This was, it feels frankly needless to say, a wild year. For the world, and also for me personally: got married, finished grad school, got a job, realized that I have way less hair than I did in the picture that sometimes shows up on Twitter for these recommended reading posts, etc.

I wrote a fair amount and also read a lot. Like, more than I have in years. It was nice. And though there was still some school reading in there, a lot of it was stuff I read because I cared about it. And that felt good. While I did run "metrics" on the books, I’m not going to share them because (a) I don’t love the politics around that kind of thing in the end (I mean, I agree and all, but I don’t like how it becomes another performative thing, and also a lot of the books I need to read for my writing projects are nevertheless by old dead white men) and (b) because I’m not sure I did the excel sheet graphs right. I will say that I read about half men and women, and about half fiction and the other mostly fairly split between poetry and nonfiction. I also read way more books written since I’ve been born this year than I have in a long time, and that was cool, too. I do have a ways to go so far as reading non-white and more international fiction, but in time.

Like every year I’ve done this, I’m just a wee bit too lazy to write something about each of these. I will, at least, bold my favorites this year. So without further todo, here’s the list:

  1. Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

  2. The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec

  3. The Art of Rivalry by Sebastian Smee

  4. Everybody Who Was Anybody by Janet Hobhouse

  5. Vox by Nicholson Baker

  6. The Greatest Love Story Ever Told by Ron and Tammy

  7. Two Lives by Janet Malcolm

  8. The Tradition by Jericho Brown

  9. Love Hotel by Jane Unrue

  10. The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

  11. The Art Lover by Carole Maso

  12. Goethe: A Very Short Introduction by Ritchie Robertson

  13. Some Trees by John Ashbery

  14. Travesty Generator by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

  15. Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt

  16. Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino

  17. Weird Weeks by Ryan Ridge & Mel Bosworth

  18. A Room in Dodge City Volume 1 by David Leo Rice

  19. Star by Yukio Mishima

  20. The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

  21. Just Ride by Grant Petersen

  22. Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery

  23. Road to Valor by Aili McConnon and Andres McConnon

  24. Everyday Reading by Mike Chasar

  25. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

  26. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

  27. The Golden Age of Hand Built Bicycles by Jan Heine

  28. The Deep End by Jason Boog

  29. The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg

  30. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

  31. At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell

  32. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

  33. Counternarratives by John Keene

  34. Oulipo: A Primer for Potential Literature by Warren F. Motte (editor, who is super cool and exchanged emails with me about this.)

  35. Emma by Jane Austin

  36. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

  37. The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle

  38. A Room in Dodge City Volume 2 by David Leo Rice

  39. Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault

  40. Casino Royale by Ian Flemming

  41. My Safe Word is Harder by McKenna Clarke

  42. The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood

  43. Three by Perec by Geroges Perec

  44. Change Me by Jane Alison

  45. De Kooning’s Bicycle by Robert Long

  46. The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić

  47. Amerikan Kontemporary Poetry by John Murillo

  48. The Logic of Sensation by Giles Deleuze

  49. Mansfield Park by Jane Austin

  50. A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

  51. My Antonía by Willa Cather

  52. Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey

  53. Inland by Gerald Murnane

  54. Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey

  55. Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison

Anyway, that’s the "completed" list. There were a few abandoned books but I don’t remember all of them, and there were many wonderful one-off essays and other such things that don’t get on here, either.

One way or another, it was a good year of reading. Here’s to another.