Reading List

This blog grew in part out of my reading list. Some years ago, after losing track of countless notes jotted to myself or book reviews clipped from newspapers and also after numerous incidents of picking up books and not quite knowing for sure if I had read them or not, I decided to organize my reading life into a list. It is simply a spreadsheet and it is a growing and very large file by now. I keep multiple copies of it on flash drives in case, God forbid, something ever happens to it. Anyhow, it would be completely impractical to share that entire list here. Plus, my reading list has as many books on it that I have yet to read as it does books I have actually gotten around to reading. My compromise will be to list here just the books I have completed for the year. Some I will have written about and some I will not have even mentioned. So, do not consider every entry necessarily a recommendation. In the same line, just because I have not written about one, do not assume that it is not worth your time.

2015

Sweetland, Michael Crummey
Days of Fire, Peter Baker
The True American, Anand Giridharadas
The Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse
The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan
This Changes Everything Naomi Klein
One Way Out, Alan Paul
Nora Webster, Colm Toibin
Something Rich and Strange, Ron Rash

2014

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
Peace, Richard Bausch
The High Divide, Lin Enger
Chilly Scenes of Winter, Ann Beattie
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Redeployment, Phil Klay
The Lincoln Myth, Steve Berry
Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer
Lila, Marilynne Robinson
The Ploughmen, Kim Zupan
Orange is the New Black, Piper Kerman
Hold the Dark, William Giraldi
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, Caitlin Doughty
The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
Mr. Tall, Tony Earley
The Varieties of Scientific Experience, Carl Sagan
The Patron Saint of Liars, Ann Patchett
Citizenship Papers, Wendell Berry
The Art of the Commonplace, Wendell Berry
Factory Man, Beth Macy
Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food, Wendell Berry
The Memory of Old Jack, Wendell Berry
Saint Monkey, Jacinda Townsend
1776, David McCullough
Johnny Cash: The Life, Robert Hilburn
During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, Joan Chase
Wolf Willow, Wallace Stegner
The Price of Justice, Laurence Leamer
The Painter, Peter Heller
Blood Will Out, Walter Kirn
Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
The Magnificent Masters, Gil Capps
This Dark Road to Mercy, Wiley Cash
Wendell Berry: His Life and Work, ed. Jason Peters
Five Days at Memorial, Sheri Fink
Family Life, Akhil Sharma
Long Man, Amy Greene
Origins, Neil DeGrasse Tyson & Donald Goldsmith
Southern Cross the Dog, Bill Cheng
The Good Lord Bird, James McBride
This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett
Townie, Andre Dubus, III
The Cartographer of No Man's Land, P.S. Duffy
The King's Deception, Steve Berry
The System, Jeff Benedict & Armen Keteyian
English Creek, Ivan Doig
Storming Heaven, Denise Giardina
Dancing at the Rascal Fair, Ivan Doig
Prairie Nocturne, Ivan Doig

2013

Fools, Joan Silber
Enon, Paul Harding
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra
The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri
Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
A Guide for the Perplexed, Dara Horn
Inferno, Dan Brown
Harvard Square, Andre Aciman
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
Brewster, Mark Slouka
Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson
The Road from Gap Creek, Robert Morgan
Salt, Sugar, Fat, Michael Moss
What It Is Like to Go to War, Karl Marlantes
So Brave, Young, and Handsome, Leif Enger
Someone Knows My Name, Lawrence Hill
My Beloved World, Sonia Sotomayor
The Dog Stars, Peter Heller
Sweet Thunder, Ivan Doig
The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver
Transatlantic, Colum McCann
Stoner, John Williams
This Side of Brightness, Colum McCann
The Son, Philipp Meyer
House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus III
Driving on the Rim, Thomas McGuane
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, David Sedaris
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, Dina Nayeri
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
Fire and Forget, ed. Roy Scranton & Matt Gallagher
Heft, Liz Moore
Gulp, Mary Roach
Benediction, Kent Haruf
Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy, John Julius Norwich
Home, Toni Morrison
The Liars' Gospel, Naomi Alderman
By the Iowa Sea, Joe Blair
The Inimitable Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse
Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, David K. Randall
Immortality, Christopher Hitchens
We the Animals, Justin Torres
Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, James L. Swanson
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, Ayana Mathis
News From Heaven, Jennifer Haigh
Lost in Shangri-La, Mitchell Zuckoff
The Quickening, Michelle Hoover
The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Baker Towers, Jennifer Haigh
The Oath, Jeffrey Toobin
On Canaan's Side, Sebastian Barry
These Thousand Hills, A.B. Guthrie
A Land More Kind Than Home, Wiley Cash
Fair Land, Fair Land, A.B. Guthrie
The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers
Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver

2012

This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz
In the Shadow of the Banyan, Vaddey Ratner
The Way West, A.B. Guthrie
A Place in Time, Wendell Berry
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
Wild, Cheryl Strayed
The Lifeboat, Charlotte Rogan
Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels
The American Way of Eating, Tracie McMillan
Hemingway: The 1930s Through the Final Years, Michael Reynolds
Eat & Run, Scott Jurek
The Bartender's Tale, Ivan Doig
Hemingway: The Paris Years, Michael Reynolds
No One is Here Except All of Us, Ramona Ausubel 
The Paris Wife, Paula McLain
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
Here is New York, E.B. White
The Colossus of New York, Colson Whitehead
When I Was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson
Elizabeth the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith
Quiet, Susan Cain
Rules of Civility, Amor Towles
Forgotten Country, Catherine Chung
The Big Miss, Hank Haney
Man Walks into a Room, Nicole Krauss
Train Dreams, Denis Johnson
Running the Rift, Naomi Benaron
Escape from Camp 14, Blaine Harden
The Obamas, Jodi Kantor
The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson
The Jefferson Key, Steve Berry
Shiloh, 1862, Winston Groom
The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
The Table Comes First, Adam Gopnik
In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson
The Tiger's Wife, Tea Obreht
The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
The Memory of Old Jack, Wendell Berry
A Place on Earth, Wendell Berry
A World Lost, Wendell Berry
Nathan Coulter, Wendell Berry
Remembering, Wendell Berry
Last Man in Tower, Aravind Adiga
Jerusalem: The Biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore
Making Our Democracy Work, Stephen Breyer
When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka
The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka
Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward
A Voice in the Box, Bob Edwards
Nothing Daunted, Dorothy Wickenden
Shannon, Frank Delaney