I’m desperately bad at keeping this personal site filled with useful things. However, after reading Roxane Gay’s 2017 reading list, I felt inspired to do the same. I’ve tried to make clever categories, or just useful ones, whenever possible, but there are a great many sitting towards the bottom and in longer categories still worth your time. I didn’t read too many awful things this year (I generally just stop reading them in the middle), so I haven’t made a tiered ranking system for those, but I’m happy to offer up some personal suggestions if you get in touch with me via Twitter. To the writers (if any of you are reading this) thanks for all the great work.
Favorite book of the year
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
Numbers two and three
Barbarian Days by William Finnegan
Judas by Amos Oz
Series I tore through and now anxiously await for the final book
The Kingkiller Chronicles (The Slow Regard of Silent Things, The Wise Man’s Fear, and The Name of the Wind) by Patrick Rothfuss
The horror I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish (and then still kept me up)
The Fisherman by John Langan
Favorite history book (and a favorite nonfiction, in general)
The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone
Book whose vast detail should’ve pained me, but instead got me thoroughly invested
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Dense academic book I couldn’t stop reading
The Long Shadow by David Reynolds
Favorite writing about writing
The Accidental Life: An Editor’s Notes on Writing and Writers by Terry McDonell
Proof genre is a silly distinction for people to make
The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
The Vorrh by Brian Catling
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Books perfectly (if occasionally unfortunately) appropriate for the times
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
Submission by Michel Houellebecq
American War by Omar El Akkad
The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert
Classics I finally got around to reading
Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
Alternating Current by Octavio Paz
The Dubliners by James Joyce
Selected Poems: 1966-1987 by Seamus Heaney
Disappointments (fiction and nonfiction)
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Worst figure of speech award
Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
Obligatory re-read
Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
Reading for articles (not including innumerable academic papers, essays, articles, etc.)
Bring Out the Dog by Will Mackin
Gambling and War by Justin Conrad
You Know When the Men are Gone by Siobhan Fallon
Youngblood by Matt Gallagher
Consequence by Eric Fair
Unknown Soldiers by Neil Hanson
The Long Walk by Brian Castner
The Road Ahead by Adrian Bonenberger and Brian Castner
Terminal Lance: The White Donkey by Maximilian Uriarte
War Porn by Roy Scranton
The Confusion of Languages by Siobhan Fallon
Retire the Colors by Dario DiBattista
War of the Encyclopaedists by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite
Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman
Reading for book research
The Hundred Years War: A People’s History by David Green
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas
Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte
Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I by John Ellis
Honorable mentions (i.e. ones I don’t have anything novel or clever to say about, but still want to single out)
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
American Originality by Louise Gluck
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
The Art of the Publisher by Roberto Calasso
Road Fever by Tim Cahill
The rest (Many of which are still fantastic!)
The Reporter’s Kitchen by Jane Kramer
The Best of Richard Matheson
In the Not Quite Dark by Dana Johnson
Someone by Alice McDermott
The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
The Radicals by Ryan McIlvain
The Changeling by Victor LaValle
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami
The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson
To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Phillip Lopate
The Kingdom and the Power by Gay Talese
Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel
The Vanishing Velazquez by Laura Cumming
My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
The Vegetarian by Kang Han
New York by Edward Rutherfurd
The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain
Fen by Daisy Johnson
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank
1984 by George Orwell
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
A History of Histories by J.W. Burrow
The Art of Intelligence by Henry A. Crumpton
The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher
The Purple Decades by Tom Wolfe
The President’s Book of Secrets by David Priess
Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson
The Dead Hand by David E. Hoffman
The Code Book by Simon Singh
The Magician King by Lev Grossman
The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman
In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson
Grunt by Mary Roach
The Georgetown Set by Gregg Herken
The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson
God’s Middle Finger by Richard Grant