Reading log

A = audiobook, NF = nonfiction, R = reread, S = short story collection/anthology

2025

  • Hello Beautiful, Ann Napolitano (A)
  • The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman
  • Poetics, Aristotle (NF)
  • Format Your Ebook, Rob Bignell (NF)
  • A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.
  • Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein (A)
  • Lincoln at the Bardo, George Saunders
  • Coolest American Stories 2025, Mark Wish & Elizabeth Coffey, eds. (S)
  • The Elements of Story: Field Notes on Nonfiction Writing, Francis Flaherty (NF)
  • The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon
  • Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, Bono (NF, A)
  • On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts, William Germano (NF)
  • A Sliver of Glass: And Other Uncommon Tales, Anne Mazer (S)
  • The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller, John Truby (NF)
  • Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein (NF)
  • Erasure, Percival Everett
  • The Stranger, Albert Camus
  • The Plague, Albert Camus
  • All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
  • Night Watch, Mathew Goldberg (S)
  • The Raven and Other Favorite Poems, Edgar Allan Poe (R)
  • Selected Poems, John Donne
  • Yellowface, R.F. Kuang
  • Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher (A)
  • Make Something Up, Chuck Palahniuk (S, A)
  • Thirteen Stories, Eudora Welty (S)
  • How to Write a Sentence, Stanley Fish (N)
  • Swamplandia!, Karen Russell (A)
  • Black Dahlia & White Rose, Joyce Carol Oates (S, A)
  • Eartheater, Dolores Reyes
  • Memorial Days, Geraldine Brooks (A, NF)
  • A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
  • A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman (A)
  • The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw (S, A)
  • Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin (A)
  • In the Temple of the Ordinary: Poems of Presence, Molly Remer
  • Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte
  • Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (A)
  • The Round House, Louise Erdrich (A)
  • More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, John Warner (NF)
  • Flash Fiction America: 73 Very Short Stories, James Thomas, Sherrie Flick, John Dufresne, editors (S)
  • The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
  • The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins (A)
  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin (A)
  • Mark Twain, Ron Chernow (NF)
  • The Women, Kristin Hannah
  • Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Elevation, Stephen King (A)
  • Memory Man, David Baldacci (A)
  • Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock, Jonathan Gould (NF)
  • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life, Mark Manson (A)
  • Love Song to Gravity, Agnes Vojta
  • Matrix, Lauren Groff (A)
  • Our Lives in Pieces, Tracie Adams (NF)
  • All Our Tomorrows, Amy DeBellis
  • The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles (A)
  • Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff (A)
  • The Coolest American Stories 2025, Mark Wish & Elizabeth Coffey, eds. (S)
  • Tortilla Flat, John Steinbeck
  • A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles (A)
  • There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak
  • Bad Mexican, Bad American: Poems, Jose Hernandez Diaz
  • All and Then None of You, Melissa Flores Anderson (S)
  • Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (A)
  • Chicano, Richard Vasquez
  • None of This Is True, Lisa Jewell (A)
  • Winter’s Bone, Daniel Woodrell (A)
  • Vera, or Faith, Gary Shteyngart
  • Night Watch, Jayne Ann Phillips
  • The Ministry of Time, Kalaine Bradley
  • Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (S)
  • The Antidote, Karen Russell
  • The Ask, Sam Lipsyte (A)
  • Happy People Don’t Live Here, Amber Sparks
  • American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins (A)
  • Better to Beg, Kirsti MacKenzie
  • Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon
  • You Like It Darker, Stephen King (S)
  • My Documents, Kevin Nguyen

2024

  • Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, Peter Godfrey-Smith (NF)
  • So Many Steves: Afternoons with Steve Martin, Steve Martin and Adam Gopnik (A, NF)
  • An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark!, Florence Hazrat (NF)
  • Writing with Style: The Economist Guide, Lane Greene, ed. (NF)
  • Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen
  • At the Existentialist Cafe, Sarah Bakewell (NF)
  • Coolest American Stories 2024, Mark Wish & Elizabeth Coffey, eds. (S)
  • Ready Player One, Ernest Cline (R)
  • The Late Show, Michael Connelly
  • Dark Sacred Night, Michael Connelly
  • 1000 Words, Jami Attenberg (NF)
  • My Bohemian Baptism and Then Some, Doug Brown (S)
  • Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow, Steve Almond (NF)
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond (NF)
  • Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro (S)
  • The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride
  • James, Percival Everett
  • Instructions for a Funeral, David Means (S)
  • Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey (A, NF)
  • The Reckoning, John Grisham (A)
  • Tiananmen Square, Lai Wen
  • Women in the Valley of the Kings, Kathleen Sheppard (NF)
  • Stoner, John Williams
  • The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy
  • The Boys from Biloxi, John Grisham (A)
  • Home Is Where the Bodies Are Buried Jeneva Rose (A)
  • Grit, Angela Duckworth (NF, A)
  • There There, Tommy Orange
  • I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Erika L. Sanchez
  • Julia, Sandra Newman
  • 1984, George Orwell (R)
  • Ernest Hemingway on Writing, Larry W. Phillips, ed.
  • The Night Raven, Johan Rundberg
  • Says Who?, Anne Curzan (NF)
  • The Writer’s Digest Handbook of Short Story Writing, Volume II, Jean M. Fredette, ed.
  • Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward
  • Trigger Warning, Neil Gaiman (A)
  • The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee (NF)
  • Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Covenants, Tommy Dean (S)
  • Reasonable, KT Carlisle
  • Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange
  • The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich (A)
  • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders (A, NF)
  • One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories, B.J. Novak (A, S)
  • The Groves of Academe, Mary McCarthy
  • The Lost Bookshop, Evie Woods
  • Mailed It!, Ashley Budd and Dayana Kibilds (NF)
  • Wild, Cheryl Strayed (NF)
  • Bark, Lorrie Moore (S)
  • Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng
  • Stay Up With Hugo Best, Erin Somer
  • The Friend, Sigrid Nunez
  • Calypso, David Sedaris (A)
  • Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie
  • October 1964, David Halberstam (NF, R)
  • Short Stories, Irwin Shaw
  • Here Goes Nothing, Eamon McGrath (A)
  • Perestroika, Joao Cerqueira
  • Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
  • First Person Singular, Harumi Murakami (A, S)
  • Circe, Madeline Miller (A)
  • Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott (NF)
  • The Mighty Red, Louise Erdrich
  • Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney (A)
  • Gone Girl, Jillian Flynn (A)
  • The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver
  • There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, Ruben Reyes (S)
  • A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (A, R)
  • Less, Andrew Sean Greer
  • The Great Divide, Cristina Henriquez
  • Orbital, Samantha Harvey
  • Chain Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
  • Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar
  • The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman (A)
  • LatinoLand, Marie Aruna (NF)
  • Aristotle for Novelists, Douglas Vigliotti (NF)