2018 in Books

Two or three years ago I began to note my daily reading (books only) in a moleskine. For 2018, I decided to log books after I finished them. What follows is a list of all the books I finished in 2018.

After the list is a brief commentary and a shorter list of especially resonant works.

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1. Age of Swords — Michael Sullivan | 1.4
2. A Wizard of Earthsea — Ursula Leguin | 1.11
3. It’s Not Yet Dark — Simon Fitzmaurice | 1.15
4. Still Life with Woodpecker — Tom Robbins | 1.22
5. Fluent in 3 Months — Benny Lewis | 1.27
6. M Train — Patti Smith | 1.29
7. Faceless Killers — Henning Mankell | 2.4
8. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil — Rüdiger Safranski | 2.6
9. No Longer Human — Osamu Dazai | 2.7
10. Writing Tools — Roy Peter Clark | 2.12
11. Cities of the Plain — Cormac McCarthy | 2.15
12. Poetry, Language, Thought — Martin Heidegger | 2.23
13. Steering the Craft — Ursula Leguin | 3.6
14. Mother of Eden — Chris Beckett | 3.6
15. Winter — Karl Ove Knausgaard | 3.9
16. Ahoi Aus Hamburg — Andre Klein | 3.9
17. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas — John Boyne | 3.19
18. Meeting the Universe Halfway — Karen Barad | 3.29
19. Wilderness — Lance Weller | 4.5
20. In Other Words — Jhumpa Lahiri | 4.6
21. Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert | 4.8
22. Go — Kazuki Kaneshiro | 4.17
23. The Practice of the Wild — Gary Snyder | 4.28
24. The 7th Function of Language — Laurent Binet | 4.30
25. Mythologies — Roland Barthes | 5.7
26. Asymmetry — Lisa Halliday | 5.8
27. Religion for Atheists — Alain de Botton | 5.9
28. Cruel Optimism — Lauren Berlant | 5.12
29. Elmet — Fiona Mozley | 5.15
30. The Order of Time — Carlo Rovelli | 5.16
31. Here — Richard McGuire | 5.16
32. How to Live in Denmark — Kay Xander Mellish | 5.20
33. Bullshit Jobs — David Graeber | 6.4
34. The Promise of Happiness — Sara Ahmed | 6.4
35. The Ice Swimmer — Kjell Ola Dahl | 6.4
36. Spring — Karl Ove Knausgaard | 6.12
37. Anticipate the Coming Reservoir — John Hoppenthaler | 6.12
38. Fun Home — Alison Bechdel | 6.16
39. Ask the Dust — John Fante | 6.23
40. Barbarian Days — William Finnegan | 6.28
41. Neither Here Nor There — Bill Bryson | 7.6
42. Arctic Dreams — Barry Lopez | 7.22
43. One Secret Thing — Sharon Olds | 8.3
44. My Struggle, Book 5 — Karl Ove Knausgaard | 8.5
45. With Deer — Aase Berg | 8.6
46. Keeping an Eye Open — Julian Barnes | 8.7
47. Lauras Lied — Corbeyran & Thierry Murat | 8.8
48. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us — Hanif Abdurraqib | 8.12
49. Call Me By Your Name — André Aciman | 8.12
50. Proust — Samuel Beckett | 8.13
51. Sting-Ray Afternoons — Steve Rushin | 8.24
52. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics — Steven Shaviro | 8.24
53. The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien | 8.25
54. Consider the Lobster — D.F. Wallace | 9.4
55. The Thief’s Journal — Jean Genet | 9.5
56. Age of War — Michael Sullivan | 9.7
57. Disquiet — Noah Van Sciver | 9.8
58. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov | 9.9
59. Summer — Karl Ove Knausgaard | 9.14
60. Blind Spot — Teju Cole | 9.14
61. The Child in Time — Ian McEwan | 9.15
62. You’ve Been So Lucky Already — Alethea Black | 9.17
63. Lives Other Than My Own — Emmanuel Carrère | 9.21
64. Wait Till Next Year — Doris Kearns Goodwin | 9.23
65. Sonnets — William Shakespeare | 9.24
66. Silas Marner — George Eliot | 10.2
67. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — Annie Dillard | 10.3
68. Maisie Dobbs — Jacqueline Winspear | 10.14
69. The Reminders — Val Emmich | 10.18
70. Inadvertent — Karl Ove Knausgaard | 10.19
71. Goethe: Life as a Work of Art — Rüdiger Safranski | 10.23
72. Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari | 10.25
73. Devotion — Patti Smith | 10.28
74. Guardians of the Night — Alan Russell | 10.28
75. The Voice of Things — Francis Ponge | 10.31
76. A Girl in the Woods — Aspen Matis | 11.9
77. Wonder Boys — Michael Chabon | 11.13
78. David Lynch: The Man from Another Place — Dennis Lim | 11.15
79. Classical Music — Julian Johnson | 11.20
80. Faust: A Tragedy, Parts One and Two — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Trans. Martin Greenberg) | 11.25
81. Embassytown — China Miéville | 11.25
82. Here in Berlin — Cristina García | 11.26
83. I Have the Right to Destroy Myself — Young-Ha Kim | 11.27
84. Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky | 11.30
85. Slaughterhouse Five — Kurt Vonnegut | 12.2
86. The Power of Language — Francis Ponge (Trans. Serge Gavronsky) | 12.5
87. The Face in the Frost — John Bellairs | 12.5
88. Selected Poems — Francis Ponge (Ed. Margaret Guiton) | 12.12
89. All the Pretty Horses — Cormac McCarthy | 12.15
90. Soap — Francis Ponge (Trans. Lane Dunlop) | 12.17
91. Visitation — Jenny Erpenbeck (Trans. Susan Bernofsky) | 12.18
92. The Primal Blueprint — Mark Sisson | 12.19
93. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Robert Pirsig | 12.23
94. Lock In — John Scalzi | 12.24
95. Bergeners — Tomas Espedal (Trans. James Anderson) | 12.29
96. The Art of Living — Epictetus (Ed. Sharon Lebell) | 12.30
97. Selected Poems & Fragments — Friedrich Hölderlin (Trans. Michael Hamburger; German/English edition) | 12.31
98. Hunger — Knut Hamsun (Trans. Sverre Lyngstad) | 12.31

I didn't have a reading goal for the year, and the number of books I ended up finishing is just the number of books I finished.

Most often, I read three books concurrently:

• (a) what is typically (but not exclusively) a non-fiction, general interest book (e.g., Sapiens or Arctic Dreams) or a something for a course I'm developing (e.g., Bullshit Jobs or Writing Tools)
• (b) a scholarly book (i.e., something directly related to my own research, e.g., Meeting the Universe Halfway or Blind Spot)
• (c) what is typically (but not exclusively) a work of fiction that I read for fun (e.g., Cities of the Plain, Lock In, Summer)

There is some overlap, and every so often I'll read two books concurrently in any given category. I read mostly on my kindle, and frequently read library books. That's part of the reason why I kept a list in 2018: I was curious about what I actually read since I couldn't look at titles on a bookshelf. It's easy to log a book after finishing, and satisfying in aggregate.

One last note before a brief list of resonant books: if you know the German word that describes the feeling of possibility, hope, joy, and wonder that one has after finishing a book and facing the delectable prospects of immediately selecting a new one, please let me know. (Das Gefühl danach schmökern, bevor weiter schmökern.)

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There's something to like in nearly every one of the books on the list, but, for many reasons, some books resonated more than others. There were two books on the list that I absolutely hated, one of which is canonical. I won't call them out beyond that.

So, what do I mean by "resonate"? A book resonates when I am forced to pause, to think, to step back, to wonder. How and where and in what ways a book resonates has much to do with where and how I am at the moment of reading, but this can't be all of it.

Some works resonate because they are different, because they're a doorway opening into an affective charge, into possibility, into change. In a list of almost 100 books, these resonated. I'll try, in a sentence or two, to describe why.

• M Train — Patti Smith
• I can't actually say it any better than this: "I can't believe Patti Smith wrote a book about drinking black coffee and watching serial crime dramas and it's the best thing I've ever read."
• Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil — Rüdiger Safranski
• Safranski's philosophical biography of the very complicated Heidegger is nearly magisterial, and the English translation by Ewald Osers includes snippets of Heidegger's work that haven't been previously translated.
• Cities of the Plain — Cormac McCarthy
• Blood Meridian is easily my favorite McCarthy novel, and one of my favorite books, full stop. I read All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing years ago, but realized this year that I had never finished the trilogy. Cities of the Plain might be the best of the three.
• The 7th Function of Language — Laurent Binet
• For the right audience, this book is hysterical. I am the right audience.
• Asymmetry — Lisa Halliday
• This is now my go-to example for the mantra to "show instead of tell." What Halliday does in the novel's first section—with almost zero exposition—is stunning.
• My Struggle, Book 5 — Karl Ove Knausgaard
• It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Knausgaard. The fifth book in his autobiographical novel takes place in Bergen, in the rain, during early adulthood.
• With Deer — Aase Berg
• This slim book by the Swedish poet Berg (printed in both Swedish and English) is indescribable. Reading it is like being fully present for every possible thing that happens during your own furious, fever-induced delirium.
• Blind Spot — Teju Cole
• Cole's book of photos and accompanying prose poems and meditations is a wonderful exploration of travel, identity, and the everyday.
• Lives Other Than My Own — Emmanuel Carrère
• Carrère is often mentioned alongside Knausgaard as an exemplar of contemporary autofiction. I found him to be almost nothing like Knausgaard, and this book was not at all what I expected. And even given all that, this was one of the best books I read in 2018.
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — Annie Dillard
• Dillard, in 1973 and 1974, was doing what I'm trying to do now, in my own work. This is a gorgeous, overflowing ontological meditation.
• Visitation — Jenny Erpenbeck (Trans. Susan Bernofsky)
• I'm looking forward to reading this in German, and even better, to reading more of Erpenbeck.
• Bergeners — Tomas Espedal (Trans. James Anderson)
• This was a Christmas gift, and I enjoyed nearly every page. As with Erpenbeck, I can't wait to read more of Espedal's work.

Until next year...