The books I read in 2020

I read 89 books in 2020. Though it sounds silly, I thought I would read more—all that time indoors, and I don't do very much else besides read, look at my cats, make lists of tasks I don't want to do, etc. Here they are in the order I read them, along with the month (or months) in which that reading took place.

2020 books:

House of the Sleeping Beauties, Yasunari Kawabata (January)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark (January)

A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood (January)

Imaginary Museums, Nicolette Polek (January)

Walks with Walser, Carl Seelig (January)

Nightwork, Christine Schutt (January)

Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, Joseph Ceravolo (February)

The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald (January-February)

Pain / Reading My Catastrophe, Robert Glück / Camille Roy (February)

Severance, Ling Ma (February-March)

Pierrot’s Fingernails, Kit Schluter (March)

Mrs. Caliban, Rachel Ingalls (March)

The Ice Cream Man and Other Stories, Sam Pink (March)

Burning Down the House, Charles Baxter (March)

Michael Kohlhaas, Heinrich von Kleist (April)

My Struggle: Book 1, Karl Ove Knausgaard (March-April)

CUD, Giulia Bencivenga (April)

Juice, Renee Gladman (April)

Paradise, Donald Barthelme (April-May)

Artforum, César Aira (May)

Pets: An Anthology, ed. Jordan Castro (May)

The Dog of the South, Charles Portis (May)

The Reproduction of Profiles, Rosemarie Waldrop (May)

Little Eyes, Samantha Schweblin (May)

How the Dead Live, Derek Raymond (May-June)

The Return, Roberto Bolaño [reread] (May-June)

Drifts, Kate Zambreno (June)

The Dominant Animal, Kathryn Scanlan (June)

The Tanners, Robert Walser (June)

Is That Kafka?, Reiner Stach (June-July)

Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson (July)

Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis (July)

Screen Tests, Kate Zambreno (July)

That Ex, Rachelle Toarmino (July) 

Thee Display, Nora Fulton (July)

To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, Hervé Guibert (July)

Collected Poems, Fairfield Porter (July)

The Straw Sandals: Selected Poetry & Prose, Pierre-Albert Jourdan (August) 

Written Lives, Javier Marías [reread] (August)

Spring and All, William Carlos Williams (August)

Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes (June-August)

My Dog Tulip, J.R. Ackerley (August)

Annotations, John Keene (August)

Observations, Marianne Moore (August)

Thanks, Pablo Katchadjian (August)

The Suspended Vocation, Pierre Klossowski (August)

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (August-September)

Free Day, Inès Cagnati (September)

Language, Jack Spicer (September)

Book of Magazine Verse, Jack Spicer (September)

The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes (September)

Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg (September)

Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, Yanis Varoufarkis (September) 

Yesterday, Agota Kristof (September)

Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball (September)

The Way Through Doors, Jesse Ball (September)

The Complete Verse, Edward Lear (September)

Selected Works, Yi Sang (September)

The Champagne of Concrete, Kit Robinson (October)

The Illiterate, Agota Kristof (October)

The Governesses, Anne Serre (October)

50 Barn Poems, Zac Smith (October)

The Cipher, Molly Brodak (October)

A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid (October)

The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino (October-November)

$50,000, Andrew Weatherhead (November)

The Friend, Sigrid Nunez (November)

Deep Acting, Caleb Beckwith (November)

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard (November)

El Hacker, Paco Ardit (November)

The Notebook, Agota Kristof [reread] (November)

The Dark Eidolon, Clark Ashton Smith (November)

In Watermelon Sugar, Richard Brautigan [reread] (November)

Spleen, Nicholas Moore (November)

Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine, Stanley G. Crawford (November)

The Freelance Pallbearers, Ishmael Reed (November-December)

Chainsaw Poems, Giacomo Pope (December)

Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati (December)

Deathwish, Ben Fama (December)

Waste, Eugene Marten (December)

Shell Game, Jordan Davis (December)

Amor online, Paco Ardit (November-December)

Not to Read, Alejandro Zambra (December)

A Brief History of Portable Literature, Enrique Vila-Matas (December)

Sham Refugia, Mark Johnson (December)

Shantytown, César Aira (December)

Zazie at the Metro, Raymond Queneau (December)

Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard (December)

Tell Me Again, Alice Notley (December)

I would like to make a few, brief remarks on some of these books I read. I am going to exclude books written by friends or contemporaries, because it seems right to do. These are just breezy thoughts and nothing more.

Breezy thoughts and nothing more:

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

I remember finding the writing in this book so sharp, mean, and pointed. Like someone stabbing you with a pencil in grammar school. I typed up one section immediately after I read it, because I couldn't take it; I couldn't handle how good it really was:

Walks with Walser by Carl Seelig

This is a sad book about friendship, starring one of my favorite writers. As I was reading it, I found myself forgetting that Seelig was the writer here, and imagined that Walser was writing a book about himself. Perhaps Seelig was that influenced by Walser's peculiar voice, or maybe it's my own fault, thinking something mistaken and stupid again, yet again!

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

This is probably my favorite book I read this year. I don't have much to say about it. I keep thinking about it. Seems unreal that it exists.

Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist

This 1810 book moves at a frenetic pace—it felt really surprising to me, every page, some new form of acceleration toward doom. Felt like reading a gun.

The Dog of the South by Charles Portis

This is the book that made me laugh the most this year, I think. It's a 'road trip' novel about a damned fool.

Drifts by Kate Zambreno

One of my favorite books published this year—like soaking up the day in a room, alone. I emailed Kate after I read it, to say how much I enjoyed it, and she responded with thanks and gratitude. That made me want to thank writers and artists for their work more—I think it's important to tell someone how much you enjoyed the great thing they did.

Is That Kafka? by Reiner Stach

Fun book of odds-and-ends about Kafka... I learned that Kafka exercised every day, even when he was sick, that he liked to drink beer, that he liked giving gifts to children, that he disliked lying in his day-to-day life, what else, I don't know... A lot of fun. Here's a doctor who was confused by Kafka's writing. He wrote him a letter; it's unclear if Kafka ever wrote back.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

It's Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Took me about three months to read it. Reading it felt like taking a picture of the Eiffel Tower.

Free Day by Inès Cagnati

Brutal, lonely little book from the perspective of a child. That kind of thing can be hard—not being so affected, not turning the voice into a caricature... I think I might have liked Bud Smith's review of this book on Goodreads just as much.

Thanks by Pablo Katchadjian

I know I said that The Rings of Saturn was my favorite book I read this year but in many ways this is my favorite book... They're both my favorite book...

Yesterday / The Illiterate / The Notebook by Agota Kristof

I wanted to read everything I had not yet read by Kristof, so I did. I re-read The Notebook, which was the first thing I read by her a few years ago. She has a direct, unique, kind of hollowed-out voice that's funny, though mostly depressing and end-of-the-world. I recommend Agota Kristof to everyone.

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

I loved this book, though I wish it was 100 pages shorter. I think most books should be shorter... My favorite sub-story was about a violent thief who becomes an obsessed reader (by accident) and how this leads to [spoilers].

Not to Read by Alejandro Zambra

This is also my favorite book I read this year. There's something about Zambra's voice that feels to me as if I am hearing a friend recount a slight but unexpected adventure... Sounds trite, I know... And even more puzzling because this book is all about other books, which is maybe why I like it so much. Forget this review and just read it.

Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard

Actually this is my favorite book I read this year. It's as perfect of a novel as you'll read, though somehow this felt like a 180-page short story instead, which I won't talk about. For a book that's a paragraph long I went through it as quickly as one watches a YouTube video called "Number ONE exercise you need to do to grow your biceps" or "Capybaras bathing."

Tell Me Again by Alice Notley

I read this chapbook this morning, on New Year's Eve. I've gotten into the habit of waking up very early and reading first thing in the morning. It's my favorite time of day. This book is from 1984, and it's a 20-something page autobiography of Alice Notley's childhood in Needles, California. At the beginning, she says she wants to tell us how she became a poet, and almost never mentions poetry for the rest of the book. This felt like the perfect thing to read in the early morning of New Year's Eve. And besides, everything Notley writes is perfect to me.

Other books I read:

—I read my own book several times in the process of editing it, so that counts as a book I read. My hands look like this (reads book 100+ times) so that yours can look like this (reads book 1 time).

—I played / beat Persona 5: Royal, which took over 100 hours. Given the amount of text in the game, it's about the length of a book. So that's like reading a book, I guess.

—I traveled to Mexico City in January, which was like reading a book in reality.

—I read and graded hundreds of student papers, which was like reading several books.

—I enjoyed many daydreams and fantasies, all of which was one long book in my memory.

—I re-watched The Wire for the first time in about 10 years, and found it disappointing. It was not a good show, I discovered... So that was like reading a book one once thought was good. Later, you find yourself disappointed by your younger self, though excuses can be made.

—I wrote a book of short stories and started a novel, which will one day be a book, though I don't know if I will put it into the world. It may say at home, where it's safer. So that was like reading a book that doesn't exist yet.

—I watched many YouTube videos, which was like making a book out of my capacity to be distracted.

—Out of the 365 days of this year, I probably had dreams for 300 of them. So those were all books that I somehow both wrote and read, and yet never fully understood. On that note, here's an amazing section from The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald: 

“I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter, and audience?”

I probably read other books but this all I have for now. Goodbye!