2011 Booklist

This year, I read the exact same number of books as I did in this year.

In chronological order of which I finished them:

1. David Rakoff – Half Empty
2. Zadie Smith – Changing My Mind
3. Bill Bryson – At Home
4. John Irving – Last Night In Twisted River
5. Stephen McCauley – Insignificant Others
6. Carolyn Parkhurst – The Nobodies Album
7. Dick Golembiewski – Milwaukee Television History
8. Michael Cunningham – By Nightfall
9. Gary Shteyngart – Super Sad True Love Story
10. Jessica Harper – The Crabby Cook Cookbook
11. Michael Davis – Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street
12. Chuck Klosterman – Fargo Rock City*
13. Sam Staggs – All About All About Eve
14. Alice Echols – Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture
15. Sloane Crosley – How Did You Get This Number?
16. Amy Sedaris – Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People
17. Steve Martin – An Object of Beauty
18. Jean Shepherd – Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories (and Other Disasters)*
19. Tina Fey – Bossypants
20. Patti Smith – Just Kids
21. Ellen Willis – Out of the Vinyl Deeps
22. Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita*
23. David Thorne – The Internet is a Playground
24. Jennifer Egan – A Visit From the Goon Squad
25. Fran Lebowitz – Metropolitan Life
26. Stanley Elkin – Searches and Seizures
27. Roberto Bolano – 2666
28. Carolyn Parkhurst – Lost and Found*
29. Tom Rachman – The Imperfectionists
30. Simon Reynolds – Retromania
31. Kurt Vonnegut – The Sirens of Titan
32. Tom Spanbauer – Now is the Hour*
33. Paul Murray – Skippy Dies
34. Chuck Eddy – Rock and Roll Always Forgets
35. Robert Hofler – The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson
36. RJ Wheaton – Portishead’s Dummy (33 1/3 series)
37. Dana Spiotta – Stone Arabia
38. Diana Rico – Kovacsland
39. Per Petterson – Out Stealing Horses
40. Tom Perrotta – The Leftovers
41. Alice Munro – The View From Castle Rock
42. John Hodgman – The Areas of My Expertise
43. Francine Prose – My New American Life
44. Brian Kellow – Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark
(* re-read)

Some Thoughts:

I spent the whole month of July reading 2666 and nothing else. A truly tremendous book, but one to endure rather than savor. The Savage Detectives is a better Bolano to start with.

I only re-read 5 books this year. This seems like less than usual, but in fact I’ve never re-read more than 5 in one year since I began collating booklists in 2007.

The Willis and Eddy collections = essential for any aspiring music critic.  The Kael biography = the same concerning movie critics.

After years of not reading him, I’m making my way through Vonnegut’s oeuvre chronologically, one book per year; expect to see Mother Night on the 2012 list.

I’ll likely never read 7, 10, 16, 23 and 35 cover-to-cover again; not to say I didn’t like them (I’ll surely browse through the first four at some point in time) but I just have too many other books to get to and so little time.

For those curious, my five favorite reads on this list are 11 (an engrossing account of an often taken-for-granted institution), 33 (a wonderfully humane Irish prep school epic), 37 (the year’s most conceptually stunning narrative), 40 (the author’s best yet) and 44 (a biography even its prickly subject might have admired), with 24 (already much praised) a most honorable mention.