My Year of Reading: Every Book I Read in 2019

111.

Three slashes, like a prisoner scratching the number of days in his prison cell; in my case, however, I was liberated by the one-hundred-and-eleven books I read in 2019. Not all of them were great, or even good; but the vast majority of the classic and contemporary literature I read was enough to tip the scales on the side of brilliant rather than blasé.

And how do I know exactly how many books I read over the course of the past year? Like many diehard readers, I obsessively track everything in a book log which I have kept since 2005, noting author, title, the number of pages, and—lately—indicating if it’s a library book or an audiobook. I also log everything into my Library Thing account as a way of keeping my shelves sane and orderly (though, with the Great Book Purge of 2019, I no longer own the bulk of that list; nonetheless, I’m not deleting anything on my LT page, partly out of sentimental reasons).

For the statisticians in the group, here’s a breakdown, by the numbers, of my decade of reading (with links back to some previous by-the-numbers blog posts:

2010:  54
2011:  55
2012:  56
2013:  81
2014:  105
2015:  114
2016:  130
2017:  119
2018:  93
2019:  111

The longest book on my 2019 reading log clocked in at 1,144 pages (The Complete Poems of e. e. cummings); the shortest were two children’s books by Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight, Moon and Little Fur Family) at 30 pages each. I didn’t read as many classic books as I’d hoped: only two on the list (three short novels by Gustave Flaubert and one long novel by Anthony Trollope) were published prior to 1900. Most of my reading this year was released in the twenty-first century. As someone who is especially fond of older books, that surprised me somewhat. I hope to do more literary time traveling in 2020.

You can see the picks for my favorite books published in 2019 here, but that only represents a small slice of the whole pie of my reading year.

[A Personal Interlude with some Big Breaking News: Things got kuh-razy busy for my wife Jean and me, starting in mid-summer and continuing until this very minute. After living in Butte, Montana for eleven years, we decided this 4,000-square-foot Craftsman house was just too big for these empty-nesters, so we put it on the market. I’ll spare you the details of all the ups and downs we suffered while riding the real estate rollercoaster—and I eventually stopped sharing the blow-by-blow account on Facebook because things never turned out the way we’d hoped—but at last I can pull the sheet off the Big Reveal: at 11 a.m. yesterday in the Year of Our Lord 2020 we signed the documents (for the fifth offer on the house!) at the title company, thus ending our mostly-happy era of living on Argyle Street. That afternoon, we signed a lease on an apartment (considerably less than 4,000-square feet, yo!) in Helena, an hour north along the interstate. One U-Haul, two days, and many sore muscles later, we are settling in to our fresh new life in a fresh new city.  I’ll still keep my day job with the federal government since my boss has graciously allowed me to telecommute, so little will change in that regard. As for the three cats...? Well, I’m sure they’ll be stressed at first, but Jean and I are pretty sure they’ll love the new place on the fourth floor of the apartment building since it has plenty of windows where they can watch “Bird TV.”]

Back to the books and my year of reading: Until I sold the bulk of my 10,000-volume collection this year (which you can read about here), I was keeping steady pace in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, James Mustich’s excellent list of must-reads. Once I no longer had the physical books in my hands, I stopped posting “1,000 Books photos” to social media; and, regrettably, I halted on my journey through Mr. Mustich’s book. I plan (resolve!) to re-embark on that voyage in this new year, starting with the E section of the book. I hope to make 1,000 Books posts a regular feature of this blog in the coming days. You can see me reading the Jennifer Egan entry (A Visit From the Goon Squad) in the photo above; Goon Squad was the last of the 1,000 Books books I read this year. That photo, taken yesterday morning, is also the last time I’ll be sitting in that breakfast nook in the Argyle Street house, seated at the table my son-in-law built for us many years ago. I will miss that table, that lamp, that cushioned bench seat. I have spent so many happy reading hours there, drenched in lamplight and sunlight. I’ll miss it, but I look forward to finding a new reading space in the Helena apartment.

Looking back over the list below, I note a number of good books I read for the first time, based on Mustich’s 1,000 Books recommendations, among them: Watership Down, Fun Home, The Outermost House, How Buildings Learn (perhaps the most delightfully-surprising one on the list because I didn’t expect to love a book about architecture as much as I did), The Worst Journey in the World, and Rebecca.

Were there disappointments along the way? Of course. No big, eclectic list like this could be all-perfect all-the-time. The ones that let me down included the following: Flaubert’s Parrot (just meh-kay for me), The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (probably knee-slapping funny when it was published in 1950, but not so much today), and My Family and Other Animals (maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind at the time, but I found it less endearing and more tedious to get through).

I made it through a good chunk of my unread Stephen King shelf this year, prompted by the downsizing of the collection which brought these previously-unread early books of his bubbling to the surface. I read all the ones published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym (save for The Running Man, which I’ll get to soon in 2020), as well as the collection of short stories The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. I also, regrettably, read Cycle of the Werewolf. It was terrible and I should have shot my copy with a silver bullet to put it out of our collective misery.

I also read a few really good books about dying, starting with Cory Taylor’s beautiful, intimate account of her last days on earth. Near the end of the year, I picked up Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal which gives good insight into how we treat the elderly and the dying. And, finally, I want to make special note of a book—a chapbook, really—which none of you have heard of: The Comfort Pathway by O. Alan Weltzien, which describes the final days of his mother and how the family gathered in her hospital room handles their individual and collective grief. I strongly urge you, in the loudest and most insistent of voices, to get a copy of The Comfort Pathway. It’s very short—less than 40 pages—but it will stay with you forever. As Weltzien writes in the opening pages: “I’ve always believed, and often taught, that when we try and write about the dead whom we loved, they come back in some ways and leave lasting traces. They don’t stay as far away.”

Other random highlights of the reading year:
*  Mary & Lou & Rhoda & Ted by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong took me back to the nights I sat in front of the TV in the 1970s watching Mary Tyler Moore and the WJM-TV crew;
*  several of Alan Bradley’s Falvia de Luce mysteries put an infectious smile on my face as I drove the highways and byways of Montana listening to the audiobooks narrated by Jayne Entwistle;
*  I finally got around to reading one of Ann Patchett’s novels, State of Wonder, and boy was I blown away by her storytelling prowess;
*  ditto with Elizabeth Gilbert (City of Girls);
*  a dreamy week spent on the crew of Wim Wenders’ short film about Edward Hopper, shot here in Butte, led me to explore more books about the American artist (Wenders’ film was for a museum installation of Hopper’s works opening this month in Switzerland);
*  I did a deep dive into the works of Adam Braver and re-confirmed my opinion that he is simply one of our greatest contemporary writers who doesn’t get as much attention as he deserves; if you have never read one of his novels, I highly recommend you start with Misfit or November 22, 1963;
*  I don’t normally read self-help books, but You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero filled me with superpowers and helped give me confidence for this life-changing move to Helena;
*  and, finally, I ventured back into the works of Virginia Woolf and found she wasn’t as dreadful as I’d thought during my grad school days.

And now on to the list, which I’ve arranged in alphabetical by author’s last name, rather than in chronological reading order:

Adams, Richard: Watership Down
Alexievich, Svetlana: Voices From Chernobyl
Armstrong, Jennifer Keishin: Mary & Lou & Rhoda & Ted
Atwood, Margaret: Cat’s Eye
Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid’s Tale
Baldwin, James: Notes of a Native Son
Barnes, Julian: Flaubert’s Parrot
Barnes, Kate: Where the Deer Were
Barrett, William E.: Lilies of the Field
Bashaw, Molly: The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It
Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home
Beckerman, Ilene: Love, Loss and What I Wore
Beston, Henry: The Outermost House
Blake, Sarah: The Guest Book
Bradley, Alan: A Red Herring Without Mustard
Bradley, Alan: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Bradley, Alan: The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag
Bradley, Ryan W.: The Memory of Planets
Brand, Stewart: How Buildings Learn
Braver, Adam: Crows Over the Wheatfield
Braver, Adam: Divine Sarah
Braver, Adam: November 22, 1963
Braver, Adam: The Disappeared
Braver, Adam: What the Women Do
Brown, Margaret Wise: Goodnight Moon
Brown, Margaret Wise: Little Fur Family
Brunhoff, Jean de: Babar and His Children
Burns, Charles: Sugar Skull
Carey, John: Eyewitness to History
Carr, J. L.: A Month in the Country
Chast, Roz: Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Chauvet, Jean-Marie: Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave
Cherry-Garrard, Aspley: The Worst Journey in the World
Christie, Agatha: Ordeal by Innocence
Christie, Agatha: Thirteen at Dinner
Clarke, Brock: Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?
Collins, Billy: Sailing Alone Around the Room
cummings, e. e.: Complete Poems
Cunningham, Michael: The Hours
Cuppy, Will: The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody
Dahl, Roald: Matilda
Delaney, Edward J.: The Big Impossible
Denby, David: Great Books
Desai, Anita: Clear Light of Day
Du Maurier, Daphne: Rebecca
Du Maurier, Daphne: The Apple Tree
Durrell, Gerald: My Family and Other Animals
Egan, Jennifer: A Visit From the Goon Squad
Farres, Ernest: Edward Hopper
Fish, Kathy: Wild Life: Collected Works
Flaubert, Gustave: Three Short Works
Fox, Wendy J.: If the Ice Had Held
French, Tana: The Witch Elm
Gaskell, Elizabeth: The Old Nurse’s Story
Gawande, Atul: Being Mortal
Gilbert, Elizabeth: City of Girls
Hall, Donald, editor: New Poets of England and America
Healy, Luke: How to Survive in the North
Hernandez, Gilbert: The Troublemakers
Hughes, Anita: Christmas in Vermont
Hughes, Dorothy B.: In a Lonely Place
Jason: Low Moon
Jason: What I Did
Kaminsky, Ilya: Deaf Republic
King, Stephen: Cycle of the Werewolf
King, Stephen: Rage
King, Stephen: Roadwork
King, Stephen: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
King, Stephen: The Long Walk
Klinger, Leslie S. and Lisa Morton, editors: Ghost Stories
Kusnetz, Ilyse: Angel Bones
MacLeod, Charlotte: Rest You Merry
Maizes, R. L.: We Love Anderson Cooper
Malden, R. H.: The Sundial
McCullough, David: The Pioneers
McMahon, Tyler: Kilometer 99
Michener, James: Hawaii
Nicolson, Nigel: Virginia Woolf
O’Brien, Tim: Dad’s Maybe Book
Obama, Barack: Dreams From My Father
Obama, Michelle: Becoming
Obreht, Tea: Inland
Olivas, Daniel: Crossing the Border
Oliver, Mary: Felicity
Olsen, Tillie: Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I, and Other Works
Olson, Justin: Earth to Charlie
Patchett, Ann: State of Wonder
Ray, Shann: Sweetclover
Reid, Taylor Jenkins: Daisy Jones and the Six
Rowland, Russell: Cold Country
Seth: Clyde Fans
Shapiro, Dani: Devotion
Shapiro, Dani: Inheritance
Sincero, Jen: You Are a Badass
Singleton, George: Staff Picks
Spawforth, Tony: Versailles: A Biography of a Palace
Strand, Mark: Hopper
Taylor, Cory: Dying
Taylor, Patrick: An Irish Country Christmas
Telgemeier, Raina: Guts
Tesdell, Diana Secker, editor: Christmas Stories
Trollope, Anthony: The Small House at Allington
Urza, Gabriel: The White Death: An Illusion
Weltzien, O. Alan: The Comfort Pathway
Wharton, Edith: The Age of Innocence
Wilder, Thornton: The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Williams, Diane: The Collected Stories of Diane Williams
Woolf, Virginia: Jacob’s Room
Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
Zalkow, Yuvi: A Brilliant Novel in the Works
Zindell, Deborah T.: National Parks History of the WPA Poster Art

Reading Ahead

I do a quick tally of my to-be-read list.

1,981.

I look again at that single-spaced list of books on my computer, that long scroll of titles that, at various times over the past decade, have piqued my interest. One thousand, nine hundred and eighty-one books. That’s a lot of papercuts.

The TBR list ebbs and flows, but mostly flows. For every four titles I add in a zest of anticipation, I know that only one will be read. When all is said and done, there’s a lot more said than done; or, a lot more said than read. Still, the mountain of must-reads, my own Mount NeveRest, grows and grows and grows.

I have no expectation of chopping off very many of feet in elevation during 2019, but I do a have a plan. I will attack Mount NeveRest methodically, judiciously, alphabetically. At least that is my plan on this first day of the year; we’ll see how the other 364 play out.

As some of you who have popped in to my Facebook page already know, I have been making a practice of adding to my TBR list by going through 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die by James Mustich one volume per day (if I’ve already read Mr. Mustich’s suggestion, all the better....but, like I said, that’s about one in four). The 1,000 Books Before You Die roster supplements my already-existing Essentials List. My plan is to alternate reading one book from the top of the list (James Agee, for instance) with one from the bottom (Emile Zola, I’m looking at you!).

Alternating with that system, I intend to take a book off the top of my ebook and “regular” book lists, which means the newer (2018 and 2019 vintage) books which I’ve been hoping to read soon. That way, I can get the best of both classic and modern literature in my diet.

Taking a peek at that latter list, here are the books which have climbed to the top (though they could always be bumped down a notch or two by other shiny new arrivals):

Earth to Charlie by Justin Olson
I Miss You When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
The Good Neighbor by Maxwell King
Inheritance by Dani Shapiro
The Municipalists by Seth Fried
Veterans Crisis Hotline by Jon Chopan
Little Faith by Nickolas Butler

But first, it’s Agatha Christie. I have a long-standing tradition of making the first book I read in the new year one by Dame Agatha. Last year, it was The Boomerang Clue; the year before that, it was Death in the Air; in 2016, it was Mrs. McGinty’s Dead. I’ve read about half of her prolific output and I’m working on the second half, starting this year with the 1933 mystery Thirteen at Dinner (aka Lord Edgware Dies). Double bonus points for the fact that it’s one of the Dell Mapbacks in my collection. I love these vintage paperbacks for the stylized maps they included, as the name states, on the back cover.

Thirteen at Dinner is a fairly routine, by-the-numbers Christie mystery. So far, nothing outright memorable has reared its bloody head to distinguish it from the many other Christies I have read. But I’m okay with a comfortable, routine investigation at this point. I read Agatha Christie to slow down, to savor, to allow my mind to float, to hover over the scene in the locked drawing room, to dissolve into the clues and to transport myself to the scene of the crime. Harsh cold weather, the bleak midwinter government furlough, the wind-up chattering-teeth noise of news headlines: all of that melts away as Hercule Poirot strokes his mustaches and announces, on page 140 (of 240 pages!!), “I know the truth of the whole affair.”

Of course he does. And now I settle in for the delicious 100-page tease in which I try, and fail and fail again, to match wits with Monsieur Poirot.

It’s a fun game to play: me in my armchair with a book and nothing but time on my hands (thanks to the government furlough) to solve a murder.

Things Are About to Get Dark: Montana Noir spills blood on the prairie

Sometimes I write with blood on the keyboard. The dark, thick, oozing kind, just released from the prison of vein, that greases my imagination as I turn down a series of midnight-black streets.

In other words, noir mystery. Not the cozy kind from Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, not the police procedurals of Ed McBain or Patricia Cornwell, but the hardboiled prose rolling off the knuckles of writers like Dashiell Hammett, John D. MacDonald and Raymond Chandler. Tough stuff full of hard liquor, soft women, and the confusion of blood trying to find its way home to the vein.

One of my short stories in such a vein (so to speak) is called “Red, White and Butte” and it is being published for the first time in a new anthology called Montana Noir, officially out today. Montana Noir is the latest in the acclaimed series from Akashic Books (Brooklyn Noir, Montreal Noir, Atlanta Noir, etc.) and we Montana writers couldn’t be happier to see our famed Big Skies turn to Dark Skies, at least for the space of 288 pages. We’ve been waiting for this anthology for years. There’s not a city big enough in Montana to warrant its own Noir volume, so the publisher decided to spread the murder and mayhem across the entire state. But we’re easy-going Montanans and we’re okay with that. We’re just happy for the chance to finally spill some blood on our prairies and drive stolen cars (with bodies in the trunks) into our forests.

Where the bodies are buried

I was invited by editors James Grady and Keir Graff to write something set in Butte and I’m honored to be in the same pages as authors like Thomas McGuane, Jamie Ford, Debra Earling, Walter Kirn, and Carrie LaSeur, among many others.

As the editors write in their Introduction,

This anthology is a road trip through the dreams and disasters of the true Montana, stories written by authors with Montana in their blood, tales that circle you around the state through its cities and small towns. These are twenty-first-century authors writing timeless sagas of choice, crime, and consequences.

Choice, crime, and consequences. Yep, that pretty much sums up the arc of a noir story.

I took on the assignment with all the glee of Hannibal Lecter sharpening his cutlery at the dinner table. Though I would have liked to include more Butte icons in the story (sadly, I couldn’t fit Pork Chop John’s, the Copper King Mansion, or the Dumas Brothers brothel into the limited word count), I hope Butte-icians will like what is there on the page. Watch for the Finlen Hotel, the Party Palace, Duggan-Dolan Mortuary, Georgetown Lake, Headframe Distillery, Walkerville, and—of course—the Berkeley Pit.

Here’s a little taste of “Red, White, and Butte” to whet your appetite:

       Marlowe was dead and that was fine by me. The two of us had gone off to war together, but only one had returned with his jaw still attached to his face, able to describe what he’d seen. Which was also fine by me since I was the one telling the war stories.
       Marlowe lay in pieces in a coffin at Duggan-Dolan Mortuary in Butte, waiting for the official start of his hero’s welcome: a parade, lying in state for two days under the courthouse rotunda, and a picnic complete with a huckleberry pie bake-off, a three-legged race, and earnest old men in combat ball caps passing around a boot to raise money for a new veterans home. Next to Evel Knievel Days, everyone said it would be the highlight of Butte’s summer.
       The rest of us got a limp salute from our commander and a three-inch stack of discharge paperwork, but Marlowe would have a big to-do—the kind of fuss showered on the dead after they can no longer appreciate it: red-white-and-blue bunting along Granite Street, his widow the grand marshal of the parade, Republican senators inserting Marlowe into their campaign speeches, and Democrats a little more reservedly acknowledging the Butte native’s service and the terrible cost of war.
       Montanans love their hometown heroes. Dead or living, soldiers like Marlowe are praised with words that bloom like fireworks and boom like parade drums from their speakers’ throats.
       But I knew the truth: Private Chandler Marlowe had died a coward in Iraq.

The editors and several of us authors will be taking Montana Noir on the road in the coming days and weeks. For a complete schedule, go here.

If you’re in Montana, we’d love to see you at one of the events. It’ll be the stuff dreams are made of.

Trailer Park Tuesday: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

       “If there was a murder, then there was a murderer. The murderer is with us...and every one of you is a suspect.”
       “And who are you?”
       “My name is Hercule Poirot, and I am probably the greatest detective in the world.”

That’s right, my little grey cells, the Belgian puzzle-solver is back on the big screen. By my reckoning, the last theatrical release featuring Agatha Christie’s beloved creation was 1988’s Appointment With Death, starring Peter Ustinov. We’re long overdue for a big, splashy Hollywood production—the kind they used to make in the 1960s and 70s where the lobby posters featured the faces of nearly-overripe actors just one disappointing opening weekend away from guest starring on The Love Boat. In the interim, of course, H. P. has been doing plenty of sleuthing on the small screen—most admirably by David Suchet, who sets such a high standard for the character that it will be hard to topple him from that pedestal. If anyone can refresh Poirot, however, it is “probably the greatest actor in the world,” Mr. Kenneth Branagh. As we see in this terrific trailer for the new movie version of Christie’s 1934 novel, Murder on the Orient Express, Branagh not only has the accent down—not too thick, not too thin—but his upper lip also bears those famous “moustaches,” here in fuller bloom than we’ve seen before. Just as in the 1974 theatrical release (starring the Oscar-nominated Albert Finney), the 2017 movie is stuffed with an all-star cast: Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench, Michelle Pfeiffer, Daisy Ridley, Derek Jacobi and Josh Gad. I can’t wait to climb aboard and start gathering clues when the Orient Express leaves the station in November.


Trailer Park Tuesday is a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

My Year of Reading: Every Book I Read in 2016

This Was the Year

This was the year I killed it, reading-wise: 130 books, a new record since I started keeping track of my habits in 2005 (the year I was deployed to Iraq with the U.S. Army, I had loads of free time on my hands, and I read what now looks like a paltry 50 books).

This was the year when I read fewer new books (i.e., those released in the past 12 months) than ones published in other years: 56 vs. 74. Part of that had to do with my commitment to making headway on my Five-Year Reading Plan of the Essentials (though I still have a long way to go on that list), but part of it also had to do with the fact that I occasionally let my fancy go free and footloose through my library, pinballing from one book to the next, no matter what the publication date.

This was the year I re-discovered audiobooks. Rather than listening to Bruno Mars, Electric Light Orchestra, or Sia on my daily commute to and from the Day Job, I opted for Audible.com and the aural pleasures of Timothy West rolling the prose of Anthony Trollope trippingly off his tongue through The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne and Can You Forgive Her?. Richard Armitage also brought David Copperfield back to life for me on my second time through the classic novel (which now might just be my favorite Dickens of all time, nudging Dombey and Son from the top of the list).

This was the year of Anthony Trollope. When I go all in, I go really deep.

This was the year I got a library card. After being appointed to the Butte-Silver Bow Public Library Board earlier this year, I realized—with a bucketload of chagrin—that I had rarely darkened the doorway of our beautiful 122-year-old library here in Butte, Montana (and never to check out a book—gasp!). I quickly corrected the error of my ways by taking out a book by Lee Child.

This was the year of Lee Child. For years, family friend Marilyn has politely badgered me to read the bestselling author. “I think you’ll really like him,” she says every time she sees me. I mean every frickin' time, without fail. Finally, caving in and attempting to silence Marilyn’s hectoring once and for all, I checked out a copy of A Wanted Man from the library. Within twenty pages, I was convinced Marilyn was the smartest person on the planet. Not only did I “really like” Child, I loved him. I immediately started binging on Jack Reacher. He turned out to be the Lay’s potato chip of action heroes. At our Christmas party a few weeks ago, I pulled Marilyn aside and told her of my new-found love for all things Lee Child. “Great!” she said. “Now, let’s talk about David Baldacci...”

This was the year I read a book about a horrific plane crash (Fireball) while I was flying cross-country from Montana to Georgia. I survived my flight; Carole Lombard, unfortunately, did not walk away from hers.

This was the year I should have revived The Biography Project here at the blog since I read books about The Lives of Others (author Anthony Trollope, baseball legend Ted Williams, film actress Carole Lombard, and author Sinclair Lewis—the latter which I haven’t completely finished, so I’m carrying it over to my 2017 book log).

This was the year of Sinclair Lewis. I originally read Main Street as part of my Five-Year Plan, but enjoyed it so much, I moved on to several other time-tested classics by the Midwestern satirist. I binged him hard. Like Lee Child hard, like Anthony Trollope levels of intensity. (Come to think of it, this was the Year of Binge.) I’m not through with Lewis yet. I plan to read at least two more of his before this year is out: It Can’t Happen Here (because, sadly, it did, it did) and Dodsworth.

This was the year I was surprised by how bad some books could be, given their popularity and the bestselling reputation of the author (the children’s classic The Black Stallion and Alan Furst’s A Hero of France to name just two), but I was also pleasantly surprised by how truly great some relatively-unheralded titles turned out to be (Searching for John Hughes; Not All Fires Burn the Same; Wilderness; and every book by Nickolas Butler, which I gobbled down in quick succession—by the way, The Hearts of Men, which comes out this March, is the best of them all). I was also left feeling flatlined by books I expected to love but only liked (The Sisters Brothers, Zero K, Then We Came to the End, I’m Thinking of Ending Things).

This was the year my wife, feeling like a “book widow,” sighed in exasperation, “You know, you’ll never be able to read ALL THE BOOKS.”

This was the year I turned to her and replied, “Maybe not, but I’m gonna try.”

Crunching the Numbers

Sure, I read a lot of poetry books which typically clock in at less than 100 pages. And, yes, I read quite a few stand-alone novellas (mostly from the fabulous Ploughshares Solo series) that were often less than 50 pages. But for every whisper-thin poetry chapbook or novella, there were books the size of small Pacific islands (I’m looking at you, Mr. Anthony Trollope Novel!). The proof in my book pudding comes when I crunch the numbers to determine the average page count (yes, I note the number of pages in my book log—don’t you?). In 2016, I read a total of 32,584 pages (not counting the 606 pages in the Sinclair Lewis biography, which I’m rolling over into the 2017 book log). That puts me at an average page count of 251, lower than last year’s average of 304 (note to my 2017 self: fewer novellas, more Trollope). But nearly 33,000 pages still feels like a whole helluva lot. I mean, I could never eat 33,000 Oreos in one year no matter how hard I tried.

More stuff which is possibly interesting only to me:

• The shortest book was Confession (24 pages) by Bill Roorbach, the longest was David Copperfield (877 pages) by Charles Dickens
• 44 of the 130 were e-books
• 5 were audiobooks
• 56 were published in 2016, 3 were advance copies destined to be released in 2017 or beyond, and the rest were from prior years
• 89 were written by men, 37 by women, 4 were a mix of both (anthologies or collaborations), and 0 were written by cats

And now, without further ado, I give you...

ALL THE BOOKS I READ THIS YEAR

Mrs. McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie
Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins
Escape and Reverse by Chelsey Johnson
Confession by Bill Roorbach
Over on the Dry Side by Louis L’Amour
The Revenant by Michael Punke
Wilderness by Lance Weller
Up From the Blue by Susan Henderson
The Detroit Frankfurt Discussion Group by Douglas Trevor
All I Want Is What You’ve Got by Glen Chamberlain
This is What I Want by Craig Lancaster
The House on the Cliff by Franklin W. Dixon
Selected Poems by Theodore Roethke
A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown
Dog Run Moon by Callan Wink
The Darkening Trapeze by Larry Levis
Hollywood and the Holocaust by Henry Gonshak
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
The Other Felix by Keir Graff
Zero K by Don DeLillo
Galaxie Wagon by Darnell Arnoult
Tin House #66
Building Stories by Chris Ware
Look by Solmaz Sharif
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
A Wanted Man by Lee Child
By the Iowa Sea by Joe Blair
Make Me by Lee Child
Dead Man’s Float by Jim Harrison
Daredevils by Shawn Vestal
Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison
Men Be Either Or, But Never Enough by Andria Nacina Cole
Killing Floor by Lee Child
Cordoba Skies by Federico Falco
Unquiet Things by James Davis May
Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me by Andy Martin
The Black Stallion by Walter Farley
The Virginity of Famous Men by Christine Sneed
Little Known Facts by Christine Sneed
One Summer by Bill Bryson
Battle Rattle by Brandon Davis Jennings
Poems: New and Selected by Ron Rash
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
Into the Sun by Deni Ellis Bechard
Mississippi Noir edited by Tom Franklin
They Could Live With Themselves by Jodi Paloni
Still Come Home by Katey Schultz
56 Counties by Russell Rowland
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
The Soul in Paraphrase by Robert Boswell
Beach Plum Jam by Patricia Buddenhagen
The Art of Departure by Craig Lancaster
They Were Strong and Good by Robert Lawson
McWhinney’s Jaunt by Robert Lawson
Canoe Country by Florence Page Jaques
Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler
Sketchy Stories by Kerby Rosanes
The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses edited by Cecily Parks
Marrow Island by Alexis M. Smith
ShallCross by C. D. Wright
I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
Liar’s Code by Rich Chiappone
Beneath the Bonfire by Nickolas Butler
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
The Walking Dead #1 by Robert Kirkman
Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover by Paul Buckley
There Now by Eamon Grennan
Bestiary by Donika Kelly
Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Exceptional Mountains by O. Alan Weltzien
Glimmer Train Stories #96 Spring/Summer 2016 (with a story by Yours Truly)
Melancholy Accidents by Peter Manseau
Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee
Closer All the Time by Jim Nichols
99 Poems by Dana Gioia
Searching for John Hughes by Jason Diamond
Nancy’s Mysterious Letter by Carolyn Keene
Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan
The Hour of Land by Terry Tempest Williams
The State We’re In by Ann Beattie
Splitting an Order by Ted Kooser
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Confusion of Languages by Siobhan Fallon
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
Footing Slow: A Walk with Keats by Eli Payne Mandel
Trending Into Maine by Kenneth Roberts
The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones
Koppargruva by Hugh Coyle
Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier
Landscape with Headless Mama by Jennifer Givhan
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
The Iliad by Homer (Robert Fagels, translator)
A Hero of France by Alan Furst
Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen
Anthony Trollope by Victoria Glendinning
Not All Fires Burn the Same by Francine Witte
Night School by Lee Child
Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope
The Door That Always Opens by Julie Funderburk
The Black Echo by Michael Connelly
Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams
Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope
The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico
The Mothers by Brit Bennett
The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri
Snowflake by Paul Gallico
Miracle in the Wilderness by Paul Gallico
Afterward by Edith Wharton
One Who Saw by A. M. Burrage
The Crown Derby Plate by Marjorie Bowen
The Diary of Mr. Poynter by M. R. James
The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by P. D. James
Waterlines by Alison Pelegrin
The Signalman by Charles Dickens
Christmas Days by Jeanette Winterson
Wintering by Peter Geye
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee Jr.