If you’ve read any of these and want to chat about them, please email me! Likewise, if there are books you think I should read, let me know. Sometimes I write short reviews over on my Goodreads page.
Selected 2017 Reading (alphabetical by author/editor last name by genre)
Short Stories/Collections
- What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
- The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
- A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
- A Model World and Other Stories by Michael Chabon
- The Black Monk by Anton Chekhov
- The Essential Tales of Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
- Transactions in a Foreign Currency by Deborah Eisenberg
- The O. Henry Prize Stories edited by Laura Furman
- Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
- The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- Send me Work: Stories by Katherine Karlin
- At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid
- A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
- The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
- Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy
- Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
- Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munroe
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O’Connor
- What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
- Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
- Green Mountains Review edited by Dan Pinkerton
- Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell
- Tenth of December by George Saunders
- Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories by Jim Shepard
Fiction
- The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
- The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
- Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
- The Girls by Emma Cline
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- LaRose by Louise Erdrich
- Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
- History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
- Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Daisy Miller by Henry James
- Long Division by Kiese Laymon
- Hardly Knew Her by Laura Lippman
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
- Eileen by Ottessa Mosfegh
- The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
- The Dark Net by Benjamin Percy
- Swing Time by Zadie Smith
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Authority by Jeff VanderMeer
- Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
- Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer
- Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
- The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
- The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Nonfiction
- The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
- Writing the Memoir by Judith Barrington
- Mythologies by Roland Barthes
- Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles
- And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos by John Berger
- Ways of Seeing by John Berger
- On Writing by Charles Bukowski
- Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women by Susan Burton
- The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine by Rita Charon
- The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus by Cyril Connolly
- An American Childhood by Annie Dillard
- My People Are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Party Captain by Aaron Dixon
- Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
- The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison
- An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison
- Ethical Issues in Rural Health Care edited by Craig M. Klugman
- The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner
- Table Talk: From the Threepenny Review edited by Wendy Lesser
- More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers by Jonathan Lethem
- Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing by Deborah Levy
- Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
- In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction by Gabor Maté
- Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care by Dayna Matthew
- Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice by Colum McCann
- Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality edited by Jonathan M. Metzl
- Ventanas de Manhattan by Antonio Muñoz Molina
- The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
- Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver
- Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
- Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction by Benjamin Percy
- Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century by Dorothy Roberts
- Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag
- God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet
- Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
- My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story by Abraham Verghese
- When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine by Monica Wood
- Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir by William Zinsser
Poetry
- Three Poems by John Ashbery
- On Cats by Charles Bukowski
- Loosestrife by Stephen Dunn
- Ugly Time by Sarah Galvin
- The Temple Gate Called Beautiful by David K. Kirby
- Falling Water by John Koethe
- Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
Plays/Zines/Graphic Novels/Other:
- Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
- Wit by Margaret Edson
- A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
- The Ring of Fire Anthology by E.T. Russian
- The Bad Doctor by Ian Williams