really means anything) I’ve had since I’ve been keeping track, and perhaps the highest count ever for me. The primary motivation for this was the need to find "comp titles" for the novel manuscript I’m trying to convince someone to agent or publish early in the year. This meant that I read contemporary fiction in an intentional way for the first time in ever. It was pretty instructive, I think, and though I’m still not sure my comps are really great comps, I did read a lot, and feel like I have at least some provisional understanding of the "market" for "literary" novels, even if I also have ideas about comp titles in general for literary — and especially "experimental"-leaning — novels, but that’s a separate thing than the book list.

I did a few rereads this year, with notables including Life of a Star and The Anthologist, both books I love for very different reasons. Speaking of Janes, Jane Alison’s Villa E was maybe my favorite "I’ve been waiting forever to read this" of the year, given that I am 99% sure I remember her mentioning an "architecture book" as far back as 2012, when I took classes with her. It lived up to the hype in my head.

I was happy to come across an ARC of James, which I really enjoyed, even if I preferred — for my own tastes and interests — Dr. No. A few books I don’t really remember at all, e.g., the Rovelli and the Christie, and there are a few (which I will keep to myself) that I still can’t decide if I liked or not, or if they were good or not. For nonfiction, I really loved The Essays of Leonard Michaels, and Once Upon a Prime made me very happy. I’m very glad I finally got to Monsters, which I greatly enjoyed. For history, I cannot recommend The Blazing World highly enough. It paired nicely with The Name of the Rose, which admittedly took me forever to read, but this was in part because I was savoring it, reading it only before bed, etc.

The latter part of the year was a lot of poetry, I think partly due to my having gone to a proper poetry reading for the first time in a very long time. And luckily, the book I got there, Visitors from the Red Star was super-excellent. The Gold Cell is one of the best collections I’ve ever read, and I’m kind of glad I waited (not intentionally) to read it in my 30s; I’ve had such good luck with the "dollar carts" outside Commonwealth Books and the Brattle Bookshop (both of which are on my "lunch walk" route when I go into the office downtown) this year. The Gold Cell was one, but maybe the best find was Country Cooking and Other Stories, even if this means that I am now forever on the hunt for books published by Burning Deck (RIP).

There were a couple more programming books in there this year, and they were fine. The best ones I read (e.g., Command-Line Rust) I never finished for one reason or another, and only "finished" books end up on the list. I feel like this is often true of programming books, though, which means they’ll always be under-represented here. I’m not going to lose sleep over this.

The year more or less finished with Claudia Rankine, Agota Kristof, Robert Coover (RIP), and Lucia Berlin. This has been a nice way to end the year, even if the Kristof novels are deeply upsetting (and excellent), and the Lucia Berlin stories make me feel far too many things.

There were other notables I didn’t necessarily mention above — e.g., The Organs of Sense might have been my favorite novel of the year, if you were to account for my very intense recency bias when it comes to "favorites" — but, you know, I’m around if you ever want to talk about one or another of them.

In any case, it was a lovely year of reading.

And so the list: