Because I’ve never shaken the summer reading list urge to track and document my work, here are all the new (to me) books I’ve read over the past decade plus. I’m not proud of my pace or the massive gaps that I continually, partially fill. It’s a list tied to good memories. Spring 2015 remains a mystery.
(a)=audiobook
Summer 2012:
The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Strangler by William Landay
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Blind Man with a Pistol by Chester Himes
Cockfighter by Charles Willeford
The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D’Ambrosio
Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler
The Art of Fiction by John Gardener
The War of Don Immanuel’s Nether Parts by Louis de Bernieres
Fall 2012:
Fun with Problems by Robert Stone
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
The Guard by Ken Bruen
Crimes in Southern Indiana by Frank Bill
Spring 2013:
The Passage by Justin Cronin (a)
Threats by Amelia Grey
The Cutie by Donald Westlake
The Dogs of Riga by Henning Menkell
Storm Front (Dresden Files #1) by Jim Butcher
Summer 2013:
The Natural by Bernard Malamud
Father and Son by Larry Brown
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
The Blue Room by Georges Simenon
The Underground Man by Ross MacDonald
Fall 2013:
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Pagan Babies by Elmore Leonard
The Canticles of Liebowitz by Walter Miller Jr.
Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter
Spring 2014:
Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgway
Summer 2014:
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
The Oracle of Stamboul by Michael Lukas
Crime and Punishment by Fyodr Doestoevsky
The IPCRESS File by Len Deighton
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiesen
Things That Pass for Love by Alison Amend
Fall 2014:
When the Women Come Out to Dance by Elmore Leonard
Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis
The Long Rifle Season by James Murray
Fourteen Stories and None of Them Yours by Luke Goebel
The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty
Spring 2015:
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Summer 2015:
Proxopera by Benedict Kiely
An Alice and a Bob by Travvis Largent
Blood of Brothers: Life and Death in Nicaragua by Stephen Kinzer
Jaws by Peter Benchley
Get in Trouble by Kelly Link
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
The Jaguar Smile by Salman Rushdie
Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista by Omar Cabezas
Fall 2015
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Love and Hydrogen by Jim Shepard
Spring 2016
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Expats by Chris Pavone
Lapse Americana by Ben Myers
Summer 2016
Sandino’s Daughters by Margaret Randall
Beauty by Robin McKinney
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Savages by Don Winslow
In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
Torture: Religious Ethics and National Security by John Perry
Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare by “Tuyacan”
Sixty Poems by Charles Simic
Sandino’s Daughters Revisited by Margaret Randall
Fall 2016
With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua by Christopher Dickey
The Tulip-Flame by Chloe Honum
In the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks
Here and Now by Stephen Dunn
The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria by Carlos Hernandez
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Spring 2017
Our Souls at Night by Ken Haruf
Tiny Horses Don’t Get a Choice by Andi Stout
Where the Wind Can Find It by Ben Nickol
Summer 2017
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Letters from Home: A Year in Nicaragua by Julia and Peter Menard-Warwick
Southern Front by Alejandro Murguia
H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald
The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems of Frank Stanford
Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
After the Fire’s Gone Out by Robert Stone
The Bounty by Derek Walcott
Blood on the Border by Rosanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Country Under My Skin by Giaconda Belli
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
American Primitive by Mary Oliver
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
Gutshot by Amelia Gray
They Feed They Lion by Phillip Levine
Fall 2017
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
The Big Blowdown by George Pelecanos
The Guestroom Novelist: A Donald Harington Miscellany ed. Brian Walters (manuscript)
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thein
Spring 2018
Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks
Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
Heating and Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Summer 2018
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
We Should All Be Feminists by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jessmyn Ward
Between Here and the Yellow Sea by Nic Pizzolatto
The Iliad by Homer (trans. Stephen Mitchell)
Black Movie by Danez Smith
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
The Women and the Men by Nikki Giovanni
Helmets by James Dickey
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce by Morgan Parker
Fall 2018
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop by Jeff Chang
Flatline Horizon by Don Stinson
Flash: Writing the Very Short Story by John Dufresne
Star of Henry by Roddy Doyle
Whereas by Layli Long Soldier
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
Spring 2019
12: The Inside Story of Tom Brady’s Fight for Redemption by Casey Wedge and Tom Sherman
The Rose Metal Field Guide to Flash Fiction, ed. Tara Masih
This Is Water by Yannick Murphy
The Wellspring by Sharon Olds
Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson
The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney
Summer 2019
The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman
Green by Sam Graham-Felsen
American Pastoral by Phillip Roth
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith
Fall 2019
The Skin of Dreams: New and Collected Poems by Quraysh Ali Lansana
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo
Now I Lay Me Down by Faith Phillips
Volcano by Elosham Vog
Spring 2020
The Macguffin by Stanley Elkin
The Night Circus by Erin Morganstern
Old Man Slave by Patrick Charbonneau
The Bureau of Divine Music by Michael Heffernen
Hit by Pitch by J.D. Scrimgeour (manuscript)
Fade Away by Harlan Coben
Summer 2020
Adherence by Ben Nickol
Sabrina and Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
The New Testament by Jericho Brown
Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian
Work Is Love Made Visible by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
Ray by Barry Hannah
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
You Are Here: Poems Old and New by Leon Stokesbury
There There by Tommy Orange (a)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (a)
Madness by sam sax
Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams
Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes
Karma’s Footsteps by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
Night Watch by Sy Hoahwah
Fall 2020:
The Red Shoes and Other Poems from the Edge by Deborah Hunter
Circe by Stephanie Miller (a)
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Spring 2021:
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carre (a)
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (a)
Leaves of Grass (1855 edition) by Walt Whitman
Defenseless by Corinne Michaels (a)
Vision in White by Nora Roberts (a)
War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (a)
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (a)
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides (a)
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (a)
A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket (a)
The English Major by Jim Harrison (a)
Fire in Beulah by Rilla Askew
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (a)
Summer 2021:
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (a)
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (a)
Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (a)
The Whites by Richard Price (a)
The Hike by Drew Magary
The Wilding by Benjamin Percy (a)
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankin
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July (a)
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (a)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (a)
Fall 2021:
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (a)
Home by Toni Morrison (a)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy (a)
100 Poems by Seamus Heaney
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich (a)
Shopgirl by Steve Martin (a)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (a)
Norwood by Charles Portis (a)
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuli Herrera (a)
Spring 2022:
When the Tree Falls by Jane Clarke
Karate Chop by Dorthe Nors
Master and Margherita by Mikhail Bulgakov (a)
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Many Have Fallen by Haesong Kwon
Summer 2022:
Ronin by Paul Juhasz
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (a)
March, Book 1 by John Lewis et al.
Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill (a)
Pekolah: Stories by Amanda Bales
Mankiller Poems by Wilma Mankiller
The Fallen Sparrow by Dorothy B. Hughes (a)
A Coffin for Demetrios by Eric Ambler (a)
Prayer Book of the Anxious by Josephine Yu
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (a)
The Bear by Andrew Krivak (a)
Speedboat by Renata Adler
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Fall 2022:
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead by Chanelle Bentz (a)
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore (a)
Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah
Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh (a)
My Man Jeeves by PG Wodehouse (a)
House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (a)
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson (a)
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (a)
I Will Die in a Foreign Land by Kalani Pickart (a)
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy (a)
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
Spring 2023
Dead Lions by Mick Herron (a)
Warriors: Into the Wild (Bk. 1) by Erin Hunter
Desperate Characters by Paula Fox
Wife with Knife by Molly Giles
The Stranger by Albert Camus (a)
The Fellowship of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (a)
Seize the Day by Saul Bellow (a)
Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red by Martha Walls (a)
Door to Remain by Austin Segrest