Paledave did it, so I’ll do it.
Prelims: I only read 77 books this year, down from 154 in 2008. Not quite sure why. The list is chronological.
Q- Luther Blissett
Melancholy- John Fosse
Watteau in Venice- Philippe Sollers
The Temple of Iconoclasts- J. Rodolfo Wilcock (reread)
Collected Novellas- Arno Schmidt
Final Exam- Julio Cortazar
The Book of Dead Philosophers- Simon Critchley
Ghosts- Cesar Aira
In Defense of Lost Causes- Slavoj Zizek
The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf- Kathryn Davis
Epitaphs for our Times: The Letters of Edward Dahlberg
Can These Bones Live- Edward Dahlberg
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea- Daniel Dennett
Trans-Atlantyk- Witold Gombrowicz
The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.- George Steiner
The Mystery Guest- Georges Bouillier
Bonsai- Alejandro Zambra
Customer Service- Benoit Duteurte
Duchamp- Calvin Tomkins
The Assault- Reinaldo Arenas
Camera- Jean-Philippe Toussaint
But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz- Geoff Dyer
Notes on Sontag- Phillip Lopate
Autonauts of the Cosmoroute- Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop
The Glass Bees- Ernst Junger
Dylan- Sidney Michaels
Yalo- Elias Khoury
George Steiner: At the New Yorker- George Steiner
Around the Day in Eighty Worlds- Julio Cortazar
Diary of Andres Fava- Julio Cortazar (reread)
Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the End of The Twentieth Century
Strange Forces- Leopoldo Lugones
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Barenton Under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade- Peter Weiss
A Mind’s Matter- Stanley L. Jaki
The Obscene Bird of Night- Jose Donoso
The Moviegoer- Walker Percy (reread)
A Strange Commonplace- Gilbert Sorrentino
In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments- David Bentley Hart
God at the Ritz- Lorenzo Albacete
The Collected Stories of Wolfgang Hildesheimer- Wolgang Hildesheimer
Shroud- John Banville
The Library at Night- Alberto Manguel
Lost in the Cosmos- Walker Percy
Science, Politics, and Gnosticism- Eric Voegelin
The Dalkey Archive- Flann O’Brien
The Last Samurai- Helen Dewitt (reread)
On Hope- Josef Pieper
Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription- William F. Buckley
The Elsewhere Community- Hugh Kenner
The King’s Evil- Will Heinrich (reread)
W., or The Memory of Childhood- Georges Perec
A Certain Lucas- Julio Cortazar
Josef Pieper: An Anthology- Josef Pieper
The Thin Place- Kathryn Davis
Chateau d’Argol- Julien Gracq
The Life of J.K. Huysmans- Robert Baldick
The Christian and Anxiety- Hans Urs Von Balthasar
A Dangerous Encounter- Ernst Junger
Love in the Western World- Denis De Rougemont
Minima Moralia- Theodor Adorno
Peace- Gene Wolfe (reread)
Letter to a Priest- Simone Weil
Wittgenstein’s Nephew- Thomas Bernhard
Paradoxes of Faith- Henri de Lubac
ABC of Reading- Ezra Pound
Anesthesia: Brief Reflection of Contemporary Aesthetics- Tripp York
Life: A User’s Manual- Georges Perec
Introduction to Christianity- Joseph Ratzinger
The Beginning of All Things- Hans Kung
Only A Theory- Kenneth R. Miller
Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview & Other Conversations
The Idiot- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Old Masters Thomas Bernhard
Most Provocative- Love in the Western World, and it isn’t even close. The Zizek would be a distant second.
Worst Book- Anesthesia, although the Buckley was pretty bad.
Meh- Watteau in Venice, Customer Service, The Thin Place.
Biggest Surprise- Arno Schmidt’s novellas, for a variety of reasons. They weren’t difficult to read at all (the typographical eccentricities had me spooked), they were weird, erudite, and veered from pastoral/wistful to (Leviathan, for example) the most brutally nihilistic things I’ve read. He’s major.
Random thoughts- This is the first year since I’ve been a serious reader that I didn’t read a word of Borges. Hans Kung’s book was shockingly good: bare, measured, honest, and intellectually serious. If you haven’t read Dewitt’s The Last Samurai, please do so.
