2025 in Books

Last year was my worst reading year since 2012. I finished 19 books in 2025, the first of which was a holdover that I started at the end of 2024. This delayed my usual starting the first of the year with a Javier Marías book, but 2025 was also the year I became a Marías completist – well, of his novels available in English at least. 

Last year I finished:

• The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig
• Voyage Along the Horizon, by Jaiver Marías
• Moving Parts, by Magdalena Tulli
• The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir
• Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain
• By the Ionian Sea, by George Gissing
• Amulet, by Roberto Bolaño
• Dance with Snakes, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• Apocalypse, by Lizzie Wade
• A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
• Heart Lamp, by Banu Mushtaq
• Transit, by Anna Seghers 
• Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson
• March Violets, by Philip Kerr
• Identitti, by Mithu Sanyal
• Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie 
• On the Calculation of Volume I, II, and III, by Solvej Balle

So, for the usual stats: A majority of the books I read this year were by women: 12 out of the 19. That's a big improvement over last year – and unusual for me. Five of these were for my Women in Translation book club, which I have to thank for keeping me reading at least at a slow pace through the year. Also 12 of the books I read this year were books in translation. Apart from Americans, I read authors from Austria, Chile, Denmark, El Salvador, Germany, Iceland, India, Poland, Spain, and the U.K. Iceland and Poland were firsts for me. 

Two of the books I read last year were rereads – the Gissing and the Leckie. Four were works of nonfiction, three of those memoirs. I was really drawn to memoirs at the beginning of last year – continuing a trend from the year before, as I noted in last year's round-up. 

I'm going to allow myself a lot of favorites this year, even though I'm working from a smaller than usual list of books. Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday and Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth were both incredible memoirs covering overlapping periods of time, the early 20th century, World War I and its aftermath, though with very different perspectives. I wanted to stay in that pre-war(s) world for a long time, which is what led me back to my beloved Gissing (but rereads can't count toward favorites – I said so last year). I thought I would go from Gissing to a reread of Dostoyevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, but somehow I ended up on a different track.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles did bring me back to that world, in the form of fiction, and I really loved it. And Transit brought me through to the other side; to the place (figuratively, though almost literally) where the Zweig book ended up: the exodus from Europe during WWII. I started Anna Seghers' Transit ahead of a trip to Provence in July because of its setting in Marseille. I was loving it, but reading very slowly, so that I only finished it not long before I visited Berlin in September. I was feeling such an affection for Anna Seghers just then, so I was most gratified to be able to visit her grave in Berlin. I ended the year with a consecutive reading of the three books from Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume series that are currently available in English. I enjoyed them all, but the first one especially was profoundly moving for me. 

I'll add one honorable mention that I didn't include in my list because I didn't read the full book. I also read – and was really struck by – Anthony Doerr's story (almost a novella really) Memory Wall.

2024 in Books

I thought 2024 might have been my worst reading year in a decade, but with 24 books read I'm actually one book ahead of where I finished 2023. I had a good run over the summer and thought I might get back into the reading habit, but I fell off again in the fall. I could blame my failure to read more on any number of things – excessive scrolling and too much time spent on Spelling Bee are surely among the culprits – but one factor for which I feel less personal responsibility is that I had two longterm houseguests this year. I wasn't living alone for 8 months of last year, meaning there were people who I talked to in the mornings and who interrupted (even if they didn't intend to) my solitary reading time. I'm happy to have my space to myself again and I'm not expecting any longterm guests any time soon, so I hope I can get back to some of my old habits. 

The books I read last year, in the order in which I finished them, were:

• Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg
• Dark Back of Time, by Javier Marías
• Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis
• A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor
• What Have You Left Behind? by Bushra Al-Maqtari
• War, So Much War, by Mercè Rodoreda
• Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga
• Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías
• Translation State, by Ann Leckie
• Canción, by Eduardo Halfon
• Trust, by Hernan Diaz
• Tyrant Memory, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• City of Laughter, by Temim Fruchter
• Vertigo, by W.G. Sebald
• The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald
• The Emigrants, by W.G. Sebald
• Near to the Wild Heart, by Clarice Lispector
• Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb
• The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy, by Antal Szerb
• Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr
• On Lighthouses, by Jazmina Barrera
• Such Fine Boys, by Patrick Modiano
• The Word is Murder, by Anthony Horowitz

The stats: I read 7 books by women and another by a nonbinary author, meaning two thirds of the books I read were by cis men. Not great. Seventeen of the books I read last year were in translation, which I think is a high proportion, even for me. The countries, apart from the U.S., from which I read books were: Brazil, El Salvador, France, Germany (maybe needs an asterisk because it's Sebald, but maybe it doesn't), Guatemala, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Rwanda, Spain (note: one of the three books I read was written in Catalan), the U.K., and Yemen. Only Yemen is a country from which I hadn't previously read a book.

The most surprising stat in here to me is that this list includes six rereads. Two of them were for my book club: Family Lexicon and Near to the Wild Heart. Two of them were different translations than the versions I had read previously: Journey by Moonlight and, again, Near to the Wild Heart. I found myself wanting to reread beloved books this year – I considered even more rereads than I completed. There's also an unusually high proportion of non-fiction (nearly all of it memoir) in here: six books in total (and I'm not even counting Sebald). Both these stats are extra notable because in 2023 I had zero rereads and zero works of nonfiction in my read list. 

And now we are at the part of the post where I declare my favorite book of the year. Sometimes there is a clear winner; not this time. Journey By Moonlight was an easy favorite when I read it in 2019. I still loved it when I read it last year, but surprisingly (or not), it wasn't a stand-out. If anything, Szerb's memoir The Third Tower (also a reread) hit harder this time around. Senselessness, too, felt more powerful on rereading. 

I feel I should limit my favorites to books I had not read previously, and if forced to choose (which I am, by my own authority), I can narrow it down to three. A Time of Gifts was an enchanting book that captured a moment in time so vividly, and Leigh Fermor himself is such a compelling storyteller. Reading this book was simultaneously a joyful experience, and heartbreaking for the lost world it exposes. I read three Sebald books, which I've always thought were a loose trilogy, consecutively (though out of order, it turned out), and while I loved them all, The Rings of Saturn was the standout among them. The wide-ranging stories it told, the history and observations Sebald makes over the course of this unusual book come together so unexpectedly into a magical whole. It's a book that defies explanation, and it's wonderful. Finally, Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome so perfectly and beautifully captures Rome, one of my favorite places in the world. It was especially rewarding to read it before, during, and just after I paid a visit to the city, but I've since passed my copy on to my father who's never been to Rome and he is also loving the book. (My intention there was to make him want to visit Rome; I think it's working.) I'll make a closing observation about all three of these books: Two of them are straight memoir and a case could be made to describe the third that way as well. All of them are about journeys and history. As someone who has mostly stuck strictly to fiction, this makes me wonder if what I'm looking for from books may be shifting. 

2023 in Books

Last year was my worst reading year since 2013 and 2014, in each of which I read 22 books (but in one of those years I read War and Peace and in the other I read Infinite Jest, so my page count was surely higher). Actually, 2023 would have counted as a pretty good reading year for me if it weren't for my reading habits of the last decade. It's been hard not to feel down about it, but when I reflect on all the other things that have happened in the last 12 months, even as I do feel I spent too much time on my phone when I could have been reading, I start to understand why maybe that's what my mind needed. 

I moved at the very end of 2022, so 2023 was a year of setting up my new home. I undertook two major home renovation projects: a new kitchen and a new HVAC system, both of which had me displaced in my home for a period of weeks, first in March and then in October; and countless minor home renovation projects. (Among these, I had solar panels installed on my roof, which could be counted as a major renovation, but honestly it required very little effort or discomfort on my part.) My last home improvement project of 2023, completed on Christmas and Boxing Day, was the installation of the bookshelves pictured here, and finally getting my fiction back to its proper organization. Last year was also an exceptionally busy year for me professionally, which was both exhausting and rewarding. (Not incidentally, I got a promotion in September.) I traveled quite a bit in 2023 – not quite at pre-pandemic levels, but approaching it. And, most miserably, I had extremely unpleasant major dental work done in November and December (which, sadly, is only half done). 

So, when I think back on the last year (or year and a half in truth, because the physical and mental energy associated with my move date back to then), it's not surprising that at the end of my days I didn't often feel motivated to pick up a book and read, though it might have been good for my mental health. I also barely wrote in the last year, and I know the two are connected. This last week and change, I've been off work with few obligations and I finally got back into a reading groove. My favorite way to spend the last days of the year is reading on the couch with my feel up, occasionally interrupted by some baking project or a walk in the winter sun. This year – rather unexpectedly – gave me that desired break. I hope I can keep up into the new year some of what I felt I got back to in the last week.

And so, the books: I read 23 books in 2023 (finishing 7 of those in the last week). In chronological order, they were:

• All Souls, by Javier Marías
• Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson
• The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald
• Drunk on Love, by Jasmine Guillory
• Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, by Maria José Silveira
• Carte Blanche, by Carlo Lucarelli
• Dora Bruder, by Patrick Modiano
• Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yōko Tawada
• The Tale of the 1002nd Night, by Joseph Roth
• In Concrete, by Anne Garréta
• Eve Out of Her Ruins, by Ananda Devi
• Provenance, by Ann Leckie
• Easy Motion Tourist, by Leye Adenle
• Strangers I Know, by Claudia Durastanti
• This Census Taker, by China Miéville
• The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng
• Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was, by Angélica Gorodischer
• Trust, by Domenico Starnone
• The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
• Where Angels Fear to Tread, by E.M. Forster
• Devotion, by Howard Norman
• Burning Secret, by Stefan Zweig

A thing that kept happening to me last year was I would select a book that I thought would be just the thing to get me out of my reading rut, and then the book would turn out to be not at all what I thought it was. I finished some of these (In Concrete and This Census Taker are a couple examples from the list above), but I also started a lot of books I did not finish. Among these were Midnight in the Century; Zorba the Greek; Hav; Beautiful World, Where Are You; The Bridge on the Drina; The Discomfort of Evening; and several others that I've since forgotten. I hope to get back to some of these (Zorba, Hav, and Drina in particular.) My decision over the summer to start Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis was an attempt to try something totally different. I read 185 depressing but informative pages of it, and may yet return. It felt startlingly relevant.

And on to the stats: 

I read 11 books by women last year, or just under 50% (which is better than I feared). Apart from the U.S., which accounts for just 3 books I read last year, I read books from 11-ish countries. I'm counting Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig as compatriots, though I'm unsure what to call the country. For the sake of simplicity we can go with Roth's preferred fatherland, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The others were: Argentina, Brazil, France, Italy, Japan/Germany (whichever is more proper to assign for Tawada), Malaysia, Mauritius, Nigeria, Spain, and the United Kingdom (my most read country, with 6 books, though perhaps I should have separated out Scotland, from where I read one book). Only Malaysia was new to me. I read 11 books in translation and one book in its original French. I didn't reread any books or finish a single work of nonfiction in 2023. 

I'm finding it very hard to name a favorite book from 2023. It may be recency bias, but The Sense of an Ending and Kalpa Imperial stand out. From the earlier clutch, Scattered All Over the Earth might be my favorite. I believe reading Dora Bruder had the greatest effect on me of any book I read this year, and it stands apart such that I'm unable to rate it alongside everything else. It was my first time reading a whole book in a language other than English, and I still marvel a bit at having done it. It felt something like magic, especially as I got on and understood more and more without having to refer to Google Translate. It was also a beautiful and affecting book. Other notable books from the year include Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, which felt like an education in Brazilian history; Provenance, which succeeded in getting me out of a rut where all those other books failed; The House of Doors, which made me really want to visit Penang; and Trust, which had this intriguing concept of mutual trust and mutual destruction at the center that I can't get over.

2022 in Books

The last year has not been a great year for reading for me. I finished 41 books in 2022, which is certainly a respectable number of books, but I had many false starts and long spells of no reading. (I didn't finish a single book between October 3 and December 9!)  During the latter half of the year, I blamed my poor reading on my impending move, which happened in mid-December but was in the works since July or August. My problems really began before then, so I can't blame the move for everything. January started off strong. I think the stumbles started in March or April, and they continued throughout the year. I allowed myself to fall out of my daily reading habit and I often found I wasn't in the mood to read. And then I kept feeling that I had selected the wrong book. The end result, though I haven't kept count, is that I believe I read an unusual number of very short books last year, which I read in the space of a day or two while on more days than not I didn't read at all. 

In the order that I finished them, the books I read in 2022 were:

• The Man of Feeling, by Javier Marías
• One Last Stop, by Casey McQuiston
• The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, by Gaito Gazdanov
• My Life as a Fake, by Peter Carey
• Childhood, by Tove Ditlevsen
• My Sister the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite
• Youth, by Tove Ditlevesen
• Dependency, by Tove Ditlevsen
• Affections, by Rodrigo Hasbún
• American Spy, by Lauren Wilkinson
• Last Night in Nuuk, by Niviak Korneliussen
• The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles
• Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli
• In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz
• Big Sky, by Kate Atkinson
• Garden by the Sea, by Mercè Rodoreda
• Home Reading Service, by Fabio Morábito
• Loving Day, by Mat Johnson
• Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, by Balli Kaur Jaswal
• Justine, by Iben Mondrup
• Persuasion, by Jane Austen
• The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang
• Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets
• The Trees, by Percival Everett
• Tremor of Intent, by Anthony Burgess
• Rattlebone, by Maxine Clair
• The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie
• Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami
• Saint Sebastian's Abyss, by Mark Haber
• Oliver VII, by Antal Szerb
• Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck
• Happiness, as Such, by Natalia Ginzburg
• Not One Day, by Anne Garréta
• Rum Punch, by Elmore Leonard
• The Moon and the Bonfires, by Cesare Pavese
• Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli
• Martha, Jack & Shanco, by Caryl Lewis
• So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, by Patrick Modiano
• Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in the Piazza Vittorio, by Amara Lakhous

And the stats:

For the second consecutive year (and second year ever), more than half the books I read last year were by women. Apart from the U.S., which only accounts for 8 of the books I read last year, I read books from 18 countries including 5 new ones (marked in bold): Australia, Bolivia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greenland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Palestine, Russia, Singapore, Spain,  Ukraine, and Wales. This is worse than last year on both counts. Two of the books I read (Persuasion and Tremor of Intent) were rereads. The only nonfiction books I read were the three Tove Ditlevsen volumes. 

Some years I just know what my favorite book of the year was. This is not one of those years. I think the honor goes to The Trees. In the Distance would be the other contender. Other notable mentions include Garden by the Sea, which I loved almost as much as A Broken Mirror – one of my favorite books read in 2018; The Spectre of Alexander Wolf and Justine, both of which had twists that have really stayed with me; The Story of My Teeth, which I'm really glad I decided to try after not really enjoying the previous Valeria Luiselli book I read; and Not One Day, which was just unexpectedly beautiful and gave me a new way of thinking about writing. 

2021 in Books

I realize this photo is very similar to the one I posted last year, but it was taken only a couple days ago, so I suppose it's just an accurate representation of my life. The pandemic continues more or less apace, and my reading kept up. I read 55 books in 2021, which is the most I've ever read in a year excepting last year. However, by page count I think this is only my fourth best year. Another fun (?) fact I learned from my Goodreads Year in Books is that 2021 was the first year in many, many years (since 2007 if Goodreads is to be trusted) that I didn't read a single book that was over 500 pages long. Berta Isla, the first book I read in 2021, was 496 pages and the longest book I read. 

I think this started in 2020, but I have noticed a definite change in the cadence of my reading. While I average a book a week or better, my actual reading pace is very different. I'll read some books (several books) in a day or two, while others take me weeks to get through. I think this tendency has grown out of the way I read now, which really has changed since February 2020. Before the pandemic, I did the bulk of my reading on the subway. Sometimes I'd spend a weekend day or a day off reading, but most of my reading was done in 30-40 minute chunks across two daily commutes. This routine I think propelled me forward and kept me moving through books that I might have set aside if I had other options. I've tried, with varying success, to stick to reading before and after work each day, but now I have my whole library available to me every day. If I'm not in the mood to read what I have started, I have many other options to choose from. I don't know that this is either good or bad, but it's a change in how I read. 

Here is the full list of books I read in 2021:

• Berta Isla, by Javier Marías
• Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
• EEG, by Daša Drndić
• Seeing People Off, by Jana Beňová
• Outline, by Rachel Cusk
• Unforgiving Years, by Victor Serge
• The Radetsky March, by Joseph Roth
• Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid
• In the Café of Lost Youth, by Patrick Modiano
• Texas: The Great Theft, by Carmen Boullosa
• The Memory Police, by Yōko Ogawa
• Red, White & Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston
• Dog Symphony, by Sam Munson
• The Dream of My Return, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• All the Names, by José Saramago
• Ambiguous Adventure, by Cheikh Hamidou Kane
• The Gloaming, by Melanie Finn
• Minor Feelings: An Asian-American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong
• Death of an Englishman, by Magdalen Nabb
• Dance of the Jakaranda, by Peter Kimani
• The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai
• Sweet and Sour Milk, by Nuruddin Farah
• Think Again, by Adam Grant
• The Fortune of the Rougons, by Émile Zola
• The Heat of the Day, by Elizabeth Bowen
• Sphinx, by Anne Garréta
• The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin
• The Obelisk Gate, by N.K. Jemisin
• The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin
• The Barefoot Woman, by Scholastique Mukasonga
• The Body Snatcher, by Patricia Melo
• Poetics of Work, by Noémi Lefebvre
• The Emissary, by Yōko Tawada
• Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, by Jenny Erpenbeck
• The Appointment, by Herta Müller
• The Spirit of Science Fiction, by Roberto Bolaño
• Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie
• How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi
• Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, by Kapka Kassabova
• Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday
• Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke
• Two Serious Ladies, by Jane Bowles
• Telephone, by Percival Everett
• Euphoria, by Lily King
• Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald
• While We Were Dating, by Jasmine Guillory
• In the Company of Men, by Veronique Tadjo
• Mourning, by Eduardo Halfon
• Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, by Penelope Mortimer
• Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski
• The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim
• Dummy Boy: Tekashi 6ix9ine and the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods, by Shawn Setaro
• French Exit, by Patrick DeWitt
• Erasure, by Percival Everett

And now some stats: For the first time ever, the majority of the books I read last year (33 out of 55) were by women, with one more by a non-binary author. Sometime in the late summer – when I accidentally broke the streak – I realized I had read 11 consecutive books by women, which itself is probably a record. I considered reading only women for the remainder of the year, and I almost did but I let a few men slip in. I read books from 23 different countries last year (fewer than in 2020), including books from 6 countries I'd never read previously (the same count as 2020; this year's new countries were: Slovakia, Somalia, Rwanda, Romania, Bulgaria, and Côte d'Ivoire). I read 14 books by Black authors, about the same as last year. For various reasons, I read more non-fiction than I have in a long while: 7 books in total. Two of these were for a work book club. A third – Dummy Boy – I read because it was written (brilliantly!) by a good friend. The others are mostly memoirs and travel journals, which is to say within the scope of non-fiction I usually read. I did two re-reads in 2021: Outline because it was selected for a book club I was in, and The Dream of My Return just because. 

When I read it in May, I declared that The Gloaming was the best book I'd read in 2021 to date. It seems like a distant memory now, but I do think it was my favorite book of the year. It sucked me in and took me to totally unexpected places. I picked up both of Melanie Finn's other books last year and I expect I'll get to reading them this year. Some other favorites from last year include Kapka Kassabova's Border, which took me ages to read, but was wonderful and really made me want to visit Bulgaria; Jenny Erpenbeck's Not a Novel, which gave me such a wonderful sense of East Berlin and the strangeness of having the entire world of your childhood just disappear; Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years, which I found rather slow reading but which has stayed with me – I find myself looking for Serge's memoirs every time I'm at a bookstore now; and there are others: Eduardo Halfon's Mourning (he makes my notables list every year I read him, it seems), Daša Drndić's EEG, Nuruddin Farah's Sweet and Sour Milk; Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April; Percival Everett's Erasure. I feel like I could go on, but I have to stop somewhere. I already have my first book of 2021 set out, but beyond that who knows what's ahead. Here's hoping for another good year of reading, with better circumstances outside my reading life.

2020 in Books

If quarantine was good for anything, it was good for my reading habits; particularly at the beginning. I slacked off a little in the fall, but between March and August I was averaging more than five books a month. (In March alone I read eight.) And, as is my habit, I read a bunch of books right at the end of the year: I finished seven books in December. So, I read a record number of books in 2020: 57; but Goodreads has kept me humble by informing me that I'm still a bit more than 200 pages short of my 2016 record, when I read 17,240 pages (in just 51 books). 

The books I read last year were:

• Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, by Javier Marías
• Little Fires Everywhere, by Celest Ng
• North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Butchers Crossing, by John Williams
• Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier
• Severance, by Ling Ma
• Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney
• Outline, by Rachel Cusk
• Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Circe, by Madeline Miller
• Bruno, Chief of Police, by Martin Walker
• Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, by Manuel Puig
• Devil on the Cross, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
• The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela
• Transit, by Rachel Cusk
• Kudos, by Rachel Cusk
• Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig
• The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Sea, by John Banville
• Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman
• The Conservationist, by Nadine Gordimer
• The Dark Child, by Camara Laye
• This Is How it Always Is, by Laurie Frankel
• Celestial Bodies, by Jokha Alharthi
• The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante
• The Hollow of Fear, by Sherry Thomas
• The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead
• The Sellout, by Paul Beatty
• Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, by Ishmael Reed
• There There, by Tommy Orange
• Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat
• Party of Two, by Jasmine Guillory
• Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, by James Baldwin
• Behold the Dreamers, by Imbolo Mbue
• Monastery, by Eduardo Halfon
• The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy, by Antal Szerb
• Romance in Marseille, by Claude McKay
• Emma, by Jane Austen (re-read)
• The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
• Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata
• The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead
• Grove: A Field Novel, by Esther Kinsky
• How to Travel without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America, by Andrés Neuman
• Milkman, by Anna Burns
• Disoriental, by Négar Djavadi
• Death and the Dervish, by Meša Selimović
• Luster, by Raven Leilani
• The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel
• Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan
• The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters
• Love, by Elizabeth von Arnim
• The Constant Gardener, by John le Carré
• On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
• The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
• Roseanna, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
• Bosnian Chronicle, by Ivo Andrić
• The Queen's Necklace, by Antal Szerb

In fun stats: I read books from 26 different countries last year, including six countries I had not read previously (Cameroon, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Northern Ireland, and Oman). I read 28 books authored (or co-authored, in the case of Maj Sjöwall) by women, which puts me at just under half. This has got to be a personal record. I also tried to read more Black writers last year, and I ended up reading 15 books by Black authors (if you accept Alexandre Dumas as one). As I did the prior year, I read four works of non-fiction last year and really enjoyed them all. Also, as in the prior year, most of them fall into in the memoir/travel journal genre, so maybe this is just a sub-genre I like. (The Camara Laye is a memoir, the Andrés Neuman and Szerb's The Third Tower are travel journals; Szerb's The Queen's Necklace would be the one novelty here genre-wise.)

I refuse to choose a single favorite, so I will give you two:

Meša Selimović's Death and the Dervish is the highest rated book on Goodreads that I read in 2020, and with good reason! (Interestingly, in looking back at my stats from 2016, which was the year I read Selimović's The Fortress, I found that was the highest rated book on Goodreads I read in that year.) It's a dense, slow book and (hardly a spoiler at all) kind of a downer. But it was filled with beauty. I marked it up like I never do. I pulled it out yesterday to take a picture for a visual year-end review and there were scraps of paper sticking up all through it to indicate passages I know I'll want to go back to. Since finishing it, I've pulled it out again and again (yes, in part this was because I decided to read another Bosnian tome -- Ivo Andrić's Bosnian Chronicle) to remind myself of little pieces.

My other favorite book from last year was Camara Laye's The Dark Child. As I wrote at the time, I've had this book since 1995, when it was on the syllabus for an African Religion class I took at Oberlin College. I was always just getting by academically in my first attempt at college (I spent 3 semesters at Oberlin before dropping out) and never kept up with my reading. Another book we were assigned for that class that I didn't read at the time was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Weep Not, Child. I read that book a couple months later in 1996 when I was studying in Zimbabwe and found a copy at the library and I loved it so much. Maybe that's why I kept holding on to The Dark Child. I knew only the roughest outline: that it was a memoir of a childhood in Guinea during French colonial rule. I think what was keeping me from this book for all those years was an assumption that, knowing approximately the material it covered, it couldn't be a happy book. But actually it is. The bulk of the book takes place during Laye's childhood in a remote village and it gives a glimpse of life untouched by colonialism (clearly it was not untouched, but you get a sense of what that could have been). After his rural childhood, Laye moved to Conakry to continue his education and then to France for university. The book ends on his flight to France.

I'll close with some other notable mentions: I read all three books in Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy and they blew my mind. I felt like I was thinking in Cusk's voice while reading them. They affected how I observed my life. I definitely want to go back to them. With Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone I felt I was filling a last gap in my reading of Baldwin and I was so glad I picked it up; it couldn't have been more timely. Esther Kinsky's Grove was a slow, meditative, gorgeous book about Italy that got me writing. Eduardo Halfon's Monastery got me thinking about the type of writing I'd like to do (i.e., his type of writing; I love it). The Javier Marías did NOT disappoint; this might even be the perfect example of his style. My love for Antal Szerb has only grown. 

2019 in Books

I always wait until the new year to write up my prior year in books because it's sort of a tradition of mine to finish a book on New Year's Eve so I can start each new year with a new book. Last year I messed this up by starting a very long book on December 29, but this year I got back on track. I also slacked off on writing about the books I read last year, but this year I wrote about every single one, which I'm pretty happy about. Here is the list:

Thus Bad Begins, by Javier Marías
Life and Times of Michael K, by J.M. Coetzee
Augustus, by John Williams
To Each His Own, by Leonardo Sciascia
By a Slow River, by Philippe Claudel
The Proposal, by Jasmine Guillory
Pig Earth, by John Berger
Trick, by Domenico Starnone
The Accident, by Ismail Kadare
A Heart So White, by Javier Marías
Tristana, by Benito Pérez Galdós
The Time of the Doves, by Mercè Rodoreda
The Rules of Magic, by Alice Hoffman
The Fifth Child, by Doris Lessing
Fludd, by Hilary Mantel
Probability Moon, by Nancy Kress
The White, by Deborah Larson
Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi
Beauty Is a Wound, by Eka Kurniawan
Missing Person, by Patrick Modiano
Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño
The She-Devil in the Mirror, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Postcards from the Edge, by Carrie Fisher
I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith
State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett
Glory, by Vladimir Nabokov
Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb
The Shape of Water, by Andrea Camilleri
The King of a Rainy Country, by Brigid Brophy
By the Ionian Sea, by George Gissing
The Invention of Truth, by Marta Morazzoni
The Wedding Party, by Jasmine Guillory
Zama, by Antonio di Benedetto
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
Old Filth, by Jane Gardam
Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz
The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
Reef, by Romesh Gunesekera
Normal People, by Sally Rooney
84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff
The View from Downshire Hill, by Elizabeth Jenkins
Transcription, by Kate Atkinson
Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg
Villa Triste, by Patrick Modiano
Winter in Lisbon, by Antonio Muñoz Molina
Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid
The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
Royal Holiday, by Jasmine Guillory
The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller

So, some stats: I read books from 18 countries this year (if we allow Homegoing for Ghana, which I still haven't decided whether I will allow myself in my world books project), plus Catalonia (I always feel I must distinguish Mercè Rodoreda from Spain since she wrote in Catalan). I read 22 books in translation, which seems a little low: usually it's closer to half the books I read, but I read a few international titles this year that were written in English (the Coetzee, Hamid, and Gunesekera, at a glance), which maybe accounts for the difference. I read 23 books by women, plus several more that were translated by women (something I started to think about earlier this year). This is maybe a little better than usual. I read three (or debatably four, if you include the Natalia Ginzburg) books of non-fiction - all memoirs - this year, which is very unusual for me. And I actually loved them all (the others are the Elizabeth Jenkins, the Helene Hanff, and the George Gissing, if you're wondering). Maybe I should read more in this vein. EDITED because I forgot one important stat: countries I haven't read before. I didn't do so great in this respect this year, but I got to Albania, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and China, plus Ghana with the caveat mentioned earlier.

My favorite book of the year is easy: Journey By Moonlight by Antal Szerb. Careful readers will have known this was coming, as I put it on my list of the ten best books I read in the last decade. Other highlights from the year include both the Modiano books (I went out and bought 2 more books of his just before the holidays - I can't wait to read more!); Normal People by Sally Rooney - I could not believe how good this was, even though I had heard so many good things about it!; Thus Bad Begins - I tweeted something to the effect that I was riding in a cab and suddenly remembered the twist in this book and gasped aloud; it was true; The King of a Rainy Country - I knew nothing about this book or its author and it turned out to be so good!; Augustus and The Song of Achilles, which I will pair as fictionalizations from ancient times; The Good Soldier, Homegoing, Trick ... okay, I'm stopping now. I read a lot of really good books this year!

My Decade in Books

It's too soon for me to write my year in books round-up because I'm still hoping to finish a few more before the year is up, but with just 19 days left in the decade, I think I can go ahead and write that round-up -- even if I do expect to finish a few more books this decade. As of today, I have finished 292 books in the 2010s. I have started and not finished at least another 16 (those are the ones I got so far as to document). As someone who used to average about a book a month, it's pretty self-affirming to see that my ten-year average is so much higher.

I told my friend Nicole that I'd write up the top ten books I read this decade, so he we are. Yesterday I took to Goodreads and figured out what the first book I read in the 2010s was (The Count of Monte Cristo if you're wondering) then scrolled through and jotted down the books I thought might be contenders for the top 10. On the first pass, I came up with 15 individual books, as well as 3 authors who I thought would make the cut but would require some consideration to figure out which specific book to include. (When making these lists, one has to make rules and so I have ruled that only one book per author will be allowed.) Last night in therapy I mentioned this list and went on to talk about how I write up my year in books every year and always declare a favorite and my therapist said, "So you already have the list then?" and I realized that (as usual) she had a point. (Of course, I often can't narrow down my favorite to just one book and I was also surprised to find that I did not make these lists between 2007 and 2012, meaning I'm missing the first two years of this decade. There is also one flaw in her argument which is that it assumes the best book I read in any given year would also beat out most books I read in any other year, but thinking through my first pass list while talking to her, I immediately recognized there was a lot of overlap.)

So, I went back to all my year in books posts and jotted down my declared favorite(s) from each year and came out with 18 books. There are two books from my first pass list that do not appear among my annual favorites, and two books from my annual favorites that did not make the first pass list, so I knocked those 4 off. There's one author who appears twice and one who appears three times in my annual favorites list, so when I narrow those down to one book a piece, that list gets down to 13: we're close!! EXCEPT, there are 2 years missing from that list and one of my 3 authors who I know makes the cut is George Eliot, whose entire oeuvre I read in 2011. My first pass list includes another two books I read before 2012 as well. So, with my 13 books from my favorite books each year list, plus one book by George Eliot, plus the 2 others, I have a list of 16 that I must narrow down to 10 (setting aside the issue of the authors who have multiple books I need to choose between).

It was not easy, but here are the ten best books (in alphabetical order) I read this decade. (Where I have them, I've included links to where I wrote about them either individually or as part of a year-end round-up.)

2666, by Roberto Bolaño (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

A Broken Mirror, by Mercè Rodoreda
(Order it from the University of Nebraska Press!)

Curfew, by José Donoso (Order it from IndieBound!)

Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

The Dream of My Return, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
(Order it from Bookshop.org!)

Explosion in a Cathedral, by Alejo Carpentier (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
(Order it from Bookshop.org!)

Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

Your Face Tomorrow, vol. 1, by Javier Marías (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

I think it's worth noting that only one of these books (the Castellanos Moya) was published this decade. Only three were published this century. It's interesting to me that fully half were written in Spanish (and a 6th in Catalan). If you're wondering, aside from Eliot, the authors for whom I had to struggle to choose which book to include were José Donoso (and I'm still not sure I made the right choice) and Javier Marías (for whom the choice was actually rather easy). Anyway, there you have it, the ten best books I read this decade.

2018 in Books

I finished 34 books in 2018, which is better than I did in 2017, but still nowhere near the 51 books (and more than 17,000 pages) I read in 2016. I do love the annual stats you get from Goodreads, though I always need to add some additional stats. I read books from 18 countries besides the US last year (Senegal, Mauritius, Spain, Lebanon, Belgium, Equatorial Guinea, Australia, Italy, Portugal, England, the Netherlands, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Sudan, Scotland, Korea, Canada, and Japan), as well as two books that are sort of nationless: a Catalan novel and a novel set on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. I read 16 books written by women, which is quite possibly the closest I've come to a 50/50 ratio in my reading life. With that, here is the list:

Your Face Tomorrow, Volume III, by Javier Marías
Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegg
Ties, by Domenico Starnone
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Sweetbitter, by Stephanie Danler
A Broken Mirror, by Mercè Rodoreda
Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner
The Wedding Date, by Jasmine Guillory
About Grace, by Anthony Doerr
Perma Red, by Debra Magpie Earling
Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee
Spring Snow, by Yukio Mishima
Please Look After Mom, by Kyung-Sook Shin
Still Life, by Louise Penny
Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih
The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez
Loquela, by Carlos Labbé
The Consequences, by Niña Weijers
The Golden Spur, by Dawn Powell
Sepharad, by Antonio Muñoz Molina
The Uninvited Guests, by Sadie Jones
Loving, by Henry Green
Siracusa, by Delia Ephron
The Stone Raft, by José Saramago
Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi
Involuntary Witness, by Gianrico Carofiglio
City of Crows, by Chris Womersly
By Night the Mountain Burns, by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel
War and Turpentine, by Stefan Hertmans
An Unnecessary Woman, by Rabih Alameddine
The Last Brother, by Nathacha Appanah
God's Bits of Wood, by Ousmane Sembène

As longtime readers (ha) know, I always pick a favorite. For 2018, I'm not sure I can settle on just one. I read A Broken Mirror early in the year and when I had finished it, I thought: "That was the one; I won't read a better book this year." But then, over the summer, I picked up a copy of Sepharad at a thrift store in LA. I had never heard of it or its author, but I read the first paragraph (my usual method of deciding whether to read a book) and it passed the test. I read it soon after and it was so beautiful, and comprehensive, and it moved me to tears on the subway more than once.

The third contender for my favorite book of 2018 is Christ Stopped at Eboli. I bought and read this in preparation for a trip I took to Calabria and Basilicata in October. I wrote about it here after reading it, but before taking my trip. I had no idea then how glad I would be that I had read it when I got to Basilicata. The morning after I arrived in Lamezia Terme, I plugged Aliano into the GPS in my car and drove straight to the town where Carlo Levi was a prisoner of the fascist government in 1935. I visited Levi's tomb and the many sights in the town dedicated to him and had a wonderful lunch. After lunch, assuming the Carlo Levi tourism portion of my trip was over, I drove on to Matera, where I had booked a room for two nights. As it turned out, Carlo Levi was all over Matera. It started when I checked into my hotel and mentioned to the woman at reception that I had read his book. She was surprised and delighted, and directed me to the Palazzo Lanfranchi, where she told me they had a painting of Levi's. I visited the museum that evening and, as it turned out, it is home to a very large painting he did called Lucania '61, as well as the photos of the people in Matera that were used as source material. In addition, the museum had a whole room of Levi's paintings some from before his captivity and several from his time as a prisoner in Aliano, and which he described painting in Christ Stopped at Eboli. There were paintings of children from the village and of his housekeeper and of the Fossa del Bersagliere, the canyon in Aliano I had visited that same morning. The next day, I went to the Casa Noha, a cave home that was turned into a center for the history of Matera. The exhibit at Casa Noha consists of a series of films and after the film covered the ancient history of the town and conditions in the early 20th century, it said something to the effect of, "Everything changed for Matera when Carlo Levi published Christ Stopped at Eboli..." and went on to talk about him and the book at length. It turns out that Levi's book is what initially draw widespread attention to the poor living conditions of the people in Matera and he has since become something of a local hero. (There is also a major street named after him in town.) Seeing how Levi was turning out not to be one small stop but rather a recurring theme of my trip, I decided to take a detour on the day I was leaving Matera and visit Grassano, the other town where he was held captive. Grassano is bigger than Aliano, and less quaint, and it has none of the magic of Matera (few places do). It felt like a regular, somewhat run down and not very prosperous, town. They have a small center devoted to Levi (which was unfortunately closed when I arrived) and a plaque in a nearby square dedicated to him. After stopping to see these two sights, I asked some friendly locals for directions to the post office (I was happy that some of my friends received postcards postmarked from Grassano), stopped in at the town's indoor market, and then proceeded on my drive to the stunning twin villages of Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa. Grassano was unremarkable, but I was actually all the more glad I went there for that reason.

If three favorite books are not enough, I also recommend By Night the Mountain Burns (which probably performed best on the "first paragraph test" of any book I read this year and which really made me want to visit the remote Annobón island of Equatorial Guinea), The Consequences (maybe not for everyone, but a particular must-read for any fans of Bas Jan Ader), The Stone Raft, War and Turpentine, In the Time of the Butterflies, and Pachinko.

A very belated 2017 year in books

In 2016, I declared I would write something brief about every book I read -- resulting in my most prolific year of blogging by far. In 2017, I gave myself a break from writing about every book and, as it turns out, that turned into a break from posting basically at all. Now we're more than halfway into 2018 and I haven't posted in 18 months. Looking back over my brief notes on books I read, I think it was a good habit and I'm going to try to get back to it - though not retroactively. But I will retroactively post about my 2017 reading material. It wasn't quite as good a year as 2016, or even 2015, but I read 25 books (I've listed 26 below - I started Your Face Tomorrow vol. 3 in 2017 and didn't finish it until a couple weeks into 2018, but felt it should be included on the list with the other Your Face Tomorrow books):

• Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 1: Fever and Spear, by Javier Marías
• The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
• The Polish Boxer, by Eduardo Halfon
• Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 2: Dance and Dream, by Javier Marías
• The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
• Embassytown, by China Miéville
• A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore
• Curfew, by José Donoso
• By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño
• The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Kintu, by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
• The Scar, by China Miéville
• We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, by Samantha Irby
• A Perfect Spy, by John Le Carré
• Jakob Von Gunten, by Robert Wallser
• The Queen of the Night, by Alexander Chee
• Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
• The Turner House, by Angela Flournoy
• Rich and Pretty, by Rumaan Alam
• Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig
• A God in Ruins, by Kate Atkinson
• The Group, by Mary McCarthy
• Call Me By Your Name, by Andre Aciman
• Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 3: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, by Javier Marías

For my favorite book of the year, I'd say it's a tie (isn't it always!) between Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 1 and Curfew.

I've recommended Curfew to several people and I decided to take a trip to Chile last November, largely because of Donoso. I visited La Chascona, Pablo Neruda's home in Santiago, which plays a major part in the book (visiting this place I had read about in a book I loved so much was a rather strange and amazing experience) and also the island of Chiloé, which I only knew of because of the book. So... you could say Curfew had a pretty significant effect on my year.

Your Face Tomorrow was different. As I felt when I read The Infatuations (the first Marías book I read), the writing just spoke to me-- it felt like me. I loved all 3 books in the trilogy, but the first book especially. A huge chunk of the first book consists of the narrator getting very drunk and going through an Oxford don's library chasing down tangential details of the Spanish Civil War and it's just incredible. I haven't recommended Your Face Tomorrow to anyone because I honestly have no idea who else might enjoy it, but the whole time I was reading the books I really wished I knew someone else who had read them because I would love to talk about them. (I have recommended The Infatuations to a couple people always with the caveat that you will know within a couple pages whether you'll enjoy the book. Marías' writing is so specific, has such a distinct voice -- I imagine it's not for everyone, but it is definitely for me. The one star reviews of book 3 crack me up... like how do you get to book 3 before you decide you don't like these books?)

Other books I really enjoyed: The Polish Boxer, Kintu, The Group, Beware of Pity. (And also The Underground Railroad and The Sympathizer, but as those each won multiple prestigious awards, I hardly feel I need to recommend them.)

2016 in Books

Last year turned out to be quite a good reading year for me. I read more books than I ever have before in a single year, 51 being the final count. I read 22 books by women, which is probably a better percentage for me than in most years. Those 22 books only represent 14 distinct authors, which isn't great. I read just one book of nonfiction. I read two books from before 1900, one of which was a reread.

My "reading project" was the main guiding principle for my reading last year, and I have to say I did pretty great in that regard. I read books from 25 countries this year. Fifteen of these (shown in bold) were countries from which I had not previously read anything. Aside from the United States, I read books from Bosnia & Herzegovina, Canada, Cape Verde, Chile, Cuba, Dominica, El Salvador, England, Finland, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Libya, Martinique, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Portugal, South Africa, and Spain. To see other fun stats, you can check out my year in books on Goodreads.

The list:

• How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
• When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
• The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa
• The Infatuations by Javier Marías
• Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau
• Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
• The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
• The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
• Home by Marilynne Robinson
• My Michael by Amos Oz
• Illustrado by Miguel Syjuco
• The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier
• The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso
• The Ruined Map by Kobo Abe
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (reread)
• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
• In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
• The City and the City by China Miéville
• Stoner by John Williams
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
• The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
• The Whites by Richard Price
• A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
• Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
• The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
• Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa
• The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
• The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
• The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox
• Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
• The Dream of My Return by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters by Louis Begley
• John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• In the Dutch Mountains by Cees Nooteboom
• The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago
• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
• The Story of a Child by Pierre Loti
• The Fortress by Meša Selimović
• Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
• The Marshal and the Madwoman by Magdalen Nabb
• Blood Rain by Michael Dibdin
• The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germano Almeida
• Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
• They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie
• The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

I'm surprised by how easy it is for me to pick a favorite book from the year, but here we are: my favorite book was The Dream of My Return. For reasons I find hard to pinpoint, this book just felt like it was for me. My other top books from the year include The Infatuations, Station Eleven, All the Light We Cannot See, They Came to Baghdad, Story of a Child, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, The Long Goodbye, Stoner, and Life After Life. 

No Children

I started this post about 9 months ago. At the end of 2015, I was writing quite a bit about the year that was ending: my travel, my reading projects. This was to be part of that year-in-review, under the title The Year I Came to Terms with Not Having Children or something. I got straight through the first part: the moment of realization, but almost immediately after that I got stuck. In the intervening time, I've opened it now and then and added little bits and taken away other little bits, but it hasn't actually changed much until today. Now I think it's time to accept that, even if I have more I might say on the topic, it's all really directed at myself anyway; that this is enough and I can just stop. So, here we go:

I can pinpoint the moment I came to terms with the idea of being childless. It was in July of last year and I was riding in a car with my dad somewhere in upstate New York. I had been restless for several months; or maybe years. I was thinking about selling my apartment, paying off all my debts, and moving somewhere cheap. I'd been floating this idea off and on for some time, and last summer it was very much on. Anyway, I was in the car with my dad driving through a lovely part of upstate New York and it hit me in a way it had never hit me before. I could sell my apartment and walk away from everything if I wanted. I could do whatever I wanted. I could move anywhere. I would never have to pay anyone else's college tuition. (For some reason the college tuition thing hit particularly hard; that was the singular thought that crystallized it all for me.) I realized that I only had to worry about getting myself by until, well, death and doing that didn't sound so hard. That may come off as selfish or morbid or both. But I felt like a huge weight was suddenly lifted off me.

I wanted kids. I was 23 when my ex-husband proposed to me and before I accepted, I said, "You know I want kids." I was married to him for 6 years. They were all financially insecure years and kids were always presumed to be in the future for us, until there was no future for us.

In the 10 years since we split up, I've been in a couple relationships, but mostly I've been single. The idea that having kids might not be in the cards for me (at least in the conditions I'd imagined: natural children who were the product of a relationship) first hit me around the time I turned 35. At the time, it was just one part of a larger life reevaluation. I realized I was not at all where I had expected to be at that age and decided to make some changes. The big change I made was going back to school for a master's degree, something I never thought I'd do. I figured that if my personal life wasn't where I wanted it to be, I might as well throw myself into my professional life. I told a few people at the time that I was starting to accept I might never have kids. I think I was testing the idea to see how it felt. The universal reaction at the time was that I was speaking too soon, that I had plenty of time. These days people don't say that. I'm 40 and very single (not in the 'dates a lot' way, these days, but in the 'doesn't date at all' way), so it's hard to argue with. When I still hoped I might have kids, I used to mentally give myself until 42 -- the age at which a former supervisor of mine got pregnant after marrying for the first time at 40 -- but turning 40 (in fact, being 39 and anticipating 40 on the horizon) seemed like a good enough time to just call it.

2015 in Books

Goodreads has made compiling this list so easy. I could just link to my year in books and be done with it. But I won't. I read 40 books this year:

• The Silence of the Sea by Vercors
• Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
• Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar
• Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño
• Broken Harbor by Tana French
• Quicksand by Nella Larsen
• The Shooting Party by Isabel Colgate
• Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• The Healing of America by T.R. Reid
• Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
• Life with Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
• Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry
• The Garden Next Door by José Donoso
• Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson
• Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Luis Zafón
• The Whispering Mountain by Joan Aiken
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• Requiem for a Glass Heart by David Lindsey
• The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
• Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
• 4:50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie
• Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Four Hands by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
• Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli
• Kinshu: Autumn Brocade by Teru Miyamoto
• Almost Never by Daniel Sada
• Leon Trotsky by Irving Howe
• No Happy Ending by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
• Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
• Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh
• One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
• Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke
• Nemesis by Jo Nesbø
• The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
• A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
• Mifanwy: A Welsh Singer by Allen Raine

Some stats:

• 15 books are by women 
• 26 books are by men (The Locked Room gets double counted)
• 14 books are in translation
• 3 books are nonfiction
• I read authors from 17 countries
• I read 9 books by American authors

I have a book club to thank for all my nonfiction reading this year. My reading choices over the last 4 months of the year were influenced by my decision to attempt to read a book from every country in the world, which I wrote about last month, though I was already reading pretty internationally in the first part of the year. Aside from the international books, there are two big, new trends in my reading this year:

1. I read a lot of short stories. Prior to 2015, I avoided short stories and claimed not to like them. At the start of 2015, I decided to read mostly short stories. I was trying to write more and I thought it would help if I wasn't always in the midst of reading some big book. I think it kind of worked, though I slacked off on writing a couple months into the year. I brought a book of short stories with me on vacation in April and decided they were the perfect form for reading while traveling (though I didn't take short story books on any of my subsequent trips). I tend not to read much when I'm traveling and several times I've found myself lugging around some large novel that I'm in the middle of, barely picking it up during the trip, and coming home after the trip having to reacquaint myself with the book. Short stories are the perfect thing for picking up occasionally when one has down time over the course of a trip.
2. I read a lot of detective novels. Eight of them to be exact. I never read detective novels before a few years ago and this is definitely the most I've read in a year. I probably read more this year than I had in all previous years combined. A few years ago I started watching detective shows on TV and I discovered that they had everything I wanted in a television program. There was drama, suspense, sometimes romance, and everything wrapped up satisfactorily in 90 minutes at the most. (I don't like the shows that don't solve the crime at the end of the episode.) Anyway, I decided I should maybe give detective novels a shot too and I liked them too. Most of the novels I've read are a bit darker than the detective TV programs I enjoy, but I have a lot more tolerance for dark books than I do for dark television.

Anyway, on to my favorite books of the year! There is a tie and a close third as well:

Tied for favorite books of the year are Explosion in a Cathedral and The Garden Next Door. I picked up The Garden Next Door at the end of May from a thrift store. I didn't know anything about it and wasn't familiar with the author, but I bought it on a whim. I started it a couple days later and it just so happened that the date that it was in the book was also that day's date, June 2. As I read the book there were all sorts of little coincidences like that and it felt totally magical as I was reading it. So I loved the book, but it almost feels like some of that was up to chance. I read the book at the right time and it was perfect. Explosion in a Cathedral was a book I'd long been aware of, but also knew nothing about really. I picked it up in July for $1.50 at a used book barn in upstate New York. If you're not familiar with it, Explosion in a Cathedral is a novel about the period leading up to and during the French Revolution and the Terror set mostly in the French Caribbean, largely about Victor Hugues, who was the governor of Guadeloupe (among other things). It was both beautifully written and a fascinating history of how the French Revolution, and the Terror, manifested in the colonies and the idealism followed by hypocrisy of the revolutionaries when it came to slavery. It was just a fascinating book and it kind of blew my mind. The close third is Wolf Hall. It was beautifully told and gave me such tender feelings toward Thomas Cromwell.

Other honorable mentions: 

• The Shooting Party, which was lovely and is apparently one of the inspirations for Downton Abbey. 
• Case Histories, which was probably my favorite detective novel of the year. 
• Kinshu: Autumn Brocade, a lovely Japanese epistolary novel. 
• Kiss of the Spider Woman, which is just incredibly told and unlike anything I've ever read, really.
• Mifanwy, which I squeezed in at the very end of the year to fill two requirements: a new country (Wales) and pre-1900 (1896!) -- aside from some uncomfortable colorism, it was a perfect 19th century romance and really evocative of Wales! And is available free from Google Books.

One more fun fact: I read two books ~on my phone~ this year, which is a first for me. 

Ok... on to 2016! I've already finished 2 books this year.

The year I went everywhere

I don't remember how I got it in my head that I wanted to go to Sicily. I had one friend who'd gone there as a teenager and told me about it and I'd seen the movie adaptation of The Leopard a handful of times and that was about all I knew about the place, but I was sure I would love it. Last fall I figured out a way I could get there cheaply by using miles to get to Milan then flying a discount airline from there to Palermo. I would only have 6 nights there, which was hardly enough time, but it would have to do. I figured out my itinerary, lined up lodging, bought a new travel bag (I highly recommend the Patagonia Transport MLC), packed light and smart (novel, for me) and was all ready to depart 24 hours ahead of time, when I got a text message from the discount airline saying that my flight from Milan to Palermo had been canceled. One international phone call and several minutes on hold later, I learned there was a general strike scheduled in Italy for the day of my arrival in Milan/departure to Palermo and all intra-Italian flights were canceled for 2 days. If I booked myself on the next possible flight to Palermo, I would only have 4 nights there and I was afraid I'd be stranded at the airport 20 miles outside Milan for the duration. So, I called Delta and spent a good half hour on the phone with two different - both very helpful! - customer service representatives trying to book a trip to somewhere - anywhere, though preferably with a similar climate to Sicily, as I had already packed - for the following day. I ended up getting a flight to Madrid for only a small additional charge, from where I took the train to Barcelona and had a lovely substitute vacation.

I planned an international vacation on 24 hours notice and it was not that hard and not that expensive. When I got back home, I was like, "I should do this more often." So then I started thinking about getting TSA PreCheck, which I'd heard some things about. I visited the website and saw that PreCheck is $85, while for just $100 you can also get Global Entry (which speeds you through customs), so I thought, what the hell? and filled out the form right then and paid my $100 and scheduled my appointment with Customs & Border Protection. I am someone who makes enough money that I can spend $100 on a splurge item without thinking too hard about it, but not so much money that I don't feel guilty about it. Immediately after signing up for it, I asked myself why a woman who has gone abroad twice in the last decade (not counting Canada and Tijuana) would need Global Entry. Then I decided: if I have it, I better use it. So I visited 7 countries in 12 months, including a much better-planned trip to Sicily last April. (Hot tip: Meridiana Airlines has weekly direct flights from JFK to Palermo from April through October!)

2013 in Books and Other Entertainments

It's a good thing I'm such an anal record keeper, because I neglected to do a year-end post about everything I read and saw in 2013. but it's not too late! Or so I am telling myself.

Books! (Those that I finished during 2013)

• Longitude by Dava Sobel
• The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
• The Little Pink House by Jeff Benedict
• Reamde by Neal Stephenson
• The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
• If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• The Likeness by Tana French
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
• The Blue World by Jack Vance
• Look At Me by Jennifer Egan
• Raj by Gita Mehta
• Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
• Faithful Place by Tana French
• Libra by Don DeLillo
• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
• River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh
• The Child in Time by Ian McEwan
• Never Mind by Edward St Aubyn

In 2013, I pretty much met my 2015 reading goals (need one more work in translation, but I think War and Peace counts extra, right?), so maybe I need to rethink those now?

According to my ratings on Goodreads, my favorite books were Reamde, The Children's Book, and the two Amitav Ghosh books (these are the first two of the Ibis trilogy, the last book of which comes out this year), and this seems about right. I might add The Diamond Age, because I feel like it has stayed with me looking back now.

I guess I like to do one long slog a year, and in 2013 that was War and Peace. I read it pretty much concurrently with writing my Master's thesis, which worked out oddly well. Each served as a pleasant break from the other.

I made a concerted effort to read a bit of genre fiction in 2013, which I don't usually read. I especially enjoyed The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

My other honorable mention goes to The Last Samurai.

Movies! (Seen in theaters)

• The Moment
• Stories We Tell
• Frances Ha
• Before Midnight
• The Manxman (1929)
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Rosemary's Baby (1968)
• Fruitvale Station
• Blue Jasmine
• Newlyweeds
• Gravity
• 12 Years a Slave
• Carrie (2013)
• Nebraska
• American Hustle

Other!
I saw two operas in 2013: The Nose at the Met and Anna Nicole at BAM. I saw no plays, apparently.

2014 in Books and Other Entertainments

Books! (Those that I finished during 2014)

• Bad News by Edward St Aubyn
• The Game by A.S. Byatt
• Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
• The Enchanted Waltz by Anne Enright
• Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell
• Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain
• Man Walks Into A Room by Nicole Krauss
• The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh
• Met At Arms by Evelyn Waugh
• Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh
• The End of the Battle by Evelyn Waugh
• The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• The Haunting of L by Howard Norman
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
• Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
• The Leopard by Giuseppe de Lampedusa
• In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster

Plus an unpublished novel by an acquaintance, to whom I owe feedback on said novel and feel terrible for not having provided to date.

Notes on what I read:
Right around this time one year ago, I read the first two of the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn. The series had been recommended to me by two people whose judgment I trust. However, I found them unbearable. I still think perhaps I'll go back and read the remaining books - or at least the two that are in the compilation I got for Christmas last year, but then I'm not sure if it's worth it.

According to the ratings I gave on Goodreads, my favorite books of the year were The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Glass Palace, and Man Walks Into a Room. This seems about right to me.

• I think I had always had an aversion to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter at least in part out of a skepticism I have toward brilliant works by extraordinarily young people. I think I expect that either the works will be impressive for someone that age, or that the writing will espouse a sort of knowing worldliness that I think of as not possible for young people. (This is undoubtedly a reflection on myself and how experienced and knowing I believed myself to be when I was younger.) In any case, I didn't find either of these to be true of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I loved it. 
• The Glass Palace was the third novel I've read by Amitav Ghosh and I've loved all three. It spans a century, with overlapping family dramas, and a good dose of British colonial history in Burma an India. I am anxiously awaiting the publication of the 3rd book in Ghosh's Ibis trilogy (due August 2015!) and plan to read some of his other works this year.
• Man Walks Into a Room feels a little smaller, somehow, than the previous two books. (It probably is shorter.) It's the story of an amnesiac, which I guess is a fairly common trope, but the challenges facing an individual, and the relationships of that person, when he loses his memory felt exceptionally well thought through and tender.

Though I gave lower ratings to each of the Evelyn Waugh novels than I did to those listed above, I really enjoyed the Sword of Honour trilogy. I think it stands as a whole better than any of the individual books. After reading several of his novels over the last 10 years in the hope of finding again what I loved so much about Brideshead Revisited, this trilogy was close. However, it also had a good dose of racism of the British colonial era that was occasionally hard to swallow. The other notable mentions I have from 2014 are The Haunting of L and Number 9 Dream.

I also can't go without talking briefly about Infinite Jest. It was a slog - it took me 2 months plus one week to finish. Parts of it were brilliant. I loved what DFW did with language. Some of it was extremely tedious, and I'm not sure to what purpose. I'm glad I did it, and I'm very glad it's behind me now.

This is the first year in a while that I haven't read anything published before the 20th Century. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) was the oldest book I read. I read 8 books published in the 21st Century, which may well be a record for me. I read 8 books by women, only 2 books by people of color, and only 1 book that was written in a language other than English.

Some of my friends are setting goals for a number of books to read  in 2015, but I've decided I'm not going to set that type of a goal for myself this year. However, I am going to set a couple other goals for my reading:

• At least one book published before 1900
• At least one work of nonfiction
• At least two books translated from another language, preferably different languages
• At least half of the books I read will be by women or people of color (This doesn't feel very ambitious, but it does feel realistic, sadly.)

A funny thing I realized about my reading in 2014 - and before - is that I read books largely on recommendations I receive, and most of the recommendations I take come from men. I read 8 books after they were recommended to me by others last year, and only 2 of those recommendations came from women (one of which was my least favorite book I read last year). I'm not sure what this says, exactly, but when I was looking over my shelves yesterday trying to decide what to read, I started to notice the sheer number of books I own that were recommended to me my men. So, women! send me some book suggestions.

Movies! (That I saw in theaters. Maybe missing some?)

• Inside Llewen Davis
• The Wolf of Wall Street
• Secret Defense (1998)
• The Monuments Men
• Alphaville (1965)
• Philomena
• About Last Night
• The Silence (1963)
• Veronica Mars
• Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
• The Lunchbox
• A Most Wanted Man
• Interstellar
• Gone Girl
• The Imitation Game
• Birdman

Other!
I only went to one opera in 2014: Die Zauberflöte at the Met. I saw two plays in 2014: A Doll's House at BAM and A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway. I also saw Isabelle Rossellini do Green Porno live at BAM, which was great.

I have never included TV in my year-end lists before, but I must mention Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. I was sick with a terrible cold over the long Thanksgiving weekend and watched all 26 episodes in four days. A+++ would watch again!