I set out to read 50 books this year and ended up reading 57. I don’t think I’ll set a goal like that for a few years; this was a lot more reading than I’d thought it would be, a lot more time spent reading. Multiple narratives carried in my head at once. Stories layered against one another in strange patterns. But down the line? Would I do it again? Totally. I may try to go for 100 sometime in the future. I’d recommend to anyone the wonderful workout of long-distance reading. It’s a kaleidoscope.
My favorites were: Vineland and Inherent Vice (Pynchon bookends on the year), Sabbath’s Theater, Lucky Jim, Tenth of December, Replay, The Dog of the South, High Tide in Tucson, Trick Mirror, Known and Strange Things and, towering above the year’s pages, Underworld. DeLillo stands tall on my list this year with a mid-summer binge, and Underworld was just one of those things that shook me up completely during the experience. The structure, the language, the cosmic sense of what a half-century of progress and missteps can mean to a society and to its individuals. The great arc of baseball in our collective consciousness. I ranked Mason & Dixon at the top of last year’s list, and here we’ve got another doorstop titan.
At the end of 2019, A Whale Hunt was the only book that I reread. It’s a delightful book that helped me think about paragraph structure in my journalism a few years back, and, wow, did it ever get me in the mood this season to strike out on some deep-zazen environmental reporting.
The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle
How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
Good Kids, Bad City by Kyle Swenson
Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Janesville by Amy Goldstein
Draft No. 4 by John McPhee
Furnishing Eternity by David Giffels
Heavy by Kiese Laymon
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
Tenth of December by George Saunders
The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo
Americana by Don DeLillo
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
Fox 8 by George Saunders
Libra by Don DeLillo
Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib
Just Kids by Patti Smith
The Hard Way on Purpose by David Giffels
Keep Going by Austin Kleon
Replay by Ken Grimwood
Feel Free by Zadie Smith
Working by Robert Caro
Hunter S. Thomson: The Last Interview edited by David Streitfeld
Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
Levels of the Game by John McPhee
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg
The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver
Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday
Go Ahead in the Rain by Hanif Abdurraqib
The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick
Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) by Jeff Tweedy
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Leger
Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
Being Here is Everything by Marie Darrieussecq
A Whale Hunt by Robert Sullivan
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
Sandy 