Recent Reading List
I’m halfway through another long read, so thought doing something different in the interim between posts might be fun.
By my late 40’s (I’m 50 now), my lifelong struggles with attentional issues had finally worn off enough for me to be able to complete whole books. New worlds opened. Since the last few months, I’ve settled into a reading practice of 50 pages a day, which clocks in at about a novel a week, on average. Couldn’t be more pleased.
Nevertheless, how about all the books I’d read the past couple of years prior to undertaking this blog? I have handwritten journal responses to many of them, so maybe I should revisit some to share. In the meantime, here’s a list of titles I’ve read within the past couple of years-ish.
The choices mostly come from middlebrow “best of” contemporary novels lists and I am leaving off a fair number of non-fiction books I read during the same time.
I’m happy to have read them all. The ones that blew my world apart appear in bold, though they speaks more to my own preferences than to one book’s inherent quality over another.
Jeff’s Reading List (books I’ve read the past 2 years, let’s say):
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last, by Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood
The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman
**The Sellout, by Paul Beatty (you keep thinking, “wait, did he just say that?” Yes, he did.)
**2666, by Roberto Bolaño (apocalyptic, sprawling, Truman Capote meets The Book of Revelations.)
The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
Ready, Player One, by Ernest Cline
The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
**The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz (clever beyond reason, the footnotes are hysterical, too.)
The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt
**All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr (spellbinding. Cliché to say, but spellbinding.)
Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
A Visit from the Good Squad, by Jennifer Egan
**Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (an expert treatment of a fascinating subject. Intersex babies may account of 2% of all births, which is about the same frequency as redhead children, so more common than you’d realize.)
Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth
The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen
**American Gods, by Neil Gaiman (a flawless one-last-job swindle story taken to a divine level.)
Coraline, by Neil Gaiman
The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman
**Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman (Gaiman loves the idea of falling through the cracks.)
**The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman (bittersweet yet beautiful.)
The Sleeper and the Spindle, by Neil Gaiman
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
The Magicians (trilogy), by Lev Grossman
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night‑Time, by Mark Haddon
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
Platform, by Michel Houellebecq
**The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (difficult to read, but you should read it.)
**Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (incandescent. Fair warning: this one hurts.)
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Institute, by Stephen King
The Flame Throwers, by Rachel Kushner
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Atonement, by Ian McEwan
The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides
Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
**Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (yes, Cloud Atlas really is that good.)
**Suite française, by Irène Némirovsky (a special book, it’s just on another level.)
Delta of Venus, by Anaïs Nin
Mr. Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi
The Chosen, by Chaim Potok
My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok
Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth
Austerlitz, by W. G. Sebald
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
Diary of an Erotic Life, by Frank Wedekind
Zone One, by Colson Whitehead
The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak