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I tend to be a voracious reader, and I read widely. This list has its origins in an old signature file which I would update periodically with the current book that I was reading. That gradually transmogrified itself into the current massive archive with brief reviews.
| What I've been reading lately |
| Number of books read and reviewed each year | |
|---|---|
| 1995* |  (28) |
| 1996 | (47) |
| 1997 | (74) |
| 1998 | (61) |
| 1999 | (62) |
| 2000 | (27) |
| 2001 | (51) |
| 2002 | (60) |
| 2003 | (37) |
| 2004 | (36) |
| 2005 | (32) |
| 2006 | (46) |
| 2007 | (109) |
| 2008 | (78) |
| 2009 | (65) |
| 2010 | (68) |
| 2011 | (98) |
| 2012 | (129) |
| 2013 | (114) |
| 2014 | (101) |
| 2015 | (88) |
| 2016 | (82) |
| 2017 | (76) |
| 2018 | (67) |
| 2019 | (95) |
| 2020 | (90) |
| 2021 | (85) |
| 2022 | (101) |
| 2023 | (124) |
| 2024 | (154) |
| 2025 |  (16) |
| * Partial year | |
[Finished 13 February 2025] One of these books that ended up getting dug up from the depths of my to-read list that I don‘t remember putting there. An interesting enough book although apparently the historical details are frequently incorrect and the Portuguese is closer to Spanish (which explains why I was able to so easily understand it), but even so, this was an interesting read even if the story was a bit meandering.
The Seven Storey Mountain
by Thomas Merton
[Finished 10 February 2025] I read this book sometime in the early 90s and coming back to it again over 30 years later, I found it so much more powerful than I did on the first reading. Merton’s account of being drawn to the church and religion and his indirect road to becoming a Trappist monk is beautifully written and greatly inspiring.
The History of Sound
by Ben Shattuck
[Finished 8 February 2025] A collection of loosely linked stories, exploring interconnected lives in New England (and, apparently, Canada). The writing is beautiful and the sometimes surprising connections between the stories enriched the collection.
Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times
by Gregory Boyle
[Finished 1 February 2025] I’m not sure I like Boyle’s use of “mentally ill” if only because that term has a very specific meaning both medically and culturally. Perhaps “broken” or “spiritually ill” would be a better descriptor. It’s, as usual, a great piece of writing from Boyle, although occasionally a little disjoint and reliant on anecdote, and I would have liked to have some sense of how Boyle would recommend people resist against the evils of the current administration.
Victorian Psycho
by Virginia Feito
[Finished 30 January 2025] While I was initially a bit put off by the mock-Victorian prose style, the gradual increase in the insanity of the novel’s narrator’s actions sold me on the book. Darkly comic and bordering on psychopathic, but brilliant.
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
by Salman Rushdie
[Finished 27 January 2025] Rushdie seems to be hit-or-miss with me. I feel like this fell more into miss than hit, although there were some moments of inspiration here, I felt like Joseph Anton was a more nakedly honest memoir.
The Best American Short Stories 2015
edited by T. C. Boyle
[Finished 26 January 2025] While I generally enjoy Boyle’s writing, I found this collection to be a bit of a disappointment, not really meeting my expectations for the series.
The Good Terrorist
by Doris Lessing
[Finished 25 January 2025] Another book where the pacing and structure intrigued me. Lessing’s depiction of the titular good terrorist, a young woman from a middle-class background in Thatcher’s England who finds herself
Sleep Decades
by Israel A. Bonilla
[Finished 17 January 2025] A collection of stories by a writer new to me. Bonilla, I presume, is a native Spanish speaker as a few Spanish calques slipped into his writing (most notably, using the word “reunion” for gathering or meeting), but between his writing in a second language and the shift in cultural context, he made for some intriguing reading.
Colored Television
by Danzy Senna
[Finished 16 January 2025] Not quite what I expected, it was a bit of an experience seeing how Senna managed the structure and pacing of her novel as opposed to my expectations from the capsule summary I’d seen before reading the book. I was very curious about the identity of “multicultural Mayberry” which I had guessed might have been somewhere in mid-city Los Angeles, perhaps Larchmont Village or Victoria Park, but a bit of googling turned up that it was, in fact, South Pasadena which hadn’t worked into my imagined geography of the novel. The plot was completely different than I expected, but kept me engaged as I read.