Here are the books I read this year.
I read more books this year than I've read in my life to date.
It's not a race, certainly!
I have no other hobbies...
I like music and watching YouTube videos on far-ranging subjects.
I find pleasure in eating, as well.
I do wish I enjoyed more things.
But I do not!
So here are the books I read in 2021.
I'll say a few things about some of them, should it strike me...
I will avoid commenting upon books written by my peers and contemporaries, though many of those books I count among my favorites I read this year. If you see your book here, that's the one I didn't like.
Just kidding, friend!
A bit of rib poking to start things off.
Well, here are the books—
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry (January)
I had wanted to read this book for many years—well over a decade, I'd imagine. I was left somewhat disappointed. It's a masterpiece, certainly, though sometimes masterpieces are not good enough.
Prophet / Profit, Patrick Balgrave (January)
Meter-Wide Button, Lillian Page Walton (January)
Split, Jeremy Boyd (January)
How I Became a Nun, César Aira (January) [reread]
The first 20 or so pages of this short novella are sublime. The rest kind of wafts into an untoward abstraction that is less palatable. That said, I enjoy its ending. When I reread this book, I had the idea to write a novel called How I Became a Nun by César Aira and Sebastian Castillo where I would include the first 20 or so pages of Aira's book, and then I would rewrite the rest. I think that would lead to some legal problems, but I feel both Aira and New Directions would permit it, should I go through with such a thing.
Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson (January)
Wittgenstein Jr, Lars Iyer (January)
Something Gross, Big Bruiser Dope Boy (January)
Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters (January-February)
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, trans. Anne Carson (February)
Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler (February)
Two Million Shirts, Zac Smith & Giacomo Pope (February)
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cuba, Machado de Assis (February)
An amazing novel. I've just assigned it to you! Ha. Time for homework.
How to Wash a Heart, Bhanu Kapil (February)
Wage Labor and Capital, Karl Marx (February)
A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes (February)
Perhaps the novel that has stayed with me strongest throughout the year. It feels perfect, an experience I haven't been able to forget. There is a pig in the book who I loved so much I decided to include an important pig into the novel I am currently writing, which, come to think of it, plagiarizes a section of this book!
Returning the Sword to the Stone, Mark Leidner (February)
Luster, Raven Leilani (March)
Value, Price, and Profit, Karl Marx (March)
The Descent of Alette, Alice Notley (March) [reread]
The Linden Tree, César Aira (March)
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (March)
I don't remember why I read this book, but I'm happy I did. I loved it so much! I often consider myself an enemy of what they call "literary fiction," and it seemed that Ishiguro was one of their generals. A man whom I should not read, but whom I should keep an eye on. They even gave him that prize. Well, it's healthy to admit when you're wrong. I did not want to put this one down. Stevens behaves so very stupidly, like a little dog. But we love him.
The Years, Annie Ernaux (March)
An indelible addition to the list-autobiography canon, a body of work I've followed for a while (and indeed have contributed to myself): Brainard's and Perec's I Remember, Leve's Autoportrait, Hejinian's My Life, etc.
Greyhound, Aeon Ginsberg (March)
Childhood, Tove Ditlevsen (March)
Worsted, Garielle Lutz (March)
I and a few friends wrote about this book here.
Malcolm, James Purdy (March-April)
Another completely divine book! Oh, how I loved it... I've heard from a bookseller friend that he simply does not sell. That Purdy is box-office poison! That's a tragedy. American writers are often passable stylists, but not very interesting. Not the case with Purdy, of course, which is why Americans can't stand him. They won't buy his books, and it's because of their own inadequacies, naturally. I'm sad for them.
Youth, Tove Ditlevsen (April)
Sea and Fog, Etel Adnan (April)
Dependency, Tove Ditlevsen (April)
Cosmogony, Lucy Ives (April)
El robo del siglo, Paco Ardit (April)
Body High, Jon Lindsey (April)
Darryl, Jackie Ess (Apri)
Bad Bad, Chelsey Minnis (May) [re-read]
Big Joe, Samuel Delany (May)
Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz (May)
What We See When We Read, Peter Mendelsund (May)
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado (May)
Rock Crystal, Adalbert Stifter (June)
Life: A User’s Manual, Georges Perec (May-June)
Hard to say, but this may be my favorite book I read this year, Moby Dick included. It feels insane that it even exists.
The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald (June)
This guy is sooooooooo good, isn't he?
Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, Norman Malcolm (June)
The Waste Books, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (March-June) [reread]
A life-long favorite; I'm currently cooking something up using fragments from Lichtenberg.
Everything Is Totally Fine, Zac Smith (June)
Love’s Work, Gillian Rose (June)
Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide, Christopher L. Caterine (May-June)
The Divorce, César Aira (July)
So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell (July)
Moby Dick, Herman Melville (July)
Hey, it's Moby Dick! Moby Dick the book.
Second Place, Rachel Cusk (July)
The Mayor of Leipzig, Rachel Kushner (July)
Marshlands, André Gide (July)
Dead Souls, Sam Riviere (August)
Troisieme Vague, Lucy K. Shaw (August)
Life in the Folds, Henri Michaux (August)
[untitled manuscript], Ivanna Baranova (August)
The Postman, Antonio Skármeta (August)
Japanese Ghost Stories, Lafcadio Hearn (August)
Battles in the Desert, Jose Emilio Pacheco (August)
This one is a bright gem to me—can be read in one sitting on the toilet, like all great, short books.
A Girl’s Story, Annie Ernaux (August-September)
The Ants, Sawako Nakayasu (September)
The Matrix Poems: 1960-1970, N.H. Pritchard (September)
Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney (September)
Three Poems, John Ashbery (September)
Ketchup, Sam Pink (September)
I Wished, Dennis Cooper (September)
I love you forever, Dennis!
Work, Brandon Brown (September)
Why Not Socialism?, G.A. Cohen (September)
Paresis, Isabelle Nicou (September)
How to Wash a Heart, Bhanu Kapil (September) [reread]
The Marquis of O and Other Stories, Heinrich von Kleist (September-October)
I was deeply Kleist-pilled this year. Things don't get much better than Kleist... "St. Cecilia or the Power of Music" is one of the very best stories. So is "The Earthquake in Chile." You've written some of the best stories they've written, so what do you do? You double suicide yourself in Berlin with a cancer patient, sadly. I want to visit the spot where he died the next time I'm in that city. And Christopher Isherwood's apartment, too.
Deepstep Come Shining, C.D. Wright (October)
Easy Way to Stop Smoking, Allen Carr (July-October)
I actually quit smoking! I don't miss smoking, but I miss the concept of smoking, which is worse than actually missing it. I'll never be happy again, I don't think.
In the Café of Lost Youth, Patrick Modiano (October)
On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt (October)
Honeymoon, Patrick Modiano (October)
For some reason I read six Patrick Modiano books this year. They're all more or less the same, and they had a narcotic effect on me. They really are drug-like, these books. I couldn't stop! But I am done for now. This one was my favorite. They also gave him that prize.
A Little Lumpen Novelita, Roberto Bolaño (October) [reread]
Night Train, A.L. Snijders (October)
We Die in Italy, Sarah Jean Alexander (October)
Afterimage, Patrick Modiano (October)
The Flight of Icarus, Raymond Queneau (October)
Anecdotes, Heinrich von Kleist (October)
Antígona González, Sara Uribe (October)
After the Circus, Patrick Modiano (November)
After Lorca, Jack Spicer (November) [reread]
Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Cabanne (November)
When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut (November)
Hamlet, William Shakespeare (November)
This year I read Shakespeare for the first time since high school. Should I count these as books? Sometimes reading Shakespeare feels like eating your vegetables, it's true, though other times there are moments of exquisite poetry, like they've always told us. The stories are usually not too bad to boot.
Pedigree, Patrick Modiano (November)
The Water Statues, Fleur Jaeggy (November)
Space Invaders, Nona Fernández (November)
His Name Was Death, Rafael Bernal (November)
This book is so good and my hope is that it becomes a classic among English-language readers now that it has been made available to them.
Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal (December)
Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare (December)
Lenz, Georg Buchner (December)
A Cavalier History of Surrealism, Raoul Vaneigem (December)
Forget Thee, Ian Dreiblatt (December)
Invisible Ink, Patrick Modiano (December)
The Tempest, William Shakespeare (December)
A Tempest, Aimé Césaire (December)
Georges Perec: A Life in Words, David Bellos (October-December)
The last big book I read this year. I was inspired to read it after finishing Life A User's Manual. Perec seems like he was a wonderful person. He had an incredibly tragic childhood that plagued him for much of his life—his father died in battle very early on in World War II, and soon after his mother was murdered in the Holocaust. He believed in literature, and I will believe in Georges for the rest of my life.
The Business of Books, Andre Shiffrin (December)
I've started a tradition of ending the year with a Bernhard book I've yet to read. So this year it was Old Masters, which I finished minutes ago. God, it was so incredible. I love Bernhard. There's something about his vim and haterade that gives the end of year the flavor I need. Strangely enough, the novel ends with the two main characters going to see Kleist's The Broken Pitcher. And in fact, I had planned to read Kleist's plays starting next week! I love coincidence, which is probably why I write fiction: it means nothing, and is delicious.
Thanks for reading!
Your friend,
Sebastian
