I Read a Lot of Books in 2016

My goal for 2016 was to read 50 books - I finished out the year with 70 just under the wire.

I liked most of what I read this year! Favorite fiction would have to be The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I was sorry to finish, as it meant reading books that weren't The French Lieutenant's Woman. Other favorites were Hag-Seed, by Margaret Atwood, The Little Red Chairs, by Edna O'Brien, and The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro.

My favorite history was Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf's new study of Thomas Jefferson, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs - books on Jefferson have to be good to impress me, as I've read so many. The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacey Schiff was an extremely close second. It's very well-researched and reads like a thriller.

My favorite book of criticism I read this year was one of the last I finished - Men Women and Chain Saws by Carol Clover.

I re-read a handful of books this year, all ones that I haven't read in at least five years. Of these, I was gladdest to revisit And Then There Were None, which I picked up after watching an excellent new adaptation of it earlier this year.

There were only two books I finished this year that I wouldn't really recommend. The first is Guy Mannering by Walter Scott, and the second is Haunted by Chuck Palahnuik. I'm not sure why I read either one, but save yourself the trouble. The first is somehow melodramatic and dull at once, and the second is so unpleasantly prurient and nasty that I could literally feel myself becoming a worse person while I read it.

Here's the full list! Items with asterisks were re-reads.

1. Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past - Thomas Foster
2. The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression - Andrew Solomon
3. The Origins of Totalitarianism - Hannah Arendt
4. Orthodoxy - GK Chesterton
5. Encounters With Wild Children - Adriana Benz
6. A Passage to India - EM Forster
7. Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams - Joseph Ellis
8. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
9. Psmith Journalist - PG Wodehouse
10. Lost Paradise: From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-Day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem, the Dark Secrets of Pitcairn Island Revealed - Kathy Marks
11. Regarding the Pain of Others - Susan Sontag
12. A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf
13. The Screwtape Letters - CS Lewis
14. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods - Umberto Eco
15. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II - Douglas Blackmon
16. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov - Vladimir Nabokov
17. Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of Imagination - Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf
18. John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit - James Traub
19. The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin
20. This Is How You Lose Her - Junot Diaz
21. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War - Drew Gilpin Faust
22. The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories - Ursula K. LeGuin
23. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
24. Villette - Charlotte Bronte
25. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara Tuchman
26. The Reshaping of Everyday Life - Jack Larkin
27. A Grief Observed - CS Lewis
28. Agony and Eloquence: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and a World of Revolution - Daniel Mallock
29. American Slavery, American Freedom - Edmund S. Morgan
30. The Witches: Salem, 1692 - Stacy Schiff
31. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic - Randy Shilts
32. And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie*
33. The Ball and the Cross - GK Chesterton
34. Beauty - Robin McKinley
35. Dear Life - Alice Munro
36. The Black Death: a Personal History - John Hatcher
37. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin - Timothy Snyder
38. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley*
39. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene*
40. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy - Laurence Sterne
41. The Little Red Chairs - Edna O’Brien
42. The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro
43. Guy Mannering - Walter Scott
44. Psycho-Sexual: Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese and Friedkin - David Greven
45. Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut*
46. The Concept of Anxiety - Soren Kierkegaard
47. The Education of Henry Adams - Henry Adams
48. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief - Lawrence Wright
49. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy - Heather Ann Thompson
50. Eutopia: a Novel of Terrible Optimism - David Nickle
51. Hag-Seed - Margaret Atwood
52. Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse - Hermann Hesse*
53. The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin*
54. The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
55. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackery
56. Ghettoside: a True Story of Murder in America - Jill Leovy
57. Malleus Maleficarum - Heinrich Kramer & James Sprenger
58. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing - Eimear McBride
59. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion - James Frazer
60. The Gulag Archipelago, Volume One: The Prison Industry and Perpetual Motion - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
61. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film - Carol Clover
62. The Gulag Archipelago, Volume Two: The Destructive-Labor Camps and The Soul and Barbed Wire - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
63. We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to Cover Girl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement - Andi Zeisler
64. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
65. The Gulag Archipelago, Volume Three: Katorga, Exile, Stalin is No More - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
66. Hard Times - Charles Dickens
67. Haunted: A Novel of Stories - Chuck Palahniuk
68. The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
69. Herman Melville: Selected Stories - Herman Melville
70. A History of Horror - Wheeler Winston Dixon