2016 was a good year for reading. I discovered new authors whose work I enjoyed: Rick Moody, Alexis André, David Szalay, and Rachel Cusk. I continued my affection for authors with whom I had already been acquainted: Colm Tóibín, Tom Drury, Zadie Smith, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Strout, and Kazuo Ishiguro. I also wrote short reviews of each book I read this past year and posted them on LibraryThing, a few of which I re-posted here on this blog. I’m already looking forward to another great year of reading ahead.
Stats from my 2016 reading list:
- 24 were borrowed from our public library
- 11 have Canadian authors
- 22 were chosen due to personal recommendations from friends
- 4 are by authors who appear more than once on the 2016 list
- 1 was being reread
- 0 was read aloud by my wife and me
- 13 are non-fiction
- 0 are ebooks
Books read in 2016 (69):
- Drury, Tom. The Driftless Area
- Moran, Caitlin. How to Build a Girl
- Cameron, Claire. The Bear
- Grosz, Stephen. The Examined Life
- Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace
- Smith, Zadie. NW
- Moody, Rick. Hotels of North America
- Brautigan, Richard. Trout Fishing in America
- St. Aubyn, Edward. The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk, At Last
- Richtel, Matt. A Deadly Wandering
- Alexis, André. Fifteen Dogs
- Evison, Jonathan. This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!
- Casey, John. Beyond the First Draft: The Art of Fiction
- Coetzee, J.M. and Kurtz, Arabella. The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy
- Keret, Etgar. The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God and other stories
- Christie, Michael. If I Fall, If I Die
- Modiano, Patrick. After the Circus
- Tóibín, Colm. The Master
- Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy
- Marcus, Ben. The Age of Wire and String
- Alexis, André. Childhood
- Cather, Willa. A Lost Lady
- Alexis, André. Despair and other stories
- Oyeyemi, Helen. What is not yours is not yours: stories
- Wilson, Kevin. The Family Fang
- Scott, A.O. Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
- Doerr, Anthony. All The Light We Cannot See
- Strout, Elizabeth. My Name Is Lucy Barton
- Beatty, Paul. The Sellout
- Modiano, Patrick. The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l’Étoile, The Night Watch, and Ring Roads
- Moody, Rick. The Ice Storm
- Millet, Lydia. Mermaids in Paradise
- Gardner, Leonard. Fat City
- Petersen, Alice. Worldly Goods: stories
- Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Virgin Suicides
- Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Buried Giant
- Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
- Szalay, David. All That Man Is
- Currie Jr., Ron. Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles: a novel
- Barnes, Julian. nothing to be frightened of
- Royle, Nicholas (Ed.) Best British Short Stories 2016
- Bryson, Bill. The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes From a Small Island
- Antrim, Donald. The Emerald Light in the Air: stories
- Kawakami, Hiromi. Strange Weather in Tokyo
- Coe, Jonathan. Number 11
- McKenzie, Elizabeth. The Portable Veblen
- Goncharov, Ivan. Oblomov
- Alexis, André. The Hidden Keys
- Bell, James Scott. Revision and Self-Editing
- Link, Kelly. Get in Trouble
- Cayley, Kate (compiler), Francis, Brian (compiler), Thien, Madeleine (compiler). The Journey Prize Stories 28
- Beukes, Lauren. Broken Monsters
- Diaz, Junot (ed.). The Best American Short Stories 2016
- Barrett, Andrea, and Turchi, Peter (editors). A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft
- Winterson, Jeanette. The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold
- Cusk, Rachel. Outline
- Haslett, Adam. Imagine Me Gone
- Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited
- Smith, Ali. Public library and other stories
- McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian
- Smith, Zadie. On Beauty
- Edugyan, Esi. Half-Blood Blues
- Svevo, Italo. Zeno’s Conscience
- Smith, Zadie. Swing Time
- Atwood, Margaret. Hag-Seed
- Tesdell, Diana Secker (ed.). New York Stories
- Adler, Renata. Speedboat
- Tóibín, Colm. On Elizabeth Bishop
- Luiselli, Valeria. Faces in the Crowd
The publication of a work by one of the writers in our group is an occasion of joy. Seeing something that you’ve watched gestate, develop, and mature over the years take wing and start flying on its own—well, it feels good. I imagine the only thing that would top it would be for a book of my own to begin its life on the book store shelves. Maybe some day I’ll find out.
On rereading Sense and Sensibility slowly and with immense pleasure, as befits this beautiful Belknap Press annotated edition edited by Patricia Meyer Spacks, I am awestruck by Austen’s maturity and delicacy in this her first published novel. The opening two chapters which set the scene with the death of Henry Dashwood and then set the plot ticking with the magnanimous ungenerosity of the sole heir, John Dashwood, toward his step-mother and his three step-sisters are so finely polished that you might imagine Austen writing and rewriting them for years on end. Indeed, much of the first volume is near this level of concentrated effort. The second volume, less so, and the third more sprawling still. But by then the reader hardly notices being so caught up in the all too real lives of Elinor and her sister, Marianne. And the horridness of John Dashwood and his wife is equalled, or possibly surpassed, by the self-serving self-love of the faithless Willoughby.
Once again, Elena Ferrante brings the intimate friendship of her principle characters, Elena and Lila, to life, though much of what occurs in this final novel in her Neapolitan series is harmful to their friendship. Elena rushes into her relationship with Nino Sarratore, all the the while trying to suppress her suspicion of Lila’s disapproval. Indeed, much of what Elena does and thinks and even writes in her growing career as a novelist and intellectual is shaped and conditioned either by Lila’s explicit critique or by Elena’s imagined version of what Lila might say. And so Elena acts both for and against her childhood friend, desperate to attain some form of autonomy even whilst she foregoes it in her anxiety. Elena has moved back to Naples, though not the old neighbourhood, with her two daughters. And it is motherhood that comes to dominate the themes here as first Elena and then Lila herself become pregnant. Their shared condition is emblematic of just how entwined their lives have been throughout whether they were conscious of it or not.