If you’ve followed my goings on either virtually or in the flesh, you know that I read a lot. And this year, as a result of a particular stew of depression and obsession, I took this pastime to new, ridiculous heights: as of December 30, I have finished 151 books* outside of my scholarly reading. That’s right, this is only the extra-curricular shit. I say so with a mixture of pride (I mean, of course) but also a bit of embarrassment. In the last two months, when I’ve been particularly overwhelmed juggling a vast and varied gig schedule on top of my second year of coursework, I’ve felt guilty about “non-required” reading. Because all of the facets of my professional life – classes, teaching, learning music, rehearsals, performances – require intellectual focus, I worry that I’m not only wasting time reading for pleasure (I could be practicing! I could be writing!) but wasting precious brain juice. What if I have not just a finite amount of space in my schedule but also in my mind?
It’s true, of course. I have only so much time and energy to give. (I’ve been much chagrined to find out these past two months that this latter amount is just a little bit smaller than I needed it to be…) But it’s also pointless to think that I can somehow conserve all my focus for required work if I don’t spend any of it on pastimes I enjoy. That’s not how it works (again, I’m much chagrined to confirm this well-known fact of late). It’s very seductive to think that we have to earn rest and pleasure, but we don’t. If anything, we earn the capacity to work, if not necessarily the desire, through rest and pleasure. It can be particularly difficult to argue in favor of leisure that’s parallel to our work lives, because we fall into the trap of wanting to optimize our actions.
If I’m not sleeping or frollicking in a meadow somewhere – or any such officially mandated restful activities – should I be pouring myself into something that could be deemed work? If my job is effectively to read and learn and think, shouldn’t I interact with something “useful”? The longer answer is that “useful” contains a multitude of layers, and they don’t have to be readily evident or optimized. The short answer is, simply, no. I don’t need to reap rewards from my every action.
So, for inquiring minds, here is the full list of the books I finished in 2022 (in chronological order). If you want my favorites, I posted a video with twenty-two of them earlier this week. Although I didn’t fall head over heels for all the books that follow, I do recommend all of them to some extent – I don’t finish books I don’t like. I don't need to, after all.
Un monde à portée de main, Maylis de Kerangal (2018)
Dead Souls, Sam Riviere (2021)
The Hopkins Manuscript, R.C. Sherriff (1939)
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays, Alexander Chee (2018)
The Latinist, Mark Prins (2022)
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (1929) (reread)
Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri (2021)
Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (1975)
Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A., Eve Babitz (1977)
Vera, Stacy Schiff (1999)
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison (1970)
Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon (2018)
Memories of the Future, Siri Hustvedt (2019)
The Appointment: A Novel, Katharina Volckmer (2021)
Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, Sigrid Nunez (2011)
Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, Laura Mulvey (2006)
Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, Olivia Laing (2020)
The Listeners, Jordan Tannahill (2021)
Public Library and Other Stories, Ali Smith (2015)
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Radden Keefe (2021)
Blue Nights, Joan Didion (2011)
The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington (1975)
Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin (1955) (reread)
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, Sigrid Nunez (1998)
Childhood, Tove Ditlevsen (trans. Tiina Nunnally) (1967)
White on White, Ayşegül Savaş (2021)
Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Travisano (2019)
Youth, Tove Ditlevsen (trans. Tiina Nunnally) (1967)
Garbo, Robert Gottlieb (2021)
Sula, Toni Morrison (1973) (reread)
The Beauty of the Husband, Anne Carson (2001)
Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Joan Didion (2021)
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Heather Clark (2020)
To Be Taught, If Fortunate, Becky Chambers (2019)
Enter the Aardvark, Jessica Anthony (2020)
The Performance, Claire Thomas (2021)
Happy Days, Samuel Beckett (1961)
The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin (1976)
Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh (2015)
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin (1956)
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, Merlin Sheldrake (2020)
The Door, Magda Szabó (trans. Len Rix) (1987)
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, Amanda Montell
A Month in the Country, J. L. Carr (1980)
The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector (trans. Giovanni Pontiero) (1977)
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Audre Lorde (1984) (partial reread)
Something New Under the Sun, Alexandra Kleeman (2021)
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (ed. Elizabeth Alexander) (2005)
Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai, Nina Mingya Powles (2019)
Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lulu Miller (2020)
Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century, ed. Jenny Minton Quigley (2021)
The Promise, Silvina Ocampo (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell) (2011)
Sorrow and Bliss, Meg Mason (2021)
Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon (2020)
Chanson Douce, Leïla Slimani (2016) (reread)
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (2017)
The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam (2011)
Strangers I Know, Claudia Durastanti (trans. Elizabeth Harris) (2022)
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (1927)
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison (1977)
L’Amant, Marguerite Duras (1984) (reread)
The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing (2013)
I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, Claire Vaye Watkins (2021)
The Premonitions Bureau, Sam Knight (2022)
The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece, Kevin Birmingham (2021)
To the River, Olivia Laing (2011)
Girls Against God, Jenny Hval (trans. Mariam Idris) (2018)
The Coming Bad Days, Sarah Bernstein (2021)
Figure It Out, Wayne Koestenbaum (2020)
Limbo, Dan Fox (2018)
Asylum Road, Olivia Sudjic (2021)
Vilette, Charlotte Brontë (1853)
Very Cold People, Sarah Manguso (2022)
The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante (trans. Ann Goldstein) (2002)
How Much of These Hills Is Gold, C Pam Zhang (2020)
All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews (2014)
The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde (1980)
Screen Tests, Kate Zambreno (2019)
When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut (trans. Adrian Nathan West) (2020)
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison (1992)
Speedboat, Renata Adler (1976)
Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, Vivian Gornick (2020)
Delphi, Clare Pollard (2022)
The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen (1938)
Possession, A. S. Byatt (1990)
Pure Colour, Sheila Heti (2022)
Passing, Nella Larsen (1929)
Abigail, Magda Szabó (trans. Len Rix) (1970)
Incidental Inventions, Elena Ferrante (trans. Ann Goldstein) (2019)
La Peste, Albert Camus (1947) (reread)
Poupée volée, Elena Ferrante (trans. Elsa Damien) (2006)
States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic, Alice Kaplan & Laura Marris (2022)
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, bell hooks (2003)
Autumn, Ali Smith (2016)
Winter, Ali Smith (2017)
Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age, Dennis Duncan (2021)
Phèdre (Phaedra), Jean Racine (1677)
Les années (The Years), Annie Ernaux (2008)
The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020, Rachel Kushner (2021)
Down Below, Leonora Carrington (1945)
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan (2021)
Tomb of Sand, Geetanjali Shree (trans. Daisy Rockwell) (2021)
Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor (trans. Sophie Hughes) (2017)
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath (1963)
Copy, Dolores Dorantes (trans. Robin Myers) (2022)
The Mayor of Leipzig, Rachel Kushner (2021)
Quand la nuit consent à me parler (When Night Agrees to Speak to Me), Ananda Devi (+ trans. Kazim Ali) (2011)
Essays One, Lydia Davis (2019) (reread)
Passion, June Jordan (1980)
Soft Targets, Deborah Landau (2019)
Time is a Mother, Ocean Vuong (2022)
Nox, Anne Carson (2010)
Tar Baby, Toni Morrison (1981)
Walking on the Ceiling, Ayşegül Savaş (2019)
Bliss Montage, Ling Ma (2022)
The Sea, the Sea, Iris Murdoch (1978)
Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith (2019)
The Colony, Audrey Magee (2022)
Pure Flame, Michelle Orange (2021)
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Kiese Laymon (2013/2020)
Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay (2014)
Recitatif, Toni Morrison (1983)
Boulder, Eva Baltasar (trans. Julia Sanchez) (2020)
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, Warsan Shire (2022)
Minor Detail, Adania Shibli (trans. Elisabeth Jaquette) (2017)
Love Me Tender, Constance Debré (2020)
Cold Enough for Snow, Jessica Au (2022)
Five Tuesdays in Winter, Lily King (2021)
Translating Myself and Others, Jhumpa Lahiri (2022)
Body Work, Melissa Febos (2022)
Palomar, Italo Calvino (1983)
Our Wives under the Sea, Julia Armfield (2022)
Oh, to Be a Painter!, Virginia Woolf (2021)
How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo (2022)
Upstream: Selected Essays, Mary Oliver (2016)
L’amore molesto, Elena Ferrante (1992)
The Seas, Samantha Hunt (2004)
Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid (1990)
Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works, John Ashbery (2022)
The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson (2015) (reread)
Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, Sianne Ngai (2020)
Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987) (reread)
A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid (1988)
Mouth to Mouth, Antoine Wilson (2022)
Blasts Cries Laughter, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2014)
Dependency, Tove Ditlevsen (trans. Michael Favala) (1971)
Indelicacy, Amina Cain (2020)
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, Rachel Cusk (2009)
A Minor Chorus, Billy-Ray Belcourt (2022)
O Caledonia, Elspeth Barker (1991)
Sleepwalking, Meg Wolitzer (1982)
*Lest my audience be either overly impressed or overly horrified, I feel the need to specify that some of these are quite short – poetry books, especially, coming in at or under 100 pages.