I’m on pace to read 116.8 books in 2015. It feels like something of a failure.
In the U.S., 300,000 new titles were published last year. If all goes well, I’ll end the year having read 0.039 percent of that number. Globally, it’s in the millions. Some years back Google released what they considered to be the total number of all books in the world: 129,864,880.
Reading has brought far more joy to my life than TV, but there’s one pleasure offered by television that I’ve found elusive as a reader. Follow any contemporary TV drama, and, as long as you’re not a hermit, you’ll find people to discuss it with. Friends, family, strangers in checkout aisles: all around you, people will be watching your same show. A single season of it takes thirteen hours to consume, but somehow, everyone has enough time, not just for that season but all seven. Years from now, you’ll still be able to recall the plot twists, and talk about them again, because you’ll have had so many conversations about them to begin with.
Try, on the other hand, to chat about your favorite new book of the year. For me that’s A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, published in March. It’s a beautiful, devastating, gripping novel. As I read, I was enjoying the story too much to pay close attention to narrative craft. I know there are surprising, unintuitive point-of-view shifts, an almost fantastical distortion of time, and an open embrace of melodrama, but how did she do it? I want to talk about it, figure it out, but even though it’s flying off shelves, only a tiny fraction of people I know have read it, not because they’re philistines but because there are just so many good new books that we’re all forever falling behind.
This is a two-way street: people eagerly ask if I’ve read this or that new book, and I usually haven’t. Instead I add it to a list that for years has grown faster than I can cross titles off of it. So I’m nonplussed when people say they think I read a lot. On the contrary, it feels like I have some work to do.
Since 1999 I’ve kept a list all the books I read. For the last few years I’ve posted it on my Facebook page at the end of the year. Several people have told me it’s inspired them to keep similar lists, and that the keeping of a list in turn causes them read more. In that spirit, here’s my 2015 list to date—uncensored, as tempting as it feels to leave off Wheat Belly.
If you’d like to talk about any of these books, drop me a line:
On the Ridge Between Life and Death—David Roberts
The Narrow Road to the Deep North—Richard Flanagan
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant—Roz Chast
The Faraway Nearby—Rebecca Solnit
Men Explain Things to Me—Rebecca Solnit
Sister Golden Hair—Darcey Steinke
The Meaning of Human Existence—Edward O. Wilson
Letters to a Young Scientist—Edward O. Wilson
Offshore—Penelope Fitzgerald
The Strange Library—Haruki Murakami
The Bookshop—Penelope Fitzgerald
The Balloonists—Eula Biss
Notes from No-Mans Land—Eula Biss
The Laughing Monsters—Denis Johnson
Bark—Lorrie Moore
Find Me—Laura van den Berg
To Kill a Mockingbird—Harper Lee
Chasing the Scream—Johann Hari
Double Negative—Ivan Vladislavic
Escape from Lucania—David Roberts
Unbroken—Laura Hillenbrand
In the Heart of the Sea—Nathaniel Philbrick
Wheat Belly—William Davis
Grain Brain—David Perlmutter
Citizen: An American Lyric—Claudia Rankine
Outline—Rachel Cusk
Dead Wake—Erik Larson
Turning the Mind into an Ally—Sakyong Mipham
Rubicon—Tom Holland
Zealot—Reza Aslan
Between You and Me—Mary Norris
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed—Jon Ronson
Preparation for the Next Life—Atticus Lish
My Brilliant Friend—Elena Ferrante
Blood on Snow—Jo Nesbo
Suicide—Edouard Leve
The Johnstown Flood—David McCullough
A Little Life—Hanya Yanagihara
Missoula—Jon Krakauer
The Sorrows of an American—Siri Hustvedt
The Unspeakable—Meghan Daum
The Children’s Crusade—Ann Packer
The Argonauts—Maggie Nelson
Ghettoside—Jill Leovy
The Parable of the Sower—Octavia Butler
Under the Skin—Michel Faber
The Job—Janet Evanovich & Lee Goldberg
Never Mind—Edward St. Aubyn
Bad News—Edward St. Aubyn
Some Hope—Edward St. Aubyn
Mother’s Milk—Edward St. Aubyn
At Last—Edward St. Aubyn
Bad Feminist—Roxane Gay
Lost for Words—Edward St. Aubyn
Hotel Living—Ioannis Pappos
Primates of Park Avenue—Wednesday Martin
Mitko—Garth Greenwell
I Am Pilgrim—Terry Hayes
The Easter Parade—Richard Yates
The Falls—Ian Rankin
My Struggle: Volume Four—Karl Ove Knausgaard
Blackout—Sarah Hepola
Our Souls at Night—Kent Haruf
Between the World and Me—Ta-Nehisi Coates