This is a potentially incomplete list of all the books I remember reading last year. I was going to put it on Twitter a few weeks ago, but nah. Why should Twitter get all the good stuff?
So, in no particular order:
- Everything Matters – Ron Currie
- The Blurry Years – Eleanor Kriseman
- Less – Andrew Sean Greer
- Dirty Boulevard: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Lou Reed
- Tales from Nowhere – Lonely Planet
- Homesick for Another World – Ottessa Moshfegh
- Love is a Mix Tape – Rob Sheffield
- Cool Gray City of Love – Gary Kamiya
- The Incendiaries – R.O. Kwon
- Hark – Sam Lipsyte
- 1Q84* – Haruki Murakami
- Solaris* – Stanislaw Lem
- Bukowski in a Sundress – Kim Addonizio
- The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States – Jeffrey Lewis
- A Thousand Distant Radios – Woody Skinner
- Severance – Ling Ma
- The White Album – Joan Didion
- A Field Guide to Getting Lost – Rebecca Solnit
- The Taxidermist’s Catalog – James Brubaker
- The Friends of Eddie Coyle – George V. Higgins
- Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
- The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells – Andrew Sean Greer
- Bartleby – Herman Melville
- Benito Cereno – Herman Melville
- No Longer At Ease – Chinua Achebe
- Favorite Monster – Sharma Shields
- They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us – Hanif Abdurraqib
- Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink – Elvis Costello
- All the Sad Young Literary Men – Keith Gessen
- Florida – Lauren Goff
- Appointment in Samarra – John O’Hara
- The Power of Point of View – Alicia Rasley
- Story Genius – Lisa Cron
- To Show and To Tell – Phillip Lopate
- Bitches Brew – George Grella Jr.
- Live at the Apollo – Douglas Volk
The last two on this list are those little 33 1/3 books published by Bloomsbury; if you’re a music lover and a particular kind of nerd, you should check them out. They’re tons of fun.
The three before that are writing craft books. I feel like I read more than just three of those last year; I should make a point to read more of them this year.
The books with an asterisk are ones I didn’t finish and probably won’t try to in the future.
As far as the rest of the list goes, there were a few re-reads (the Melville, the Didion and the Higgins), but I’m trying not to revisit many books these days, since there are so so so many out there that I want to read but haven’t. For 2020 I’d like to get the number of female authors up a bit, and I’d definitely like the next edition of this list to be less white.