Books I Read in 2018

I only read 59 books this year, just over half of what I read last year. This does not surprise me, as I was taking classes for the entire year instead of only half; I've been neglecting my own writing too. Still, 59 is good! I’ll still be in class for all of 2019, but I’m going to shoot for 75 anyway. Here is the list, along with my brief thoughts as I finished each work. Anything with one asterisk is something I’d read before; two asterisks is something read for school; three asterisks means both.

Favorite work of fiction: Head Full of Ghosts, The Doomsday Book, and Sing, Unburied, Sing!
Favorite collection of short fiction: The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, A Natural History of Hell
Favorite non-fiction: Medical Apartheid, The March of Folly, Columbine
Favorite book read for school: Keynotes
Favorite re-read: The Robber Bride

1. Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle - Daniel L. Everett: This was a very interesting read. It was surprisingly accessible, considering how dense it gets in explaining the Piraha grammar. The way their language works with their culture is really fascinating; I’d like to read more on this subject but don’t really know where to start as a layperson.

2. The Color of Magic: A Novel of Discworld - Terry Pratchett: This is the first Discworld novel, and I hadn’t read it before. I like Pratchett’s voice (and for want of a better word, ethics) quite a bit, but this didn’t grab me. There’s a cliffhanger ending and I don’t especially care to dive into the sequel. The plot wasn’t especially gripping, though Pratchett’s works are always more about spending time in his world with his characters for me.

3. House of Leaves: A Novel - Mark Z Danielewski: I didn't love this as much as everyone assured me I would. I admired it, it was clever and at times compelling, but it didn't make me feel much of anything at all. Too hyped? Maybe. It doesn’t do anything that Pale Fire didn’t do better.

4. Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins - Emma Donoghue: This was great! The linked format for the stories worked really well; the voices were cohesive but distinct. I liked each of them a lot, and the ending was really moving. I’m interested in the ways that women and girls tell stories to each other, and about themselves, and the different reasons they have for telling those stories. Donoghue is such a good writer for that topic.

5. Living a Feminist Life - Sara Ahmed: I liked this quite a bit. Ahmed’s background is in critical theory, so her writing is a good application of theory to actual praxis - she doesn’t get too bogged down in either one. It’s refreshing to read a feminist who rejects the idea that something is feminism just because it makes a woman feel good in the moment, but also rejects the idea that a woman has the obligation to be a 24-7 activist if she wants to call herself a feminist. This is “Living a Feminist Life” not “Joining the Feminist Political Movement” and Ahmed acknowledges the difference. Her thoughts about various works of literature are interesting too; it’s always nice to see that Maggie Tulliver means a lot to someone else. Would recommend.

6. The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara W. Tuchman: This was really good. I especially liked Tuchman’s thoughts on the American Revolution; I’d like to read an entire book about the revolution from the British perspective, about what went wrong for them. It was cool, and strangely comforting in these trying times, to read a history book which has as its thesis basically “these aren’t very bright guys, and shit got out of hand.”

7. Wieland, or the Transformation: An American Tale - Charles Brockden Brown: This was certainly goofy. Have to love a novel that seriously included spontaneous combustion right out of the gate, you know it’s only going to get weirder from there. I liked the narrator, but the narration was very rough and sort of sloppy. It never seemed to amount to much.

8. Songs of a Dead Dreamer - Thomas Ligotti: Ligotti’s work is so strange; it’s very deliberately dreamlike, which makes it more unsettling than frightening. I can definitely see the Lovecraft influence. I think, of the stories in this volume, “Notes on the Writing of Horror” was my favorite.

9. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte: I can’t believe I’d never read this before. I loved it; unexpectedly, since I was convinced it would be disappointing. Everyone in it is a terrible person, Heathcliff and Catherine especially, but those two garbage monsters are so entertaining I could read about them making everyone around them miserable forever. What a great novel; so compelling and weird and interesting. It’s rated exactly where it should be, it’s always nice to read a book like that.

10. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present - Harriet A. Washington: This book was brutal, but really incredible and so detailed. I didn’t know what happened to Addie Mae Collins’ body; my jaw dropped open when I read that. And the KKI lead paint study (in the 90s!) made me livid, especially as I’m sure some of the people involved are still employed by JHU. Washington makes a really good case that Black people are hit from both sides when it comes to medical trials. They’re disproportionately likely to be targeted for unethical, non-therapeutic research studies which harm them and which they cannot give meaningful consent to, but they’re shut out of research which could benefit them, and important medical advances are often never tested on Black people before they are released to the public at large, which can have very negative results when those Black people are finally given those treatments later. But medical researchers only have themselves to blame for the fact that Black people often don’t trust them, and medical systems have plenty of blame to go around for the fact that Black people are systemically cut off from regular health care (which is a gateway for a lot of beneficial, therapeutic medical trials). Really, really a good book; there’s so much more to this history than the Tuskegee study and it still lasts today.

11. Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement - Angela Y. Davis: I liked this a lot. Davis is one of my favorite theorists, in that she never dumbs down her ideas but she is conscious that many people reading her aren’t experts, so she writes very clearly and concisely. I never think I’m getting the simplified version, but I also don’t feel like I need to re-read Marx or Foucault in order to understand what she’s talking about. She also really does understand how everything is connected, as opposed to just one or two things, and unlike a lot of activists who came of age in the 60s & 70s, she is never defensive about her cred but is clearly always learning and open to new forms of discourse about oppression and power, and is always encouraging towards younger activists and their ways of working. I just wish this collection had more to it.

12. Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel - Jesmyn Ward: God, this was good. I want to read all of Ward’s other work. It wasn’t easy - Leonie’s was not an easy head to live inside, I think. It’s beautifully written and very, very sad.

13. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley**: I had to read this for school, for my literary research methods class. I'm so glad I got the chance to; it's so rich and weird and my head is full of ideas. I can't wait to write about it; I think I'll write on the storytelling structure, which is so interesting.

14. Nightmare at 20,000 Feet: Horror Stories - Richard Matheson: This was fun. A lot of Matheson’s stories are pretty goofy, and of course we’ve all seen the Twilight Zone version of the title story and it’s hard to be really scared of it. I think most of them age pretty well, though. His writing is very thoughtful and concise. I think “The Distributor” was my favorite in the collection; it’s so nasty.

15. Grimscribe: His Lives and Works - Thomas Ligotti: I didn't love this. Ligotti’s voice has diminishing returns, for me, and the story's and narrators just blended together. Maybe it makes me a philistine, or something, but I do need things to actually happen in my genre fiction.

16. The Philosophy of Misery - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Ayy. I’ll come back to Proudhon, he’s important, but this was an audiobook and it was read so poorly that I could barely follow it. It was clear that the narrator couldn’t follow it at all, what with mispronouncing “posthumously” as “post-humorously” and “catechism” as “catchism.” It was embarrassing, I’ll have to seek out another edition.

17. Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America - Catherine Kerrison: This was really incredible, so well researched and well written. It was very moving to read a bit about how accomplished Sally Hemings’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren were; I wish Kerrison had managed to track down Harriet Hemings after her escape, but it’s almost better that we don’t know. She won. Anyway, this was a very rewarding read.

18. Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories - edited by John Joseph Adams: This was a fun collection. I didn’t love every story in it; I knew the classics, by Shirley Jackson and Le Guin, but there were a few genuine nice surprises. I liked “Red Card” and “Ten With a Flag” a lot, along with “Dead Space for the Unexpected” and “Just Do It.”

19. The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood*: This was the second book by Atwood I ever read, years ago. It was fun to take another look at it as an adult, with adult problems and worries. Tony is still my favorite, but I appreciate her flaws more, and look at Zenia with a little more nuance. This book is great, and still one of my favorites by Atwood.

20. Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories - Angela Carter: I’ve read the stories in The Bloody Chamber many times; I love them a lot, but her others didn’t grab me, sadly.

21. Columbine - Dave Cullen: This book was valuable, but very hard to read. I ended it feeling sorry for everyone involved, because there’s so little to make sense of and one wonders whether any of it could have been avoided. It was really well written, one of the better true-crime books I’ve read.

22. Romola - George Eliot: I wasn’t crazy about this. The setting was certainly evocatively written, but the characters still seemed so English, and Eliot had the typical problem of mid Victorian English writers of really not getting Catholicism. You can tell she tried, but it was just...wrong, and clearly written with an attitude of basically “the poor superstitious idiots.” Romola herself is an interesting character, but obviously of a type that Eliot did better elsewhere.

23. If on a winter’s night a traveler - Italo Calvino: It was certainly very clever. I enjoyed the parts addressed to the reader best, rather than the individual narrative variations. What it means to be a reader is an interesting question to me. Still, the stories in the story gave a sense of diminishing returns, sadly.

24. The Scapegoat - Daphne Du Maurier: I loved this a lot! I love Du Maurier, and this might be my favorite after My Cousin Rachel (or the short stories, or Rebecca, or etc.) The ending was an unexpected heartbreaker; I kept hoping it could work out differently. I can see why the movie changed it; it was a mistake, but the original ending is such a knife in the gut that of course they wanted something else. John, the protagonist, was so kind and sad and responsible. What a great book.

25. The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror - Daniel Mallory Ortberg: This was fun. A few of the stories I remember from Ortberg’s series of horrifying fairy tales in The Toast, but it was still cool to revisit them. He has a knack for portraying the horror of the kind of emotional loan-sharking that can happen in abusive relationships; it’s so disorienting and Ortberg portrays it really well. I think The Boy Coffins was my favorite, along with the title story.

26. Station Eleven: A Novel - Emily St. John Mandel: I liked this very much. It was beautifully written; I wish I liked Kirstin better. I was more interested in the histories of the changeover from pre to post apocalypse. The scenes with Clark at the airport, everyone struggling to form a community and slowly realizing that no help was coming and this was their life now were fascinating and wonderfully done. I wish that were the whole book. Still, it was a really interesting spin on post-apocalyptic fiction: showing people being people, mostly alright, not grim and sociopathic but loving and imperfect and in love with their things. I was very moved by the end, and hopeful about humanity if the worst were to ever happen.

27. A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel - Paul Tremblay: Holy crap this was really, really good. I should have known from the narrator’s name which Shirley Jackson book this was an homage too (and I picked it up) but I didn’t realize how far that homage would go and how devastating it would be. I really liked this. The child narrator was very convincing and the relationship between the sisters was really well-drawn and heartbreaking. And it was SCARY, and it surprised me. I’ll look for Tremblay’s other stuff, he’s great.

28. The Dispossessed: A Novel - Ursula K. Le Guin: this was so good and interesting and moving, like all Le Guin. I'm glad Shevek went home; I hope he was welcomed.

29. A Natural History of Hell: Stories - Jeffrey Ford: I hadn’t heard of Ford before, but I liked these stories quite a bit. They vary in tone and play with genre a bit - occasionally too clever by half but I liked them. “Blood Drive” and “The Angel Seems” were probably my favorite, but “A Terror” was a really cool idea well-executed, and “The Thyme Fiend” ended up being really moving. I’ll look for more of Ford’s work.

30. The Vegetarian: A Novel - Han Kang: This book was very odd and very interesting. I wouldn’t say I loved it, but it was unnerving; the way women’s bodies become public or at least family property is so frightening and it was well conveyed here.

31. The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: Stories - Emma Donoghue: This was great. I loved the dawning realization that happened with each story as you realized what was happening - realizing that the happy couple in “Come Gentle Night” was John Ruskin and Effie, or that the much loved governess who disappeared in “Words for Things” was Mary Wollstonecraft. I liked the lesser known stories best though; “Cured” was so horrifying and moving and I’ll never forget it. It’s rare that a short story can make you burst into tears at the end, but when I found this was a real woman, and her doctor did this to so many women, I was livid. I’d like to go back in time and strangle him. Each of these stories are really clever and sad and very well written. I like Emma Donoghue a lot.

32. I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer - Michelle McNamara: This was a fun read. It was especially interesting to read the book now that the killer has been (apparently) caught; so many little things add up now. Like, of course he was a fucking cop. It all makes sense.

33. My Cousin Rachel - Daphne Du Maurier*: I’m writing my final paper on it this semester (my choice!) and I’m glad I got the chance to. I love it a lot, and I think it’s so weird and rich and full of great stuff. I love Du Maurier! She is the best! I will somehow get her taken seriously.

34. The White Devil: The Werewolf in European Culture - Matthew Beresford: I wanted to like this more than I did. This book contains a lot of interesting information, but I think it tried to cover too much and the style was too dry. W. Scott Poole could have done a better version of this.

35. The Birds and Other Stories - Daphne Du Maurier: These were really fun, as per usual. I’ve seen the film of title story, of course, and the actual story is very different. Broader and more apocalyptic. I probably liked the last story, The Old Man, the best; it surprised me the most. You would have thought the twist would be a groaner, but it really works.

36. The Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood: I liked this, as I always like Atwood, but this felt like a first novel. The main character felt like such a passive cypher, and I get that that was the point, but it was difficult to stay engaged. It was certainly interesting. And frightening. There are so many women who live like that.

37. The Penguin Book of Witches - edited by Katherine Howe: Interesting, in particular the documents from the Salem witch trials and after, but more useful as a reference than a volume to sit down and read. Still, I’ll be able to make use of it.

38. Eve’s Ransom - George Gissing: This was cool. I didn't like it as much as The Odd Women, but it was still good. Gissing is a really compelling writer and his view of romantic relationships is so ambivalent and dark and complicated.

39. XO Orpheus: Fifty New Myths - edited by Kate Bernheimer: This was uneven. I liked several of the stories very much, especially “Devourings,” based on the story of Cronos eating his children, and “Galatea,” which was a takeoff of Pygmalion. They were similar in looking at the women in those myths; I would have liked the whole volume to be like that. But there was too much, and I think many of the stories could have been cut.

40. The Doomsday Book - Connie Willis: I loved this so damn much. I don’t know why I thought it would be lighter; it was very funny, but so bleak too. I liked all of the characters and relationships so much, and both worlds were so finely drawn. I kept hoping for some kind of miraculous happy ending but of course there couldn’t be.

41. Frenchman’s Creek - Daphne Du Maurier: It was alright, nothing special. I’d have liked to see the central relationship actually continue, but that’s just not Du Maurier. She never lets you get too comfortable. I’d put this in the middling category; fun, but not as interesting as MCR or Rebecca or The Scapegoat, which I think are her three best (that I’ve read so far).

42. Assata: An Autobiography - Assata Shakur: I wanted to like this more than I did. Shakur is such an interesting thinker and very good poet, and has lived such an interesting life, but this account of that life didn’t have a whole lot of narrative energy and I’m not sure she’s a great prose stylist. And I couldn’t help but notice what was glossed over - we jump right from Assata in prison to Assata in Cuba, with nothing about her breakout. I understand the evasiveness, she’s still on the most wanted list even now and wouldn’t want to implicate the people who helped her even by accident, but it’s a shame. Worth reading, anyway.

43. The Great Divorce - CS Lewis: Liked but didn’t love. I’ve liked Lewis’s other stuff more, even if I don’t necessarily agree with him. He was a compelling writer, always, and the idea of actively choosing hell or heaven is a compelling one, but I’m not sure I buy it all the way. And he can’t make it not unfair, in the end - if people don’t take their one chance, they don’t get another one, and the people in heaven all seem insufferable and cold to be honest. Still, worth reading.

44. Her Body and Other Parties: Stories - Carmen Maria Machado: I liked these stories. “The Husband Stitch” was probably my favorite, followed by “Mothers” and “Real Women Have Bodies.” “Especially Heinous” got old fast; the idea didn’t deserve the length. They were all very well-written meditations on women’s relationships with their bodies; I enjoyed them.

45. Blood Meridian: Or, The Evening Redness in the West - Cormac McCarthy: Oh I wanted to love this because of its reputation, but I didn’t. The older I get the less patience I have for stories about how terrible the world is and how terrible people are. I know they can be bad, but they can be good too, and it seems less like cynicism and more like a deliberate, self-protective delusion. There’s no reason to care about anything if everyone is irredeemable. Well-written, of course, which is what I expected, but punishing, and not rewarding enough to make up for it. I got to the famously ambiguous ending and found that I finally didn’t care.

46. Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case - Debbie Nathan: Well this was a wild ride. I wanted to like this more than I did; I didn’t fully care for the narrative style. Still, it’s interesting. I was particularly interested in the aftermath, in the way belief in “Sybil” led to a lot of bolstering of the Satanic Panic hoaxes of the 1980s and 90s. It was most fascinating as a case study in the lengths women will go to to be listened to.

47. Jamaica Inn - Daphne Du Maurier:* Not my favorite of hers; it’s very silly. It’s fun, but dumb. Still, lots of twisty weird Du Maurier stuff in it.

48. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy*****: I love this book a lot, but I remember once telling someone that Hardy’s books all make me think of the smell of mildew and I stand by it. Still beautiful and sad, though. Jude and Sue are so, so, so stupid.

49. North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell*****: I like this book very much. I wish I liked Margaret herself more, but I can never quite get a firm read on her. She’s modern in some ways and then such a type in others. I enjoy all of the other characters, though. Gaskell’s politics are garbage but it's an interesting and mostly fair portrayal of a factory town.

50. Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales - edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant: None of these stories grabbed me. I probably liked “Old Souls” the best, but overall it wasn’t a stellar collection. Oh well.

51. Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel - George Saunders: I’m always so worried to read books that are as critically acclaimed as this one, but I shouldn’t be. It really was as good as everyone said, and desperately, desperately sad. You forget, don’t you, that they were people.

52. Keynotes - George Egerton**: I loved this. I wish Egerton had a greater output that was easier to find nowadays, because she was really incredible. I think “Now Spring Has Come Again” is my favorite one, but I’m thinking of writing my final paper this semester on “A Little Grey Glove.” All of her stories are so ambiguous and weird and sad; I like them so much.

53. Discords - George Egerton**: Also loved; the stories are much darker than in Keynotes. Virgin Soil is probably my favorite, so oddly hopeful and very loving. Wedlock is more impressive, but holy cats is it scary. I like Egerton so much, and I wish more people read her.

54. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson**: This was not quite what I was expecting. Cultural osmosis had led me to believe we would start with Jekyll, not finish with him - it’s an interesting way to construct the story. Reminds me of some of Collins’ work, though not quite as much fun for me.

55. Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror - W. Scott Poole: I liked this so much, but I suppose I expected to. Only Poole would write about Lovecraft and T.S Eliot as parallel artists with similar concerns (and, you know, bigotries). It made me want to read more of the Frankfurt school, in particular Benjamin. Poole is always worth reading and this was especially fun.

56. Mrs. Warren’s Profession - George Bernard Shaw**: what an interesting play. I find the ending so difficult to parse; whether we’re supposed to agree with Vivie or not is hard to tell. I tend to agree with her, but she’s so cold and judgemental. It was funnier and sadder than I expected.

57. A Woman of No Importance - Oscar Wilde*****: I re-read this for my final paper. Someday I’ll just write on Wilde on his own, because he means so much to me. This isn’t one of his best plays, but it’s so twisty and weird and sad, and of course very funny. I had fun writing about it.

58. The Royals - Kitty Kelly: Was this ever a riot and a half. It’s probably at least 30% lies (at least). What does seem clear is that Princess Margaret was a real piece of work, Prince Philip as well, Charles means very well but doesn’t have a whole lot of natural charm or as much intelligence as he would like (he strikes me as someone who is just clever enough to be interested in a lot of things but not enough to be really good at any of them), and Diana married as a twenty-year-old and never matured past that. What was most interesting to me is how quick and ready people in these peoples’ lives were to share extremely embarrassing dirt about them; this is even more interesting when I realized that the only person who gets away unscathed is Anne. Not one gossipy story about Anne, apart from a couple about Diana saying bitchy things about her. Anne must be the only one who never treats her friends or employees like shit, as far as I can tell.

59. Good Bones and Simple Murders - Margaret Atwood: This was a great way to end the year. It's not quite accurate to call the pieces in this collection short stories; they're more like brief explorations of ideas. I think was just as long as it needed to be. Like bits of ivory, to quote Austen. I think my favorites were Happy Endings, The Little Red Hen Tells All, and Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women.