Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Agee
Incredible book, never read anything like it. Heartbreaking. Amazing observations and descriptions of people, houses, towns, landscapes, nature. Some scenes that are so beautifully written that it's honestly hard to understand how Agee wrote them. I started reading this book two times before and couldn't get through it, but this time I finally got it.
You, Me, & Ulysses S. Grant
Brad Neely
“You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant” is probably of the funniest books I’ve ever read. I was laughing so hard at one point while reading the book that my wife came from the other room to see what was going on. Neely, in character as Grant’s bumbling but clear-eyed biographer, writes about Grant’s life and the wider historical context in a modern, conversational way. So you get a lot of good basketball references to the Western theater as the “Western Conference” and Grant’s horsemanship is almost always presented in fantastic skateboarding terms. There’s something so compelling about Neely’s re-telling of history—it’s both as entertaining as what you’d see on an episode of “Drunk History” but also more serious too, more morally considered. I interviewed Neely over at Vol. 1 Brooklyn about the book.
Whatever's Forbidden the Wise
Anthony Madrid
Another masterpiece from Madrid. One of the best poets out there.
ELADATL
Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo
One of the best books I read in 2023. Still thinking about this one.
Revenge of the Scapegoat
Caren Beilin
Elite Capture
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
Zen Master Yunmen: His Life and Sayings
Translated and edited by Urs App
Trespassing Across America
Ken Ilgunas
Spooner
Pete Dexter
Re-read this one after reading it originally in 2009. Insanely funny book. An autobiographical novel about Dexter's life, mostly focused on his stepfather.
Not a lot of reading this year, but all good ones
Reconsidering ReparationsProject Hail Mary
Andy Weir
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Daniyal Mueenuddin
Hot Pink
Adam Levin
Spooner
Pete Dexter
Too Loud a Solitude
Bohumil Hrabal
John the Posthumous
Jason Schwartz
Leave the World Behind
Rumaan Alam
Madness, Rack, and Honey
Mary Reufle
Pulp
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
Folktales from the Sahel
collected and retold by Christopher Kirkley
Thus Bad Begins
Javier Marías
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Somehow had never read this, even though I went through 18 cumulative years of school. Of course it's really good. It was good in a different way than I expected. Given the time period when it was written and what I gathered of the plot from "Apocalypse Now," I expected something stiffer and more formal, serious, but this book is playful and weird and so shifting and mysterious. Conrad's sentences are beautiful and seem effortless, somehow, and he also often makes very unexpected choices in what he chooses to convey. Wild book with lots of complex ideas very simply expressed, distilled into half-paragraph meditations dense with meaning. Surprisingly funny in parts too, Marlow has some great reactions to the straight-up oddity of his colleagues.
The Walk
Robert Walser
One of the funniest books I've read in a while. Like one of Bernhard's rant books, but sunnier, in a way, and way more over the top. The narrator is a write who goes on a walk about his town and runs a few errands. The book's like 80 pages long, and it's so easy and fun to read. I'd heard a lot about Walser over the last 15 years, and mostly knew him from the story of his bizarre death, but had never actually gotten into his work. This was a wonderful reading experience, and it makes me want to pick up some of his novels.
Tristes Tropiques
Claude Lévi-Strauss
I'd owned this book for maybe a decade or more before I read it and I wish I'd read it sooner. Great read, half memoir, half anthropology text. Some of the book is Lévi-Strauss's memories about getting into anthropology but most of the book is about his time in Brazil, specifically travelling to interact with indigenous tribes in Brazil. His writing about the time he spends with the different tribes is incredible, and for someone writing in the 50s, Lévi-Strauss shows a lot of surprisingly modern attitudes toward colonization, ecosystem degradation, the sovereignty of indigenous people, etc. Amazing and detailed descriptions of the lifeways and culture of some of the tribes. Also very good and unglamourous accounts of what it was like to travel into the backcountry of Brazil in the early part of the 20th century.
Rag
Maryse Meijer
Great and surprising collection of stories. Horror adjacent. Really enjoyable to read, constantly turning away from the expected plot choices. Incredible sentences that come out of left field but totally make sense in the story. One of the best short story collections I've read in a long time. "Her Blood," "Jury," and "The Shut-In" are incredible stories that have stayed with me. Thanks to Vi for sending it to me!
Inspector Maigret, Omnibus 1
Georges Simenon
Four Inspector Maigret mysteries, all of them intensely enjoyable to read, but in particular the two related to water and shipping: "The Carter of La Providence" and "The Grand Banks Cafe." The first one takes place on a series of canals in France and the other happens at the seaside. The other two novels in the ombinus are really good too, of course, "Pietr the Latvian" and "The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien." Simenon is a great writer, and he's an especially great writer of food, drink, walking around, coming back home, and travelling. This is the case even in his 'roman durs' as well. Simenon probably could have written a really compelling novel about eating a sandwich and drinking a couple beers. This Omnibus 1 from Penguin has a 1955 Paris Review Art of Fiction interview with Simenon as well and it's really good. Strangely the Omnibus 2 from Penguin is extremely hard to get--at one point I checked and most copies were over $700, now around $150-$200. It'd be nice if they'd reprint it.
Lolly Willowes
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Great and weird book, really fun read. Laura Willowes is a single woman who ends up becoming a quasi-servant to her own extended family, and dreams later in life of making her escape. She eventually does find her way to a small village in the Chilterns area of England, where she discovers her real purpose. The book is funny, super charming, and pretty unpredictable. Thanks to Tony for this one as well.
Bass Cathedral
Nathaniel Mackey
Number four in the series of epistolary novels that Mackey has been writing since 1986 under the overall title of "From a broken bottle traces of perfume still emanate." "Bass Cathedral," like the other volumes, follows a jazz band in L.A. via the letters written by N to his correspondent, the Angel of Dust. This was the last one of the series that I had yet to read, and I can say that this has been one of the most rewarding and enjoyable reading experiences I've had in the last 10 years. Mackey's novels are probably the closest thing I've seen to writing as music: there are so many passages where he takes a phrase, or just a word, and works it, or worries it, positioning it in different ways, incorporating mistakes and imprecisions into something new, moving the story, moving the emotion. It's a huge achievement, an incredible series of books.
The Wagers
Sean Michaels
Unsurprisingly, an extremely fun and beautifully written book from the author of "Us Conductors," another amazing book. "The Wagers" is about family and grief, life ambitions, luck and causation, merit and just deserts, love, and adventure. The book has some of the best heist set pieces I've read in a long time, all so kinetic and clear and rendered in wonderful detail (there is something about these scenes in particular that reminded me a little of Chistopher Logue's "War Music" which has a similarly camera-on-the-move style in its action scenes). I laughed out loud throughout the book, and muttered 'damn' to myself more than once when the main character, Theo, hit up against a couple particularly heartbreaking situations. One of those books that's both easy to read because the story moves so fast and memorable because the writing's so special. Michaels is the founder of Said the Gramophone, and there are a couple fun music moments throughout the book too.
Tin House
A Small Circus
Hans Fallada
translated by Michael Hofmann
A weird but enjoyable book. A little like "Mayor of Casterbridge" if that book focused less on the famly drama and more on the fine-grained details of municipal government. Set in a town within the German countryside just before WWII. Features good scenes with farmers, journalists, town council, county administrators. Lots of conversation, lots of talking in bars, on the street, in offices. Like a slow-motion political thriller. Hofmann always uses lots of fun idioms in his translations, taken from the range of Englishes of the world, and this book is no exception. Fun read once you get into it.
Michael Kohlhaas
Heinrich von Kleist
Translated by Michael Hofmann
One of the wildest things I've ever read. An incredible book. Very hard to put down. It's a revenge tale that takes everything to the next level over and over again. If you're familiar with Thomas Bernhard, "Michael Kohlhaas" is a little like if one of the more single-minded Thomas Bernhard characters decided to stop complaining and went on a rampage instead. The book is basically all summary, like von Kleist took a 300-page masterpiece and compressed it down to a super-dense and indestructible novella. One of the reading highlights of 2020 for me. Thanks to Tony for sending this along!
Widening Income Inequality
Frederick Seidel
Maybe not quite as compelling as some of the other recent collections, but still wild. You kind of know what you're getting when you go into a Seidel poem, maybe some mix of motorcycles, luxury, name-dropping, politics, sex, and shocking turns of phrase, but he deploys all those so well and to such interesting effect most of the time. Not my favorite of his, but still pretty enjoyable.
Submergence
J.M. Ledgard
Incredible novel. Two main characters: a secret service agent, James, and a scientist, Danielle. The narrative is split between when they first meet and fall in love and then later, when they're far apart from each other. Great writing, totally engrossing. Amazing scenes on the Atlantic coast of France, in Somalia, and at the bottom of the ocean.
October
China Miéville
Fantastic non-fiction book about the Russian Revolution. Looks at the history leading up to 1917 and then goes through all the developments of that year. Detailed and captivating. Miéville does such a good job depicting the sweep of big historical events and the small-scale human dramas involved in the revolution.
The Hill of Summer
J.A. Baker
The author of The Peregrine, which is recommended below in the 2016 list. The Hill of Summer is similar to The Peregrine in many ways, at least in the fact that it features Baker's amazingly precise writing and poetic descriptions of landscapes, wildlife (especially birds), weather, and buildings. Where The Peregrine is focused on following a pair of hawks over the course of one winter (actually a decade of winters), The Hill of Summer moves through different months and habitats, like the woods, the fields, the estuary, the river, the moor, the heath, etc. This book is as good as The Peregrine, maybe better. It's definitely the best nature writing I've ever read. There were dozens of paragraphs in this book that articulated half-formed thoughts I'd had about experiences of nature, or that described a bird, or a plant, or a landscape in a way that felt shockingly vivid and correct, almost more real than real. I can say that reading The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer will make you want to wander outside to watch the natural world more closely, or, maybe more in keeping with the books, to sit and be still to see what happens in a field over the course of a day and into the evening.
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
Maybe read an exceprt or a few chapters of this when I was in high school and never returned to it until a a few years ago, when I bought an ebook copy of this for cheap. It was wilder and way different than I remembered and mostly more interesting and more transgressive than I thought it would be. The slang is insane and incredible, kind of crazy to me that Burgess built a whole vocab that works so well.
Book of Numbers
Joshua Cohen
Really enjoyable read. A sort of failed novelist is commissioned to ghostwrite the biography of the founder of a fictionalized version of Google. Funny, wild passages about writing and literature, and an incredible middle section where the founder (an amazing character with a great voice) tells his life story. Fantastic sections about the early days of the internet as well. Fun book.
Blackfishing the IUD
Caren Beilin
An affecting book about medical gaslighting, pain, writing, literature, bodies, communities, being alive. Harrowing shit, super intense and compelling read. Beilin writes about her rheumatoid arthritis being activated/unleashed by a copper IUD, and her pain, and how she thinks about it, how she deals with it. Also features the stories of other folks who had similar painful and horrifying experiences with copper IUDs, along with beautiful writing from Beilin about J.A. Baker, the writer of "The Peregrine," who also suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Beilin is a genius writer and this book is another huge achievement.
Wolfman Books
In the Blink of an Eye
Walter Murch
This short book about film editing is probably one of the best craft books I've ever read. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in film (obviously), but also to any writers who want a different perspective on what it means to successfuly execute an idea, frame it correctly, etc.
The Soul of an Octopus
Sy Montgomery
A great companion to Peter Godfrey-Smith's "Other Minds." Montgomery writes beautifully and passionately about the octopuses she encounters in the New England Aquarium and in the wild. Great book and super easy to read.
Americans, Guests, or Us
Caren Beilin
Like distilled paragraph premonitions of the thoughts in Beilin's novel, "University of Pennsylvania." Bonkers, hilarious, wild.
New Michigan Press
From a broken bottle traces of perfume still emanate
Nathaniel Mackey
Volumes one through three of Nathaniel Mackey’s epistolary novel about a jazz band in L.A. I’d read “Late Arcade” and decided to go back and read from the beginning. There’s no one better writing fiction about music, fiction like music, fiction about what it’s like to play music. Mackey describes or references hundreds of songs and albums in these novels and they’re all worth checking out. Highly recommend reading all of Mackey’s stuff.
Spain
Caren Beilin
Genius. Weird and hilarious memoir about spending time at an artist residency in Spain. Unreal. Rescue Press.
Songs & Ballads Lindsay Turner
One Lark, One Horse Michael Hofmann
Sudden Death Álvaro Enrigue
There Was an Old Man with a Springbok
Anthony Madrid
This is a book of limericks, written by Anthony Madrid, accompanied by beautiful art by Mark Fletcher. It is an insane, amazing book. It provides extremely high levels of entertainment. Many of these rhymes are so improbable and seem so dangerous that, when they land, you want to clap and cheer, like anxious flyers sometimes do when the pilot brings the plane down on the runway. Many of these limericks will stay in your head for a long time. Fletcher's art brings a whole other level to the experience. You can now order a copy online from the good folks at Prelude Books.
The Black Maria Aracelis Girmay
Blow-Up and Other Stories Julio Cortázar
The Buried Giant Kazuo Ishiguro
Loin de Médine
Assia Djebar
Incredible book about the women who were involved with the beginnings of Islam (including those women who opposed it), told in fragments, monologues, anecdotes. Moving and deeply fascinating.
Paris Nocturne Patrick Modiano
Melville: A Novel Jean Giono
Emergency Brake
Ruth Madievsky
Great poetry book, full of surprises and vicious twists
Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming
Andreas Malm
A Void Georges Perec
A Brief Alphabet of Torture
Vi Khi Nao
I Am Flying Into Myself Bill Knott
Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men (a.k.a Hologram) Padgett Powell
The Known World Edward P. Jones
Homesick for Another World Ottessa Moshfegh
Gork, the Teenage Dragon Gabe Hudson
The Sellout Paul Beatty
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness Peter Godfrey-Smith
Loving Henry Green
Margaret the First Danielle Dutton
The City
Melanie Amaral and Stephen Crowe
Umbilical Hospital
Vi Khi Nao
Mysterious and shifting poem, made of sheep, grass, and wilderness.
At the Lightning Field Laura Raicovich
Made for Love Alissa Nutting
Late Arcade Nathaniel Mackey
The Engagement Georges Simenon
L'Étranger
Albert Camus
(Read this in French and it took me what felt like four months to finish. Great and strange)
The End of Vandalism Tom Drury
Sixty Stories Donald Barthelme
Goodbye, Vitamin
Rachel Khong
Funny, sweet, and totally engrossing.
Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador Horacio Castellanos Moya
Miles: The Autobiography Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe
The Babysitter at Rest Jen George
Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi Geoff Dyer
Noble Hustle Colson Whitehead
Try Never
Anthony Madrid
Madrid's incredible follow-up to I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say is mind-bending, charming, and full of rhyme and wisdom
L'enfant Noir Camara Laye
The Hero and the Blues Albert Murray
New Collected Poems W. S. Graham
Fish In Exile
Vi Khi Nao
One of the best books I read in 2016
Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis Benjamin Kunkel
Loitering Charles D'Ambrosio
The Underground Railroad Colson Whitehead
God Is Round Juan Villoro
The Surrender Scott Esposito
A Man Lies Dreaming Lavie Tidhar
The Great Glass Sea Josh Weil
Combien de terre fault-il à un homme
Annelise Heutier and Raphaël Urtwiller
French children's book based on a story by Tolstoy. Beautiful artwork.
Slant Six Erin Belieu
Magic Hours Tom Bissell
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot David Shafer
Mislaid Nell Zink
Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve Tom Bissell
The Getting Rid
Anthony Madrid
Poetry chapbook; funny, wild, catchy; hard rhymes, birthday poems, and unhinged cheers. So good.
Mr. Cogito
Zbigniew Herbert
Third (fourth?) time I've read this and it gets better every time
While the Women Are Sleeping Javier Marias
Calligraphy Lesson Mikhail Shishkin
The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories Hassan Blasim
Apex Hides the Hurt Colson Whitehead
In A Strange Room Damon Galgut
The Old Philosopher
Vi Khi Nao
The Old Philosopher, a poetry collection, is hilarious, sensual, beguiling, and wild. There is a set of Biblical poems in this book that will stay with you forever (that is a guarantee) and other poems that will do the same. It's unlike pretty much anything else out there. Check it out.
Zona Geoff Dyer
Sphinx Anne Garréta
Newspaper Édouard Levé
War Music Christopher Logue
The Making of Zombie Wars Aleksandar Hemon
Eileen Ottessa Moshfegh
Undermajodomo Minor Patrick deWitt
The Peregrine J.A. Baker
Where Have You Been? Michael Hofmann
Cries for Help, Various Padgett Powell
The Pickle Index Eli Horowitz
Class War Megan Erickson