Books in one sentence

The ones I’ve read so far in 2024:

• And Away… The Autobiography by Robert Mortimer: A sweet, if not slightly boring at times, account of how Bob became comfortable being the wonderful man he now is (i.e., on WILTY)
• Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum: Unsophisticated and syrupy
• One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer by Nathaniel Fick: A polished and at times sterilized memoir that nevertheless manages in the end to show the madness of war
• The Overstory by Richard Powers: A great idea ruined by pretentious prose, scientific inaccuracies, and a general poor understanding of how people actually talk
• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman: “I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”
• The Sellout by Paul Beatty: Heavy topic carried by laughter but made hollow by emotional stuntedness 
• Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt: Anyone can get on a best sellers list these days, can’t they?
• Kindred by Octavia Butler: The future is not what it used to be 
• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang: cerebral

The ones I read in 2023:

• Serenad by Zülfü Livaneli: state vs. humanity part II
• Smiley’s People by John le Carre: showdown and letdown
• What Is It Like Going to War by Karl Marlantes: Let’s see how many ways one can spell “warrior”?
• Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman: light triumphs over dark, good triumphs over evil, etc.
• Perfume by Patrick Süskind: Even ugliness can smell great
• Attempted to read these but did not finish: Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House, Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays, Philip K. Dick’s Valis.

The ones I read in 2022:

• The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie: Reservation tragedy in 8 acts
• Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson: becoming
  
• Educated by Tara Westover: The maddening call of that other world
  
• The Razor’s Edge by William Somerset Maugham: You’ll find what you’re looking for
• A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver: Frustratingly metaphorical
• Dry. A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs: Devastating
• The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje: So beautiful are deserts, so tragic are wars, and yet so pale compared to those in love.
• The Six Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert: We will look back, not just once, not just twice
• A Burning by Megha Majumdar: Trapped
• The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton: Here looking at you, A
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre: state vs. humanity
• Various plays by Shakespeare (Macbeth – Arden edition), Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof): dialogue exercise
• Collected Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay: Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree | Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one | Yet knows its boughs more silent than before | I cannot say what loves have come and gone | I only know that summer sang in me | A little while, that in me sings no more***
• Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters: if the dead could speak, it’d only be regrets they speak of***
• Crush by Richard Siken: Visceral, urgent, and crushing
• Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky: horror and banality in the search for meaning
  
• Hiroshima by John Hersey: Human capacity to endure ≈ Human capacity to inflict 
• Blindness by Jose Saramago: The inability to use our eyes only shields us from the sight of our external ugliness
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman*: Intelligence can make people forget you’re an annoying asshole – only this time it didn’t**

The ones I read in 2021:

• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking: The universe is the greatest wonder and Isaac Newton was an a–hole
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon: Looking out from someone else’s window
• An Agricultural Testament by Albert Howard: The farmer OG
• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy:  Those who broke “the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much”
• Lit by Mary Karr: When boredom becomes the reason to write a memoir
• Gallipoli by Les Carlyon: How a nation lost its young men and how the young men lost their innocence (or the most moving anti-war book I’ve ever read)
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: Construction workers still working on plot holes
• Horoscopes For the Dead by Billy Collins: Before death, there is life, and so is there after
• New and Selected Poems, volume one by Mary Oliver: Nature eclipses everything
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: Not nearly as funny as everyone says it is
• Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick: Frogs in a well
• Solaris by Stanisław Lem: “Don’t turn a scientific problem into a common love story” (Tarkovsky) – is the quest to know simply a scientific problem and is there such a thing as a common love story?
• The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington: Feministic and surrealistic take on religion and… selective hearing?
• The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla: The terrifying power of irrationality

And the ones I read in 2020, in no particular order:

• Failed States by Noam Chomsky: Dry as a Thanksgiving turkey though not as essential
• On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky: Why yours truly is a socialist
• Nuremberg and Vietnam by Telford Taylor: I bet Mr. Taylor doesn’t play dart
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan: The magic of dirt
• Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas: High society party conversation
• Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance: As deep as a kiddy pool
• Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams: All to the blender, even the gorilla!
• How to Cook A Wolf by M. F. K. Fisher: humor is the quintessential ingredient 
• Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich: Dog-eat-dog
• Snow by Orhan Pamuck: If you think it’s time to make a snow angel, you’re very much mistaken
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin: Nationalism is so hot right now!
• Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy by John le Carré: Master
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole: How to raise blood pressure in one easy step
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy: In the quiet words of Sheriff Bart: Where the (white) women at?