I made my way through 45 books in 2017. As always, it’s never enough — but I was glad to have read most of these, with only a couple of clunkers. They’re listed below in the order in which I read them, as pulled from my monthly Reading Log posts on this blog.
- “Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters,” Anne K. Mellor
- “A Tramp Abroad,” Mark Twain
- “Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan,” John Bauldie, ed.
- “A Working Man’s Apocrypha,” William Luvaas
- “The Variable Man,” Philip K. Dick
- “The Invisible Man,” H.G. Wells
- “Behold the Man,” Michael Moorcock
- “The Female Man,” Joanna Russ
- “Funny in Farsi,” Firoozeh Dumas
- “Wolf in White Van,” John Darnielle
- “Reading Comics,” Douglas Wolk
- “Bloodhounds on Broadway and Other Stories,” Damon Runyon
- “Reporters: Memoirs of a Young Newspaperman,” Will Fowler
- “The World of Jimmy Breslin,” Jimmy Breslin
- “You Know Me Al,” Ring Lardner
- “The Island of Fu Manchu,” Sax Rohmer
- “Treasure Island,” Robert Louis Stevenson
- “Treasure Island!!!,” Sara Levine
- “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” H.G. Wells
- “On Chesil Beach,” Ian McEwan
- “The Slide,” Kyle Beachy
- “Galactic Pot-Healer,” Philip K. Dick
- “Jose Clemente Orozco: Prometheus,” Pomona College Museum of Art, eds.
- “Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything,” Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
- “Julius Caesar,” William Shakespeare
- “Antony and Cleopatra,” William Shakespeare
- “From Bill, With Love,” Bill McClellan
- “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” Michael Chabon
- “Rock ‘n’ Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip,” Robert Landau
- “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Kurt Vonnegut
- “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer,” Philip K. Dick
- “Prometheus 2017: Four Artists From Mexico Revisit Orozco,” Rebecca McGrew and Terri Geis, eds.
- “How to Win a Pullet Surprise: The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Our Language,” Jack Smith
- “The Puppet Masters,” Robert Heinlein
- “The Toynbee Convector,” Ray Bradbury
- “One Hundred and Two H-Bombs,” Thomas M. Disch
- “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” H.P. Lovecraft
- “Love Conquers All,” Robert Benchley
- “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance
- “It Can’t Happen Here,” Sinclair Lewis
- “The Woody Allen Companion,” Stephen Spignesi
- “True Stories of Claremont, CA,” Hal Durian
- “Readings,” Michael Dirda
- “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen
- “Happiness is Warm Color in the Shade: a Biography of Artist Milford Zornes,” Hal Baker
As usual I read more fiction than nonfiction, a couple of recent books, a few things for work and a lot of older books, both in when they were published or in when I acquired them. Any year in which you read two Shakespeare plays is going to be a pretty good year. How was your own year in reading?