Another year gone already? Strange. I never seem to spend as much time reading as I’d like. I imagine others share my dismay when I realize that yet another twelve months have spun round. Here are some of the books I did manage to read. War & Peace alone took out about a dozen other potential books! There’s always next year. Onward! 

William Langewiesche, The Outlaw Sea
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22
Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern
Nicholson Baker, Anthologist
Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist
Don Thompson, The $12,000,000 Stuffed Shark
Howard Nemerov, Collected Poems
Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking
Seamus Heaney, Field Work
Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland
Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man
Bruce Bawer, Prophets and Professors
Gregory McNamee, Return of Richard Nixon
Wesley Stace, Charles Jessold Considered as a Murderer
Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall
Rae Armantrout, Versed
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Michael Chabon, Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
William Burroughs, The Job
Stevyn Zaloga, Panther Vs. Sherman
A.N. Wilson, Tolstoy
Ted Hughes, Lupercal
Rachel Wetzsteon, Silver Roses
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Rosemary Edmonds
CA Conrad, Book of Frank
David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Phil Hoy, Seven American Poets
Christopher B. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich
Joan Didion, White Album
Tina Fey, Bossypants
Nikki Sixx, Heroin Diaries
A. E. Hotchner, The Good Life According to Hemingway
Cyril Edwards, trans, Nibelungenlied, Oxford Classics
Henry Miller, Black Spring
Martin Amis, Moronic Inferno
Alan Bennett, Uncommon Reader
Shakespeare, MacBeth, Yale series
Philip Larkin, Whitsun Weddings
Philip Larkin, High Windows
Saul Bellow, Herzog
Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
Justin Taylor, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever
John Carey, Pure Pleasure
Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Ian McEwan, Cement Garden
Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity
Muriel Spark, Far Cry from Kensington
Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
Adrian Tomine, Scenes from an Impending Marriage
Christian Lander, Whiter Shades of Pale
Christopher Buckley, Florence of Arabia
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Hunter S. Thompson, Songs of the Damned
Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve
William Kennedy, Ironweed
Max Brooks, World War Z
H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
Joseph Epstein, Life Sentences
Justin Quinn, Close Quarters
Barnaby Conrad, Martini
Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Goering: The Rise and Fall of the Notorious Nazi Leader
Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library 1
David Higgins, King Tiger Vs. IS-2
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Kingsley Amis, Green Man
Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary
Jason Guriel, Pure Product
Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murad, trans. Maud
Leo Tolstoy, Kreuzer Sonanta, trans. Maud
Samuel Manashe, New and Selected Poems
Gabriella Ibieta, ed, Latin American Writers
Anthony Preston, World’s Worst Warships
Robert Desaix, Night Letters
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, trans Christopher Fry
Kim Deitch, Alias, Cat
Best American Comics 2011
Mark Stille, Imperial Japanese Navy Battleships
Richard Ford, Women with Men
Erik Davis, Led Zeppelin IV
Thomas Foster, 25 Books that Changed America
Richard Humble, Hitler’s High Seas Fleet
Muriel Spark, the Finishing School
Clive James, Opal Sunset, New and Selected Poems

Books read or reread in 2010

Sinclair Lewis, Babbit
William Logan, Whispering Gallery
Best American Comics 2009
Best American Comics 2010
Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl
William T. Vollman, Europe Central
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
William Logan, Strange Flesh
Hunter S. Thompson, Hey, Rube
Frederick Seidel, Collected Poems
Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil (various translators, New Directions)
Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes
Calvin Tomkins, Lives of the Artists
Paul Siegell, Wild Life Rifle Fire
Katy Evans-Bush, Oscar and Henry
Dave Sim, Glamourpuss
Alvaro Mutis, Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, translated by Edith Grossman, five novels:
The Snow of the Admiral
Ilona Comes with the Rain
The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call
Abdul Basher, Dreamer of Ships
Tryptich on Sea and Land
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
P.J. O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell
Kevin Prufer, Fallen from a Chariot
Harvey Pekar, The Beats
Rutu Modan, Exit Wounds
Kenneth Rexroth, Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile
Mark Dawson, Solitary Conversations
Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems
Maurizio Catelan (Phaidon), by Francesco Bonami, Nancy Spector, Barbara Vanderlinden, and Massimiliano Gioni
Zora Neale Hurston, Complete Stories
Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
Jill Essbaum, The Devastation
The Complete Graphic Work of Jack Levine, Kenneth W. Prescott and Emma-Stina Prescott
William S. Burroughs, The Ticket that Exploded
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Superfreakonomics
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
Horace, Odes and Epodes, Joseph Clancy, trans
Anton Joachimsthaler, The Last Days of Hitler: Legend, Evidence and Truth

David Sedaris, When You are Covered in Flames
Damion Searls, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going
Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again
Sapphire, Push
James Thurber, Credos and Curios
Robert Lowell, Collected Prose
Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed
Paul Johnson, Modern Times
Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore
Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All
John O’Hara, Appointment in Samara
T.S. Eliot, The Confidential Clerk
Donald Hall, White Apple and the Taste of Stone, New and Selected
Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach
Ian McEwan, Solar
Evan Thomas, Sea of Thunder, Four Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign 1941-1945
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, Peter Carson, trans
David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp
Lester Bangs, Mainlines, Bloodfeasts, and Bad Taste
David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Christopher Buckley, Supreme Courtship
Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana
Alan Powers, Front Covers
Martin Amis, The Information
Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms
Graham Annable, Further Grickle
Hunter S. Thompson, Better Than Sex
Edwin Gaustad, Ben Franklin
Martial, Epigrams, William Matthews, trans
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
Tao Lin, Shoplifting from American Apparrel
Philip Roth, American Pastoral
John Foy, Techne’s Clearinghouse
Robert Lowell, Notebook (Red)
T.C.F. Hopkins, Confrontation at Lepanto
Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, David Yezzi, ed.
Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities
Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
J.L. Carr, Month in the Country
Steve Mateo, Let It Be
Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It
Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick
Matthew Zapruder, Come On All You Ghosts
Nicholas Basbanes, Among the Gently Mad
Thomas Aylesworth, Monsters from the Movies
Peter Bagge, The Bradleys
Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange
David Sedaris, Holidays on Ice
A.M. Homes, This Book Will Save Your Life
Dan Breithaupt, Aja
Mark Polizzotti, Highway 61 Revisited
Jane Smiley, Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Robert Stern, Kriegsmarine
Seamus Heaney, North
Timothy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation
John Ashbery, Notes from the Air
Julia Wertz, Drinking at the Movies
W. Somerset Maugham, Razor’s Edge

Jay McInerney, How it Ended
Robert Lowell, Lord Weary’s Castle
Hunger S. Thompson, Curse of Lono
Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato
W.D. Snodgrass, Not for Specialists
Philip Hoy, W.D. Snodgrass in Conversation
Rachel Wetzsteon, Home and Away
Michael Reck, Ezra Pound, a Close-Up
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler (Hugh Aplin translator)
William Burroughs, Place of Dead Roads
Kay Ryan, Niagara River
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
Tom Wolf, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Matthew Zapruder, The Pajamaist
Jill Alexander Esbaum, Heaven
Pictopia, Volume One
Andi Watson, Slow News Day
Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
Mountain Man Dance Moves, by the editors of McSweeney’s
Annie La Ganga, Stoners and Self-Appointed Saints
Daniel Clowes, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
Franz Wright, Wheeling Motel
Tom Wolf, The Right Stuff
Plato, Trial and Death of Socrates
Jon Stallworthy, War Poet
John Danielle, Master of Reality
Esquire Handbook of Style, by the editors of Esquire
Batton Lash, Tales of Supernatural Law
Robert Jackson, The World’s Great Battleships, from the Middle Ages to the Present
Gillian G. Gaar, In Utero
Christopher Buckley, Boomsday
Heather Green, No Omen
Kaya Oakes, Slanted and Enchanted: the Evolution of Indie Culture
Daniel Clowes, Eightball
Richard Ford, Multitude of Sins
David Cross, I Drink for a Reason
Anthony Thwaite, Ruins of Time
Peter Bagge, Buddy Does Seattle
Paul Fussell, Bad, or the Dumbing of America
Chuck Klosterman, Eating the Dinosaur
Theresa Ortolani, Endurance
Ethan Rilly, Pope Hats One
Donald Barthelme, Flying to America
John Updike, Pigeon Feathers
Allison Hoover Bartlett, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much
Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw
Jamie McKendrick, Crocodiles and Obelisks
Peter Bagge, Everyone is Stupid Except for Me
Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water
Ian McEwan, Comfort of Strangers
Sharon Olds, The Father
Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
John Updike, The Complete Henry Bech
New British Poetry, edited by Don Paterson and Charles Simic
John Updike, Bech at Bay
Jason Shinga, Bookhunter
Geoffrey Brock, Weighing Light
Tim Clayton, Hogarth
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Craig Arnold, Made Flesh
Danny Sugerman, Appetite for Destruction
Malcolm Gladwell, Tipping Point
Jason Lutes, Berlin, Book Two
Hugo Wilkes, Low
Craig Arnold, Shells
Douglas Coupland, Generation X
Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet
Tony Horowitz, Confederates in the Attic

Books read or reread in 2009

Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons
Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word
George Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier
Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch
Ben Katchor, Beauty Supply District
Charles Burns, Big Baby
George Orwell, Why I Write
Tom Wolfe, In Our Time
Tom Wolfe, Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Kimball and Kramer (eds.), Lengthened Shadows
Amy Clampitt, Westward
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
Robert Crumb, R. Crumb’s America
Gay Talese, The Gay Talese Reader
W.H. Auden, Academic Graffiti
Gabrielle Bell, When I am Old
Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories
Cusquena Paintings in the Churches of Cusco [no author]
Mario Vargas Llosa, Feast of the Goat
Mario Vargas Llosa, Death in the Andes
Garcilaso de la Vega, The Royal Commentaries
Sarah Hannah, Inflorescence
T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and The Waste Land, annotated by Valden James Madson
Adam Kirsch, Invasions
Adam Kirsch, The Modern Element
Hal Sirozitz, Before, During, and After
E.A. Robinson, Selected Poems
Dana Goodyear, Honey and Junk
Davis McCombs, Dismal Rock
Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House
David Mason, Ludlow
Lynn Levin, Imaginarium
George Plimpton, The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair
Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up
Tom Wolfe, The Pumphouse Gang
Jenny Holzer, The Venice Installation
Philip Roth, Everyman
Simon Armitage (translator), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Robert Lowell, Life Studies
Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead
Erica Dawson, Big-Eyed Afraid
Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into the Trees
Drawn and Quarterly Showcase Volume One
Drawn and Quarterly Showcase Volume Two
Harvey Pekar, Another Day
Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny
Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men
John Ashbery, A Worldly Country
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
Nathanael West, Day of the Locust
Sophie Hannah, Pessimism for Beginners
P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves
J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets
W.H. Auden, As I Walked out One Evening
Mary Jo Bang, Elegy
Henry Taylor, Brief Candles
Arthur Nersesian, The Fuck-Up
Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt
J. Allyn Rosser, Foiled Again
David Leaf (ed.), KISS, Behind the Mask
P.G. Wodehouse, Luck of the Woosters
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy
Johannes Steinhoff, Final Hours
Tom Disch, About the Size of It
T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
Charles Simic, A Wedding in Hell
Charles Bukowski, The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain
Jay McInerny, Model Behavior
W.S. Di Pierro, Brother Fire
Chuck Palahniuk, Snuff
Simon Armitage, Selected Poems
David Davies, Nelson’s Navy
Kevin Huizenga, Curses
Eavan Boland, Outside History
Joshua Ferris, And then We Came to the End
Jeanette Winterson, Boating for Beginners
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno
Sarah Vowell, Party Cloudy Patriot
Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
Michael Quadland, That Was Then
Tom Disch, Castle of Indolence
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation
Tom Disch, Castle of Perseverance
Tom Disch, Camp Concentration
Greg Sanders, Motel Girl
D.H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts, and Flowers
Howard Griffin, Conversations with Auden
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
The Upanishads
Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
Ben Katchor, Julius Kniple, Real Estate Photographer
Jonathan Ames, The Alcoholic
Henry James, The Ambassadors
Paul Fussell, Class
Christian Landor, Stuff White People Like
Drawn and Quarterly Showcase, Volume Four
Robert Lowell, Lord Weary’s Castle
Jason Lutes, Berlin: City of Stones, Part One
Gahan Wilson, Monster Collection
Charles Addams, Half-Baked Cookbook
Robert Frost, Versed in Country Things
Stewart O’Nan, Last Night at the Lobster
Wendell Stacy Johnson, W.H. Auden
Frederick Seidel, Cosmos Trilogy
Philip Larkin, Jill
Joseph Epstein, Narcissus Leaves the Pool
S. Eddy Bell, Lulu and Mitzy, Best Laid Plans
David Yezzi, Azores
Paul Siegell, Poemergency Room

Books read or reread in 2008

Alistaire Horne, The Age of Napoleon
Philip K. Dick, Selected Stories
Henry Reed, The Auction Sale, introduction by Jon Stallworthy
Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me
Catullus, Odi et Amo, translated by Roy Arthur Swanson
Jennifer Omand, Squarecat Comics, Volume One
Mark Steyn, America Alone
W.H. Auden, About the House
Michel Rabagliati, Paul Moves Out
Jon Stallworthy, Body Language
Marilyn Taylor, Subject to Change
George Herbert, Selected Poems, edited by R.S. Thomas
Eric Pankey, For the New Year
Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves
C.K. Williams, The Vigil
Gustave Dore/Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
C.K. Williams, Flesh and Blood
Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Chris Ware, Quimby the Mouse
Ovid, Amores, translated by Peter Green
Morri Creech, Field Knowledge
Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga
Par Lagerkvist, The Dwarf
August Kleinzahler, The Strange House Travelers Keep
Rachel PapersMartin Amis, The Rachel Papers
Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems
Frederick Seidel, Going Fast
Joshua Beckman, Shake
G.M. Hopkins, Poems
Debra Ginsberg, Waiting
Philip Larkin, Girl in Winter
W.H. Auden, The Double Man
Scott Donaldson, E.A. Robinson, a Life
Sam Lipsyte, Home Land
Gilbert Hernandez, Sloth
Peter Porter, Selected Poems
Lynn Truss, Talk to the Hand
James Merrill, Water Street
Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
Justin Quinn, Fuselage
Justin Quinn, The O’o’a’a Bird
James Merrill, Braving the Elements
Michel Houelbecq, Possibility of an Island
Chuck Klosterman, IV
Peter Young, English Civil War Armies
Adrian Tomine, Summer Blonde
Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
Dana Gioia, Barrier of a Common Language
Raymond Carver, Ultramarine
Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli
Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon
Dana Gioia, Daily Horoscope
William T. Vollman, Poor People
Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness
Bob Dylan, Chronicles I
H.L. Hix, Surely as Birds Fly
Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon, Pride of Baghdad
Thomas Lux, The Cradle Place
Andrew Marvell, Poems, with drawings by Kurt Roesch
Rodney Jones, Transparent Gestures
Michael Schmidt, Great Modern Poets
David B., Epileptic
Scott Morse, Southpaw
Adrian Tomine, Stories, the Best of Optic Nerve
Philip K. Dick, Man in the High Castle
X.J. Kennedy, Cross Ties, Selected Poems
Adriane Tomine, Optic Nerve, #-
Jeffrey Brown, Cat Getting Out of Bag
Seamus Heaney, District and Circle
Joe Queenan, Queenan Country
James Merrill, Country of a Thousand Years of Peace
W.D. Snodgrass, Not for Specialists, New and Selected Poems
Charles Bukowski, Come On In!
Jeffrey Brown, Clumsy
Bill Coyle, God of this World to His Prophet
Eavan Boland, Selected Poems
Sherman Alexie, Ten Little Indians
Jack Wiler, Fun Being Me
Jeffrey Brown, Every Girl is the End of the World for Me
Jan Schreiber, Orvietto, wood engravings by William Rueter
Don Paterson, Landing Light
David Jones, The Sleeping Lord
John Ashbery, Can You Hear, Bird?
Marilyn Taylor, Seven Very Liberal Arts
Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women
Children In ExileJames Fenton, Children in Exile
Wendy Cope, Serious Concerns
Major Jackson, Leaving Saturn
Lawrence Durrell, Justine
Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan, eds., A Passion for Books
William Logan, Reputations of the Tongue
Wendy Cope, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems
Charles Simic, Walking the Black Cat
Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces
Richard Wright, Native Son
William Logan, Vain Empires
Joe Matt, Spent
Jeffrey Brown, Unlikely
Henry James, Washington Square
Sharon Olds, Satan Says
Jeffrey Brown, Miniature Sulk
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Justin Quinn, Waves and Trees
Charles Bukowski, Women
Rebecca Wolff, Figment
Par Lagerkvist, The Sybil
Charles Bukowski, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Being to Bleed a Bit
Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos
Joshua Mehigan, The Optimist
William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust
Charles Simic, Book of Gods and Devils
John Ashbery, Houseboat Days
Philip Roth, My Life as a Man
Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (includes The Morality of Poetry, The Experimental School, Poetic Convention, Primitivism and Decadence, The Influence of Meter on Poetic Convention, Maule’s Curse, The Significance of Hart Crane’s The Bridge)
Hart Crane, The Bridge
Scott Miles, Trenches
John Knowles, A Separate Peace
W.D. Snodgrass, Make Believes, Verses and Visions
Jeffrey Brown, Big Head
Jeffrey Brown, Any Early Intimacy
Elizabeth Dieffendorf, Books of the Century
David Horowitz, Indoctrination, U.
P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores
James Merrill, Scattering of Salts
Joshua Furst, Short People
Pricksongs and Descants Sarah Hannah, Longing Distance
William Faulkner, Light in August
Flannery O’Connor, Complete Stories
Seth, Vernacular Drawings
Thomas de Quincy, Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Ernest Hemingway, True at First light
Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes
C.P. Cavafy, Poems
John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
Robert Coover, Pricksongs and Descants
Toni Morrison, Sula
Jeanette Winterson, Stone Gods
Best American Comics
Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Henry Green, Loving
Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals