Reading – a year in review, 2016

2016 was a good year for reading. I discovered new authors whose work I enjoyed: Rick Moody, Alexis André, David Szalay, and Rachel Cusk. I continued my affection for authors with whom I had already been acquainted: Colm Tóibín, Tom Drury, Zadie Smith, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Strout, and Kazuo Ishiguro. I also wrote short reviews of each book I read this past year and posted them on LibraryThing, a few of which I re-posted here on this blog. I’m already looking forward to another great year of reading ahead.

Stats from my 2016 reading list:

  • 24 were borrowed from our public library
  • 11 have Canadian authors
  • 22 were chosen due to personal recommendations from friends
  • 4 are by authors who appear more than once on the 2016 list
  • 1 was being reread
  • 0 was read aloud by my wife and me
  • 13 are non-fiction
  • 0 are ebooks

Books read in 2016 (69):

  • Drury, Tom. The Driftless Area
  • Moran, Caitlin. How to Build a Girl
  • Cameron, Claire. The Bear
  • Grosz, Stephen. The Examined Life
  • Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace
  • Smith, Zadie. NW
  • Moody, Rick. Hotels of North America
  • Brautigan, Richard. Trout Fishing in America
  • St. Aubyn, Edward. The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk, At Last
  • Richtel, Matt. A Deadly Wandering
  • Alexis, André. Fifteen Dogs
  • Evison, Jonathan. This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!
  • Casey, John. Beyond the First Draft: The Art of Fiction
  • Coetzee, J.M. and Kurtz, Arabella. The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy
  • Keret, Etgar. The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God and other stories
  • Christie, Michael. If I Fall, If I Die
  • Modiano, Patrick. After the Circus
  • Tóibín, Colm. The Master
  • Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy
  • Marcus, Ben. The Age of Wire and String
  • Alexis, André. Childhood
  • Cather, Willa. A Lost Lady
  • Alexis, André. Despair and other stories
  • Oyeyemi, Helen. What is not yours is not yours: stories
  • Wilson, Kevin. The Family Fang
  • Scott, A.O. Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
  • Doerr, Anthony. All The Light We Cannot See
  • Strout, Elizabeth. My Name Is Lucy Barton
  • Beatty, Paul. The Sellout
  • Modiano, Patrick. The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l’Étoile, The Night Watch, and Ring Roads
  • Moody, Rick. The Ice Storm
  • Millet, Lydia. Mermaids in Paradise
  • Gardner, Leonard. Fat City
  • Petersen, Alice. Worldly Goods: stories
  • Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Virgin Suicides
  • Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Buried Giant
  • Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
  • Szalay, David. All That Man Is
  • Currie Jr., Ron. Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles: a novel
  • Barnes, Julian. nothing to be frightened of
  • Royle, Nicholas (Ed.) Best British Short Stories 2016
  • Bryson, Bill. The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes From a Small Island
  • Antrim, Donald. The Emerald Light in the Air: stories
  • Kawakami, Hiromi. Strange Weather in Tokyo
  • Coe, Jonathan. Number 11
  • McKenzie, Elizabeth. The Portable Veblen
  • Goncharov, Ivan. Oblomov
  • Alexis, André. The Hidden Keys
  • Bell, James Scott. Revision and Self-Editing
  • Link, Kelly. Get in Trouble
  • Cayley, Kate (compiler), Francis, Brian (compiler), Thien, Madeleine (compiler). The Journey Prize Stories 28
  • Beukes, Lauren. Broken Monsters
  • Diaz, Junot (ed.). The Best American Short Stories 2016
  • Barrett, Andrea, and Turchi, Peter (editors). A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft
  • Winterson, Jeanette. The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold
  • Cusk, Rachel. Outline
  • Haslett, Adam. Imagine Me Gone
  • Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited
  • Smith, Ali. Public library and other stories
  • McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian
  • Smith, Zadie. On Beauty
  • Edugyan, Esi. Half-Blood Blues
  • Svevo, Italo. Zeno’s Conscience
  • Smith, Zadie. Swing Time
  • Atwood, Margaret. Hag-Seed
  • Tesdell, Diana Secker (ed.). New York Stories
  • Adler, Renata. Speedboat
  • Tóibín, Colm. On Elizabeth Bishop
  • Luiselli, Valeria. Faces in the Crowd

 

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