Reading List

Goodreads may be useful for competing in reading challenges with your friends, but when it comes to tracking, I’m a strong believer in the simple list. Below are all the books I’ve read since I started reading seriously again. Books I especially loved are marked with an asterisk.

2026

  1. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
  2. Ernest Hemingway on Writing by Larry W. Phillips
  3. The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
  4. Before Sunrise & Before Sunset: Two Screenplays by Richard Linklater
  5. Blue Nights by Joan Didion
  6. The Luckiest Girl by Beverly Cleary
  7. Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
  8. White Noise by Don DeLillo
  9. Happening by Annie Ernaux
  10. Perfume by Patrick Süskind*
  11. Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
  12. Jack the Modernist by Robert Glück
  13. Vigil by George Saunders
  14. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders*
  15. Wait Till You See Me Dance by Deb Olin Unferth
  16. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
  17. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
  18. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv
  19. Early Work by Andrew Martin
  20. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

2025

  1. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
  2. Intimations by Zadie Smith
  3. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
  4. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  5. Generations by Lucille Clifton
  6. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
  7. Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
  8. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
  9. The Idiot by Elif Batuman
  10. Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
  11. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
  12. Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer
  13. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway*
  14. Diary of a Philosophy Student by Simone de Beauvoir
  15. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard*
  16. Bagombo Snuff Box by Kurt Vonnegut
  17. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
  18. Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
  19. The Secret History by Donna Tartt*
  20. The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker
  21. The Haunting of Hillhouse by Shirley Jackson
  22. The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell
  23. White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link
  24. Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux
  25. Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman
  26. Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels by Clarice Lispector
  27. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  28. North Woods by Daniel Mason*
  29. Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik*
  30. Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte*

2024

  1. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
  2. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
  3. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  4. The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis
  5. Love, Kurt by Kurt Vonnegut
  6. Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
  7. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
  8. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib
  9. Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald
  10. The Soul of a Woman by Isabel Allende
  11. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
  12. My Husband by Maud Ventura
  13. Take Care of Your Friends by Christina Wilcox
  14. A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs
  15. All Fours by Miranda July
  16. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  17. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  18. Outsider in the White House by Bernie Sanders
  19. Where We Go from Here by Bernie Sanders
  20. Our Revolution by Bernie Sanders
  21. The Years by Annie Ernaux
  22. Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass by Lana Del Rey
  23. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
  24. The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton
  25. The Twelve Terrors of Christmas by John Updike and Edward Gorey

2023

  1. The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
  2. Forever by Judy Blume
  3. A Bright Ray of Darkness by Ethan Hawke
  4. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
  5. Letters to Vera by Vladimir Nabokov
  6. Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
  7. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins
  8. Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg
  9. Selected Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva
  10. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
  11. No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
  12. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
  13. Just Kids by Patti Smith
  14. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
  15. Slaughterhouse-Five (the graphic novel) by Kurt Vonnegut
  16. The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories by Kevin Brockmeier
  17. Severance by Ling Ma
  18. Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
  19. While Mortals Sleep by Kurt Vonnegut