Category: literature

Alphabetical by author:

• I Will Be Complete: A Memoir – Glen David Gold (podcast)
• Essays After Eighty – Donald Hall
• A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety – Donald Hall
• James Merrill: Life and Art – Langdon Hammer (podcast)
• The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World – David Jaher (podcast)
• Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade – Walter Kirn (podcast)
• An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic – Daniel Mendelsohn (podcast coming 2020)
• House of Nutter: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row – Lance Richardson (podcast)
• A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel – Amor Towles (podcast)
• My Young Life – Frederic Tuten (podcast)
• The Cold Song: A Novel – Linn Ullmann (podcast 1 and 2)
• Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation; Authority; Acceptance – Jeff VanderMeer
• The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany – Donald Westlake (ed. Levi Stahl) (podcast w/Levi)

I started this on a whim, Christmas Eve, looking over the list of Every Book I’ve Finished Since 1989. These are the books that have stuck with me most over the decade, or continue to rise up in my thoughts. Given recency bias, a bunch of them are reads from the past few years.

Observations:

I thought about ranking them, but they’re so different from one another that it seemed futile. If pressed, I’d put those two Donald Hall essay collections at the top, followed by Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir on teaching The Odyssey.

It’s only prose, not comics. I don’t keep a list of comics I’ve finished, and I’m not at home while I write this, where I’d be able to refer to my library.

I read a ton for the podcast, but much of it is non-fiction, so I get minimal exposure to contemporary novels & stories. Hence only 3 novels to 10 non-fiction works. Also, I barely read poetry. I’m glad that memoirs didn’t outweigh history/biography, as I fear that’s a bias of mine.

This was the decade in which I finished reading Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts(podcast), and in which I discovered/read Stefan Zweig (esp. Chess Story), The Peregrine by JA Baker, The Leopard by Giuseppe Lampedusa, Bruce Jay Friedman’s short fiction(podcast), Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series, The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins, and Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Which is to say, a lot of pre-2010 work made a huge impression on me, which maybe crowded out some of this decade’s work, in terms of stature/relevance.

Yep, all 12 authors are white, and yep, it’s 11 male to 1 female author. I’ll try to do better next decade.

There would be a whole bunch of honorable mentions, but that’s a whole new can of worms to open up. To quote the late Tom Spurgeon, “If I missed your book, it’s because I hate you.”

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