In seventh grade, we had to keep a list of everything we read. The habit stuck.
2023:
The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
Listen, World! by Julia Scheeres and Allison Gilbert
2022:
Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark
Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
Girls They Write Songs About by Carlene Bauer
Chouette by Claire Oshetsky
Hunger by Roxane Gay
Why Patti Smith Matters by Caryn Rose
Beloved by Toni Morrison
These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder
On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Bodies in Motion and at Rest by Thomas Lynch
Upstream by Mary Oliver
Big Sky by Kate Atkinson
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn
The Chancellor by Kati Marton
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
2021:
Heavy by Kiese Laymon
A Song Everlasting by Ha Jin
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
The Promise by Damon Galgut
Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley
Hold Still by Sally Mann
I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell
A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
Still Life by Louise Penny
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
At the Edge of the Haight by Katherine Seligman
The Inextinguishable Symphony by Martin Goldsmith
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
The Boys In the Boat by Daniel James Brown
After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
2020:
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
Writers and Lovers by Lily King
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban
Plains Song by Wright Morris
Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
The Dakota Winters by Tom Barbash
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
Fairyland by Alysia Abbott
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Real American by Julie Lythcott-Haims
Alta California by Nick Neely
Time Regained by Marcel Proust
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui
Indelicacy by Amina Cain
The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall
A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell
Belladonna by Daša Drndić
Beastly Things by Donna Leon
Suffer the Little Children by Donna Leon
Through a Glass, Darkly by Donna Leon (escapism during Covid-19)
Falling in Love by Donna Leon
News of Our Loved Ones by Abigail DeWitt
American Grief in Four Stages by Sadie Hoagland
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
Rebellion by Molly Patterson
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
Tell Me, Signora by Ann Harleman
A Girl Goes Into the Forest by Peg Alford Pursell
The Fugitive by Marcel Proust
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
2019:
Henry, Himself by Stewart O’Nan
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
Lying by Lauren Slater
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
The Captive by Marcel Proust
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
Inside by Alix Ohlin
24/6 by Tiffany Shlain
What Is Missing by Michael Frank
Hawai’i (sections) by James Michener
Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta
Go With Me by Castle Freeman Jr.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
The Stranger In the Woods by Michael Finkel
Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life by Steve Almond
Transcription by Kate Atkinson
Stoner by John Williams
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
Bilgewater by Jane Gardam
Interior States: Essays by Meghan Gieblyn
Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
The Wild Impossibility by Cheryl A. Ossola
Look at Me by Anita Brookner
Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
There There by Tommy Orange
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
Lost Time by Jósef Czapski (tr. Eric Karpeles)
The Overstory by Richard Powers
The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
The Witch Elm by Tana French
2018:
Improvement by Joan Silber
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
The Risk of Us by Rachel Howard
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
The Boatbuilder by Daniel Gumbiner
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown
The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
& Sons by David Gilbert
Laura & Emma by Kate Greathead
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Between Heaven & Here by Susan Straight
Blame by Michelle Huneven (again)
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust
A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua
Sapiens by Yuvah Noah Harari
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
The Lion in the Living Room by Abigail Tucker
American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Candide by Voltaire
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
2017:
But Beautiful by Geoff Dyer
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
How to Be Both by Ali Smith
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Geek Sublime by Vikram Chandra
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
The Mighty Franks by Michael Frank
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
LaRose by Louise Erdrich
Transit by Rachel Cusk
The War by Marguerite Duras
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders Wow
Broad Strokes by Bridget Quinn
Outline by Rachel Cusk
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
The Girls by Emma Cline
The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
Muzzled (True Story) by Gabriela Denise Frank
Trip to the Zoo (True Story) by Steven Church
2016:
Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen
Doctored Evidence by Donna Leon
A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler
Letters to Grandmother by Anne Blanton
The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain
The Weight of Him by Ethel Rohan
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Mercury by Margot Livesey
Willful Behavior by Donna Leon
Friends in High Places by Donna Leon
The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies
The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Mendocino Fire by Elizabeth Tallent
The Door by Magda Szabó (again)
The O Henry Prize Stories 2015
VQR spring 2016 issue
Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
The Geometry of Love by Jessica Levine
The Reef by Edith Wharton
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
The American Granddaughter by Inaam Kachachi
Adam, Eve, and the Serpent by Elaine Pagels
What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas
The St. Zita Society by Ruth Rendell
Heartstones by Ruth Rendell
Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
The Door by Magda Szabó (!!!)
Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie
2015:
The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Season of the Witch by David Talbot
Deep Down Dark by Héctor Tobar
M Train by Patti Smith
The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Someone Not Really Her Mother by Harriet Scott Chessman
Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Girl at War by Sara Nović
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
The Forgiven by Lawrence Osborne
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
It’s Fine by Me by Per Petterson
One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks
Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman
All This Life by Joshua Mohr
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
The Green Road by Anne Enright
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
The Whites by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt
Heat Wave by Penelope Lively
Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen
Cleopatra’s Sister by Penelope Lively
Consequences by Penelope Lively
The American Lover by Rose Tremain
The Children Act by Ian McEwan
Don’t Let Him Know by Sandip Roy
The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
Redeployment by Phil Klay
The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit
The Martini Shot by George Pelecanos
The Odds by Stewart O’Nan
Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade
Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman
A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell
Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls by Susanna Solomon
2014:
Best European Fiction 2015
Euphoria by Lily King
Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín
Whatever Doesn’t Kill You; Best of shebooks, volume 1
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore
Memoirs by Pablo Neruda
Lila by Marilynne Robinson
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
How It All Began by Penelope Lively
Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
Now by Lauren Bacall
Married at Fourteen by Lucille Lang Day
Transatlantic by Colum McCann
Toby’s Room by Pat Barker
The Year She Left Us by Kathryn Ma
A Green Journey by Jon Hassler
Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis
Mary Coin by Marisa Silver (again)
The Last Days of California by Mary Miller
I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons
Off Course by Michelle Huneven
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
Blood from a Stone by Donna Leon
A Sea of Troubles by Donna Leon
Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart
Byrd by Kim Church
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
Alone With You by Marisa Silver
31 Hours by Masha Hamilton
The God of War by Marisa Silver
2013:
And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
Mary Coin by Marisa Silver
Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Goodnight Nobody by Ethel Rohan
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban
The Grifters by Jim Thompson
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Quiet by Susan Cain
A Prayer Journal by Flannery O’Connor
The Dinner by Herman Koch
Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
Fatal Remedies by Donna Leon
Swim: Why We Love the Water by Lynn Sherr
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Knocking on Heaven’s Door by Katy Butler
The World Without You by Joshua Henkin
Lost Cat by Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton
A History of the Present Illness by Louise Aronson
Tigerlily’s Orchids by Ruth Rendell
Holding Silvan by Monica Wesolowska
Tasting Home by Judith Newton
Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres
The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín
Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
Married Love and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley
Dear Life by Alice Munro
2012:
Quietly In Their Sleep by Donna Leon
My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis by Lauren Winner
Best American Short Stories 2012
A House With No Roof by Rebecca Wilson
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey
Then Again by Diane Keaton
Fighting Fire by Caroline Paul
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer
Heidegger’s Glasses by Thaisa Frank
Acqua Alta by Donna Leon
Making It Up by Penelope Lively
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
God Bless America by Steve Almond
The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel
The Photograph by Penelope Lively
Prosper in Love by Deborah Michel
Dressed for Death by Donna Leon
Life by Keith Richards
The Edge of Maybe by Ericka Lutz
Love and Shame and Love by Peter Orner
A Noble Radiance by Donna Leon
Emily, Alone by Stewart O’Nan
The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht
Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon
Ghost Town by Patrick McGrath
Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon (Ruth Rendell no longer sits alone on my murder mystery shelf)
2011:
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Death and Judgement by Donna Leon
The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe
Caribou Island by David Vann (what an ending. wow. that takes guts.)
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz
In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard
Madame Bovary (Lydia Davis translation) by Gustave Flaubert
Jamesland by Michelle Huneven
Blame by Michelle Huneven
Lies of the Saints by Erin McGraw
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
To Fear a Painted Devil by Ruth Rendell
Given (poems) by Wallace Berry
Magnificat (poems) by Marilyn Nelson Waniek
The Face of Trespass by Ruth Rendell (the only mystery writer I can read; I love her)
A Demon in My View by Ruth Rendell
Yes, I did read books between 2003 & 2011; just haven’t transcribed them all here yet.
2003:
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Human Stain by Philip Roth (while on residency at VCCA)
On Writing by Stephen King
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Ploughshares spring 2002 issue, cover to cover, mostly in the Lynchburg, VA, Amtrak station waiting for the delayed train to New York
Story collection (Stories? Collected Stories?) by Richard Bausch
Stories by Richard Yates
Summer fiction issue — The New Yorker — excellent memoir excerpts by Alice Munro and Donald Antrim; especially liked short story by Grace Paley)
The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories by Nina Berberova
Women in Their Beds by Gina Berriault
Ha Jin stories
Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot (poetry)
2002:
War & Peace (at VCCA)
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro (at VCCA)
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (at VCCA)
Marie Antionette by Antonia Fraser (at VCCA; thank you, VCCA)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (on my father’s couch while suffering from depression; thank you, Dad)
Atonement by Ian McEwan LOVED THIS
The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. Read this one while on a cycling trip of the Southwest. Recall reading it under the pines at the Bryce camping ground, and in a super-comfy leather reading chair at the lodge on the edge of the Grand Canyon
2001:
Another World by Pat Barker
Bridget Jones’ Diary
Afterwards by Gina Berriault
Border Crossing by Pat Barker
Snow Mountain Passage by James Houston
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
Slouching Towards Bethlehem & The White Album (again) by Joan Didion
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers
An Italian Affair by Laura Fraser
Girl With Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
Codeine Diary by Tom Andrews
issues of Ploughshares
2000:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose (every now & again, nonfiction sneaks in)
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Plainsong by Kent Haruf — LOVED this
The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan — I can still feel the chill in the airport waiting lounge where I read this as it turned REALLY dark. A master at work.
Room with a View (again) by E. M. Forster
She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb
Daisy Miller by Henry James
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
The Aspern Papers by Henry James
A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham
Lying Awake by Mark Salzman
Experience by Martin Amis
Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick (right after my mother died)
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Adam, One Afternoon by Italo Calvino
Feast of Love by Charles Baxter
Gravity of Sunlight by Rosa Shand
1999:
“Sexy” by Jhumpa Lahiri New Yorker 12/28/98-1/4/99 : Was this the first I read (and loved) of hers?
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Beloved (again) by Toni Morrison
Approaching Eye Level by Vivian Gornick
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison — blew me away
1998:
“Night Vision” by Amy Bloom in The New Yorker 2/16/98 – phenomenal story
Great William Trevor story in 3/9/98 New Yorker in which an Anglican rector (would he say “vicar”?) is visited by a Catholic priest
The March 1998 Harper’s excerpted Tony Earley’s memoir, which made good use of weaving the personal into the “trival.” TV episodes anchor family drama. Deadpan and very effective. “We watched Little Rascals on Channel 4. Dad moved out.”
3/23/98 The New Yorker, “An Old Affair”: Only Updike could get away with “doubly drenched” for sweat & semen. Also this lovely ending: “The woman he did see, stepping naked toward him across a sun-soaked carpet, was the one who, as long as he loved her, he must hate.”
Underworld by Don De Lillo. Nick on his mother’s death: “She is part of me now, total and consoling. And it is not a sadness to acknowledge that she had to die before I could know her fully. It is only a statement of the power of what comes after.” WOW.
Light Years by James Salter. Are people really named Viri & Nedra?
Plains Song by Wright Morris — gorgeous telling, gorgeous showing. “When Sharon had left the farm to live in Lincoln, she had emerged from an oppression so habitual she had hardly suspected its existence. On returning she sensed her submergence to that lower level of feeling. As if drowsy with ether, she observed their movements and listened to their voices.” Then this observation anchored in specific: “Madge, thick with another child” “reduced Sharon’s capacity to think.” And how cool, that Morris spoke at my college graduation in 1983…if I’d only taken notes!
Mrs. Bridge by Evan Connell
