A list of the books I’ve read, along with the month and year in which I finished each one. An asterisk indicates it is a “best of” book: one of the very best I read that year.
2021
A Long Way From Verona, Jane Gardam (on deck)
Rachel Ray, Anthony Trollope (on deck)
Migrations, Charlotte McConaghy (on deck)
Zazie dans le Métro, Raymond Queneau (reading now)
Travesties, Tom Stoppard (10/21)
*East of Eden, John Steinbeck (10/21)
Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer (DNF)
The Beautiful and the Chosen, Nghi Vo (9/21)
*Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir (9/21)
Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay (9/21)
*Witness for the Dead, Katherine Addison (9/21)
*The Thirty Names of Night, Zeyn Joudhakar (9/21)
The Salt Path, Raynor Winn (9/21)
Mister Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater (9/21)
Flowers in the Mirror, Li Ju-Chen (9/21)
Hexarchate Stories, Yoon Ha Lee (9/21)
Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan Maguire (8/21)
Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott (re-read, 8/21)
Land Above the Trees, Ann Zwinger and Beatrice Willard (8/21)
Under the Pendulum Sun, Jeannette Ng (8/21)
The Luck of Barry Lyndon, William Thackeray (8/21)
*The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James Cone (8/21)
Captains Courageous, Rudyard Kipling (8/21)
Eight Perfect Murders, Peter Swanson (8/21)
Confessions of the Fox, Jordy Rosenberg (8/21)
Cemetery Boys, Aiden Thomas (8/21)
The Collected Short Stories, Eudora Welty (8/21)
Castle Shade, Laurie King (7/21)
*A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders (7/21)
*Afterparty, Daryl Gregory (7/21)
Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu (7/21)
Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (7/21)
The Invited, Jennifer McMahon (7/21)
*As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner (7/21)
*The Sin of Father Amaro, Eça de Queirós (7/21)
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon (7/21)
Summerwater, Sarah Moss (6/21)
Race and Popular Fantasy Literature, Helen Young (6/21)
Later, Stephen King (6/21)
The Whole Story and Other Stories, Ali Smith (6/21)
The Fisherman, John Langan (6/21)
*Long Bright River, Liz Moore (6/21)
Reservoir 13, Jon McGregor (6/21)
The Sixties, Jenny Diski (6/21)
The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones (5/21)
*Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot (5/21)
A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov (5/21)
Rules for Vanishing, Kate Alice Marshall (5/21)
Black Narcissus, Rumer Godden (5/21)
Burial Rites, Hannah Kent (5/21)
Surfacing, Kathleen Jamie (5/21)
The Space Between Worlds, Micaiah Johnson (5/21)
How the South Won the Civil War, Heather Cox Richardson (5/21)
Waverley, Walter Scott (5/21)
Jack, Marilynne Robinson (4/21)
Blindness, Jose Saramago (DNF, 4/21)
The Sin Eater, Alice Thomas Ellis (4/21)
Jane: A Murder, Maggie Nelson (4/21)
Winter Counts, David Heska Wanbli Weiden (4/21)
Real Life, Brandon Taylor (4/21)
*Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, Sara Gran (4/21)
Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice (4/21)
Rosalie Lightning, Tom Hart (4/21)
*News of the World, Paulette Jiles (4/21)
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, C.S. Lewis (re-read, 4/21)
Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng (4/21)
Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam (3/21)
*My Real Children, Jo Walton (3/21)
*The Office of Historical Corrections, Danielle Evans (3/21)
One Good Story, That One, Thomas King (3/21)
The Cold Millions, Jess Walter (3/21)
*Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, John Crowley (3/21)
The Abacus and the Cross, Nancy Marie Brown (DNF, 3/21)
The Relentless Moon, Mary Robinette Kowal (3/21)
Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf (3/21)
The Martian, Andy Weir (3/21)
Thin Air, Ann Cleeves (3/21)
*The Evidence of Things Not Seen, James Baldwin (3/21)
*Vertigo, W. G. Sebald (2/21)
Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, Norman Ohler (2/21)
Sylvia’s Lovers, Elizabeth Gaskell (2/21)
*Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, Dubravka Ugresic (2/21)
The House on the Strand, Daphne du Maurier (2/21)
If It Bleeds, Stephen King (2/21)
Rob Roy, Walter Scott (2/21)
In a Dark, Dark Wood, Ruth Ware (1/21)
Public Library and other stories, Ali Smith (1/21)
*The Master Butchers Singing Club, Louise Erdrich (1/21)
Sister Citizen, Melissa Harris-Perry (1/21)
*Corregidora, Gayl Jones (1/21)
Anxious People, Fredrik Backman (1/21)
Dead Water, Ann Cleeves (1/21)
The Forgotten Garden, Kate Morton (1/21)
*The Angel of the Crows, Katherine Addison (1/21)
This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (1/21)
I Remember You, Yrsa Sigurdardottir (1/21)
The Fated Sky, Mary Robinette Kowal (1/21)
