We asked the past year’s podcast-guests for the favorite books they read in 2021 and the books they hope to read in 2022 for our special year-end Guest List episode! Thirty guests participated, so listen to the show to hear about their picks, and use this page to check out all the books, as well as their past episodes!

Photo of my 2021 books (not incl. comics) by me. Some e-books are missing, of course.

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If you’d like a guide to the episode, detailing the order of the speakers and when their segments begin, please scroll to the bottom of the page.

The Guests

Jonathan Baylis – 19:00

• Locas – Jaime Hernandez

Jonathan’s 2022 goals

• The Customer Is Always Wrong – Mimi Pond
• Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio – Derf Backderf
• a whole ton of Keiler Roberts books
• back issues of Kramer’s Ergot
• The Secret to Superhuman Strength – Alison Bechdel

Zoe Beloff – 25:45

• Walker Evans: The Magazine Work – David Campany

Jacques Berlinerblau – 21:00

• Cane – Jean Toomer

Jacques’ 2022 goals

• Can’t wait to find out for himself

Anne Cattaneo – 5:30

• Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone – Madison Smart Bell
• Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II – Svetlana Alexievich

Anne’s 2022 goals

• Cookbooks!

Michael DeForge – 49:10

• The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care – John Foot

Shary Flenniken – 57:23

• Kindred – Octavia Butler
• Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
• Parable of the Talents – Octavia Butler
• Goodbye for Now – Laurie Frankel
• This Is How It Always Is – Laurie Frankel
• The Midnight Library – Matt Haig
• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic – Alison Bechdel
• Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama – Alison Bechdel
• The Secret to Superhuman Strength – Alison Bechdel

Sophia Glock – 17:50

• Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin
• Crisis Zone – Simon Hanselmann

Sophia’s 2022 goals

• Dostoevsky? Maybe? How about just making it through a stack of New Yorkers?

Heywood Gould – 45:20

• The Nazarene – Sholem Asch
• The Apostle – Sholem Asch
• Mary – Sholem Asch
• Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film – Alan K.Rode

Glenn Head – 16:30

• The Art Of Time In The Memoir: Then, Again – Sven Birkerts
• Autobiography of a Face – Lucy Grealy

Glenn’s 2022 goals

• Dance Nation – Clare Barron

Ron Hogan – 50:20

• Roland in Moonlight – David Bentley Hart

Ron’s 2022 goals

• Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief – David Bentley Hart
• You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature – David Bentley Hart

Kate Lacour – 37:55

• Moby-Dick – Herman Melville

Kate’s 2022 goals

• American Gothic – Robert Bloch

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn – 30:55

• Phoenix: A Father, a Son, and the Rise of Athens – David Stuttard
• Quarter In Autumn – Barbara Pym
• The Myth of Sisyphus – Albert Camus
• Real Presences – George Steiner
• How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius – Donald Robertson

Elisabeth’s 2022 goals

• Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession – Ian Bostridge
• House of Music: Raising the Kanneh-Masons – Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason
• Carnival – The Kanneh-Masons, Michael Morpurgo, & Olivia Colman
• The Bible –
• Notre-Dame of Amiens: Life of the Gothic Cathedral – Stephen Murray
• Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms – Georg Simmel
• All of Jane Austen? Maybe?

Matt Madden – 56:05

• In the Dream House: A Memoir – Carmen Machado

Matt’s 2022 goals

• Tunnels – Rutu Modan
• The Anomaly – Hervé Le Tellier
• More Charles Portis and Flann O’Brien

Kate Maruyama – 22:10

• The Letters of Shirley Jackson
• The Last House on Needless Street – Catriona Ward
• The Only Good Indians – Stephen Graham Jones
• Hex – Thomas Olde Heuvelt
• The Vanishing Half – Brit Bennett
• David Tung Can’t Have a Girlfriend Until He Gets into an Ivy League College – Ed Lin

Robert McCrum – 15:05

• Burning Boy: The LIfe and Work of Stephen Crane – Paul Auster

Robert’s 2022 goals

• In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust

Robert Emmet Meagher – 24:20

• And Then Your Soul is Gone: Moral Injury and U.S. War Culture – Kelly Denton-Borhaugh
• Holiness in Words: Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Poetics of Piety – Edward K. Kaplan
• The Doctor Stories – William Carlos Williams
• This Blinding Absence of Light – Tahar Ben Jelloun
• A Human Being Died That Night – Nicholas Wright
• River of Fire – Helen Prejean

Robert’s 2022 goals

• Chess Story – Stefan Zweig
• Arjuna-Odysseus: Shared Heritage in Indian and Greek Epic – N.J. Allen
• Coming Home in Viet Nam: Poems – Edward Tick

Anahid Nersessian – 10:20

• Permanent Volta – Rosie Stockton

Anahid’s 2022 goals

• Plans for Sentences – Renee Gladman

Scott Newstok – 46:45

• The Peregrine – J.A. Baker
• Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life – Zena Hitz
• Essays – Michel de Montaigne

Scott’s 2022 goals

• Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
• Rome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand Tour – Scott Samuelson

Weng Pixin / PIX – 39:15

• A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
• This is What Inequality Looks Like – Teo You Yenn
• Unspeakable Acts – Sarah Weinman

Pix’s 2022 goals

• The Art of Advocacy in Singapore – Constance Singam and Margaret Thomas (eds.)
• The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media – Brooke Gladstone
• The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton

AL Price – 59:20

• Close to the Teeth – Elisa Biagini (tr. Sarah Stickney and Diana Thow)
• Exhausted on the Cross – Najwan Darwish (tr. Kareem James Abu-Zeid)
• Born in a Second Language – Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie
• Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines – ed. Tilde Acuña, John Bengan, Daryll Delgado, Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III, and Kristine Ong Muslim

Alta’s 2022 goals

• Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time – Teju Cole
• Der Termin – Katharina Volckmer (tr. Milena Adam)
• Appropriate: A Provocation – Paisley Rekdal
• Lady Joker, Volume 1 – Kaoru Takamura (tr. Allison Markin Powell and Marie Iida)
• Kaya Days – Carl de Souza (tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman)

Keiler Roberts – 41:25

• Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood – Trevor Noah
• Penny – Karl Stevens

Keiler’s 2022 goals

• A bunch of Conundrum Press books

Dmitry Samarov – 3:30

• A Fan’s Notes – Frederick Exley
• Collected Stories – Breece D’J Pancake
• JR – William Gaddis
• An Alphabet for Joanna – Damian Rogers
• Running the Light – Sam Tallent
• Faux Pas – Amy Sillman
• The Most Fun Thing – Kyle Beachy

Nadine Sergejeff – 53:05

• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents – Isabel Wilkerson

Nadine’s 2022 goals

• The Lincoln Highway – Amor Towles
• The Sentence – Louise Erdrich
• some Anthony Bourdain cookbooks
• Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them – Dan Saladino

Dash Shaw – 8:50

• Second Place – Rachel Cusk
• Queen of the Ring – Jaime Hernandez

Dash’s 2022 goals

• A Spectre Haunting Europe – China Mieville

Jen Silverman – 52:20

• The Death of Vivek Ohi – Akwaeke Emezi
• Red Pill – Hari Kunzru
• Smile: The Story of a Face – Sarah Ruhl

Jen’s 2022 goals

• Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait – Bathsheba Demuth
• The Great Circle – Maggie Shipstead

Ed Sorel – 25:20

• Lives of the Novelists – John Sutherland

Ed’s 2022 goals

• “No plans for more books, but I’ll continue to write and draw The Literati feature in the NYTimes Book Review.”

Rosemary Steinbaum – 37:30

• Homeland Elegies – Ayad Akhtar

Rosemary’s 2022 goals

• Burning Boy: The LIfe and Work of Stephen Crane – Paul Auster

Karl Stevens – 30:25

• Super Host – Kate Russo
• David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
• Lurkers – Sandi Tan
• My Begging Chart – Keiler Roberts
• Crisis Zone – Simon Hanselmann

Karl’s 2022 goals

• Orlando – Virginia Woolf

Andi Watson – 36:05

• Winter Garden – Beryl Bainbridge

Andi’s 2022 goals

• more novels by Beryl Bainbridge, and finishing the ouevre of Penelope Fitzgerald
• The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories – Robert Aickman
• a big stack of Graham Greene novels

Heather Cass White – 12:30

• Ducks, Newburyport – Lucy Ellmann
• Piranesi – Susanna Clarke

Gil Roth – 1:01:45

• Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 – Peter Schjeldahl
• The Free World: Art & Thought in The Cold War – Louis Menand
• Drafted: A Memoir of the ‘60s – Heywood Gould
• Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living – Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
• Lost Property: Memoirs & Confessions of a Bad Boy – Ben Sonnenberg
• Albert Camus and the Human Crisis – Robert Emmet Meagher
• BALD: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts – Simon Critchley
• Shakespearean: On Life and Language in Times of Disruption – Robert McCrum
• We Play Ourselves – Jen Silverman
• Empire of the Sun – JG Ballard
• Let’s Not Talk Anymore – Weng Pixin
• My Begging Chart – Keiler Roberts
• Trots & Bonnie – Shary Flenniken

Gil’s 2022 goals

• All the Living and the Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life’s Work – Hayley Campbell
• Letters to Gwen John – Celia Paul
• Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine – Anna Della Subin
• Orwell’s Roses – Rebecca Solnit
• The Lincoln Highway – Amor Towles
• The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer – Siddhartha Mukherjee
• Renoir, My Father – Jean Renoir
• The Maze Maker – Michael Ayrton
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running – Haruki Murakami
• more Shakespeare, more Camus

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