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Every Book I've Read Since 2008

Writer's picture: Charles ArrowsmithCharles Arrowsmith

Having left the world of study-mandated reading in 2007 and fearing a progressive atrophying of the reading muscles, I made a new year's resolution in 2008 to read a book a week. Ten years and 620 books later, imagining that a full list might make for a fun thirty seconds' perusal, here's the result.


Some discoveries:


1. Passing interests lead one to the doormat of some crazy titles. Favourites here include: Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives; Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film; and The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics.


2. Numbers tell a story but not the whole story. According to the spreadsheet, I've read more books by Martin Amis (14 books, including Time's Arrow twice) than by anyone else. This surely overstates my enthusiasm. Other high scorers include Vladimir Nabokov (9), Philip Roth (9), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (8 -- a thoroughly worthwhile blitz of the Sherlock Holmes canon), Jonathan Franzen (7), José Saramago (7), Edward St. Aubyn (7), Truman Capote (7), Marcel Proust (7... if you include two failed attempts to finish Swann's Way before I finally did it), Alan Hollinghurst (6), and Slavoj Žižek (6).

3. My male:female author ratio is embarrassing. To the order of about 17:3 embarrassing. Check back in with me in 2028.


4. Novels win out for now, but age and perhaps curiosity have been inclining one to nonfiction since 2012.


5. I remember almost nothing about almost everything. Some of these books I couldn't even tell you the subject.


6. I pushed unnecessarily through some real clangers.


7. Certain patterns of interest -- in terrorism, David Lynch, dictionaries, mid-twentieth-century Americana -- have persisted.


8. Sometimes you put a book down -- Infinite Jest, for instance (which in truth was more of a smack down), The Goldfinch -- and then don't quite ever pick it up again. Maybe 2% of these books are as such.


9. Aside from being the responsible older brother of your internet browsing history, a list like this is also a lovely mnemonic for various trips by train, plane, bus, or subway, for lingerings and loiterings, holidays, night shifts, houses and apartments, friends and family...


10. According to the algorithm on this webpage, it'll take you about 17 minutes to read the whole actual list. Seriously don't bother.


Including the covers of some faves, then, herewith:


2008

  1. Silas Marner, George Eliot

  2. Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, John Steinbeck

  3. The Empty Space, Peter Brook

  4. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

  5. The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch

  6. The Witches of Eastwick, John Updike

  7. The Strange World of David Lynch: Transcendental Irony from Eraserhead to Mulholland Dr., Eric G. Wilson

  8. The Arena, John Swales

  9. Violence, Slavoj Žižek

  10. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

  11. In A Glass Darkly, Sheridan Le Fanu

  12. A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays, Tennessee Williams

  13. The Little Friend, Donna Tartt

  14. Plague 99, Jean Ure

  15. Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, Harold Bloom

  16. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

  17. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

  18. Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis

  19. Twelve, Nick McDonell

  20. The Hours, Michael Cunningham

  21. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

  22. Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster

  23. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

  24. Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee

  25. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

  26. The Swimming-Pool Library, Alan Hollinghurst

  27. Raising Kane, Pauline Kael

  28. The Informers, Bret Easton Ellis

  29. The Rotters' Club, Jonathan Coe

  30. The Tin Drum, Gunther Grass

  31. Libra, Don DeLillo

  32. Notes On A Scandal, Zoe Heller

  33. The Second Plane, Martin Amis

  34. Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk

  35. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King

  36. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

  37. Looking For Sex In Shakespeare, Stanley Wells

  38. The Old Devils, Kingsley Amis

  39. Have I Got Views For You, Boris Johnson

  40. Life of Pi, Yann Martel

  41. Straw Dogs, John Gray

  42. Notes From Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky

  43. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature, Steven Pinker

  44. My Favourite Wife, Tony Parsons

  45. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking

  46. Ripley Under Water, Patricia Highsmith

  47. Sabbath's Theater, Philip Roth

  48. Blair Unbound, Anthony Seldon

  49. The Widows of Eastwick, John Updike

  50. Bambi vs Godzilla, David Mamet

  51. The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins

  52. Hard Times, Charles Dickens

  53. The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein

  54. The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

  55. 9-11, Noam Chomsky

  56. The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda's Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright

  57. Stuff Happens, David Hare

  58. Summer Crossing, Truman Capote

  59. The Magus, John Fowles


2009

  1. Culture, Crisis and America's War On Terror, Stuart Croft

  2. Film and Television After 9/11, Wheeler Winston Dixon (editor)

  3. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

  4. Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Žižek

  5. Time's Arrow, or the Nature of the Offence, Martin Amis

  6. The Folding Star, Alan Hollinghurst

  7. Ground Zero, Paul Virilio

  8. The Europeans, Henry James

  9. The Mercy Seat, Neil LaBute

  10. After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, Michael Sorkin, Sharon Zukin (editors)

  11. Terrorist, John Updike

  12. Then We Came To The End, Joshua Ferris

  13. A Good School, Richard Yates

  14. The Human Stain, Philip Roth

  15. Jack Maggs, Peter Carey

  16. Experience, Martin Amis

  17. A Word Child, Iris Murdoch

  18. Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin

  19. The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries, Alastair Campbell

  20. How To Be Alone, Jonathan Franzen

  21. Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

  22. The Double, José Saramago

  23. Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, Kazuo Ishiguro

  24. The King's English, Kingsley Amis

  25. The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton

  26. Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh

  27. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, José Saramago

  28. Night Train, Martin Amis

  29. Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov

  30. The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History, Jonathan Franzen

  31. The Gum Thief, Douglas Coupland

  32. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, Peter Biskind

  33. The Road, Cormac McCarthy

  34. The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood, James Mottram

  35. Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Franz Kafka

  36. The Fifth Child, Doris Lessing

  37. The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard

  38. Young Hearts Crying, Richard Yates

  39. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

  40. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, Lynne Truss

  41. Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern, John Gray

  42. The Natural: Bill Clinton's Misunderstood Presidency, Joe Klein

  43. A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham

  44. Indignation, Philip Roth

  45. Molesworth, Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle

  46. Crash, J.G. Ballard

  47. Leviathan, or The Whale, Philip Hoare

  48. London Fields, Martin Amis

  49. David Lynch: Beautiful Dark, Greg Olson

  50. The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby

  51. The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  52. Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote

  53. Remainder, Tom McCarthy

  54. Einstein's Monsters, Martin Amis

  55. Cock & Bull, Will Self

  56. The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham

  57. The Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster, David Bradshaw (editor)

  58. A Study In Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  59. The Humbling, Philip Roth

  60. The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and What It Means, Vince Cable


2010

  1. The Hell of It All, Charlie Brooker

  2. Hunger, Knut Hamsun

  3. 2666, Roberto Bolaño

  4. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain De Botton

  5. Time's Arrow, or the Nature of the Offence, Martin Amis

  6. Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey

  7. A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood

  8. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Sloan Wilson

  9. Rabbit, Run, John Updike

  10. They Came Like Swallows, William Maxwell

  11. Possession: A Romance, A.S. Byatt

  12. The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, Greil Marcus

  13. How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain De Botton

  14. Strong Motion, Jonathan Franzen

  15. The Wapshot Scandal, John Cheever

  16. The Modern American Novel, Malcolm Bradbury

  17. The Château, William Maxwell

  18. Falconer, John Cheever

  19. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

  20. Money: A Suicide Note, Martin Amis

  21. The City and the Pillar, Gore Vidal

  22. Cameron on Cameron: Conversations with Dylan Jones, Dylan Jones

  23. Moby-Dick, or The Whale, Herman Melville

  24. Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis

  25. Blindness, José Saramago

  26. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis

  27. The Breast, Philip Roth

  28. Laughter In The Dark, Vladimir Nabokov

  29. Imperial Bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis

  30. The Unlimited Dream Company, J.G. Ballard

  31. Ghostwritten, David Mitchell

  32. Alone In Berlin, Hans Fallada

  33. A Boy's Own Story, Edmund White

  34. Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey

  35. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

  36. Boxer, Beetle, Ned Beauman

  37. Of Love and Hunger, Julian Maclaren-Ross

  38. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen

  39. C, Tom McCarthy

  40. Atomised, Michel Houellebecq

  41. A Journey, Tony Blair

  42. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

  43. The Information, Martin Amis

  44. The Sign of Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  45. Collected Stories, John Cheever

  46. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

  47. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  48. Teach Us To Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing, Tim Parks

  49. American Pastoral, Philip Roth

  50. Open, Andre Agassi

  51. Brighton Rock, Graham Greene

  52. The Easter Parade, Richard Yates

  53. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  54. Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote


2011

  1. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

  2. Masters of Cinema: David Lynch, Thierry Jousse

  3. The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory, Allister Mactaggart

  4. Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared, Andrew Brown

  5. So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell

  6. By Nightfall, Michael Cunningham

  7. The Spell, Alan Hollinghurst

  8. Death At Intervals, José Saramago

  9. Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, Gary Marcus

  10. Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, Will Bunch

  11. Cocaine Nights, J.G. Ballard

  12. Submarine, Joe Dunthorne

  13. The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death, John Gray

  14. Visiting Mrs Nabokov, and Other Excursions, Martin Amis

  15. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  16. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Vladimir Nabokov

  17. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis

  18. Race of a Lifetime, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

  19. Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald

  20. Columbine, Dave Cullen

  21. Kingdom Come, J.G. Ballard

  22. The Art of Fiction, David Lodge

  23. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John Le Carré

  24. The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst

  25. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

  26. Orpheus Descending / Something Unspoken / Suddenly Last Summer, Tennessee Williams

  27. Underworld, Don DeLillo

  28. Music for Chameleons, Truman Capote

  29. The Stranger's Child, Alan Hollinghurst

  30. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, George Plimpton

  31. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon

  32. The Damned Utd, David Peace

  33. The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  34. If On A Winter's Night A Traveller..., Italo Calvino

  35. What Ever Happened To Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici

  36. Right Ho, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse

  37. Washington Square, Henry James

  38. The Valley of Fear, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  39. Letter From America, Alistair Cooke

  40. Light Years, James Salter

  41. The American Revolution: A History, Gordon S. Wood

  42. Vernon God Little, D.B.C. Pierre

  43. Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, Michael Sorkin

  44. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth

  45. Antwerp, Roberto Bolaño

  46. Seize the Day, Saul Bellow

  47. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain

  48. Oh What a Paradise It Seems, John Cheever

  49. Tender Is The Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

  50. Hangover Square, Patrick Hamilton

  51. Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives, Greil Marcus

  52. The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens

  53. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Anthony Summers

  54. Point Omega, Don DeLillo

  55. In the Bedroom: Seven Stories, Andre Dubus

  56. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, David Foster Wallace

  57. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales, Oliver Sacks

  58. The Grass Harp, Truman Capote

  59. Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann

  60. The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides

  61. Concerning E.M. Forster, Frank Kermode

  62. Everyman, Philip Roth

  63. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, David Shields

  64. Swann's Way, Marcel Proust [first attempt]


2012

  1. Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics, Daniel Marcus

  2. How We Got Here: The 70's - The Decade That Brought You Modern Life -- For Better or Worse, David Frum

  3. The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

  4. Palimpsest, Gore Vidal

  5. Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction To Its Own Past, Simon Reynolds

  6. The Fall, Albert Camus

  7. Seeing, José Saramago

  8. A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

  9. Ravelstein, Saul Bellow

  10. The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis

  11. Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film, Christine Sprengler

  12. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton

  13. Writing in Restaurants, David Mamet

  14. Cain, José Saramago

  15. Life & Times of Michael K, J.M. Coetzee

  16. The Third Reich, Roberto Bolaño

  17. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, Zadie Smith

  18. Authorship and the Films of David Lynch: Aesthetic Receptions in Contemporary Hollywood, Antony Todd

  19. The Sonderberg Case, Elie Wiesel

  20. Hotel de Dream, Edmund White

  21. Our Iceberg Is Melting, John Kotter & Holger Rathgeber

  22. End Zone, Don DeLillo

  23. The Luzhin Defense, Vladimir Nabokov

  24. Back To Work: Why We Need Smart Government For A Strong Economy, Bill Clinton

  25. Jack Holmes & His Friend, Edmund White

  26. Farther Away, Jonathan Franzen

  27. Time To Start Thinking: America In the Age of Descent, Edward Luce

  28. Those Guys Have All The Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales

  29. The Chemistry of Tears, Peter Carey

  30. Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

  31. Too Big To Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street, Andrew Ross Sorkin

  32. Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Slavoj Žižek

  33. They Eat Puppies, Don't They?, Christopher Buckley

  34. The Spoils of Poynton, Henry James

  35. Fifth Business, Robertson Davies

  36. Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America, Stacy Takacs

  37. The Kreutzer Sonata, Leo Tolstoy

  38. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

  39. Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages, David Bevington

  40. Junk Mail, Will Self

  41. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, Vladimir Nabokov

  42. The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker

  43. No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, Christopher Hitchens

  44. Lionel Asbo: State of England, Martin Amis

  45. The Inimitable Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse

  46. Every Nation For Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World, Ian Bremmer

  47. The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century, D. Graham Burnett

  48. Film After Film, Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?, J. Hoberman

  49. Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris

  50. It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

  51. Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov

  52. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

  53. Mr. Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow

  54. The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics, John Pollack

  55. All the Names, José Saramago

  56. Thomas Adès: Full of Noises - Conversations with Tom Service, Thomas Adès and Tom Service

  57. The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells

  58. David Lynch, Justus Nieland

  59. Point to Point Navigation, Gore Vidal

  60. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace

  61. The Manticore, Robertson Davies

  62. Generation of Swine - Gonzo Papers Vol. 2: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's, Hunter S. Thompson

  63. Zeroville, Steve Erickson

  64. Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, Christopher Hayes

  65. Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max

  66. The Sorceror's Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper, John Richardson

  67. Tintin and the Secret of Literature, Tom McCarthy

  68. The Plot Against America, Philip Roth

  69. Back To Blood, Tom Wolfe

  70. Mortality, Christopher Hitchens

  71. Something Like The Gods: A Cultural History of the Athlete from Achilles to LeBron, Stephen Amidon

  72. Never Mind, Edward St. Aubyn

  73. Bad News, Edward St. Aubyn


2013

  1. Michael Haneke, Peter Brunette

  2. Some Hope, Edward St. Aubyn

  3. Mother's Milk, Edward St. Aubyn

  4. Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne

  5. Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008, Simon Sellars and Dan O'Hara (editors)

  6. The Art of Immersion: How the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the way we tell stories, Frank Rose

  7. One Man's Castle: Clarence Darrow In Defense of the American Dream, Phyllis Vine

  8. At Last, Edward St. Aubyn

  9. The Aleph and Other Stories, Jorge Luis Borges

  10. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Yukio Mishima

  11. Both Flesh and Not: Essays, David Foster Wallace

  12. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag

  13. The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  14. The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, Al Gore

  15. The End of the Story, Lydia Davis

  16. Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up - An Insider's Portrait, Bob Colacello

  17. Prater Violet, Christopher Isherwood

  18. The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published, David Skinner

  19. Answered Prayers, Truman Capote

  20. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick

  21. Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, John Adams

  22. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain

  23. The Hundred Brothers, Donald Antrim

  24. The Alastair Campbell Diaries, Volume One: Prelude to Power, 1994-1997, Alastair Campbell

  25. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, Slavoj Žižek

  26. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright

  27. The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, John Gray

  28. The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, Martin Amis

  29. The Enchanter, Vladimir Nabokov

  30. World of Wonders, Robertson Davies

  31. When You Are Engulfed In Flames, David Sedaris

  32. The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

  33. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

  34. Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson

  35. City of Quartz, Mike Davis

  36. Saturday, Ian McEwan

  37. Because the Night, James Ellroy

  38. The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers

  39. Too Brief A Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote, Gerald Clarke (editor)

  40. Breaking Bad and Philosophy: Badder Living Through Chemistry, David R. Koepsell and Robert Arp (editors)

  41. Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon

  42. All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy

  43. The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000, Gore Vidal

  44. Murphy, Samuel Beckett

  45. A Separate Peace, John Knowles

  46. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

  47. Pulphead: Essays, John Jeremiah Sullivan

  48. My Lives, Edmund White

  49. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

  50. The Philosophy of David Lynch, William J. Devlin and Shai Biderman (editors)

  51. Tales From the City, Armistead Maupin

  52. Lightning Rods, Helen DeWitt

  53. Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses, Ian Hacking

  54. Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs, James Wolcott

  55. Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America's Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Boris Kachka

  56. The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, Pauline Kael

  57. At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches, Susan Sontag

  58. Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon

  59. Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, Adam Gopnik


2014

  1. The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

  2. How To Be A Woman, Caitlin Moran

  3. The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, Tom Reiss

  4. The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible, Simon Winchester

  5. Lars von Trier, Linda Badley

  6. Mergers & Acquisitions, Dana Vachon

  7. Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival, Sean Strub

  8. The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester

  9. Monkeys, Susan Minot

  10. The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography, Stephen Fry

  11. Rapture, Susan Minot

  12. Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative, Lawrence Weschler

  13. The Good Life, Jay McInerney

  14. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion

  15. e.e. cummings: A Life, Susan Cheever

  16. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney

  17. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days, Jeff Kinney

  18. American Dervish, Ayad Akhtar

  19. Disgraced, Ayad Akhtar

  20. Constellation of Genius - 1922: Modernism Year One, Kevin Jackson

  21. Rules of Civility, Amor Towles

  22. The Winter Ghosts, Kate Mosse

  23. Brooklyn Bounce: The Highs of Lows of Nets Basketball's Historic First Season in the Borough, Jake Appleman

  24. In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master, Tim Teeman

  25. The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing, Daniel Bergner

  26. Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems, J.D. McClatchy

  27. Seating Arrangements, Maggie Shipstead

  28. After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, Evie Wyld

  29. Jesus: The Human Face of God, Jay Parini

  30. The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, Jonathan Alter

  31. & Sons, David Gilbert

  32. Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War, Amanda Vaill

  33. To Rise Again At A Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris

  34. The News: A User's Manual, Alain De Botton

  35. Tiny Terror: Why Truman Capote (Almost) Wrote Answered Prayers, William Todd Schultz

  36. How About Never - Is Never Good For You?: My Life in Cartoons, Bob Mankoff

  37. Do The Movies Have A Future?, David Denby

  38. The Children and the Wolves, Adam Rapp

  39. Nocturne, Adam Rapp

  40. The Vacationers, Emma Straub

  41. The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years, Greil Marcus

  42. Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection, Debora Spar

  43. Chapel of Inadvertent Joy, Jeffrey McDaniel

  44. My Salinger Year, Joanna Rakoff

  45. Lost For Words, Edward St. Aubyn

  46. Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, John Paul Stevens

  47. My Struggle: Book 1, Karl Ove Knausgaard

  48. Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks, Brad Dukes

  49. David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire, Martha P. Nochimson

  50. The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, Kevin Birmingham

  51. My Life in Middlemarch, Rebecca Mead

  52. The Sea Inside, Philip Hoare

  53. The House of Blue Leaves, John Guare

  54. The Furies, Natalie Haynes

  55. Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare

  56. A Free Man of Color, John Guare

  57. Daring: My Passages - A Memoir, Gail Sheehy

  58. The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning, Marcelo Gleiser

  59. Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Andrew Solomon

  60. Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay

  61. Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart

  62. Roberto Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe, Chris Andrews

  63. The Children Act, Ian McEwan

  64. The Ministry of Guidance Invites You To Not Stay, Hooman Majd

  65. The Last Girlfriend on Earth, and Other Love Stories, Simon Rich

  66. Sane New World: A User's Guide to the Normal-Crazy Mind, Ruby Wax

  67. The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis

  68. We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch

  69. How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise, Chris Taylor

  70. The Sherlockian, Graham Moore

  71. My Struggle: Book 2, Karl Ove Knausgaard

  72. There Must Be Some Mistake, Frederick Barthelme

  73. Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept, Slavoj Žižek

  74. Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty, Diane Keaton

  75. The White Album, Joan Didion

  76. Margaret Thatcher - The Authorized Biography: Volume One, Charles Moore


2015

  1. The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way And It Wasn't My Fault And I'll Never Do It Again, P.J. O'Rourke

  2. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

  3. Imperfect Bliss, Susan Fales-Hill

  4. The Asylum: True Tales of Madness from a Life in Fashion, Simon Doonan

  5. Amnesia, Peter Carey

  6. The Unspeakable and Other Subjects of Discussion, Meghan Daum

  7. Bonita Avenue, Peter Buwalda

  8. The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs, Greil Marcus

  9. Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview, Roberto Bolaño

  10. The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, Boris Johnson

  11. The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song, Ben Yagoda

  12. Satin Island, Tom McCarthy

  13. The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man, Luke Harding

  14. Olives, A.E. Stallings

  15. Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Tom Wolfe

  16. The Fifth Gospel, Ian Caldwell

  17. Discontent and Its Civilizations, Mohsin Hamid

  18. The Architecture of David Lynch, Richard Martin

  19. There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll, Lisa Robinson

  20. I Am Sorry To Think I Have Raised a Timid Son, Kent Russell

  21. The Architect's Apprentice, Elif Shafak

  22. The Emerald Light in the Air, Donald Antrim

  23. Dark Sparkler, Amber Tamblyn

  24. The Farm, Tom Rob Smith

  25. The Marauders, Tom Cooper

  26. The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker

  27. Properties of Light, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

  28. The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, Sarah Lewis

  29. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh

  30. The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, Irvine Welsh

  31. Frank: A Life in Politics From the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage, Barney Frank

  32. Gabriel: A Poem, Edward Hirsch

  33. Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

  34. My Struggle: Book 3, Karl Ove Knausgaard

  35. One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, Åsne Seierstad

  36. Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita, Richard Roper

  37. My Documents, Alejandro Zambra

  38. Van Gogh: A Power Seething, Julian Bell

  39. Age of Fracture, Daniel T. Rodgers

  40. The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry Into Human Freedom, John Gray

  41. Book of Numbers, Joshua Cohen

  42. The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir, Nick Flynn

  43. The Reenactments: A Memoir, Nick Flynn

  44. The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood

  45. On Michael Jackson, Margo Jefferson

  46. The Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up With George, Kelly Carlin

  47. We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, Richard Beck

  48. The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq, Emma Sky

  49. I Am My Own Wife, Doug Wright

  50. Charlie Mike: A True Story of War and Finding the Way Home, Joe Klein

  51. When Blackness Rhymes With Blackness, Rowan Ricardo Phillips

  52. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

  53. Heaven: Poems, Rowan Ricardo Phillips

  54. Purity, Jonathan Franzen

  55. Let's Talk About Love: A Journey To the End of Taste, Carl Wilson

  56. Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal, Wendy Walters

  57. Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe, Lisa Randall

  58. Daydreams of Angels: Stories, Heather O'Neill

  59. I See You Made An Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50, Annabelle Gurwitch

  60. The Emperor of Water Clocks: Poems, Yusef Komunyakaa

  61. Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii, Susanna Moore

  62. A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara

  63. Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers, Simon Winchester

  64. David Lynch: The Man From Another Place, Dennis Lim

  65. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, David Graeber

  66. Cameron at 10: The Inside Story 2010-2015, Anthony Seldon & Peter Snowdon

  67. Chess Story, Stefan Zweig

  68. Playing to the Gallery: Helping Contemporary Art In Its Struggle To Be Understood, Grayson Perry

  69. My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

  70. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie


2016

  1. The Fran Leibowitz Reader, Fran Leibowitz

  2. A Decent Ride, Irvine Welsh

  3. Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped, Garry Kasparov, with Mig Greengard

  4. Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, Erik Larson

  5. True Believers, Kurt Andersen

  6. Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, Janet Malcolm

  7. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, Nathaniel Philbrick

  8. Drawing Blood, Molly Crabapple

  9. Bettyville: A Memoir, George Hodgman

  10. Negroland: A Memoir, Margo Jefferson

  11. Francis Bacon In Your Blood: A Memoir, Michael Peppiatt

  12. The Danish Girl, David Ebershoff

  13. Sudden Death, Álvaro Enrigue

  14. Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, Bryan Burrough

  15. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson

  16. A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time, Adrian Bardon

  17. The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe, Stephon Alexander

  18. What Belongs To You, Garth Greenwell

  19. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

  20. Swann's Way, Marcel Proust [second attempt]

  21. Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past, Douwe Draaisma

  22. White Sands, Geoff Dyer

  23. Another Great Day At Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, Geoff Dyer

  24. Venusberg, Anthony Powell

  25. The Face: Cartography of the Void, Chris Abani

  26. 10:04, Ben Lerner

  27. Power and the People: The Alastair Campbell Diaries Volume 2, 1997-1999, Alastair Campbell

  28. Maggie & Me: Coming Out and Coming of Age in 1980s Scotland, Damian Barr

  29. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

  30. Intellectual Skywriting: Literary Politics and The New York Review of Books, Philip Nobile

  31. Memoirs, Kingsley Amis

  32. The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt

  33. John Aubrey, My Own Life, Ruth Scurr

  34. Postcapitalism: A Guide To Our Future, Paul Mason

  35. Thirteen Ways of Looking, Colum McCann

  36. The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, Mark Lilla

  37. Loner, Teddy Wayne

  38. The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander

  39. The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State, Lawrence Wright

  40. Redeployment, Phil Klay

  41. Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Craig Seligman

  42. Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors: Against the Double Blackmail, Slavoj Žižek

  43. The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir, Vivian Gornick

  44. How To Write Like Tolstoy, Richard Cohen

  45. Sweet Lamb of Heaven, Lydia Millet

  46. The Sellout, Paul Beatty

  47. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder

  48. The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld, Jamie Bartlett

  49. 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, Anthony Burgess

  50. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami

  51. Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters, John Richardson

  52. How To Change the World, John-Paul Flintoff

  53. The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp


2017

  1. Black Hole Blues and Other Songs From Outer Space, Janna Levin

  2. How To Survive A Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS, David France

  3. Washington’s Farewell: The Founding Father’s Warning to Future Generations, John Avlon

  4. A World In Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order, Richard Haass

  5. Time Travel, James Gleick

  6. Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, John Nixon

  7. My Struggle: Book 4, Karl Ove Knausgaard

  8. Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Pankaj Mishra

  9. Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin

  10. Universal Harvester, John Darnielle

  11. I, Claudius, Robert Graves

  12. Private Citizens, Tony Tulathimutte

  13. So Much Synth, Brenda Shaughnessy

  14. The Word Detective: Searching for the Meaning of it All at the Oxford English Dictionary, John Simpson

  15. Richard Nixon, John A. Farrell

  16. Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays, Tom McCarthy

  17. The Early Stories of Truman Capote, Truman Capote

  18. A Colony in a Nation, Chris Hayes

  19. Political Fictions, Joan Didion

  20. The End of Eddy, Édouard Louis

  21. Over To You, Roald Dahl

  22. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder

  23. Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco

  24. Making It, Norman Podhoretz

  25. Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag

  26. Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Michael Peppiatt

  27. Writing the 9/11 Decade: Reportage and the Evolution of the Novel, Charlie Lee-Potter

  28. Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag

  29. Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, David Thomson

  30. Stephen Florida, Gabe Habash

  31. Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt

  32. Marcel Proust: A Life, Edmund White

  33. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard

  34. The Way By Swann's, Marcel Proust [third attempt; first successful]

  35. Live From Golgotha, Gore Vidal

  36. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin, James Campbell

  37. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Marcel Proust

  38. RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR, Philip Hoare

  39. Autobiography, Morrissey

  40. Submission, Michel Houellebecq

  41. Melville, Jean Giono

  42. The Guermantes Way, Marcel Proust

  43. We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates

  44. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Adrienne Rich

  45. The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, Elizabeth Hardwick

  46. Sodom and Gomorrah, Marcel Proust

  47. Dunbar, Edward St. Aubyn

  48. The Sparsholt Affair, Alan Hollinghurst

  49. Call Me By Your Name, Andre Aciman

  50. The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, Joan Schenkar

  51. The Prisoner & The Fugitive, Marcel Proust

  52. Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency, Joshua Green

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