What I Read in 2019: 65 Books
This is the sixth edition of my yearly reading list recap. After increasing my total number of books read each year for the first five years, this is the first time the number has decreased from the previous year (118 to 65, in this case). Either way, I apparently have read nearly 500 books over the last six years. During this “lighter” year that has just finished, most of what I read was quite enjoyable and worthy, but there were very few individual titles that I would add to my all-time favorites list. For what it’s worth, the longest title of the year was the colossal Les Miserables, which could easily count as five books.
Paper or E-Books (26):
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Dalva by Jim Harrison
The Road Home by Jim Harrison
The Woman Lit by Fireflies by Jim Harrison
The Push by Tommy Caldwell
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
If Beale Street could Talk by James Baldwin
Judas by Amos Oz
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Plague by Albert Camus
The Fall by Albert Camus
At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell
Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
Herzog by Saul Bellow
The Chapo Guide to Revolution by Chapo Trap House
Talking Back, Talking Black by John McWhorter
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Shame by Salman Rushdie
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
The Map of Knowledge by Violet Moller
Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman
Audiobooks (39):
The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. Dubois
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
Mosses from an Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
What Maisie Knew by Henry James
The American by Henry James
My Life: Provincial by Anton Chekhov
Beast in the Jungle by Henry James
Studies in Pessimism by Arthur Schopenhauer
Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche
Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Omoo by Herman Melville
I Malavogli by Giovanni Verga
Canne al Vento by Grazia Deledda
Il Principe by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Inheritors by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford
Benito Cereno by Herman Melville
The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield
Theological Political Treatise by Benedict Spinoza
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed
Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens
My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
Right Ho Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D’urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
The Man who was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
Youth by Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad
The Point of Honor by Joseph Conrad
Almayer’s Folly by Joseph Conrad
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
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