2016

What I read in 2016.

January 2016

1. Unfinished Business, Anne-Marie Slaughter
2. Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff
3. Accidental Saints, Nadia Bolz-Weber
4. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
5. Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat
6. Our Bodies, Ourselves, Boston Women’s Health Collective
7. Basin and Range, John McPhee
8. The Yeats Reader
9. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
10. Spark Joy, Marie Kondo
11. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
12. The Wallcreeper, Nell Zink
13. Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson
14. The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick
15. Tar Baby, Toni Morrison
16. Black Zodiac, Charles Wright
17. The Ponder Heart, Eudora Welty
18. The Journals of John Cheever
19. Blow-Up and Other Stories, Julio Cortázar

February 2016

1. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
2. Ironweed, William Kennedy
3. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

March 2016

1. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
2. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
3. The Father, Sharon Olds
4. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
5. Global Cosmopolitans, Linda Brimm
6. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
7. The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich
8. London: A Biography, Peter Ackroyd
9. The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels
10. Rose Mellie Rose, Marie Redonnet
11. Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
12. Collected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz

April 2016

1. The Unvanquished, William Faulkner
2. How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are, Anne Berest
3. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. The Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney
5. The Shepherd’s Life, James Rebanks
6. Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, ed. Adrian Blevins
7. The Beginning of Spring, Penelope Fitzgerald
8. New Selected Poems, Philip Levine
9. Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney
10. The Supper of the Lamb, Robert Farrar Capon
11. The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley

May 2016

1. Searches and Seizures, Stanley Elkin
2. The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
3. Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
4. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
5. My Struggle, Book 4, Karl Ove Knausgaard
6. Troubling Love, Elena Ferrante
7. The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
8. Hunger, Knut Hamsun

June 2016

1. The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays, James Wood
2. Some Prefer Nettles, Junichiro Tanizaki
3. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan
4. The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington
5. Summer, Edith Wharton
6. The Seagull, Anton Chekhov
7. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
8. Ursula, Honoré de Balzac
9. The Book of Tea, Kazuko Okakura

July 2016

1. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
2. In Defence of Dogs, John Bradshaw
3. Proust’s Overcoat, Lorenza Foschini
4. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex Haley
5. The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett
6. Persuasion, Jane Austen
7. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, Evan Osnos
8. Dracula, Bram Stoker
9. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis
10. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman

August 2016

1. Loving, Henry Green
2. Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag
3. Slade House, David Mitchell
4. The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
5. Not So Big House, Sarah Susanka
6. The Visual Dictionary of American Domestic Architecture, Rachel Carley
7. Creating a New Old House, Russell Versaci
8. Renovating Old Houses, George Nash
9. War Dances, Sherman Alexie
10. A Field Guide to American Houses, ed. Virginia McAlester
11. Origins: How Nine Months before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, Annie Murphy Paul
12. The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
13. Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, Liz Wiseman
14. Taking Charge of Your Fertility, Toni Weschler
15. The Association of Small Bombs, Karan Mahajan
16. The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector

September 2016

1. What Does It Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy, Robin DiAngelo
2. Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, Joby Warrick
3. The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante
4. The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, ed. Jesmyn Ward
5. Habitat: The Field Guide to Decorating, Lauren Liess
6. Swann’s Way: A Graphic Novel, Stéphane Heuet
7. Losing It, Emma Rathbone
8. Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, Mary Roach
9. Proust’s Way, Roger Shattuck
10. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, George Saunders

October 2016

1. The End of the Story, Lydia Davis
2. Pit Bull, Bronwen Dickey
3. The Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon
4. The Course of Love, Alain de Botton
5. Notable American Women, Ben Marcus
6. The Friendly Persuasion, Jessamyn West
7. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert Macfarlane
8. Nicotine, Nell Zink
9. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
10. On Writing, Eudora Welty
11. Thrall, Natasha Trethewey

November 2016

1. What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, Raymond Carver
2. Falconer, John Cheever
3. The Abundance, Annie Dillard
4. The Elements of Content Strategy, Erin Kissane
5. Wolf Willow, Wallace Stegner
6. Frantumaglia, Elena Ferrante
7. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? Frans de Waal
8. Content Strategy for Mobile, Karen McGrane
9. The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
10. The Best American Essays 2015, ed. Ariel Levy

December 2016

1. Swing Time, Zadie Smith
2. Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett
3. The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, George Packer
4. The Curated Closet, Anuschka Rees
5. Bluets, Maggie Nelson