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:
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Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein
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The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec
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The Art of Rivalry by Sebastian Smee
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Everybody Who Was Anybody by Janet Hobhouse
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Vox by Nicholson Baker
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The Greatest Love Story Ever Told by Ron and Tammy
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Two Lives by Janet Malcolm
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The Tradition by Jericho Brown
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Love Hotel by Jane Unrue
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The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
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The Art Lover by Carole Maso
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Goethe: A Very Short Introduction by Ritchie Robertson
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Some Trees by John Ashbery
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Travesty Generator by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
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Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt
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Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino
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Weird Weeks by Ryan Ridge & Mel Bosworth
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A Room in Dodge City Volume 1 by David Leo Rice
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Star by Yukio Mishima
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The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
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Just Ride by Grant Petersen
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Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery
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Road to Valor by Aili McConnon and Andres McConnon
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Everyday Reading by Mike Chasar
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The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
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The Golden Age of Hand Built Bicycles by Jan Heine
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The Deep End by Jason Boog
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The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
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And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
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At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell
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The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
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Counternarratives by John Keene
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Oulipo: A Primer for Potential Literature by Warren F. Motte (editor, who is super cool and exchanged emails with me about this.)
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Emma by Jane Austin
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Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
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The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
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A Room in Dodge City Volume 2 by David Leo Rice
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Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault
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Casino Royale by Ian Flemming
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My Safe Word is Harder by McKenna Clarke
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The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
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Three by Perec by Geroges Perec
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Change Me by Jane Alison
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De Kooning’s Bicycle by Robert Long
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The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić
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Amerikan Kontemporary Poetry by John Murillo
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The Logic of Sensation by Giles Deleuze
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Mansfield Park by Jane Austin
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A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
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My Antonía by Willa Cather
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Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey
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Inland by Gerald Murnane
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Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey
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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.