dorothea-rising

Books read in 2018, part 1

Life Among the Savages - Shirley Jackson

All You Can Ever Know - Nicole Chung

Dear Committee Members - Julie Schumacher

The Great Believers - Rebecca Makai

Motherhood - Sheila Heti

The Tradition - Jericho Brown

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Indian America from 1890 to Present -David Treuer

Orlando - Virginia Woolf

Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. - Eve Babitz

Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature - Bruce Handy

Night Film - Marisha Pessl

The Shakespeare Requirement - Julie Schumacher

What Should Be Wild - Julia Fine

Strange The Dreamer - Laini Taylor

Innapropriation - Lexi Friedman

The Other Americans - Laila Lalami

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold - John LeCarre

Little - Edward Carrey

Everything Lost is Found Again: Four Seasons in Lesotho - Will McGrath

The Orchard - Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Melmoth - Sarah Perry

Like Rock Needs River - Vanessa McGrady’

A Cruelty Special to Our Species - Emily Jungmin Yoon

Time’s Convert - Deborah Harkness

The Essex Serpent - Sarah Perry

A Torch Against the Night - Sabaa Tahir

I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean - Shayla Lawson

At Home in the World - Joyce Maynard

Conversations with Friends - Sally Rooney

The Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Inglass Wilder - Caroline Fraser

Four-Legged Girl - Diane Seuss

Stardust - Neil Gaiman

Alanna: The First Adventure - Tamora Pierce

Lord of Shadows - Cassandra Clare

Convenient Store Woman - Sayaka Murata

The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell

The Carrying - Ada Limon

The Incendiaries - R.O. Kwon

The Fact of a Body - Alexandria Marzano-Lexnievich

Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

The Talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith

Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday

Mr. Splitfoot - Samantha Hunt

Transit - Rachel Cusk

Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik

My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh

The Book of Life - Deborah Harkness

Shadow of Night - Deborah Harkness

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession - Alice Bolin

The Mars Room - Rachel Kushner

Home - Marilynne Robinson

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup - John Carreyou

There There - Tommy Orange

The Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI - David Graham

The Magicians Nephew - C.S. Lewis

A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith ed. Ilya Kaminsky

Nicotine - Nell Zink

The Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

Reversible - Marisa Crawford

The Outsider - Stephen King

Awayland - Ramona Ausubel

The Sparsholt Affair - Alan Hollinghurst

The Book of Speculation - Erika Swyler

Autumn - Ali Smith

The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath - Leslie Jamison

How to Suppress Women’s Writing - Joanna Russ

Garments Against Women - Anne Boyer

The Dream Thieves - Maggie Stiefvater

American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land - Monica Hesse

Circe - Madeline Miller

The Female Persuasion - Meg Wolitzer

Tangerine - Christine Mangan

Calling a Wolf a Wolf - Kaveh Akbar

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

Virgin - Analicia Sotelo

Magdalene - Marie Howe

blud - Rachel McKibbons

Nice Try, Jane Sinner - Lianne Oelke

The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters

Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure - Amy Kaufman

The Hazel Wood - Melissa Albert

The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore - Kim Fu

Sweetbitter - Stephanie Danler

Beneath the Sugar Sky - Seanan McGuire

Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo

Fire Sermon - Jamie Quatro

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in an American City - Matthew Desmond

The Vet’s Daughter - Barbara Comyns

The Glass Eye - Jeannie Venasco

Stay With Me - Ayobami Adebayo

The Perfect Nanny - Leila Slimani

Heartless - Marissa Meyer

The Book of Dust - Phillip Pullman

Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger

dorothea-rising

Along with these there are a number of books that I’ve been reading slowly but haven’t quite finished:

Roger Reeve’s King Me. I’m still thinking about the poem Domestic Violence.

Feeld by Jos Charles

The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You - Frank Stanford

Frank Bidart’s Half Light: Collected Poems.

David Wojnawaricz’ Close to the Knives

The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America - Richard Rothstein

Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey

I’m also rereading Marilyn Robinson’s The Death of Adam and The Giveness of Things

Other things that I’ve read this year that are sticking with me: ProPublica’s excellent investigation into the lack of justice for the teenage boys murdered on Long Island The Disappeared, The New Yorker’s How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity, The Feels of Love by T Kira Madden, Patricia Lockwood’s How Do We Write Now? Pretty much anything Patricia Lockwood has written for the London Review of books, including on Lucia Berlin, on Rachel Cusk, on Joan Didion. Living with Slenderman by Kathleen Hale, How I Broke, and Botched, The Brandon Teena Story, by Donna Minkowitz, Texas Monthly’s fascinating Schlitterhban’s Tragic Slide, Elisa Gabbert’s Big & Slow

I don’t listen to many books on tape, but every Autumn I find myself relistening to Jim Dale’s narration of the Harry Potter books. For some reason this year I found myself crying more than I ever had while listening. I’ve been trying to methodically reread a lot of the books I read as a child, and just like books like Charlotte’s Web and The Lord of the Rings, they possess something more profoundly sad to me as an adult then there ever was as a child.

Reading Goals of 2019:

There’s a lot to look forward to next year, and I’ve written a lot elsewhere about the books I’m most looking forward to. However as reading has become more attached to my actual career, I’ve begun to think about how I consume books and whether I should spend less time reading and more time doing other things. Trying to shake off the inertia I’ve sunk into with my own writing I’ve also felt that I should maybe delete this blog, which I started because I wanted a place to talk about books, and which I have poured so much time and energy into over the past two years. I can’t quite bring myself to just delete it, but I have been trying to slowly extricate myself from it, which has seemed harder than I thought possible. But that’s my goal of 2019, read less, do other things more.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Books read in 2018, part 1