Sunday, October 31, 2004


Happy Halloween (or, Amsterdam in July). Posted by Hello
Sam Schulman snarks the literary community for not having high enough standards in its denunciations of Bush--"such indulgence in smug assumptions, such languid trading in crude stereotypes and awful clichés." ( Wall Street Journal.)

Methinks he's really annoyed that writers won't remain silent when asked whether or not they support Bush. Or has Schulman at some point bemoaned Bush's style of language as not being worthy of the office?

Platypuses are weird

"Scientists from the Australian National University have proved what many have thought for years - platypuses are really weird.
In the international Nature journal today they report a platypus has five chromosomes determining sex, not one - like the rest of the species in the world.
Professor Jennifer Graves says platypuses have five X and five Y chromosomes, and when sperm are made it gets even stranger.
"What we've discovered is that these five Xs and five Ys line up in a great big long chain, that go XY XY XY XY XY XY, and then all the X chromosomes move to one pole, and all the Y chromosomes move to the other," she said.
Professor Graves says there is another unexpected finding.
"One end of the chain looks like human sex chromosomes but the other end of the chain looks like bird sex chromosomes, so the chain is actually linking a very ancient system of sex determination in birds and probably reptiles too," she said.
The unique status of the Australian mammal is now unassailable."
----ABC News

I wonder if Stephen Maturin ever got to study platypuses.

Saturday, October 30, 2004


Don't forget. . . Posted by Hello

. . . to set the clock back Posted by Hello
Michael Chabon talked about the golems of his life, the clay of language, and how a writer's life depends upon lies. He said he's reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando at the moment, recently reread all his Raymond Chandlers, and recommended John Crowley's Little, Big. He writes screenplays so he can get health insurance for his four children through the screenwriters guild. We took three books to be signed and bought a copy of The Escapist for S.

Friday, October 29, 2004

I feel bad about missing Audrey Niffenegger last night, and thought I'd feel equally bad about waiting till the last minute to secure Michael Chabon tickets. But tickets are still available, and now all I have to do is decide how many books I attempt to get signed tomorrow night.

Woo hoo!

Thursday, October 28, 2004

If you are lonely while you are alone, you are in bad company.
--Jean-Paul Sartre

Wednesday, October 27, 2004


Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. Posted by Hello
I stumbled across the coolest book this week. It's History Lessons: How Textbooks From Around the World Portray U.S. History. Authors Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward have gathered selections from high school textbooks that offer differing views from those presented here at home, covering major (or not so major, depending upon whose viewpoint you're seeing things through) events from the earliest Viking exploration of the New World to modern times--the hostage crisis in Iran, apartheid, Nicaragua in the 1980s, nuclear weapon in North Korea, to name a few.

So far I've read only the chapter on the War of 1812 (of timely interest to me since I'm now reading Patrick O'Brian's The Fortune of War) as portrayed in textbooks in Canada, Great Britain and the Caribbean, and the one on Columbus as viewed in the Caribbean (the authors make note that texts in the islands usually come from either Great Britain or the U.S.). While Columbus isn't demonized to the extent he is in Lies My Teacher Told Me, his nasty side certainly isn't glossed over.

We'll no doubt return to this one next year when we study U.S. History.

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Last time I received an Amazon delivery from the UK, my Seamus Heaney was bent and my Orhan Pamuk had its jacket scuffed. This time, fortunately, the mail carrier saw fit to bring my package to the door (although he left the magazines, cards and political flyers at the street) instead of attempting to wrap it around the mailbox flag. My Kate Atkinson arrived in perfect condition today, complete with an attached red ribbon marker. It's so pretty I don't regret not waiting for the US version.

Monday, October 25, 2004

Literature is inescapably political. . . . It is in the act of reading that we define our notions about the world, what we judge to be right or wrong, important or unimportant, acceptable or unacceptable; literature is the testing ground of the imagination, where we decide who we are and what sort of society we live in or should be living in. You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.
-- Stephen Vizinczey

I'm always rather stunned when people reject a previously loved author or entertainer once they discover his or her political views are at odds with their own. The hatred directed at the Dixie Chicks last year was downright frightening--especially since so much of it was provoked and then encouraged by corporate radio with ties to the Bush administration and family.

Yet I've noticed that my favorites generally do seem to share my beliefs; I suppose we are naturally drawn to those like us without our having to consciously seek them out. It's those who relate to authors or entertainers in one area and cannot stand the cognitive dissonance in having their favorites differ from them in another who sputteringly bemoan the fact that these, these celebrities won't practice self-censorship and spare them from their awful opinions. First amendment rights aren't pretty unless put into practice by their own side.

Sunday, October 24, 2004

Keeping a Reading Record 2022-1993


Books Read in 2022


(In backwards order)

The Snow Hare. Paul Lichtarowicz

“He’s Very Well Read.” Catherine Lacey

A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Becky Chambers

Belle Greene. Alexandra Lapierre

Villette. Charlotte Bronte

The English Understand Wool. Helen DeWitt

A Horse at Night: On Writing. Amina Cain

The Hero of the Book. Elizabeth McCracken

The Marriage Portrait. Maggie O’Farrell

Now is Not the Time to Panic. Kevin Wilson

Checkout 19. Claire-Louise Bennett

Small Things Like These. Claire Keegan

Cosmonaut Keep. Ken Macleod

Kick the Latch. Kathryn Scanlan

And the Birds Rained Down. Jocelyne Saucier

The Mountain in the Sea. Ray Nayler

Demon Copperhead. Barbara Kingsolver

Nomad Century. Gaia Vince

Still No Word From You. Peter Orner

Shame. Annie Ernaux

The Dolphin House. Audrey Schulman

This is What it Sounds Like. Susan Rogers

Happening. Annie Ernaux

The Cloisters. Katy Hays

Maud Martha. Gwendolyn Brooks

The Unwritten Book: An Investigation. Samantha Hunt

Every Day is Mother’s Day. Hilary Mantel

The Autumn People. Ruth M. Arthur

Natural History. Andrea Barrett

The Bell in the Lake. Lars Mytting

Ink in the Blood: A Hospital Diary. Hilary Mantel

“The Egg.’ Andy Weir

Childhood.Tove Ditlevson

Horse. Geraldine Brooks

The Unfolding. A.M. Homes

The Gospel According to Jesus. Stephen Mitchell

We Spread. Iain Reid

Lucy by the Sea. Elizabeth Strout

A History of Present Illness. Anna DeForest

Walk the Vanished Earth. Erin Swan

Denial. Jon Raymond

Treacle Walker. Alan Garner

My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues. Pamela Paul

Foster. Claire Keegan

Festival Days. Jo Ann Beard

The Frederick Sisters are Libing the Drea. Jeannie Zusy

How Civil Wars Start. Barbara F. Walter

Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village. Maureen Johnson

Joan is Okay. Weike Wang

The Wild Hunt. Emma Seckel

Aurora. David Koepp

Either/Or. Elif Batuman

Mercy Street. Jennifer Haigh

Little Housewolf. Medric Perdham

The Book of Goose. Yiyun Li

The Fourth State of Matter. Jo Ann Beard

Fellowship Point. Alice Elliot Dark

Girls They Write Songs About. Carlene Bauer

Glorious Veils of Diane. Rainie Oet

Companion Piece. Ali Smith

The Death of Vivek Oji. Alwaeke Emezi

A Dream Life. Claire Messud

God: An Anatomy.Francesca Stavrakopoulou

The Candy House. Jennifer Egan

A Visit from the Goon Squad. Jennifer Egan

Assembly. Natasha Brown

Dinosaurs. Lydia Millet

The Promise. Damon Galgut

Flight. Lynn Steger Strong

Voting Day. Clare O’Dea

All You Who Sleep Tonight. Vikram Seth

My Evil Mother. Margaret Atwood

Search. Michelle Huneven

A Half-Built Garden. Ruthanna Emrys

Recitatif. Toni Morrison

Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object. Laurie Colwin

French Braid. Anne Tyler

Before Her Voice Was Still. Judith Wurtman

Eleutheria. Allegra Hyde

The Waterfall. Margaret Drabble

Lucy and Bonbon. Don LePan

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Olga Tokarczuk

End of the World House. Adrienne Celt

Nine Days on Planet Earth. Daryl Gregory

Station Eleven. Emily St. John Mandel

Agatha of Little Neon. Claire Luchette

Matrix. Lauren Groff

Still Life. Sarah Winman

The Book of Form and Emptiness. Ruth Ozeki

The Door. Magda Szabo

On Time and Water. Andri Snaer Magnason

Late City. Robert Olen Butler

Maus : A Survivor’s Tale. Art Spiegelman

Gender Queer. Maia Kobabe

How High We Go in the Dark. Sequoia Nagamatsu

The Sentence. Louise ERdrich

The Scapegoat. Sara Davis

Wide Sargasso Sea. Jean Rhys

Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte

Very Cold People. Sarah Manguso

2040 A.D. (McSweeney’s #58). Clarie Boyle, ed.

Booth. Karen Joy Fowler

Sea of Tranquility. Emily St. John Mandel

Books Read in 2021

(in backwards order)

The Electricity of Every Living Thing. Katherine May

Entangled Life : How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. Merlin Sheldrake

Play It As It Lays. Joan Didion

Two Truths and a Lie. Sarah Pinsker

The Fell. Sarah Moss

House of Trelawney. Hannah Rothschild

Why Didn’t You Do What You Were Told? Jenny Diski

Sorrow and Bliss. Meg Mason

The Sheltering Sky. Paul Bowles

The Breaks. Juliette Singh

Intimacies. Katie Kitamura

Klara and the Sun. Kazuo Ishiguro

Edie Richter is Not Alone. Rebecca Handler

Or What You Will. Jo Walton

“Face Time.” Lorrie Moore

French Braid. Anne Tyler

“Time Enough at Last.” Lyn Venable

The Midnight Library. Matt Haig

Gallery of Clouds. Rachel Eisendrath

Oh, William! Elizabeth Strout

Anything is Possible. Elizabeth Strout

My Name is Lucy Barton. Elizabeth Strout

Unsettled Ground. Claire Fuller

Second Nature. Nathaniel Rich

The Trees. Percval Everett

A Feather on the Breath of God. Sigrid Nunez

The Wall. Marlen Haushofer

Cloud Cuckoo Land. Anthony Doerr

Underground Airlines. Ben H. Winters

Mrs. Lorimer’s Quiet Summer. Molly Clavering

The Half Has Never Been Told : Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Edward E. Baptist

Out of the Red, Into the Blue. Barbara Comyns

Peril. Bob Woodward and Robert Costa

Bewilderment. Richard Powers

Playlist for the Apocalypse. Rita Dove

The Long Secret. Louise Fitzhugh

Magic Lessons. Alice Hoffman

Florida. Lauren Groff

Small Pleasures. Clare Chambers

Nightbitch. Rachel Yoder

The Last Wild Horses. Maja Lunde

We Want What We Want. Alix Ohlin

The Future Library. Peng Shepherd

The Recent East. Thomas Grattan

Cicada. Shaun Tan

A Harp in Lowndes Square. Rachel Ferguson

Postcard Poems. Jeanne Griggs

The High House. Jessie Greengrass

Phineas Redux. Anthony Trollope

The Actual Star. Monica Byrne

Palace of the Drowned. Christine Mangan

How the Word is Passed. Clint Smith

The Line. Amor Towles

Life on Other Planets. Matt Cook

Phase Six. Jim Shepard

Slaughter-House Five. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

What Was She Thinking? : Notes on a Scandal. Zoe Heller

Moving the Birds. Mitsuyo Kakuta

Wolf Border. Sarah Hall

Remote Control. Nnedi Okorafor

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. George Saunders

Children of Ruin. Adrian Tchaikovsky

Dance Me to the End : Ten Months and Ten Days with ALS. Alison Acheson

“It’s a Good Life.” Jerome Bixby

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch. Rivka Galchen

Children of Time. Adrian Tchaikovsky

Nomadland : Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. Jessica Bruder

The Cretaceous Past. Cixin Liu

Starve Acre. Andrew Michael Hurley

A Town Called Solace. Mary Lawson

The Old Romantic. Louise Dean

The Great Offshore Grounds. Vanessa Veselka

What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf? Lauren Groff

Thin Places : Essays from In Between. Jordan Kisner

The All-Night Sun. Diane Zinna

My Turn to Make the Tea. Monica Dickens

Boca Raton. Lauren Groff

Weather. Jenny Offill

Creating Anna Karenina. Bob Blaisdell

When Ghosts Come Home. Wiley Cash

How Fire Runs. Charles Dodd White

Anna Karenina. Leo Tolstoy

Song For the End of the World. Saleema Nawaz

Piranesi. Susanna Clarke

Gaze at the Moon. Joanna Cannan

The Doors of Eden. Adrian Tchaikovsky

Weird Pig. Robert Long Foreman

No More Meadows. Monica Dickens

Bright and Dangerous Objects. Anneliese Macintosh

We Ride Upon Sticks. Quan Barry

Miss Mole. E.H. Young

Four Hundred Souls. Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha Blain

Leonard and Hungry Paul. Ronan Hessian

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. Elizabeth Kolbert

We Are Satellites. Sarah Pinsker

Jerusalem the Golden. Margaret Drabble

The Tin-Can Tree. Anne Tyler

Robinson. Muriel Spark

I Wanted a Pony. Diana Pullein-Thompson

In the Quick. Kate Hope Day

The Absolute Book. Elizabeth Knox

The Tivington Nott. Alex Miller

The Only Good Indians. Stephen Graham Jones

The Stray Cats Of Homs. Eva Nour

National Velvet. Enid Bagnold

Early Morning Riser. Katherine Heiny

Drifts. Kate Ambreno

The Searcher. Tana French

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground. Alicia Elliot

Black Beauty. Anna Sewell

Hamnet. Maggie O’Farrell

 

Books Read in 2020
 (in backwards order)

The Way the World Ends. Jess Walter

Harriet the Spy. Louise Fitzhugh

Fake Accounts. Lauren Oyler

Sometimes You Have to Lie: the Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy. Louise Brody

Planetfall. Emma Newman

Lost Cat. Mary Gaitskill

A Song for a New Day. Sarah Pinsker

Ankomst. Gohril Gabrielson

The Narrowboat Summer. Anne Youngson

Fair Play. Trove Jansson

The Story of a Year. Henry James

The Death of Grass. John Christopher

The Dry Heart. Natalie Ginzburg

Want. Lynn Steger Strong

Dead in Devon. Stephanie Austin

Summerwater. Sarah Moss

English Animals. Laura Kaye

Agatha. Anne Cathrine Bmann

Perestroka in Paris. Jane Smiley

The True Deceiver. Trove Jansson

Upright Women Wanted. Sarah Gailey

Teenage Wasteland. Anne Tyler

Vanished Birds. Simon Jimenez

Parable of the Sower. Octavia E. Butler

Zikora. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Farthing. Jo Walton

Love and Other Thought Experiments

American Gospel. Lin Enger

Blue Marlin. Lee Smith

Why I Don’t Write. Susan Minot

All Passion Spent. Vita Sackville-West

Passing. Nella Larsen

Brood. Jackie Polzin

The Ministry for the Future. Kim Stanley Robinson

These Truths: A History of the United States. Jill Lepore

The Orphan Master’s Son. Adam Johnson

The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter. Anne S. Drangsholt

The Details. On Love, Death, and Reading. Tegan Bennett Daylight

O Caledonia. Elspeth Barker 

Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. Bart D. Ehrman

It is Wood, It is Stone. Gabriella Burnham

The Night Watchman. Louise Erdrich

Rage. Bob Woodward

The Small House at Allington. Anthony Trollope

Shine, Pamela! Shine! Kate Atkinson

A Mercy. Toni Morrison

Red Pill. Hari Kunzru

Summer. Ali Smith

These Ghosts are Family. Maisy Card

The Space Between Worlds. Micaiah Johnson

Long Live the Post Horn! Vigdis Hjorth

Vain Shadow. Jane Hervey

Montage of a Dream Deferred. Langston Hughes.

Hieroglyphics. Jill McCorkle

Circe. Madeline Miller

The Pull of the Stars. Emma Donoghue

Sharks in the Time of Saviors. Kawai Strong Washburn

The Animals in That Country. Laura Jean McKay

The Weekend. Charlotte Wood.

Crime and Punishment. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter. Kia Corthron
Leave the World Behind. Rumaan Alam
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Nikolai Leskov
Too Much and Never Enough. Mary Trump
How the Dead Dream Lydia Millet
Sweet Lamb of Heaven. Lydia Millet
Caste: the Origins of Our Discontent. Isabel Wilkerson
All Adults Here. Emma Straub
When They Call You a Terrorist. Patrice Khan-Cullors
Insomnia. Marina Benjamin
Felix Holt. George Eliot
The Animals of Lockwood Manor. Jane Healey
Happiness. Jack Underwood
The Shapeless Unease. Samatha Harvey
The Friend. Sigrid Nunez
Blood Pages. George Bilgere
Ghost Species. James Bradley
Transcendent Kingdom. Yaa Gyasi
The Case for Keto. Gary Taubes
Telephone. Percival Everett
The House at World's End. Monica Dickens
A Children's Bible. Lydia Millet
Rodham. Curtis Sittenfeld
Hiding in Plain Sight. Sarah Kendzior
Having and Being Had. Eula Biss
Therese Raquin. Emile Zola
The Glass Hotel. Emily St. John Mandel
Wild Life: Dispatches from a Childhood of Baboons and Button-Downs. Keena Roberts
The Best American Poetry 2019. David Lehman, ed.
Old Lovegood Girls. Gail Godwin
Lifelode. Jo Walton
Crossings. Alex Landragin
The Street. Ann Petry
Sounds Like Titanic. Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman
What Are You Going Through. Sigrid Nunez
The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here. Hope Jahren
Bina. Anakana Schfield
The Great Influenza. John M. Barry
Emergency Skin. N.K. Jemisin
Summer Frost. Blake Crouch
Caffeine. Michael Pollan
You Have Arrived at Your Destination. Amor Towles
Writers and Lovers. Lily King
The Corner That Held Them. Sylvia Townsend Warner
A Start in Life. Anita Bookner
The Illness Lesson. Clare Beams
Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf
Agency. William Gibson
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Becky Chambers
Holding On to Nothing. Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne
300 Arguments. Sarah Manguso
Moonstone. Sjon
They Call Me the Cat Lady. Amy Miller
The Midwich Cuckoos. John Wyndham
Life of Galileo. Bertolt Brecht
A Stranger City. Linda Grant
The Second Mrs. Hockaday. Susan Rivers
Can You Feel This? Julie Orringer
The Impeachers. Brenda Wineapple
The Peripheral. William Gibson
The Shape of My Name. Nino Cipri
The Lady Astronaut of Mars. Mary Robinette Kowal
The Grammarians. Cathleen Schine
The Naseby Horses. Dominic Brownlow
Walking. Henry David Thoreau
Sanditon. Jane Austen
Our Nig. Harriet E. Wilson
Ducks, Newburyport. Lucy Ellman

Lois the Witch. Elizabeth Gaskell
Lab Girl. Hope Jahren


Books Read in 2019
(in backwards order)
When We Were Vikings. Andrew David MacDonald
Generosity. Richard Powers
Redhead by the Side of the Road. Anne Tyler
Coventry: Essays. Rachel Cusk
The Long Call. Ann Cleves
The Rise and the Fall of the Dinosaurs. Stephen Brusatte
Rhinoceros. Eugene Ionesco
Hard Mouth. Amanda Goldblatt
Radioapocrypha. B.K. Fischer
Weather. Jenny Offill
Sh*tshow. Richard Russo
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Olga Tokarczuk
Cold Earth. Sarah Moss
Family of Origin. C.J. Hauser
Raven. John Smelcer
Olive, Again. Elizabeth Strout
Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen
The Mayor of Casterbridge. Thomas Hardy
Gaudy Night. Dorthy L. Sayers
The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind. Barbara K. Lipska
The Exmoor Files. Liz Jones
Will and Testament. Vigdis Hjorth
The Testaments. Margaret Atwood
The Paper Wasp. Lauren Acampora
The Sealwoman's Gift. Sally Magnussson
Spring. Ali Smith
The Second Sleep. Robert Harris
If You Tame Me. Kathie Giorgio
The Need. Helen Phillips
American Spy. Lauren Wilkinson
The Sin Eater and Other Stories. Elizabeth Frankie Rollins
The Salt Path. Raynor Winn
The Curiosity. Joan Thomas
Say Say Say. Lila Savage
The Lightest Object in the Universe. Kimi Eisele
The House on the Strand. Daphne Du Maurier
I'll Be Gone in the Dark. Michelle McNamara
The Dutch House. Ann Patchett
On Tyranny. Timothy Snyder
Beautiful Bad. Annie Ward
A Modern Family. Helga Flatland
The Gulf. Belle Boggs
Henry, Himself. Stewart O'Nan
The Altruists. Andrew Ridker
Barchester Towers. Anthony Trollope
Elderhood. Louise Aronson
If, Then. Kate Hope Day
White Elephant. Julie Langsdorf
Still Alice. Lisa Genova
The Mere Wife. Maria Dahvana Headley
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf. Katharine Smyth
We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Shirley Jackson
"Muslim": A Novel. Zahia Rahmani
The Flight Portfolio. Julie Orringer
Sinners Welcome. Mary Karr
Famous Men Who Never Lived. K. Chess
Bartleby the Scrivener. Herman Melville
North and South. Elizabeth Gaskell
Saturn's Return to New York. Sara Gran
Big Sky. Kate Atkinson
Merlin Bay. Richmal Crompton
The Collected Schizophrenias. Esme Weijun Wang
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. Leo Tolstoy
The Philosopher's Pupil. Iris Murdoch
The Snakes. Sadie Jones
In My Mind's Eye: A Thought Diary. Jan Morris
Austral. Paul McAuley
Rabbits for Food. Binnie Kirshenbaum
The Heavens. Sandra Newman
Palladian. Elizabeth Taylor
Tender is the Night. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Welcome to the Anthropocene. Alice Major
One of Ours. Willa Cather
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. David Wallace-Wells
Normal People. Sally Rooney
The Break. Katherena Vermette
Becoming. Michelle Obama
The Blithedale Romance. Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Haruki Murakami
The Lake on Fire. Roselyn Brown
Tropic of Squalor. Mary Karr
The Black Tulip. Alexandre Dumas
Milkman. Anna Burns
How to Be Safe. Tom McAllister
Extinctions. Josephine Wilson
Wild Horses of the Summer Sun. Tory Bilski
Save Me the Waltz. Zelda Fitsgerald
Abraham Lincoln. James M. McPherson
The Atom Station. Halldor Laxness
The Wedding Group. Elizabeth Taylor
The Whole Story and Other Stories. Ali Smith
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America. Beth Macy
The Dream of Reason. Jenny George
Rabbit Back Literature Society. Pasi Ilmari Jaakelainen
A Trick I Learned from Dead Men. Kitty Aldridge
Autumn. Ali Smith
The Golden State. Lydia Kiesling
My Sister, the Serial Killer. Oyinkan Braithwaite
The Millstone. Margaret Drabble
Trick. Domenico Starnone
Winter. Ali Smith
CoDex 1962. Sjon
Hazards of Time Travel. Joyce Carol Oates
If Morning Ever Comes. Anne Tyler
Craving. Esther Gerritsen

Books Read in 2018
(in backwards order)
The Garrick Year. Margaret Drabble
A House in Norway. Vigdis Hjorth
Phineas Finn. Anthony Trollope
A Mind Unraveled. Kurt Eichenwarld
Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return. Martin Riker
Whiskey When We're Dry. John Larison
A Tale for the Time Being. Ruth Ozeki
Saplings. Noel Streadfeild
A Summer Bird-Cage. Margaret Drabble
Ghost Wall. Sarah Moss
Scribe. Alyson Hagy
The Borrower. Rebecca Makkai
Margaret the First. Danielle Dutton
The Book of M. Peng Sheperd
My Duck is Your Duck. Deborah Eisenberg
William - An Englishman. Cicely Hamilton
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. Elizabeth Taylor
The New House. Lettice Cooper
Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles. Anne Tyler
Happiness. Aminatta Forna
What Luck, This Life. Kathryn Schwille
How Democracies Die. Steven Levitsky
Severance. Ling Ma
Unsheltered. Barbara Kingsolver
Annotated Little Women. Louisa May Alcott (Daniel Shealy)
Melmoth. Sarah Perry
The Shakespeare Requirement. Julie Schumacher
Fox 8. George Saunders
Still Life with Monkey. Katharine Weber
American Hippo. Sarah Gailey
White Houses. Amy Bloom
Transcription. Kate Atkinson
The Road to Unfreedom. Timothy Snyder
Fear. Bob Woodward
A Place for Us. Fatima Farheen Mirza
World and Town. Gish Jen
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky. Jana Casale
I Am I Am I Am. Maggie O'farrell
Crazy Cat Lady Finds Love. Sudesna Ghosh
The Line That Held Us. David Joy
The Birds of Opulence. Crystal Wilkinson
The Only Story. Julian Barnes
Doctors of Philosophy. Muriel Spark
Blaming. Elizabeth Taylor
The Cows. Lydia Davis
Between the Pages: Reflections on Reading. Kathleen Adelaide
My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Ottessa Moshfegh
The Art of Misdiagnosis: Survivng My Mother's Suicide. Gayle Brandeis
All for Nothing. Walter Kempowski
Southernmost. Silas House
Educated. Tara Westover
The Parasites. Daphne du Maurier
I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land. Connie Willis
Clock Dance. Anne Tyler
Florida. Lauren Groff
Theory of Bastards. Audrey Schulman
The Gone World. Tom Sweterlitsch
The Radium Girls. Kate Moore
Told By an Idiot. Rose Macaulay
Black Out. Ragnar Jonasson
How I Shed My Skin. Jim Grimsley
Independent People. Halldor Laxness
The Afterlives. Thomas Pierce
The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. Margareta Magnusson
The Overstory. Richard Powers
More Was Lost. Eleanor Perenyi
Basket of Deplorables. Tom Rachman
Li'l Dan, the Drummer Boy: A Civil War Story. Romare Bearden
Grief Cottage. Gail Godwin
The Animators. Kayla Rae Whitaker
Sycamore. Bryn Chancellor
Red Clocks. Leni Zumas
Exit West. Nohsin Hamid
Reykjavik Nights. Arnaldur Indridason
Fever Dream. Samanta Schweblin
The Invoice. Jonas Karlsson
The Journey Home. Olaf Olafsson
Iceland Travel Guide. Lars Jonsson
Sing, Unburied, Sing. Jesmyn Ward
The Misfortune of Marion Palm.Emily Culliton
The Greenhouse. Audur Ava Olarsdottir
The Idiot. Elif Batuman
The Only Harmless Great Thing. Brooke Bolander
Pachinko. Min Jin Lee
Under the Glacier. Halldor Laxness
Improvement. Joan Silber
The Power. Naomi Alderman
The Pets. Brogi Olafsson

Books Read in 2017
(in backwards order)
Imagine Me Gone. Adam Haslett
A Book of American Martyrs. Joyce Carol Oates
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. Gail Honeyman
The Last Ballad. Wiley Cash
The Leavers. Lisa Ko
The Dream Watcher. Barbara Wesba
The Changeling. Victor LaValle
The Tidal Zone. Sarah Moss
A Loving, Faithful Animal. Josephine Rowe
Picnic at Hanging Rock. Joan Lindsay
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake. Chiara Barzini
La Belle Sauvage. Philip Pullman
Bilgewater. Jane Gardam
H is for Hawk. Helen Macdonald
Joyride to Jupiter. Nuala O'Connor
Modern Gods. Nick Laird
Mitzi Bytes. Kerry Clare
The Trespasser. Tana French
Behold the Dreamers. Imblo Mbue
The Burning Girl. Claire Messed
Molly Fox's Birthday. Deirdre Madden
The Sheltered Life. Ellen Glasgow
The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life. Anu Partaken
The Long View. Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Forgotten Waltz. Anne Enright
Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy. Anne Lamott
Single, Carefree, Mellow. Katherine Heiny
Standard Deviation. Katherine Heiny
The Spinning Heart. Donal Ryan
The Essex Serpent. Sarah Perry
American Gods. Neil Gaiman
American War. Omar El Akkad
The Love-Child. Edith Olivier
Anything is Possible. Elizabeth Strout
Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World. Nell Stevens
New York 2140. Kim Stanley Robinson
Everything I Never Told You. Celeste Ng
Pretending is Lying. Dominique Goblet
No One is Coming to Save Us. Stephanie Powell Watts
Ill Will. Dan Chaon
Edith's Diary. Patricia Highsmith
Idaho. Emily Rushovich
The Core of the Sun. Johanna Sinisalo
Transit. Rachel Cusk
The Handmaid's Tale. Margaret Atwood
Homegoing. Yaa Gyasi
The Unseen World. Liz Moore
National Security and Double Government. Michael J. Glennon
The Believers. Zoe Heller
The Mothers. Brit Bennett
Version Control. Dexter Palmer
The Underground Railroad. Colson Whitehead
Butterflies in November. Audur Ava Olafsdottir
Grief is the Thing with Feathers. Max Porter
We Love You, Charlie Freeman. Kaitlyn Greenidge
The Nix. Nathan Hill
All the Birds in the Sky. Charlie Jane Anders
The Sport of Kings. C.E. Morgan
The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble
The Soul in Paraphrase. Robert Boswell
Little Labors. Rivka Galchen
The Lady on the Hill: How Biltmore Estate Became an American Icon. Howard E. Covington Jr.



Books Read in 2016
(in backwards order)
Disturbing the Peace. Richard Yates
Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light. Cyril Wong
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Ruth Franklin
We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Shirley Jackson
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. Erik Larson
The Sundial. Shirley Jackson
The Unknown Bridesmaid. Margaret Forster
The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047. Lionel Shriver
In Gratitude. Jenny Diski
Vinegar Girl. Anne Tyler
The Italian Girl. Iris Murdoch
Aaron and Alexander: The Most Famous Duel in American History. Don Brown
Everybody's Fool. Richard Russo
The Gate of Angels. Penelope Fitzgerald
The Longest Journey. E.M. Forster
The Beginning of Spring. Penelope Fitzgerald
The Soul of an Octopus. Sy Montgomery
Under the Udala Trees. Chinelo Okparanta
Innocence. Penelope Fitzgerald
The Portable Veblen. Elizabeth McKenzie
Karate Chop and Minna Needs Rehearsal Space. Dorthe Nors
At Freddie's. Penelope Fitzgerald
The Plot Against America. Philip Roth
My Name is Lucy Barton. Elizabeth Strout
Human Voices. Penelope Fitzgerald
At Hawthorn Time. Melissa Harrison
The Story of My Teeth. Valeria Luiselli
Journey by Moonlight. Antal Szerb
The Turner House. Angela Flournay
A Birthday Cake for George Washington. Ramin Ganeshram
Offshore. Penelope Fitzgerald.
The Tsar of Love and Techno. Anthony Marra
The Bookshop. Penelope Fitzgerald
The New World. Chris Adrian
The Sellout. Paul Beatty
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Sarah Manguso
The Water Museum. Luis Alberto Urrea
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Elizabeth Gilbert
The Past. Tessa Hadley
Aurora. Kim Stanley Robinson
"At Christmas Time." Anton Chekhov
Fates and Furies. Lauren Groff

Books Read in 2015
(in backwards order)
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Marie Kondo
The Flight of the Enchanter. Iris Murdoch
The Year of Living Danishly. Helen Russell
Our Souls at Night. Kent Haruf
The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789, Joseph J. Ellis
The Skin Chairs. Barbara Comyns
A Few Figs From Thistles. Edna St. Vincent Millay
Submission. Michel Houellebecq
The Strange Children. Caroline Gordon.
We Should All Be Feminists. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
After Alice. Gregory Maguire
To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee
Go Set a Watchman. Harper Lee
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. Svetlana Alexievich
The Juniper Tree. Barbara Comyns
Christ's Ventriloquists: the Event that Created Christianity. Eric Zuesse.
The Chimes. Anna Smaill
John Adams. David McCullough
The Go-Between. L.P. Hartley
Let Me Tell You. Shirley Jackson
Birds in Tiny Cages. Barbara Comyns
Middlesex. Jeffrey Eugenides
Hearing Secret Harmonies. Anthony Powell
Steffan Green. Richmal Crompton
Man at the Helm. Nina Stibbe
Between the World and Me. Ta-Hehisi Coates
Temporary Kings. Anthony Powell.
Mr. Fox. Barbara Comyns
The Seed Collectors. Scarlett Thomas
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. Barbara Comyns
Books Do Furnish a Room. Anthony Powell
Barren Ground. Ellen Glasgow
Early Warning. Jane Smiley
Horse Heaven. Jane Smiley
The Military Philosophers. Anothony Powell
A God in Ruins. Kate Atkinson
The Green Road. Anne Enright
Lucky Alan and Other Stories. Jonathan Lethem
A Reunion of Ghosts. Judith Claire Mitchell
Extraordinary. Miriam Spitzer Franklin
Sleep Donation. Karen Russell
The Children's Crusade. Ann Packer
The Folded Clock: A Diary. Heidi Julavits
Springtime on Mars. Susan Woodring
Being Mortal.  Atul Gawande
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Anne Tyler
Find Me. Laura Van Den Berg
Eugenie Grandet. Honore de Balzac
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. Joshua Ferris
Road Ends. Mary Lawson
Duel with the Devil. Paul Collins
On the Banks of Plum Creek. Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Soldier's Art. Anthony Powell
A Spool of Blue Thread. Anne Tyler
Horses of God. Mahi Binebine
Little House on the Prairie. Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Valley of Bones. Anthony Powell
The Confessions of Nat Turner. William Styron
My October. Claire Holden Rothman
The Kindly Ones. Anthony Powell
Casanova's Chinese Restaurant. Anthony Powell
The Vet's Daughter. Barbara Comyns
The Golden Child. Penelope Fitzgerald
The End of Days. Jenny Erpenbeck


Books Read in 2014
(in backwards order)
A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion. Ron Hansen
Hello, I'm Johnny Cash. G. Neri
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By. Georges Simenon
Euphoria. Lily King
Florence Gordon. Brian Morton
Disputed Land. Tim Pears
Mrs. Frensham Describes a Circle. Richmal Crompton
At Mrs. Lippincote's. Elizabeth Taylor
Land of Love and Drowning. Tiphanie Yanique
A Town of Empty Rooms. Karen E. Bender
The Soul of Kindness. Elizabeth Taylor
Memory of Water. Emmi Itarenta
The Priory. Dorothy Whipple
The Good Husband. Gail Godwin
What I Didn't See and Other Stories. Karen Joy Fowler
Stoner. John William
Chalcot Crescent. Fay Weldon
An Untamed State. Roxane Gay
Some Luck. Jane Smiley
Talk Talk. T.C. Boyle
The Bone Clocks. David Mitchell
In America. Susan Sontag
The Mystery of Mrs. Blencarrow. Mrs. Oliphant
Turtle Diary. Russell Hoban
The Book of Strange New Things. Michel Faber
The Beggar Maid. Alice Munro
The Girls from Corona del Mar. Rufi Thorpe
Night Waking. Sarah Moss
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Hilary Mantel
The Women on the Porch. Caroline Gordon
At Freddie's. Penelope Fitzgerald
At Lady Molly's. Anthony Powell
Out of the Dark. Patrick Modiano
The Secret Place. Tana French
The Fault in Our Stars. John Green
Goldengrove. Francine Prose
Stone Mattress. Margaret Atwood
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. Lawrence Wright
Bough Down. Karen Green
Station Eleven. Emily St. John Mandel
The Paying Guests. Sarah Waters
The Solitary Summer. Elizabeth von Arnim
The Arsonist. Sue Miller
Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison. Piper Kerman
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. David Mitchell
We Need New Names. NoViolet Bulawayo
Burial Rites. Hannah Kent
The Children. Edith Wharton
Thunderstruck and Other Stories. Elizabeth McCracken
Democracy. Joan Didion
Play It As It Lays. Joan Didion
When I Lived In Modern Times. Linda Grant
Dance of the Happy Shades. Alice Munro
The Empathy Exams. Leslie Jamison
The Dazzle of Day. Molly Gloss
A Lemon and a Star. E.C. Spykman
The Circle. Dave Eggers
California. Edan Lepucki
Call It Sleep. Henry Roth
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
American Innovations. Rivka Galchen
Last Friends. Jane Gardam
The Man in the Wooden Hat. Jane Gardam
Alys, Always. Harriet Lane
The Talented Mr. Ripley. Patrica Highsmith.
Old Filth. Jane Gardam
The Martian. Andy Weir
I Remember You. Yrsa Sigurdardottir
Shirley. Susan Scarf Merrell
Tono-Bungay. H.G. Wells
Off Course. Michelle Huneven
All My Puny Sorrows. Miriam Toews
An Unnecessary Woman. Ribih Alameddine
Winter's Bone. Daniel Woodrell
Young God. Katherine Faw Morris
We Are Taking Only What We Need. Stephanie Powell Watts
Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Roz Chast
My Brilliant Friend. Elena Ferrante
Fun Home. Alison Bechdel
Americanah. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I Murdered My Library. Linda Grant
Anagrams. Lorrie Moore
My Life in Middlemarch. Rebecca Mead
Goat Mountain. David Vann
Casebook. Mona Simpson
How Jesus Became God. The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. Bart D. Ehrman.
The Liars Gospel. Naomi Alderman
Lives of Girls and Women. Alice Munro
Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books. Wendy Lesser
Dept. of Speculation. Jenny Offill
Perfect. Rachel Joyce
Everything Will Be All Right. Tessa Hadley
The Hothouse by the East River. Muriel Spark
Clever Girl. Tessa Hadley
The Sentinel. Rebecca West
The Sorrow of Angels. Jon Kaman Stefansson
Lookaway, Lookaway. Wilton Barnhardt
Bark. Lorrie Moore
The People in the Trees. Hanya Yanagihara
The Quiet American. Graham Greene
The Signature of All Things. Elizabeth Gilbert
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Elizabeth Kolbert
And the Land Lay Still. James Robertson
Mia and Woody: Love and Betrayal. Kristi Groteke
The Acceptance World. Anthony Powell
Mad Puppetstown. M.J. Farrell (Molly Keane)
The Horses. Elaine Walker
Too Much Happiness. Alice Munro
Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Katherine Anne Porter
War Nurse. Rebecca West
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Alice Munro
Jamaica Inn. Daphne du Maurier
Fangirl. Rainbow Rowell
The Goldfinch. Donna Tartt
Starting Over. Elizabeth Spencer


Books Read in 2013
(in backwards order)
The House of the Spirits. Isabel Allende
The Night Bookmobile. Audrey Niffenegger
The Unicorn. Iris Murdoch
Zelda: A Biography. Nancy Milford
A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, and The Thanksgiving Visitor. Truman Capote
A Suitable Boy. Vikram Seth
The Universe versus Alex Woods. Gavin Extence
Dear Life. Alice Munro
Reading in Bed. Hermione Lee
Fever. Mary Beth Keane
The Good Lord Bird. James McBride
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Karen Joy Fowler
The Adjacent. Christopher Priest
The Pure Gold Baby. Margaret Drabble.
The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards. Kristopher Jansma
The Invisible Circus. Jennifer Egan
The Secret World of Sleep. Penelope A. Lewis
Last Rituals. Yrsa Sigurdardottir
Young Hearts Crying. Richard Yates
Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland. Sarah Moss
MaddAddam. Margaret Atwood
If the Old Could. . . by Jane Somers. Doris Lessing
Diary of a Good Neighbour by Jane Somers. Doris Lessing
Night Film. Marisha Pessl
The Quarry. Iain Banks
Life After Life. Kate Atkinson
Tumbledown. Robert Boswell.
Hidden Victims Hidden Healers: An Eight-Stage Healing Process for Family and Friends of the Mentally Ill. Julie Tallard Johnson
My Sster's Keeper; Learning to Cope with a Sibling's Mental Illness. Margaret Moorman
Strange Bodies. Marcel Theroux
The Cuckoo's Calling. Robert Galbraith
Lean on Pete. Willy Vlautin
Norwegian by Night. Derek B. Miller
Artificial Things. Karen Joy Fowler
In the Woods. Tana French
The Year of the Flood. Margaret Atwood
Glaciers. Alexis M Smith
Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. Anton Disclafani
Oryx and Crake. Margaret Atwood
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Karen Joy Fowler
Sparta. Roxana Robinson
And Sons. David Gilbert
The Ridleys. Richmal Crompton
The End of Vandalism. Tom Drury
Fools. Joan Silber
The Sense of an Ending. Julian Barnes
The Interestings. Meg Wolitzer
The Book and the Brotherhood. Iris Murdoch
When God was a Rabbit. Sarah Winman
Apologize, Apologize! Elizabeth Kelly
100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: A Memoir. Kim Stafford
The Keep. Jennifer Egan
The Woman Upstairs. Claire Messud
Bunner Sisters. Edith Wharton
Flora. Gail Godwin
Stet: An Editor's Life. Diana Athill
A Childhood in Scotland. Christian Miller
The Blackhouse. Peter May
The Burgess Boys. Elizabeth Strout
The Imperfectionists. Tom Rachman
Good-bye to All of That. Robert Graves
The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life. Ann Patchett.
The Waterworks. E.L. Doctorow
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. James Lasdun
Ragtime. E.L. Doctorow
Toby's Room. Pat Barker
May We Be Forgiven. A.M. Homes
Brazzaville Beach. William Boyd
Life After Life. Kate Atkinson
The Judge. Rebecca West
The Uninvited. Liz Jensen
Small Island. Andrea Levy
The Eustace Diamonds. Anthony Trollope
Breakfast of Champions. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Books Read in 2012
(in backwards order)
Cat's Eye. Margaret Atwood
The French Lieutenant's Woman. John Fowles
The Long Winter. Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Realms of Gold. Margaret Drabble
The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. Jonathan Evison
Wish Her Safe at Home. Stephen Benatar
What Happened to Sophie Wilder. Christopher R. Beha
Crewe Train. Rose Macauley
The Heart of the Matter. Graham Greene
Weird Sisters. Eleanor Brown
Hangsaman. Shirley Jackson
The Tree of Forgetfulness. Pam Durban
The Yellow Admiral. Patrick O'Brian
The Commodore. Patrick O'Brian
The Wine-Dark Sea. Patrick O'Brian
A Touch of Mistletoe. Barbara Comyns
2312. Kim Stanley Robinson
April Witch. Majgull Axelsson
Red Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson
Too Many Magpies. Elizabeth Baines
The Gooseboy. A.L. Barker
More Baths Less Talking. Nick Hornby
Cloud Atlas. David Mitchell
Treasure Island!!! Sara Levine
To the North. Elizabeth Bowen
The Winds of Heaven. Monica Dickens
Sarah Canary. Karen Joy Fowler
Walking Lessons. Reynolds Price
Ragnarok. A.S. Byatt
The Year We Left Home. Jean Thompson
Slouching Towards Kalamazoo. Peter De Vries
Broken Harbor. Tana French
Boleto. Alyson Hagy
Z. Lauren Baratz-Logsted
11/22/63. Stephen King
The Catcher in the Rye. J.D. Salinger
The Wise Virgins. Leonard Woolf
Eve's Ransom. George Gissing
Reply All. Robin Hemley
Three Weeks in December. Audrey Schulman
Our Friend the Charlatan. George Gissing
Existence. David Brin
Bring Up the Bodies. Hilary Mantel
In a Perfect World. Laura Kasischke
The Astronomer and Other Stories. Doris Betts
A Candle in Her Room. Ruth M. Arthur
Children in Reindeer Woods. Kristin Omarsdottir
A Buyer's Market. Anthony Powell
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. Judy Blume
Born in Exile. George Gissing
A Question of Upbringing. Anthony Powell
Harriet the Spy. Louise Fitzhugh
Sharp Objects. Gillian Flynn
Dark Places. Gillian Flynn
Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir). Jenny Lawson
Gone Girl. Gillian Flynn
Wolf Hall. Hilary Mantel
The Long Secret. Louise Fitzhugh
The Yacoubian Building. Alaa Al Aswany
The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Arthur B. Evans et al, eds.
Miss Mackenzie. Anthony Trollope
Anne Tyler: A Bio-Bibliography. Robert W. Craft
Leviticus
A Good Hard Look. Ann Napolitano
Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere. Don McLeese
Crusoe's Daughter. Jane Gardam
The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. M. Glenn Taylor
A Land More Kind Than Home. Wiley Cash
The Cove. Ron Rash
Friends and Heroes. Olivia Manning
The Abbess of Crewe. Muriel Spark
The Last Gentleman. Walker Percy
The Beginner's Goodbye. Anne Tyler
The Spoilt City. Olivia Manning
The Great Fortune. Olivia Manning
How We Got Insipid. Jonathan Lethem
My Mortal Enemy. Willa Cather
Chronic City. Jonathan Lethem
Exodus.
Genesis.
The Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins
Arcadia. Lauren Groff
Cora Glynn. Peter Cameron
The Middle Ground. Margaret Drabble
The Sense of an Ending. Julian Barnes
Searching for Caleb. Anne Tyler
The Marriage Plot. Jeffrey Eugenides
Assumption. Percival Everett
Is He Popenjoy? Anthony Trollope
Cutting for Stone. Abraham Verghese
Cain. Jose Saramago
Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Katherine Boo
Serenity: the Shepherd's Tale. Joss Whedon, Zack Whedon and Chris Samnee
Genesis. Stephen Mitchell
Day of the Triffids. John Wyndham
State of Wonder. Ann Patchett
A Wrinkle in Time. Madeleine L'Engle
A Good Man. Guy Vanderhaeghe
Earth. David Brin
A World Elsewhere. Wayne Johnston

Books Read in 2011
(in backwards order)
God is Not Great. Christopher Hitchens
Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen
Death Comes to Pemberley. P.D. James
More Home Life. Alice Thomas Ellis
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. Alan Bradley
Wild Life. Molly Gloss
The Odd Woman. Gail Godwin
There but for the. Ali Smith
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. Margaret Atwood
Zone One. Colson Whitehead
Home Life. Alice Thomas Ellis
Pillars of Gold. Alice Thomas Ellis
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. Helen Simonson
Nightwoods. Charles Frazier
Caleb Williams. William Godwin
The Revisionists. Thomas Mullen
The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin. Joe McGinniss
Ann Veronica. H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man. H.G. Wells
The Map of Time. Felix J. Palma
The Time Machine. H.G. Wells
Galore. Michael Crummey
Fiction Ruined My Family. Jeanne Darst
Light from a Distant Star. Mary McGarry Morris
The Memory of All That. Katharine Weber
Agamemnon. Aeschylus
Model Home. Eric Puchner
Lie Down in Darkness. William Styron
The Last Werewolf. Glen Duncan
Dreamers of the Day. Mary Doria Russell
The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War. Stephen Budiansky
We Had It So Good. Linda Grant
Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. Brad Watson
Darkness Visible. William Styron
Reading My Father. Alexandra Styron
Theatre. W. Somerset Maugham
Liza of Lambeth. W. Somerset Maugham
The American Senator. Anthony Trollope
The Razor's Edge. W. Somerset Maugham
Emily, Alone. Stewart O'Nan
The Painted Veil. W. Somerset Maugham
Doc. Mary Doria Russell
Cakes and Ale. W. Somerset Maugham
The Professor and the Madman. Simon Winchester
In Persuasion Nation. George Saunders
When the Killing's Done. T.C. Boyle
The Sisters Brothers. Patrick deWitt
The Towers of Trebizond. Rose Macaulay
Wish You Were Here. Stewart O'Nan
Skippy Dies. Paul Murray
Wounded. Percival Everett
Home Fires. Gene Wolfe
Island Beneath the Sea. Isabel Allende
The Sundial. Shirley Jackson
A Visit from the Goon Squad. Jennifer Egan
Journal of a UFO Investigator. David Halperin
The House of Mirth. Edith Wharton
The Transit of Venus. Shirley Hazzard
This Vacant Paradise. Victoria Patterson
Spotted Horses. William Faulkner
Who was Changed and Who was Dead. Barbara Comyns
The Chrysalids. John Wyndham
Among Others. Jo Walton
Safe from the Neighbors. Steve Yarbrough
Purple Hibiscus. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Art of Time in Fiction. Joan Silber
The Brutal Telling. Louise Penny
Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond. Margaret Oliphant
The Far Cry. Emma Smith
Super Sad True Love Story. Gary Shteyngart
The Waves. Virginia Woolf
Atonement. Ian McEwan
Othello. William Shakespeare
He Knew He Was Right. Anthony Trollope
PopCo. Scarlett Thomas
Selected Myths. Plato
Started Early, Took My Dog. Kate Atkinson
All Clear. Connie Willis
Cousin Rosamund. Rebecca West
Blackout. Connie Willis
This Real Night. Rebecca West

Books Read in 2010
(in backwards order)
The Lost Art of Reading. David L. Ulin
So Long, See You Tomorrow. William Maxwell
The Shooting Party. Anton Chekhov
True Grit. Charles Portis
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Karen Russell
The Old Maid: The 'Fifties. Edith Wharton
My Hollywood. Mona Simpson
Bound. Antonya Nelson
So Long a Letter. Mariama Ba
Palace Walk. Naguib Mahfouz
The Day of the Locust. Nathanael West
The Way We Live Now. Anthony Trollope
Love, Again. Doris Lessing
The Quantum Thief. Hannu Rajaniemi
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. Elisabeth Tova Bailey
The Wake of Forgiveness. Bruce Machart
Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So. Mark Vonnegut
In Utopia. J.C. Hallman
How to Be Alone. Jonathan Franzen
The Invisible Bridge. Julie Orringer
Madame Bovary. Gustave Flaubert
Pedigree. Georges Simenon
The Best American Short Stories 2010. Richard Russo, ed.
The Small Room. May Sarton
Foreign Bodies. Cynthia Ozick
The Ambassadors. Henry James
Kraken. China Mieville
Mennonite in a Little Black Dress.  Rhoda Janzen
Freedom. Jonathan Franzen
Boneshaker. Cherie Priest
I'd Know You Anywhere. Laura Lippman
Nashville Chrome. Rick Bass
To the End of the Land. David Grossman
A Perfectly Good Family. Lionel Shriver
Composed. Rosanne Cash
Miracle Boy and Other Stories. Pinckney Benedict
Ladder of Years. Anne Tyler
Burning Bright. Ron Rash
Know Nothing. Mary Lee Settle
Our Tragic Universe. Scarlett Thomas
Demos. George Gissing
Manservant and Maidservant. Ivy Compton-Burnett
The Cookbook Collector. Allegra Goodman
Ulysses. James Joyce
The Bloomsday Book. Harry Blamires
A Meaningful Life. L.J. Davis
School for Love. Olivia Manning
Cold Sassy Tree. Olive Ann Burns
Faithful Place. Tana French
Oil Notes. Rick Bass
Memento Mori. Muriel Spark
The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Wallace Stegner
The Sweetest Dream. Doris Lessing
The Home-maker. Dorothy Canfield
The Passage. Justin Cronin
The End of Mr. Y. Scarlett Thomas
The Mountain Lion. Jean Stafford
The Windup Girl. Paolo Bacigalupi
Bad Blood. Lorna Sage
The Fox in the Attic. Richard Hughes
In the Year of Jubilee. George Gissing
Private Life. Jane Smiley
Raney. Clyde Edgerton
Shane. Jack Schaefer
Arctic Summer. E.M. Forster
My Life and Hard Times. James Thurber
As a Friend. Forrest Gander
Cassandra at the Wedding. Dorothy Baker
Homer and Langley. E.L. Doctorow
Islands. Marta Randall
The British Museum is Falling Down. David Lodge
The Invention of Morel. Adolfo Bioy Casares
Max and the Cats. Moacyr Scliar
We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Shirley Jackson
Wigs on the Green. Nancy Mitford
The Third Rail. Michael Harvey
Sleeping Fires. George Gissing
Angelology. Danielle Trussoni
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Philip Pullman
Mrs. Adams in Winter. Michael O'Brien
Indemnity Only. Sara Paretsky
Germinal. Emile Zola
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Rebecca Skloot
Next. James Hynes
Life Sentences. Laura Lippman
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Elif Batuman
True Murder. Yaba Badoe
Overhead in a Balloon. Mavis Gallant
Stalking Irish Madness. Patrick Tracey
The Macdermots of Ballycloran. Anthony Trollope
Things We Didn't See Coming. Steven Amsterdam
The Hopkins Manuscript. R.C. Sherriff
Orlando. Virginia Woolf
Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing. Lydia Peelle
The Behaviour of Moths. Poppy Adams
Novel on Yellow Paper. Stevie Smith
Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton. J.G. Ballard
The Little Stranger. Sarah Waters
Can You Forgive Her? Anthony Trollope
The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Michael Chabon
The Master and Margarita. Mikhail Bulgakov


Books Read in 2009
(in backwards order)
The Magicians. Lev Grossman
The Claverings. Anthony Trollope
The Georges and the Jewels. Jane Smiley
Howards End is on the Landing. Susan Hill
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Elizabeth Smart
Blind Man's Buff. Richmal Crompton
The Dead Secret. Wilkie Collins
A Friend of the Family. Lauren Goldstein
The Hidden. Tobias Hill
New World Monkeys. Nancy Mauro
Small Beneath the Sky. Lorna Crozier
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. Dubravka Ugresic
The Family Man. Elinor Lipman
The Woman in Black. Susan Hill
The Truelove. Patrick O'Brian
The Blank Wall. Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Zeitoun. Dave Eggers
The Haunt. A.L. Barker
Her Fearful Symmetry. Audrey Niffenegger
The Wreath. Sigrid Undset
This is Where I Leave You. Jonathan Tropper
The Servants' Quarters. Lynn Freed
Submerged: Selected Stories. A.L. Barker
Poseidon's Steed. Helen Scales
The Bertrams. Anthony Trollope
Hamlet. John Marsden
A Gate at the Stairs. Lorrie Moore
Nikolski. Nicolas Dickner
Going Away Shoes. Jill McCorkle
The Bookshop. Penelope Fitzgerald
The Nutmeg of Consolation. Patrick O'Brian
Don't Look Now. Daphne du Maurier
The Maltese Falcon. Dashiell Hammett
Await Your Reply. Dan Chaon
Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace
Columbine. Dave Cullen
Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. Susan Jane Gilman
Dance Night. Dawn Powell
Noah's Compass. Anne Tyler
Princes in the Land. Joanna Cannan
Laura Rider's Masterpiece. Jane Hamilton
The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster. Kaye Gibbons
Everything Matters! Ron Currie, Jr.
The Owl Killers. Karen Maitland
The Texicans. Nina Vida
Six Ponies. Josephine Pullein-Thompson
At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom. Amy Hempel
Reasons to Live. Amy Hempel
Family Roundabout. Richmal Crompton
April and Oliver. Tess Callahan
A Broom of One's Own: Words on Writing, Housecleaning and Life. Nancy Peacock
One Foot in Eden. Ron Rash
Making Conversation. Christine Longford
The Children's Book. A.S. Byatt
The New Valley. Josh Weil
The Angel's Game. Carlos Ruiz Zafon
My Soul to Take. Yrsa Sigurdardottir
Vanessa and Virginia. Susan Sellers
The Slaves of Solitude. Patrick Hamilton
Woodsburner. John Pipkin
Book by Book: Notes of Reading and Life. Michael Dirda
The Vicar of Bullhampton. Anthony Trollope
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding. Julia Strachey
Darling Jim. Christian Moerk
Etta. Gerald Kolpan
Book of Norse Myths. Ingrid and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire
Great Granny Webster. Caroline Blackwood
When Will There Be Good News? Kate Atkinson
The Fire Gospel. Michel Faber
Genesis. Bernard Beckett
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. Reif Larsen
The Warden. Anthony Trollope
Lulu in Marrakech. Diane Johnson
The Tricking of Freya. Christina Sunley
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. Brad Gooch
The Romance of a Shop. Amy Levy
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. A.S. Byatt
The Post-Office Girl. Stefan Zweig
The Children's Bach. Helen Garner
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. Jon Meacham
I See You Everywhere. Julia Glass
The Fall of Hyperion. Dan Simmons
Sputnik Caledonia. Andrew Crumey
Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them). Bart Ehrman
American Sphinx. Joseph J. Ellis
Disquiet. Julia Leigh
Lark and Termite. Jayne Anne Phillips
Buddenbrooks. Thomas Mann
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Margaret Atwood
Alex and Me. Irene M. Pepperberg
A Life's Morning. George Gissing
Hyperion. Dan Simmons
The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia. Laura Miller
Sexing the Cherry. Jeanette Winterson
The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America. James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn.
The Siege of Krishnapur. J.G. Farrell
The Flying Troutmans. Mirian Toews
The Whiskey Rebels. David Liss
Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. Richard Fortey
East of Eden. John Steinbeck
The Secret Scripture. Sebastian Barry


Books Read in 2008
(in backwards order)
The Normal One: Life With a Difficult or Damaged Sibling. Jeanne Safer
The Spare Room. Helen Garner
Shakespeare Wrote For Money. Nick Hornby
Rock Crystal. Adalbert Stifter
The Emancipated. George Gissing
Animal Farm. George Orwell
The Northern Clemency. Phillip Hensher
How to Read Novels Like a Professor. Thomas C. Foster
I Know This Much is True. Wally Lamb
The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
The Bible Salesman. Clyde Edgerton
The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Muriel Barbery
Hurry Down Sunshine. Michael Greenberg
When We Were Romans. Matthew Kneale
Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn Waugh
Ruth Hall. Fanny Fern
The Likeness. Tana French
The Return. Walter de la Mare
This Must Be the Place. Anna Winger
How Fiction Works. James Wood
In the Woods. Tana French
Cranford. Elizabeth Gaskell
What is the What. Dave Eggers
The Thirteen-Gun Salute. Patrick O'Brian
Good-bye and Amen. Beth Gutcheon
Leeway Cottage. Beth Gutcheon
A High Wind in Jamaica. Richard Hughes
Cost. Roxana Robinson
Julius Winsome. Gerard Donovan
Mudbound. Hillary Jordan
Burr. Gore Vidal
The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order. Joan Wickersham
A Quiet Storm. Rachel Howzell Hall
Everything That Rises Must Converge. Flannery O'Connor
Undiscovered Country. Lin Enger
The Well and the Mine. Gin Phillips
Split Estate. Charlotte Bacon.
The Calling. Inger Ash Wolfe
Requiem, Mass. John Dufresne
Was This Man a Genius? Julie Hecht
The Glimpses of the Moon. Edith Wharton
The Writing Class. Jincy Willett
The Bell. Iris Murdoch
Silas Marner. George Eliot
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. Peter Cameron
Oscar and Lucinda. Peter Carey
Happy Trails to You. Julie Hecht
Mary Barton. Elizabeth Gaskell
The Grass Harp. Truman Capote
The Philosopher's Apprentice. James Morrow
Olive Kitteridge. Elizabeth Strout
The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam. Lauren Liegenberg
The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread. Don Robertson
The Heroines. Eileen Favorite
Child 44. Tom Rob Smith
A Dangerous Age. Ellen Gilchrist
Dreaming in Cuban. Cristina Garcia
The Once and Future King. T.H. White
Dreams From My Father. Barack Obama
Boy and Girl Tramps of America. Thomas Minehan
Wives and Daughters. Elizabeth Gaskell
My Own Kind of Freedom. Steven Brust
A Miracle of Catfish. Larry Brown
The Long Emergency. James Howard Kunstler
World Made By Hand. James Howard Kunstler
The Stone Angel. Margaret Laurence
Jane Austen: A Life. Claire Tomalin
The Pursuit of Love. Nancy Mitford
Half of a Yellow Sun. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
People of the Book. Geraldine Brooks
Our Horses in Egypt. Rosalind Belben
An Absolute Gentleman. R.M. Kinder
The Wig My Father Wore. Anne Enright
Hons and Rebels. Jessica Mitford
The God Delusion. Richard Dawkins
Every Last Cuckoo. Kate Maloy
Fire in the Blood. Irene Nemirovsky
The Birds Fall Down. Rebecca West

Books Read in 2007
(in backwards order)
The Letter of Marque. Patrick O'Brian
The Gravedigger's Daughter. Joyce Carol Oates
For Love Alone. Christina Stead
Tree of Smoke. Denis Johnson
Christmas Holiday. W. Somerset Maugham
Bridge of Sighs. Richard Russo
Daniel Deronda. George Eliot
The Owl Service. Alan Garner
No Exit. Jean-Paul Sartre
Last Night at the Lobster. Stewart O'Nan
Identical Strangers. Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein
The Stranger. Albert Camus
The Gathering. Anne Enright
The Little Hotel. Christina Stead
The Rainbow. D.H. Lawrence
The Thirteenth Tale. Diane Setterfield
The Turn of the Screw. Henry James
The Stylist. Cai Emmons
The Sea Lady. Margaret Drabble
The Fountain Overflows. Rebecca West
The Woman Who Waited. Andrei Makine
The Shadow-Line. Joseph Conrad
Angle of Repose. Wallace Stegner
Twilight. Stephenie Meyer
Sons and Lovers. D.H. Lawrence
Butcher's Crossing. John Williams
To My Dearest Friends. Patricia Volk
The Master Bedroom. Tessa Hadley
Lord Jim. Joseph Conrad
Death of a Salesman. Arthur Miller
The Looking Glass Wars. Frank Beddor
The Unvanquished. William Faulkner
The Used World. Haven Kimmel
The Art of Subtext. Charles Baxter
Sleepless Nights. Elizabeth Hardwick
The Reverse of the Medal. Patrick O'Brian
The Far Side of the World. Patrick O'Brian
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. J.K. Rowling
A Dead Language. Peter Rushforth
The Beautiful Miscellaneous. Dominic Smith
The Thinking Reed. Rebecca West
At Large and At Small. Anne Fadiman
The Assault on Reason. Al Gore
The Maytrees. Annie Dillard
The River Wife. Jonis Agee
A Midsummer Night's Dream. William Shakespeare
The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Susanna Clarke
Other Voices, Other Rooms. Truman Capote
A Good Man is Hard to Find. Flannery O'Connor
Pete Duel: A Biography. Paul Green
Joe Gould's Secret. Joseph Mitchell
The Good Soldier. Ford Madox Ford
The Violent Bear It Away. Flannery O'Connor
The Folded World. Amity Gaige
Gilgamesh. Stephen Mitchell
Out Stealing Horses. Per Petterson
The Harsh Voice. Rebecca West
Galapagos. Kurt Vonnegut
Queen of the Underworld. Gail Godwin
Doctor Faustus. Christopher Marlowe
The Translation of Dr Apelles. David Treuer
Emma. Jane Austen
The Testament of Gideon Mack. James Robertson
Heyday. Kurt Andersen
Lady Susan. Jane Austen
Pedro Paramo. Juan Rulfo
Wise Blood. Flannery O'Connor
The Comforters. Muriel Spark
Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog. Kitty Burns Florey
The Terror. Dan Simmons
The Book of Lost Things. John Connolly
David Copperfield. Charles Dickens
Waiting for Godot. Samuel Beckett
Field Notes from a Catastrophe. Elizabeth Kolbert
The List. Tara Ison
The Return of the Native. Thomas Hardy
The Street of Crocodiles. Bruno Schulz
"Ward No. 6." Anton Chekhov
Six Characters in Search of an Author. Luigi Pirandello
The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Dostoevsky
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Marcel Proust

Books Read in 2006
(in backwards order)
Monkeyluv. Robert Sapolsky
Twilight of the Superheroes. Deborah Eisenberg
The Red and the Black. Stendhal
Housekeeping vs. The Dirt. Nick Hornby
Macbeth. William Shakespeare
The Echo Maker. Richard Powers
The Cherry Orchard. Anton Chekhov
Reading Like a Writer. Francine Prose
Ghosts. John Fuller
One Good Turn. Kate Atkinson
Night. Elie Wiesel
Letters from Yellowstone. Diane Smith
Indiana. George Sand
Harriet Hume. Rebecca West
The Road. Cormac McCarthy
Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Marisha Pessl
Warlock. Oakley Hall
A Spot of Bother. Mark Haddon
Little Big Man. Thomas Berger
The Taming of the Shrew. William Shakespeare
The People's Act of Love. James Meek
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. David Quammen
H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. Gordon N. Ray
The Island of Doctor Moreau. H.G. Wells
The Old Man and the Sea. Ernest Hemingway
Not Buying It. Judith Levine
Swann's Way. Marcel Proust
How Proust Can Change Your Life. Alain de Botton
Pretty Birds. Scott Simon
Triangle. Katharine Weber
Rebecca West. Fay Weldon
The Judge. Rebecca West
The Scapegoat. Mary Lee Settle
The Finishing School. Muriel Spark
Rebecca West: A Life. Victoria Glendinning
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Muriel Spark
His Majesty's Dragon. Naomi Novik
Anything Goes. Madison Smartt Bell
The Last Witchfinder. James Morrow
The Return of the Soldier. Rebecca West
Abide With Me. Elizabeth Strout
Down and Out in Paris and London. George Orwell
The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
1984. George Orwell
Black Swan Green. David Mitchell
The Messiah of Morris Avenue. Tony Hendra
Averno. Louise Gluck
Everyman. Philip Roth
The Driver's Seat. Muriel Spark
The Ox-Bow Incident. Walter Tilburg Clark
Digging to America. Anne Tyler
The Good Wife. Stewart O'Nan
The Brief History of the Dead. Kevin Brockmeier
King Lear. William Shakespeare
The Following Story. Cees Nooteboom
Intuition. Allegra Goodman
The Virginian. Owen Wister
A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bill Bryson
Suttree. Cormac McCarthy
Home Ground. Lynn Freed
Beowulf. Seamus Heaney
The Amalgamation Polka. Stephen Wright
Feed My Dear Dogs. Emma Richler
One Good Horse. Tom Groneberg
Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home. Lynn Freed
She Got Up Off the Couch. Haven Kimmel
The Three Incestuous Sisters. Audrey Niffenegger
New Grub Street. George Gissing
Walden. Henry David Thoreau
Moby Dick. Herman Melville
Spider Blue. Carla Damron
Oryx and Crake. Margaret Atwood
Seven Types of Ambiguity. Elliot Perlman
Second Lives. Richard S. Wheeler
The Winter's Tale. William Shakespeare

Books Read in 2005
(in backwards order)
The Accidental. Ali Smith
Beyond Black. Hilary Mantel
The Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion
Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne
Play It As It Lays. Joan Didion
The Midwife's Tale. Gretchen Moran Laskas
Mission to America. Walter Kirn
Weight. Jeanette Winterson
A Short History of Myth. Karen Armstrong
The Lambs of London. Peter Ackroyd
The Penelopiad. Margaret Atwood
The Solace of Open Spaces. Gretel Ehrlich
Desert Solitaire. Edward Abbey
Rising From the Plains. John McPhee
The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Mark Bittner
The March. E.L. Doctorow
On Beauty. Zadie Smith
A Canticle for Leibowitz. Walter M. Miller
The History of Love. Nicole Krauss
The Highest Tide. Jim Lynch
Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes
Specimen Days. Michael Cunningham
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. George Saunders
Picnic, Lightning. Billy Collins
Jack and Other New Poems. Maxine Kumin
Alias Smith and Jones: The Story of Two Pretty Good Bad Men. Sandra K. Sagala and JoAnne M. Bagwell
The Summer Book. Tove Jansson
As You Like It. William Shakespeare
Treason's Harbour. Patrick O'Brian
Harry Potter and the Half- Blood Prince. J.K. Rowling
Edie on the Warpath. E.C. Spykman
Terrible, Horrible Edie. E.C. Spykman
Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad
The Wild Angel. E.C. Spykman
Roger Williams. Edwin S. Gaustad
A Lemon and a Star. E.C. Spykman
Jackson's Dilemma. Iris Murdoch
"Trifles." Susan Glaspell
Alison's House. Susan Glaspell
The Historian. Elizabeth Kostova
Pinkerton's Sister. Peter Rushforth
Dracula. Bram Stoker
The Diezmo. Rick Bass
Everything You Need. A.L. Kennedy
The Age of Innocence. Edith Wharton
Ship Fever. Andrea Barrett
Nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Glass Castle. Jeannette Walls
Never Let Me Go. Kazuo Ishiguro
Joy Comes in the Morning. Jonathan Rosen
Fathers and Sons. Ivan Turgenev
Alexander Hamilton. Ron Chernow
March. Geraldine Brooks
The Ionian Mission. Patrick O'Brian
As I Lay Dying. William Faulkner
How to Breathe Underwater. Julie Orringer
A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. Eudora Welty
The Burial at Thebes. Seamus Heaney
Antigone. Sophocles
The Odyssey. Homer
Sugar and Other Stories. A.S. Byatt
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Equus. Peter Shaffer
The Casting of Bells. Jaroslav Seifert
Closely Observed Trains. Bohumil Hrabal
Back in the World. Tobias Wolff
Frankland. James Whorton, Jr.
Nursery Crimes. Ayelet Waldman
Runaway. Alice Munro
Love and Hate in Jamestown. David A. Price
The Polysyllabic Spree. Nick Hornby
Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories. Truman Capote
True Grit. Charles Portis
Heir to the Glimmering World. Cynthia Ozick
The Surgeon's Mate. Patrick O'Brian

Books Read in 2004
(in backwards order)
The Island at the Center of the World. Russell Shorto
To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf
Elsewhere in the Land of Parrots. Jim Paul
The Homeric Hymns. Diane J. Rayor
Gilead. Marilynne Robinson
"Works and Days." Hesiod
Cloud Atlas. David Mitchell
"Theogony." Hesiod
The Donnie Darko Book. Richard Kelly
The Odd Women. George Gissing
Welcome to Hard Times. E.L. Doctorow
The Final Solution. Michael Chabon
One for the Money. Janet Evanovich
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Susanna Clarke
Ideas of Heaven. Joan Silber
Case Histories. Kate Atkinson
The Fortune of War. Patrick O'Brian
Desolation Island. Patrick O'Brian
The Ghost Writer. John Harwood
The End of the Affair. Graham Greene
The Mauritius Command. Patrick O'Brian
H.M.S. Surprise. Patrick O'Brian
Setting the World Ablaze. John Ferling
The Importance of Being Earnest. Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde
The Optimist's Daughter. Eudora Welty
The Master. Colm Toibin
Checkpoint. Nicholson Baker
What's the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank
Morality Play. Barry Unsworth
Silk. Alessandro Baricco
A Change of Climate. Hilary Mantel
The Saskiad. Brian Hall
Post Captain. Patrick O'Brian
Truth & Beauty. Ann Patchett
Evidence of Things Unseen. Marianne Wiggins
Deadwood. Pete Dexter
Troll. Johanna Sinisalo
Master and Commander. Patrick O'Brian
The Jane Austen Book Club. Karen Joy Fowler
No Saints or Angels. Ivan Klima
Snow. Orhan Pamuk
Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen
Our Kind. Kate Walbert
The Confessions of Max Tivoli. Andrew Sean Greer
Kings of Infinite Space. James Hynes
Founding Brothers. Joseph Ellis
Scribbling the Cat. Alexandra Fuller
Little Black Book of Stories. A.S. Byatt
Giving Up the Ghost. Hilary Mantel
The New Confessions. William Boyd
Oracle Night. Paul Auster
How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Thomas C. Foster
Red Strangers. Elspeth Huxley
Slaughterhouse-Five. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Welcome to Paradise. Mahi Binebine
Divining Women. Kaye Gibbons
Hamlet. William Shakespeare
A Mixture of Frailties. Robertson Davies
Leaven of Malice. Robertson Davies
Little Children. Tom Perrotta
So Many Books, So Little Time. Sara Nelson
The Epicure's Lament. Kate Christensen
The Lord of the Flies. William Golding
The Birth of Venus. Sarah Dunant
The Tempest. William Shakespeare
Dude, Where's My Country? Michael Moore
The Rules of Engagement. Anita Brookner
The Last Crossing. Guy Vanderhaeghe
Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen
The Baron in the Trees. Italo Calvino
The Sleeping Father. Matthew Sharpe
Any Human Heart. William Boyd
Pnin. Vladimir Nabokov
Julius Caesar. William Shakespeare
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Robert Calasso
Not the End of the World. Kate Atkinson
Was It Beautiful? Alison McGhee
Something Rising (Light and Swift). Haven Kimmel
The Custom of the Country. Edith Wharton
True History of the Kelly Gang. Peter Carey
The Amateur Marriage. Anne Tyler
The Known World. Edward P. Jones

Books Read in 2003
The Years. Virginia Woolf
Pictures from an Exhibition. Diane Smith
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Nancy Milford
The Disapperation of James. Anne Ursu
The Professor's House. Willa Cather
Crow Lake. Mary Lawson
An Unofficial Rose. Iris Murdoch
Life of Pi. Yann Martel
Tempest-Tost. Robertson Davies
A Girl Named Zippy. Haven Kimmel
The Map of Love. Ahdaf Soueif
The Seven Sisters. Margaret Drabble
Hardcore Troubadour: The Life and Near Death of Steve Earle. Lauren St. John
I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company. Brian Hall
A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Dickens
The School of Beauty and Charm. Melanie Sumner
Seabiscuit. Laura Hillenbrand
Knowledge of Angels. Jill Paton Walsh
Blue Heaven. Joe Keenan
My Name is Red. Orhan Pamuk
In Open Spaces. Russell Rowland
Child of My Heart. Alice McDermott
The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters. Timothy Schaffert
Juggling. Barbara Trapido
Instant Karma. Mark Swartz
The Dive from Clausen's Pier. Ann Packer
Elephant Winter. Kim Echlin
The Mushroom Man. Sophie Powell
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain
The Killer Angels. Michael Shaara
Howards End. E.M. Forster
Across Five Aprils. Irene Hunt
The Magus. Jown Fowles
The Sea, the Sea. Iris Murdoch
The Tempest. William Shakespeare
The Book of Dead Birds. Gayle Brandeis
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. J.K. Rowling
Particularly Cats. . . and Rufus. Doris Lessing
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Mark Haddon
The Hills at Home. Nancy Clark
The Sovereignty of Good. Iris Murdoch
The Secret Life of Cowboys. Tom Groneberg
The Wandering Hill. Larry McMurtry
All Honest Men. Claude and Michele Stanush
This Boy's Life. Tobias Wolff
Sweetwater. Roxana Robinson
Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar Nafisi
A Whistling Woman. A.S. Byatt
The Little Women. Katharine Weber
The Time Traveler's Wife. Audren Niffenegger
The Unprofessionals. Julie Hecht
A Box of Matches. Nicholson Baker
Into the Wild. Jon Krakauer
The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown
Changing Places. David Lodge
Small World. David Lodge
Burmese Days. George Orwell
Something Special Iris Murdoch
Up at the Villa. W. Somerset Maugham
Blue Angel. Francine Prose
Waxwings. Jonathan Raban
The Black Prince. Iris Murdoch
The Art of Fiction. David Lodge
Old School. Tobias Wolff
The Wife. Meg Wolitzer
The Great Fire. Shirley Hazzard
The Iliad. Homer
the True Story of Hansel and Gretel. Louise Murphy
By Sorrow's River. Larry McMurtry
The Barracks Thief. Tobias Wolff
Persepolis. Marjane Satrapi
Oedipus Rex. Sophocles
Roughing It (vol. 1). Mark Twain
Daylight. Elizabeth Knox

Books Read in 2002
The Cement Garden. Ian McEwan
The Shrimp and the Anemone. L. P. Hartley
Atonement. Ian McEwan.
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. Brady Udall
Spilling Clarence. Anne Ursu
To Say Nothing of the Dog, or How We found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last. Connie Willis
Milton in America. Peter Ackroyd
Desperadoes. Ron Hansen
The Death of the Heart. Elizabeth Bowen
The Outlaw Trail. Brian Fox
The Cheese Monkeys. Chip Kidd
Hotel World. Ali Smith
Dead Ringer. Brian Fox
Possession. A.S. Byatt
Peace Like a River. Leif Enger
Gabriel's Story. David Anthony Durham
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. Alexandra Fuller
The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. Marily Durham
Sister Crazy. Emma Richler
Lincoln's Dreams. Connie Willis
Montana Gothic. Dirck Van Sickle
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. Jane Smiley
The Green Knight. Iris Murdoch
Fingersmith. Sarah Waters
Century's Son. Robert Boswell
The Queen of the Tambourine. Jane Gardam
Unless. Carol Shields
Midnight's Children. Salman Rushdie
Sin Killer. Larry McMurtry
Little, Big. John Crowley
Railroad Schemes. Cecelia Holland
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Alexander McCall Smith
Strange Angels. Jonis Agee
Keeping Silent. Carla Damron
Places to Look for a Mother. Nicole Stansbury
Accidents in the Home. Tessa Hadley
Doomsday Book. Connie Willis
Instances of the Number 3. Salley Vickers
Under the Net. Iris Murdoch
the Bottle Factory Outing. Beryl Bainbridge
Alias Heyes and Curry (unfilmed asj script)
Orphan Trains: the Story of Charle Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed. Stephen O'Connor
When We Were Orphans. Kazuo Ishiguro
The Lovely Bones. Alice Sebold
Redeye. Clyde Edgerton
Life on the Mississippi. Mark Twain
Nobody's Fool. Richard Russo
The Lonesome West. Martin McDonagh
You Are Not a Stranger Here. Adam Haslett
Female Trouble. Antonya Nelson
The City of Your Final Destination. Peter Cameron
Wildwood Boys. James Carlos Blake
The French Lieutenant's Woman. John Fowles
The Solace of Leaving Early. Haven Kimmel
Spies. Michael Frayn
Partners. Carla Damron
Carter Beat the Devil. Glen David Gold
Why Did Pete Duel Kill Himself? Mark Kalesniko
The Monk Downstairs. Tim Farrington
A Wild Sheep Chase. Haruki Murakami
Macbeth. William Shakespeare
The White Deborah Larsen
Half in Love. Maile Meloy
Watership Down. Richard Adams
The Divine Economy of Salvation. Priscila Uppal
Henry and Cato. Iris Murdoch
Lucky. Alice Sebold
The Little Friend. Donna Tartt
The Book of Illusions. Paul Auster
My Brother Sam is Dead. James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
At the Jim Bridger. Ron Carlson
A Word Child. Iris Murdoch
On Writing. Stephen King
The Book of Ebenezer LePage. G.B. Edwards
The Lives of Christopher Chant. Diana Wynne Jones
All My Friends are Going to be Strangers. Larry McMurtry
Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Salman Rushdie

Books Read in 2001
The Last Samurai. Helen DeWitt
Pobby and Dingan. Ben Rice
Where the Roots Reach for Water: A Personal and Natural History of Melancholia. Jeffery Smith
 In the Skin of a Lion. Michael Ondaatje
The Peppered Moth. Margaret Drabble
Large Animals in Everyday Life. Wendy Brenner
Mrs. Caliban. Rachel Ingalls
Excellent Women. Barbara Pym
A Prayer for the Dying. Stewart O'Nan
The Plague. Albert Camus
Bleak House. Charles Dickens
Armageddon Summer. Jane Yolen and Bruce Coville
High Fidelity. Nick Nornby
The Gift of Stones. Jim Crace
The Camomile Lawn. Mary Wesley
A Short History of a Small Place. T.R. Pearson
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Carson McCullers
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Jose Saramago
Louise Fitzhugh. Virginia L. Wolf
Where Angels Fear to Tread. E.M. Forster
Reality and Dreams. Muriel Spark
The Easter Party. Vita Sackville-West
A Severed Head. Iris Murdoch
The Wild Iris. Louise Bluck
The Lecturer's Tale. James Hynes
The Wooden Sea. Jonathan Carroll
Of Human Bondage. W. Somerset Maugham
Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found. Jennifer Lauck
The Biographer's Tale. A.S. Byatt
Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! M.E. Kerr
Mary and O'Neil. Justin Cronin
A Primate's Memoir. Robert M. Sapolsky
Waiting for My Cats to Die: A Morbid Memoir. Stacy Horn
Basil Street Blues. Michael Holroyd
Angels and Insects. A.S. Byatt
Spiderweb. Penelope Lively
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael Chabon
The Blind Assassin. Margaret Atwood
The Razor's Edge. W. Somerset Maugham
The Fire-Dwellers. Margaret Laurence
Observatory Mansions. Edward Carey
Jim the Boy. Tony Earley
As I Lay Dying. William Faulkner
Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible. Joseph A Amato
Light in August. William Faulkner
Intrusions. Ursula Hegi
Small Gods. Terry Pratchett
The Fifth Child. Doris Lessing
They Came Like Swallows. William Maxwell
Back When We Were Grownups. Anne Tyler
The Old Wives' Tale. Arnold Bennett
The Clothes They Stood Up On. Alan Bennett
Snow Angels. Stewart O'Nan
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear. Katharine Weber
Virginia Woolf. Nigel Nicolson
Field Guide. Gwendolen Gross
English Passengers. Matthew Kneale
The Bone People. Keri Hulme
Summer Rain. Marguerite Duras
U and I. Nicholson Baker
Sylvia and Ted. Emma Tennant
Hunters and Gatherers. Francine Prose
Restoration. Rose Tremain
How I Came Into My Inheritance. Dorothy Gallagher
Mary, Bloody Mary. Carolyn Meyer
The Hiding Place. Trezza Azzopardi
Ender's Game. Orson Scott Card
The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble
A Natural Curiosity. Margaret Drabble
Mansfield Park. Jane Austen
Miss Garnet's Angel. Salley Vickers
Passage. Connie Willis
Immortality. Milan Kundera
Girl With a Pearl Earring. Tracy; Chevalier
The Gardens of Kyoto. Kate Walbert
The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World. Michael Pollan
Somehow Form a Family. Tony Earley
Still Life With Oysters and Lemon. Mark Doty
At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins and Other Troublesome Things. Diane Purkiss
The Song of the Lark. Willa Cather
Year of Wonders. Geraldine Brooks
Uncle Tom's Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe
Alias Smith and Jones, pilot script
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. William Goldman
Eva Moves the Furniture. Margot Livesey
Delta Wedding. Eudora Welty
The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen
The Shadow of a Noose. Ralph Cotton
Among the Missing. Dan Chaon
The Englishman's Boy. Guy Vanderhaeghe
Empire Falls. Richard Russo
Jeremy Thrane. Kate Christensen
Alias Smith and Jones: The Reformation of Harry Briscoe, script
Alias Smith and Jones: Journey from San Juan, script
The Forgetting: Alzheimer's Portrait of an Epidemic. David Shenk
Absolom, Absalom! William Faulkner
Raising Holy Hell. Bruce Olds
Creatures of Habit. Jill McCorkle
Bucking the Tiger. Bruce Olds
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Ron Hansen


Books Read in 2000
Howards End. E.M. Forster
Waiting for the Barbarians. J. M. Coetzee
The Mill on the Floss. George Eliot
The Love of a Good Woman. Alice Munro
The Pleasing Hour. Lily King
Plainsong. Kent Haruf
Who's Irish? Gish Jen
The Snow Goose. Paul Gallico
Ahab's Wife or, The Star-Gazer. Sena Jeter Naslund
The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodo Dostoevsky
A Book of Reasons. John Vernon
The Game. A.S. Byatt
Great Expectations. Charles Dickens
God Said, "Ha!" Julie Sweeney
Human Croquet. Kate Atkinson
The Brontes Went to Woolworths. Rachel Ferguson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Jeanette Winterson
The Walking Tour. Kathryn Davis
Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Susan Vreeland
Emotionally Weird. Kate Atkinson
The Voyage Out. Virginia Woolf
Breakfast With Scot. Michael Downing
Polly's Ghost. Abby Frucht
Mr. Spaceman. Robert Olen Butler
Roman Fever and Other Stories. Edith Wharton
The Brothers K. David James Duncan
Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf
The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters. Wendy Lesser
The Red Tent. Anita Diamant
Jacob's Room. Virginia Woolf
The Hours. Michael Cunninghan
Between the Acts. Virginia Woolf
Maurice. E.M. Forster
The Tie That Binds. Kent Haruf
Villette. Charlotte Bronte
My Antonia. Willa Cather
Disgrace. J.M. Coetzee
My Family and Other Animals. Gerald Durrell
The Lives of Animals. J. M. Coetzee et al.
Baltasar and Blimunda. Jose Saramago
Passing On. Penelope Lively
Fierce Attachments. Vivian Gornick
Wit. Margaret Edson
Slapstick. Kurt Vonnegut
Being Dead. Jim Crace
Unstrung Heroes. Franz Lidz
Stones from the River. Ursula Hegi
House of Mirth. Edith Wharton
Dreamhouse. Alison Habens
Miss Lonelyhearts. Nathanael West
The Lost Suitcase: Reflections on the Literary Life. Nicholas Delbanco
Another World. Pat Barker
The Martian Chronicles. Ray Bradbury
Enchanted Night. Steven Millhauser
Siddhartha. Herman Hesse
The Name of the Rose. Umberto Eco
The Human Stain. Philip Roth
The Longest Journey. E.M. Forster
Me Talk Pretty One Day. David Sedaris
Quarantine. Jim Crace
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. J.K. Rowling
Living to Tell. Antonya Nelson
Witch Week. Diana Wynne Jones
Use Me. Elissa Schappell
The Peaceable Kingdom. Francine Prose
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. J.K. Rowling
The Spectator Bird. Wallace Stegner
The Late Mr. Shakespeare. Robert Nye
The Magician's Nephew. C.S. Lewis
All the Little Live Things. Wallace Stegner
Middlemarch. George Eliot
Notes from a Small Island. Bill Bryson
The Daughters of Simon Lamoreaux. David Long
Glass People. Gail Godwin
Welcome to My Planet. Where English is Sometimes Spoken. Shannon Olson
The Feast of Love. Charles Baxter
The Golden Compass. Philip Pullman
The Subtle Knife. Philip Pullman
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. Hilary Mantel
The Lost Legends of New Jersey. Frederick Reiken
Life in a Day. Doris Grumbach
Joan of Arc. Mary Gordon
The Defense. Vladimir Nabokov
House of Sand and Fog. Andre Dubus III
The Giver. Lois Lowry
Brother of the More Famous Jack. Barbara Trapido
The Sooterkin. Tom Gilling
Under the Skin. Michel Faber
Bee Season. Myla Goldberg
Speak, Memory. Vladimir Nabokov
Something Wicked This Way Comes. Ray Bradbury
The People With the Dogs. Christina Stead
The Amber Spyglass. Philip Pullman
Continent. Jim Crace
Temples of Delight. Barbara Trapido
An Invisible Sign of My Own. Aimee Bender
Hunts in Dreams. Tom Drury
Take the Cannoli. Sarah Vowell
Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. Gina Kolata
Lolly Willowes. Sylvia Townsend Warner
Lost in Place:Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia. Mark Salzman
Lying Awake. Mark Salzman
Out of Africa. Isak Dinesen
Chocolat. Joanne Harris
The Virgin in the Garden. A.S. Byatt
Still Life. A.S. Byatt
Off Keck Road. Mona Simpson
Jude the Obscure. Thomas Hardy
Loving Graham Greene. Gloria Emerson
The Travelling Horn Player. Barbara Trapido
A World Lit Only By Fire. William Manchester
Jane and Prudence. Barbara Pym


Books Read in 1999
Babel Tower. A.S. Byatt
Happenstance. Carol Shields
The Hours. Michael Cunningham
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day. Pearl Cleage
The Distance from the Heart of Things. Ashley Warlick
Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary. Pamela Dean
The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. Thomas Lynch
In the Presence of Horses. Barbar Dimmick
West of Rome. John Fante
1933 Was a Bad Year. John Fante
The Sparrow. Mary Doria Russell
Children of God. Mary Doria Russell
Little Altars Everywhere. Rebecca Wells
Clara, the Early Years: The Story of the Pug Who Ruled My Life. Margo Kaufman
Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemany. Pamela Dean
Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Kate Atkinson
Tam Lin. Pamela Dean
Into the Forest. Jean Hegland
Straight Man. Richard Russo
Into the Wild. Jon Krakauer
Amsterdam. Ian McEwan
The Wings of the Dove. Henry James
The Voyage of the Narwhal. Andrea Barrett
What Girls Learn. Karin Cook
The Adrian Mole Diaries. Sue Townsend
Adrian Mole: The Lost Years. Sue Townsend
Amy and Isabelle. Elizabeth Strout
84, Charing Cross Road. Helene Hanff
Harnessing Peacocks. Mary Wesley
Poisonwood Bible. Barbara Kingsolver
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. J.K. Rowling
Daughter of the Queen of Sheba. Jacki Lyden
Last Things. Jenny Offill
A Home at the End of the World. Michael Cunningham
Last Temptation of Christ. Nikos Kazantzakis
The Music Lesson. Katharie Weber
The Handyman. Carolyn See
My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell. Sarah Payne Stuart
Men in Trouble. Sarah Payne Stuart
The Magic Mountain. Thomas Mann
The Archivist. Martha Cooley
The Loved One. Evelyn Waugh
Human Croquiet. Kate Atkinson
Fairy Tale. Alice Thomas Ellis
The Fountain Overflows. Rebecca West
O Pioneers! Willa Cather
The White Bone. Barbar Gowdy
The Basic Eight. Daniel Handler
Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World. Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone
Just Checking: Scenes from the Life of an Obsessive-Compulsive. Emily Colas
Humboldt's Gift. Saul Bellow
Where the Heart Is. Billie Letts
The House Next Door. Anne Rivers Siddons
Enduring Love. Ian McEwan
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Melissa Bank
Local Girls. Alice Hoffman
Family Happiness. Laurie Colwin
Persuasion. Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen
Skillig. David Almond
Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Book Lore. Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone
The Odd Sea. Frederick Reiken
Mrs. Bridge. Evan S. Connell
The Trial. Franz Kafka
The Distinguished Guest. Sue Miller
The Club Dumas. Arturo Perez-Reverte
Happy All the Time. Laurie Colwin
Goodnight, Nebraska. Tom McNeal
Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte
War and Peace. Leo Tolstory
In the Memory of the Forest. Charles T. Powers
The Honey Thief. Elizabeth Graves
Fifth Business. Robertson Davies
I, Robot. Isaac Asimov
Angels on Toast. Dawn Powell
Agnes Grey. Anne Bronte
The Demon in the House. Angela Thirkell
Winesburg, Ohio. Sherwood Anderson
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Milan Kundera
The Mezzanine. Nicholson Baker
The Realms of Gold. Margaret Drabble
The Slow Way Back. Judy Goldman
Look Back All the Green Valley. Fred Chappell
The Millstone. Margaret Drabble
Electricity. Victoria Glendinning
Howards End. E.M. Forster
Household Gods. Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove
In the Drink. Kate Christensen
Girl in Landscape. Jonathan Lethem
The Book Borrower. Alice Mattison
The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble
Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov
Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. Barbara Comyns
The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers. Margaret George
The Last Life. Claire Messud
To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf
Firebird: A Memoir. Mark Doty
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. J.K. Rowling
Werewolves in Their Youth. Michael Chabon


Books Read in 1998
Father Melancholy's Daughter. Gail Godwin
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Maya Angelou
The Ice Storm. Rick Moody
Four Dreamers and Emily. Stevie Davies
The Patron Saint of Liars. Steven Millhauser
Tuesdays with Morrie. Mitch Albom
Dancing on the Edge. Han Nolan
The Road Home. Eliza Thomas
Gospel Truth.
Two Guys from Verona. James Kaplan
Rosemary's Baby. Ira Levin
Son of Rosemary. Ira Levin
Pretending the Bed is a Raft. Nanci Kincaid
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne Bronte
The Year of Reading Proust. Phyllis Rose
Mendel's Dwarf. Simon Mawer
An Underachiever's Diary. Benjamin Anastas
Doris Betts. Elizabeth Evans
A Patchwork Planet. Anne Tyler
The Sweet Hereafter. Russell Banks
The God of Small Things. Arundhati Roy
Crooked Hearts. Robert Boswell
Nobody's Girl. Antonya Nelson
The Magician's Assistant. Ann Patchett
The Horse Whisperer. Nicholas Evans
Searching for Caleb. Anne Tyler
The Everlasting Story of Nory. Nicholson Baker
Imaginary Friends. Alixon Lurie
On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon. Kaye Gibbons
Other People's Dirt. Louise Rafkin
Final Vinyl Days and Other Stories. Jill McCorkle
A Room with a View. E.M. Forster
Frankenstein. May Shelley
A Widow for One Year. John Irving
Up Island. Anne Rivers Siddons
Barrel Fever. David Sedaris
A Confederacy of Dunces. John Kennedy Toole
The Rosewood Casket. Sharyn McCrumb
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Rebecca Wells
My Sister's Bones. Cathi Hanauer
Herb's Pajamas. Abigail Thomas
A Passage to India. E.M. Forster
Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Vikram Chandra
Into the Forest. Jean Hegland
Naked. David Sedaris
Cold Comfort Farm. Stella Gibbons
Washington Square. Henry James
The Road Through the Wall. Shirley Jackson
My Sister from the Black Lagoon. Laurie Fox
Planet of the Blind. Stephen Kuusisto
I Capture the Castle. Dodie Smith
A Gracious Plenty. Sheri Reynolds
Visitors. Anita Brookner
Nola: A Memoir of Fairth, Art and Madness. Robin Hemley
The Dog of the South. Charles Portis
The Evolution of Jane. Chathleen Schine
Catch-22. Joseph Heller
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury. Sigrid Nunez
Heminway's Chair. Michael Palin
How Reading Changed My Life. Anna Quindlen
The Good Children. Kate Wilhelm
Beloved. Toni Morrison
Kaaterskill Falls. Allegra Goodman
Starting Out in the Evening. Brian Morton
The Giant's House. Elizabeth McCracken
Death in Summer. William Trevor
Crossing to Safety. Wallace Stegner
Mrs. Houdini. Rebecca McClanahan Devet
Black and Blue. Anna Quindlen
The Chocolate War. Robert Cormier
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. Anne Fadiman
Waltzing the Cat. Pam Houston
The Little Prince. Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Memory Slips. Linda Katherine Cutting
Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf
A Crime in the Neighborhood. Suzanne Berne


Books Read in 1997
Longitue. Dava Sobel
A Marriage Made in Woodstock. Cathie Pelletier
Operating Instructions. Anne Lamott
Ten Indians. Madison Smartt Bell
The Congregation of the Dead. Max Childers
The Solitaire Mystery. Jostein Gaarder
The Whole Story: Editors on Fiction. Warren Slesinger, ed.
Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen
Saint Maybe. Anne Tyler
Republic of Love. Carol Shields
The Moral Intelligence of Children. Robert Coles
A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell. Stephen and Robin Larsen
Push. Sapphire
The Story of B. Daniel Quinn
New Year's Eve. Lisa Grunwald
Gnostic Gospels. Elaine Pagels
Dead Soutls. Nikolai Gogol
One True Thing. Anna Quindlen
Do the Windows Open? Julie Hecht
Fat Lightning. Howard Owen
The Virgin Suicides. Jeffrey Eugenides
The Awakening. Kate Chopin
White Noise. Don DeLillo
Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. John Shelby Spong
Among the Ginzburgs. Ellen Pall
Love Warps the Mind a Little. John Dufresne
The Bird of the Air. Alice Thomas Ellis
Roger's Version. John Updike
Tightwad Gazette III. Amy Dacyczyn
Tightwad Gazette. Any Dacyczyn
The Rose Revived. Katie Fforde
The Sharp Teeth of Love. Doris Betts
Life Without Water. Nancy Peacock
Northern Borders. Howard Frank Mosher
You Might As Well Laugh. Sandi Kahn Shelton
View from Saturday. E.L. Konigsburg
Louisiana Power and Light. John Dufresne
The Bubble Reputation. Cathie Pelletier
Shelter. Wesley Gibson
We Were the Mulvaneys. Joyce Carol Oates
American Pastoral. Philip Roth
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Donald Rackin
Same Place, Same Things. Tim Gautreus
The Library Policeman. Stephen King
The Rapture of Cannan. Sheri Reynolds
Various Miracles. Carol Shields
The Soul's Code. James Hillman
Alice in Bed. Cathleen Schine
Swimming in the Starry River. P. Carey Reid
She's Come Undone. Wally Lamb
Jakob. Anna Mitgutsch
Trying to Smile and Other Stories. Sara Lewis
Cold Mountain. Charles Frazier
Normal. Lucia Newai
American Owned Love. Robert Boswell
Midwives. Chris Bohjalian
Angela's Ashes. Frank McCourt
Martha Stewart: Just Desserts. Jerry Oppenheimer
Larry's Party. Carol Shields
The Witch of Exmoor. Margaret Drabble
A Plan for Women. Lawrence Namoff
The 12th Planet. Zecharia Sitchin
Bright Angel Time. Martha McPhee
The Kiss. Kathryn Harrison
Ticker Than Water. Kathryn Harrison
Exposure. Kathryn Harrison
News of the Spirit. Lee Smith
Plays Well With Others. Allan Gurganus
That Night. Alice McDermott
What Child is This? Caroline B. Cooney
Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte
Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness. Rick Bass
At the Owl Woman Saloon. Tess Gallagher
The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison
Fortunate Lives. Robb Forman Dew


Books Read in 1996
The Lost Grizzlies. Rick Bass
Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness. David Weeks and Jamie James
The Blue Jay's Dance. Louise Erdrich
Rhoda. Ellen Gilchrist
The Day I Became an Autodidact. Kendall Hailey
Frankenstein. Mary Shelley
The Portrait of a Lady. Henry James
A Southern Exposure. Alice Adams
Night of the Avenging Blowfish. John Welter
A.A. Milne: The Man Behind Winnie the Pooh. Ann Thwaite
The Reader's Quotation Book. David Guterson, ed.
Brave New World. Aldous Huxley
The Enchanted Places. Christopher Milne
White Rabbit. Kate Phillips
At Every Wedding Someone Stays Home. Dannye Romine Powell
Independence Day. Richard Ford
1984. George Orwell
Morgan's Passing. Anne Tyler
Persuasion. Jane Austen
Morning in the Burned House. Margaret Atwood
Blown Sideways Through Life. Claudia Shear
Brain Fever. Valerie Sayers
Small Ceremonies. Carol Shields
Familiar Heat. Mary Hood
The Clock Winder. Anne Tyler
Lies My Teacher Told Me. James W. Loewen
A Wind in the Door. Madeleine L'Engle
Loving Wanda Beaver. Alison Baker
The Fennel Family Papers. William Baldwin
How I Came West, and Why I Stayed. Alison Baker
The Box Garden. Carol Shields
In the Beauty of the Lilies. John Updike
Midnight Lemonade. Ann Goethe
The Bostonians. Henry James
Swann. Carol Shields
An Actual Life. Abigail Thomas
The Pull of the Moon. Elizabeth Berg
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are. Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
The Bird Artist. Howard Norman
Angel Angel. April Stevens
Letts to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen. Fay Weldon
Beaming Sonny Home. Cathie Pelletier
Emma. Jane Austen
The Deep End of the Ocean. Jacquelyn Mitchard
The Funeral Makers. Cathie Pelletier
Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil. Rafael Yglesias
Paper Wings. Marly Swick
Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club. Bill Henderson
The Adventures of Augie March. Saul Bellow
High Rising. Angela Thirkell
The Emperor's Virtual Clothes. Dinty W. Moore
Typical American. Gish Jen
Mona in the Promised Land. Gish Jen
My Walden: Tales from Dead Cow Gulch. Susan Baumgartner
Off With Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Maria Tatar
Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury
Plain and Simple. Sue Bender
Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You. Fred Chappell
A History of Reading. Alberto Manguel
I Want to Buy a Vowel. John Welter
Begin to Exit Here. John Welter
Carolina Moon. Jill McCorkle
Cheerfulness Breaks In. Angela Thirkell
The Christmas Letters. Lee Smith
American Pie. Michael Lee West
Montana 1948. Larry Watson
Polite Society. Melanie Sumner
The Sportswriter. Richard Ford
Better Than Life. Daniel Pennac
Alias Grace. Margaret Atwood
Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. Frank J. Sulloway

Books Read in 1995
The Age of Grief. Jane Smiley
The Queen Must Die and Other Affairs of Bees and Men. William Longgood
Other Voices, vol. 21
Shadow Play. Charles Baxter
The Kitchen God's Wife. Amy Tan
Lame Deer, Seer of Visions. john (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes
We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Shirley Jackson
Durable Goods. Elizabeth Berg
A Thousand Acres. Jane Smiley
The Lottery and Other Stories. Shirley Jackson
Ordinary Love and Good Will. Jane Smiley
Sophie's World. Jostein Gaarder
Life Among the Savages. Shirley Jackson
Story, Spring 1995
Cosmicomics. Italo Calvino
Raising Demons. Shirley Jackson
The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck
A Summons to Memphis. Peter Taylor
Ladder of Years. Anne Tyler
All That Remains. Patricia D. Cornwell
White Water. Joyce Reiser Kornblatt
A Model World and Other Stories. Michael Chabon
Silk Hope, N.C. Lawrence Naumoff
Private Altars. Katherine Mosby
The Pugilist at Rest. Thom Jones
Her Blood is Gold. Lara Owen
Wonder Boys. Michael Chabon
Open Secrets. Alice Munro
Mysteries of Pittsburg. Michael Chabon
Talk Before Sleep. Elizabeth Berg
Autobiography of a Face. Lucy Grealy
Then She Found Me. Elinor Lipman
Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America. Carolyn See
The Ninemile Wolves. Rick Bass
Saving Grace. Lee Smith
Isabel's Bed. Elinor Lipman
The Big Ear. Robin Hemley
Sleeping at the Starlite Motel. Bailey White
The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell
The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. John Berendt
Lost in the Cosmos. Walker Percy
Main Street. Sinclair Lewis
Ethan Frome. Edith Wharton
Cold Snap. Thom Jones
Babbitt. Sinclair Lewis.
The Book of J. Harold Bloom
The American Religion. Harold Bloom
Good Bones and Simple Murders. Margaret Atwood
The Drama of the Gifted Child. Alice Miller
The Book of Ruth. Jane Hamilton
In the Loyal Mountains. Rick Bass
Duplicate Keys. Jane Smiley
Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. Judy Oppenheimer
Parting the Curtains: Interviews. Danny Romine Powell
The Haunting of Hill House. Shirley Jackson
Come Along With Me. Shirley Jackson
Moo. Jane Smiley
The Stone Diaries. Carol Shields
The Paper Anniversary. Joan Wickersham
Shirley Jackson. Lanemaja Friedman
Sights Unseen. Kaye Gibbons
The Origin of Satan. Elaine Pagels
We Took to the Woods. Louise Dickinson Rich
The Liar's Club. Mary Karr
Range of Motion. Elizabeth Berg
How We Die. Sherwin B. Nuland
Of Love and Other Demons. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Lost World. Michael Crichton
North Gladiola. James Wilcox
Color is the Suffering of Light. Melissa Green
The Gutenberg Elegies. Sven Birkerts
The Man Who Loved Children. Christina Stead
Poison. Kathryn Harrison
The Hundred Secret Senses. Amy Tan
Witchcraze. Anne Llewellyn Barstow
Idiot Letters. Paul Rosa
Songs in Ordinary Time. Mary McGarry Morris
An Unquiet Mind. Kay Redfield Jamison
Reviving Ophelia. Mary Pipher
The Man Who Turned Into Himself. David Ambrose
Fifty Days of Solitude. Doris Crumbach
Practical Magic. Alice Hoffman
The Love Letter. Cathleen Schine


Books Read in 1994
All the Pretty Horses. Cormac McCarthy
Nasty People. Jay Carter
Love Medicine. Louise Erdrich
The End of All of That. Stanley Elkin
Living to Be 100. Robert Boswell
Souls Raised from the Dead. Doris Betts
Turtle Moon. Alice Hoffman
Bad Behavior. Mary Gaitskill
Einstein's Dreams. Alan Lightman
The Gaudy Place. Fred Chappell
Parents Who Love Reading, Kids Who Don't. Mary Leonhardt
Dolly. Anita Brookner
The Waterfall. Margaret Drabble
The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed. Lee Smith
Here We Are in Paradise. Tony Earley
The Shipping News. E. Annie Proulx
Guest of a Sinner. James Wilcox
Miss Undine's Living Room. James Wilcox
Mama Makes Up Her Mind. Bailey White
Slow Poison. Sheila Bosworth
The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Pigs in Heaven. Barbara Kingsolver
A Whistling Woman. Louise Shivers
The Robber Bride. Margaret Atwood
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Allan Gurganus
Safe Passage. Ellyn Bache
In the Land of Dreamy Dreams. Ellen Gilchrist
Come to Me. Amy Bloom
A Map of the World. Jame Hamilton
Feather Crowns. Bobbie Ann Mason
Modern Baptists. James Wilcox
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Lorrie Moore
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath. Janet Malcolm
Darkness Visible. William Styron
The Hidden Life of Dogs. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Bird by Bird. Anne Lamott
A Circle of Quiet. Madeleine L'Engle
Getting Over Tom. Abigail Thomas
The Private Lives of Albert Einstein. Roger Hatfield and Paul Carter
Split-Levels. Thomas Rayfiel
The Power of Myth. Joseph Campbell
The Way of Myth. Joseph Campbell
Harmony of the World. Charles Baxter

Books Read in 1993
Good Hearts. Reynolds Price
The Last Studebaker. Robin Hemley
The Devil's Dream. Lee Smith
Bastard Out of Carolina. Dorothy Allison
Scar Lover. Harry Crews
The Firm. John Grisham
Family Linen. Lee Smith
Love in the Time of Cholera. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Mystery and Manners. Flannery O'Connor
Taller Women. Lawrence Naumoff
Follow the River. James Alexander Thom
Joe. Larry Brown
Ishmael. Daniel Quinn
Mating. Norman Rush
Anagrams. Lorrie Moore
The Way Men Act. Elinor Lipman
Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Cowboys are My Weakness. Pam Houston
Pride. William Wharton
Mystery Ride. Robert Boswell
The Road from Coorain. Jill Ker Conway
Charms for the Easy Life. Kaye Gibbons
Tender Mercies. Rosellen Brown
Blue Calhoun. Reynolds Price
Housekeeping. Marilynne Robinson
Dancing Girls and Other Stories. Margaret Atwood
She Needed Me. Walter Kirn
Inventing the Abbotts and Other Stories. Sue Miller
Wilderness Tips. Margaret Atwood
First Light. Charles Baxter
The Remains of the Day. Kazuo Ishiguro
Second Marriage. Frederick Barthelme
Anna Karenina. Leo Tolstoy
Soldier's Joy. Madison Smartt Bell
Replacing Dad. Shelley Fraser Mickle
Girl, Interrupted. Susanna Kaysen
The Secret History. Donna Tartt
Streets of Laredo. Larry McMurtry
The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Before and After. Rosellen Brown
A Relative Stranger. Charles Baxter
Staggerford. Jon Hassler
The Love Hunter. Jon Hassler
Folly. Susan Minot
The Bridges of Madison County. Robert James Waller
The Lover of Horses. Tess Gallagher
Believe Them. Mary Robison
The Silent Passage. Gail Sheehy
Rough Strife. Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Acquainted With the Night and Other Stories. Lynne Sharon Schwartz
The Invention of Truth. Marta Morazzoni
At Weddings and Wakes. Alice McDermott
Far Afield. Susanna Kaysen
Best American Short Stories, 1993. Robert Stone, ed.
Asa, As I Knew Him. Susanna Kaysen
New Stories from the South, 1993. Shannon Ravenal, ed.
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Robert Olen Butler
A Dangerous Woman. Mary McGarry Morris
A Room of One's Own. Virginia Woolf
The Cry for Myth. Rollo May
Myths to Live By. Joseph Campbell
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs. Tobias Wolff



























































A bang, not a whimper

  Two months into L.'s retirement, and I'm finished with the stockpiling of books. No more book purchases! Or at least, no purcha...