100 books that I read in 2022

I read 100 books in 2022. 100 books, that’s a lot of books. In fairness, this ended up being a pretty arbitrary exercise. I did not distinguish between poetry or fiction. An 800-page postmodern classic counted as the same number of books as a 17-page chapbook from a twitter mutual—which is to say, one book. This type of reading challenge absolutely incentivized seeking out the shortest, easiest books I could get my hands on while actively discouraging me from tackling stuff I might otherwise be interested in. It also turns out that buying 100 new books to read is expensive. Amazon is a supposed corporate monopoly edging out the market because it doesn’t have to deal with the same taxes its competition faces, yet somehow even books listed as a dollar used total $10 after shipping and handling (I don’t have Amazon Prime because of sunk-cost fallacy; my local gas station that I’ve bought pretty much a decade’s worth of gas from has a rewards program I refuse to invest in for the same reason). Multiply this by 100 books. That’s a lot of books to buy. Still, I’m glad I did this. Before 2022, the most books I’d read in a year was ~50 back in 2017, and in the years following I struggled to finish anything more than 20 books annually. Reading 100 books forced me to engage with material I’d otherwise ignore, while also encouraging positive-seeming habits like scheduling daily reading time, not getting plastered drunk so I could process words on a page, and staring at my phone less. These are all the books I read in 2022.

 

1. Preparation for the Next Life (Atticus Lish): Finished in January but began over Christmas with my family, such that I primarily associate it with the disillusionment of being a 28-year-old office worker ‘home for the holidays’, sadly masturbating in my childhood bedroom. At the time I was making $1800/month filing documents. My family seemed off-putting and tragic, dad complaining about the price of shellfish. I’d been meaning to read the prodigal son of Gordon Lish for a while but also delayed this due to doubts of nepotism. My concerns were for nothing, this is a truly ‘literary’, capital L, book. Some people might find it obnoxiously so, but there’s a clear level of meticulous craft and detail here, of trying to mean something big, that I respect. Ultimately this is a ‘George Bush-era’ political novel, in that the themes it highlights—the ramifications of mindless American interventions in the Middle East— are probably obsolete at this point, but still appealing to me in the way of nostalgia, of the sound of a Nintendo Gamecube booting up.

 

2. A Fan's Notes (Frederick Exley): Genuinely didn’t know anything about Exley as a literary figure before reading, I was primarily attracted to this book because of how much it reminded me of the era I spent unemployed watching sports games on bar television screens 2018-2019. Wikipedia tells me that ‘The title comes from Exley’s fear that he is doomed to be a spectator in life as well as sports’. Seems a little dramatic to me. I liked this book because it struck me as a primordial sitcom, it is beautifully insane and funny without ever unnecessarily elevating its own tragedy.

 

3. Left Hand (Paul Curran): Among the category of ‘online books’—which I define as ‘books that circumvent traditional publishing means and marketing by going straight to independent publishing thanks to the internet’s word-of-mouth viral capacities’—there is a specific subgenre I default to insufficiently defining as ‘edgy lit’. What I’m talking about is a style that emphasizes split-fractal narratives, gore, and foggy shock value. Basically, Dennis Cooper will blurb these books. Left Hand fits this bill. I wasn’t overly interested in it but I also can’t concretely say it’s bad. I saw a Reddit comment criticizing it as ‘schizoposting’ and immediately felt warm and defensive toward Paul Curran. This book is a thoughtful experiment. I thoroughly disagree with Reddit at all times.

 

4. Ghettoside (Jill Levoy): One of the few nonfiction books I read this year. Through the lens of a specific homicide case in early 2000s Los Angeles, it provides a broader analysis of murder in urban America, where most cases go unsolved and the majority of the victims are black men. I was intrigued by this premise as it’s sort of an inverse twist on current policing debate: in this scenario it’s not police over-aggression killing these men but indifference, as cops simply don’t care enough to solve the myriad cases ripping poorer communities apart. Most insane-seeming aspect of this book is it spends hundreds of pages building its main detective into an eccentric, Hollywood-glazed genius, just for him to ‘solve’ the final case by bullying a teenager into confession without any actual evidence. In my experience, even media that takes the most painstaking approach to glorify policework ends up exposing the sewage inherent to it. I was recently laid off, and whenever I’m out of a job I immediately fantasize about Antarctic scientist, unionized railroad worker, or cop as my next career option.

 

5. When We Cease to Understand the World (Benjamin Labatut): Wrote about this in a previous blogpost. Very Reddit-seeming book. Obama recommends it and Obama is by objective legal definition a war criminal.

 

6. A Gate at the Stairs (Lorrie Moore): Wrote about this in a previous blogpost but basically I think Moore is underwhelming as a novelist compared to what she can do as a short story writer (probably an unfair judgment since this is the only novel I’ve read by her). I did find this book notable in that it accurately predicts modern Twitter discourse. Written in 2009, its plot revolves around a white family adopting a black baby, with numerous scenes precociously evocative of 2022 Twitter threads where comedically out-of-touch Caucasians deliberate over race, such as a passage where they brag about who volunteers the most at soup kitchens before debating whether it’s more socially progressive to say ‘biracial’ or ‘mixed’.  

 

7. Heathenish (Kelby Losack): There was a plot thread about selling marijuana that seemed melodramatic to me, the narrator has to like, ‘go straight’ and find an honest living instead of selling weed to escape his delinquency, etc. Reminded me of the kids I went to college with who thought they were the Sopranos because they sold weed. To be fair, there are other drugs in this book. There’s meth and pills and stuff. I realize I’m coming at this with an incredibly biased perspective, as marijuana is legal in my state and hasn’t been a criminal offense in years. Interestingly, weed is legal at the state but not federal level, so if you were to smoke it in a national park you could still be federally prosecuted. The last time I was unemployed, I part-timed for this guy who wanted me to help him grow weed, but I ended up just doing odd jobs for him like repairing the steps to his house and putting up a fence. To this day I have this on my resume as ‘construction’. I don’t know how to use a hammer or screwdriver properly.

 

8. Salad Days (Laura Theobald): Using italics to indicate that this is poetry. I thought these poems were deceptively straightforward, there’s minimal enjambment, advanced rhetorical techniques, or complicated imagery or whatever. As an example, ‘ASS POEM’ opens with ‘You have the finest ass I have ever touched / Great now I am full of despair / And I would like to be on fire / I am exactly like a Buddhist’. Poetry recommendations can be very hit or miss for me, but I found this collection worthwhile and good. Megan Boyle has a blurb for this I liked, to quote an excerpt: ‘I started copying and pasting my favorite lines into an email draft, which quickly turned into copying and pasting entire poems, before I realized I’d soon have an email draft containing an exact copy of the book.’

 

9. The Sky Contains the Plans (Matthew Rohrer): Been a longtime Matthew Rohrer fan, enjoying The Hummock in the Malookas and his pieces up on bear parade, so I decided I should probably extend my knowledge of his work and see if it holds the same charm. The premise behind this collection is cool, it’s a ‘hypnagogic project’, which sounds pretentious but means Rohrer essentially wrote the titles/opening lines for these pieces in the dreamlike state between falling asleep and waking. Some lines generated by this technique: ‘ALL RIGHT, SMELL YOUR FINGER’, ‘A TOY SPACESHIP CALLED ALMOND CHICKEN’, ‘BRIEF, ALMOST MICROSCOPIC ATTEMPTS MADE ON MY LIFE’.

 

10. Love Actually (Ann Beattie): Saw this at a used bookstore and bought because it had a classic Vintage Contemporaries cover. I’ve read Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie and a short story collection, both of which I liked, but found this one kind of meandering. Plot mostly focuses on the romantic drama of a group of upper-class artists in Vermont who don’t work real jobs. At one point there’s a tragic death which felt, to me, shoehorned in to make the plot ‘matter’, or something. There’s a ‘dumb cop’ scene too, where dumb rural cops pull out of like a McDonald’s drive-thru to fumblingly stop a low-level crime, spilling French fries, donuts. Found it wholly uninteresting, trite, without literary value or meaning. Imagined saying this to Ann Beattie and receiving the rebuttal ‘Your face has no literary value.’

 

11. Woke Racism (John McWhorter): Seems funny that I only read 2ish nonfiction books this year and one of those is cop propaganda and the other an ‘anti-woke’ tirade. Overall I think McWhorter’s main points are actually pretty tame. He doesn’t deny systemic racism but thinks we need to take steps to clearly address it outside of say, performative social media posts and corporate HR trainings. If anything, it’s not his ‘takedown’ of wokeness that struck me as controversial but his proposed solution to racial inequity: according to McWhorter, we need to teach children to read by using phonics, i.e., having them sound out words letter-by-letter versus the more standard practice of encouraging students to recognize words as single chunks. As a linguist, McWhorter probably knows extensively more about this subject to me, but it still seems jarring to argue that the biggest, most sweeping fix for deep structural, racial, economic inequities in America is changing school curriculum phonics. Going to start advocating for phonics-based teaching at parties, I think, the next time that I am invited to a party.

 

12. His Name Was Death (Rafael Bernal): This is a science fiction book from like, the 1950s, I think? ‘Old’ sci-fi seems insane to me as the theories and explanations it provides for space, the universe, etc are often jarringly different from our modern hindsight. For example, in this book mosquitoes are a sentient alien race possessing supreme intelligence, who the protagonist learns to communicate with to the degree that he is able to coordinate the domination of the earth and human race with their insect help. It’s a quick read. I finished on a rainy afternoon and then went to see the new Batman movie, which was 3-hours long—far too long, it feels, for a Batman movie. This was late spring, a murky, submarine-like period that always renders me nostalgic for the wet dark days of my childhood when I would attend the funerals of grandparents.

 

13. Liver Mush (Graham Irvin): Probably has the most unique cover of anything on this list. If you haven’t seen it, Liver Mush is a truly beautiful-looking book. It’s modeled after FDA food packaging standards, so in addition to the blood smears smattered across its front, you’ll also find net weight, nutritional info, even refrigeration instructions. You might worry this is too ‘on the nose’—a fear that you could rightfully extend to the rest of the book, as this is, after all, a collection of poems titled ‘Liver Mush’. Liver mush as a phrase inherently steals your attention, it is a meme at the cellularly phonetic level, and so my worry was Graham would lean on this gimmick instead of the actual quality of his writing to keep readers interested. I associate Back Patio Press (the publisher of this book) with a sort of ‘anti-poetry’—even though probably only two of their books I’ve read actually fit this description I just invented—where they use more grounded poetry with simpler language, themes, lines, breaks, etc as a ‘fuck you’ to the kind of mainstream poetry that sags with the weight of its self-importance. Hence, this is a collection of poems purely about liver mush, ‘a pork liver and cornmeal based food eaten mostly in Western North Carolina’ (quoted from the product description of Liver Mush). The joke is liver mush is unappetizing and we’re going to get a whole book of unappetizing poems (I guess there are, too, stories in here, but I still consider this poetry as a whole). But Graham tenderly balances the joke with universal sadness and weighty truths—he earns the right to hand-wavingly use liver mush as a metaphor for everything because he proves that all of existence can be boiled down to processed pig product, in the same sense that even processed pig can be served, insanely and impossibly, as a vegan alternative. (The collection ends, poignantly, with a recipe for vegan liver mush.)

 

14. No Tiger (Mika): This book fits, I think, the narrow definition I established for the third book I read this year, book 3—Left Hand by Paul Curran, except that because it’s poetry, I offer it much more leniency. I think this format of verbal fragmentation/evisceration is 1000x more effective when there’s no other broader narrative expectation. Trying to talk about poetry sucks, in my opinion, and I find I actually lean on poets using gimmicks like the previous entry’s Liver Mush just so I can find common ground with an unfamiliar reader to explain why they should check out a collection in the first place, so I’m going to default to abstract, blurb-like language here: this book is the mobile Gundam suit of an extracted heart’s wiring, it is an angel cut in two: this book is the dead bullet of everything that is left of you.

 

15. Battles in the Desert (Jose Emilio Pacheco): Can’t remember much about this/don’t have any broader insights except that it’s about like a fifth grader kissing his best friend’s mom? I think she just kisses him on the cheek. According to Wikipedia, this book is significant to Mexican culture and literature, but also ‘highly criticized’ (?). It reminded me of a Mishima or Kobo Abe novel, which seems retrospectively racist, in that I associate any foreign novel that deals with premature sexuality with Japan.

 

16. Pushkin Hills (Sergei Dovlatov): A failed writer needs cash having recently lost his wife and child to divorce, and so he takes a job as a tour guide. Set in Russia, Russian author. Most eye-opening line to me is how the narrator describes his alcoholism, something like: ‘It’s easy to get the engine going, I have no problem with the engine, it’s the brakes I can’t control’, which reminds me of a country music song I often hear playing at the local biker bar near me named The Roost whose lyrics are something like ‘They say I got a drinking problem / Well I ain’t got no problem drinking at all’. This is probably in my top personal favorites of books I read this year, due to biases; it concludes with our protagonist luridly drunk alone after his wife and daughter emigrate without him to America as the secret police smash on his door, which reminds me viscerally of the year I spent drunk and unemployed swigging rum in my bedroom replaying old Pokemon games—this book is literally me.

 

17. Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon): I’ve blogged about this previously, but essentially I have mixed thoughts when it comes to hefty, postmodern ‘literary’ (capital L) novels. These are big books for big boys. They are not meant to be read in the infantile diaper of mental inadequacy, no. Because I read this book, I’m sort of a genius. All ‘fine art’ has differing layers of pretentiousness, but it seems to me there’re few things as exhaustingly exclusionary as a well-renowned book. Even an experimental, 3-hour long art movie can be endured by sheer force of will. But an 800+ paged, excessively dense book? I’ll say this. Gravity’s Rainbow is simultaneously rewarding and capricious. It does not take itself seriously, balancing every potentially overburdened theme of nuclear extinction with the slapstick comedy of banana peels (there are literally entire chapters of this book devoted to the joke of characters slipping on bananas, to piss and poop, to how terrible British candies are). It’s also densely obnoxious. Chapters have no title or number marking, page counts vary by edition, so to even begin joking about ‘the part where Slothrop falls in the toilet’ requires an almost mathematically precise familiarity with the text. The issue isn’t its multiple narrators but that its narrative perspective can shift, at a sentence-level quick notice, through both space and time, a transition from one paragraph to the next that tumbles you between tenses, perspectives, and entire decades of thought. Most of the ‘challenge’ of the book is just keeping track of where you are in the narrative because the author smugly won’t tell you. In this sense, though, Gravity’s Rainbow is more than ‘just’ a book. It’s a piece of art you have to clash and reckon with, to pin to the wrestling mat of your mind. I think the ultimate measure of the worth of a ‘big book’ is if you could simply read a lesser work by the author and more or less milk the same point. Previously I’d only read Crying of Lot V by Pynchon, and yes, you can more or else get the signature gist of paranoia and comedic conspiracy in a measure of pages hundreds less than Gravity’s Rainbow. If you want to brag about reading Pynchon, you can save yourself a lot of time with just Crying of Lot V, but I admit Gravity’s Rainbow justifies itself by being such an annoyingly unique reading experience. It’s an incredibly big book. I’m smarter than anyone I went to high school with because I finished it.

 

18. Dog Day Economy (Ted Rees): Primarily objected to this book’s emphasis on process—there’s a note at the end of this collection on how the first half was inspired by the author physically cutting and pasting excerpts from The Economist together, while the second was ‘composed on large sheets of butcher paper utilizing luggage markets, permanent markers, packing tape, scraps of paper, and pens, in a rather physical process’. Give me a fucking break!! I don’t care about your poems more or less because you ripped them from glossy magazine pages vs spurted them out in a Microsoft Office word processor. Can’t poems just be fucking poems? That being said, one factor I valued in my previous review of the ninth book I read this year—#9. The Sky Contains the Plans (Matthew Rohrer)—is how the author utilized an outside, hypnagogic method to create his pieces. Methodology is, I guess, important, although ultimately what matters to me is what I get out of a piece by the surface level experience of skimming through. The coolest thing Rees does in this collection isn’t write poems on construction paper but rather uniquely establish syntax structures like ‘[tangible mundane concept] of the [abstract concept]’ – i.e., an excerpt like ‘hibachi of the conscience, / a stripmall in Dayton’; syntactical structures I’ve liked enough to emulate in my own poetry, so I have to give him credit.

 

19. Bondings (Maggie Siebert): Falls into the same arbitrary category I’ve previously established for Left Hand and No Tiger—edgy books, likely to be published by Apocalypse Press and/or blurbed by Dennis Cooper. I liked it. ‘Edgy’ is a vague, slug-like term, used as pathetic shorthand. This is a book that wants to make its readers uncomfortable by presenting them with a relentless sequence of unique, morally challenging scenarios. In this sense, even though I try to clumsily sledgehammer it into a ‘category’, it is fundamentally different from the other titles I’ve mentioned, as it splices its fractal gore cohesively, with thoughtful, plot-involved narratives. I liked this amalgam-like approach, this synthesis of shattered language and stories with clearly defined arcs and lessons: it seems like a sustainable approach for balancing the frenetic energy of ‘outsider’ ‘alt-lit’ with more traditional horror structures.  

 

20. Thank You, Steel China (Sean Kilpatrick): I want to explain this right…this book establishes, basically, a ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ within its poems, in that while each poem functions as its own piece, it also creates an overarching, self-referential ‘lore’ about ‘Steel China’. Steel China is a city, it’s a country, it’s a mood, it’s your worst hangover, it is the future and the exposed rib cage of the past. Helpfully, this book isn’t pretentious in its methods either, but at times even slapstick, doing a good job, in my opinion, of balancing the bite of what might otherwise be a collection I deem too up its own ass.  

 

21. People from My Neighborhood (Hiromi Kawakami): Series of ‘fairy tale’-like, interlinking vignettes about a small town. This had flavors of ‘magical realism’ to me in that most of the stories are grimy, unsettling, and often mundane in their use of the supernatural. Enjoyed this quote from a five-star Amazon review: ‘The difference between a palm-of-the-hand story and flash fiction is not clear to me. According to my extensive research (two minutes on the web) flash fiction is a story of less than 1000 words that emphasizes plot. It not a vignette or reflection but a story. So what’s a story?’ What indeed…

 

22. Light-Up Swan (Tom Snarsky): Became aware of Tom by his twitter, where he reliably posts excerpts of poetry that resonate with me ~75% of the time. He has good taste and is also a poet, so I figured his own work would be worth checking out. I wasn’t wrong. He gets bonus points, in my opinion, for being a ‘serious’ poet—he has established through his Twitter that he has genuinely good, ‘educated’ taste in poetry—that’s also playful, he can do beautifully elaborate, linguistically rich poems, but he can also do the old ‘two line short and sweet clever’ poem, he can do video game poems.

 

23. Small Moods (Shane Kowalski): DM’d Zac Smith comparing this book to his recently published Everything Is Totally Fine and he got mad at me, I think. These are similar books to me in terms of tone, humor, use of ellipsis, but also very different conceptually—Kowalski favors, I feel, more abstract themes/ideas, stories that verge on ‘prose poetry’. Regardless, I felt excited ‘discovering’ this book. My process for finding books for this 100 book list was mostly to read 1.) ‘big name classics’ I’d been meaning to get around to, 2.) any book Sebastian Castillo and Crow Jonah mention, and 3.) online authors I’d read/heard of before and could reliably guess I’d enjoy further reading. I would then put in Amazon orders based on this methodology and receive books a month later, wholly forgetting why I’d purchased them in the first place. This made bad books feel extra bad to read, as I had no idea why they’d ended up in my hands to begin with, but it also made books like this more enjoyable, like ‘Christmas presents’ I got to open early and unexpectedly.

 

24. Norwood (Charles Portis): I’d previously watched the Coen Brother’s adaptation of True Grit, a movie I liked and specifically remember for the unique dialogue, but had otherwise no prior experience with Charles Portis. Enjoyed, book seems sufficiently flawless in a literary capacity such that I can’t think of anything further to say, except that it’s ‘literary’ in a comedy sense, it’s funny, doesn’t sniff its own ass, etc.  

 

25. First Love (Gwendoline Riley): Remember being bored by this, which seems bad as it’s a horrific story of gritty relationship abuse. I did find the parts about the awful boyfriend valuable in how over-the-top villainous his dialogue and shittalking were, he was exaggerated in a way that made him more real than any portrayal of a shitty partner I’ve ever read. I’d almost recommend checking out this book just for that, as much as I otherwise felt uninterested and unengaged by it.

 

26. The Mezzanine (Nicholson Baker): When people talk about Jordan Castro’s novel The Novelist (reviewed further down this list) they mention this book. They say insane shit like, ‘Jordan Castro is where Nicholson Baker meets Thomas Bernhard on the iPhone app’. The ‘gimmick’ of The Mezzanine is it charts a single day of an office worker in microscopic detail, every stapler, paper clip, trip to the bathroom, and lunchbreak is examined to a molecular degree. Found it overall relentless and plodding, at times unbearable to sit down and read, but I guess that’s the literal point—congratulations Nicholson Baker, you sure showed me, you accomplished what you set out to do.

 

27. Begat Who Begat Who Begat (Marcus Pactor): Heard of Marcus when he went on the Selected Prose podcast, and I guess I found the interview compelling enough to buy his book. Overall don’t have much to say, I don’t think this one resonated with me, the biggest thing I associate with Pactor is in the podcast he talks about how he values spending time with his children more than writing, he told an anecdote about how like, if the decision is between teaching his daughter to ride a bike and writing a story, he will always favor creating irreplaceable memories with his daughter, which I found gentle and profound. I have neglected pretty much every other aspect of my life by doing this reading challenge. I have lost so much time with family and loved ones. This whole literature thing—it’s all kind of shit, isn’t it? There’s no value, there is no point. The only thing that’s real is the dirt you can grasp, the overflowing trash of the world. Girlfriend is mad at me right now because I need to clean the toilet but I’m not, I’m working on my blogpost about all 100 books I read this year, one hundred books. That’s a lot of books.

 

28. Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett): I italicized this, but it’s a play, not poetry. I’d never read Beckett before, and obviously you have to read Beckett. So I did. I read this play, I have read Samuel Beckett. Big takeaways are there is a video game villain in the series Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney named Godot who I think is cool, one of his character traits is he insists on drinking coffee ‘black as a moonless night’.

 

29. Tom Sawyer (Joseph Grantham): Grantham has always been an interesting online ‘alt-lit’ figure to me. Seems like he ‘cracked’ the classical online scene, securing an editor position at The Nervous Breakdown while making inroads with famous people like Megan Boyle and the guy who does the Otherppl literature podcast. Simultaneously, I wonder if his celebrity has ‘stalled out’, in that he hovers around ~2000 twitter followers and has not, to my knowledge, cemented the book deals and fame one is supposed to with 2010 alt-lit internet connections. In this frame of reference, I appreciate his Twitter presence, in that he seems to use it solely for corny, throwaway jokes—I genuinely mean this, I like the sheer ‘nothingness’, the lack of a goal or product, of this account that represents the culmination of his online achievements. He does these commercial voiceovers  that I like and laugh at and feel are underrecognized. So much of life and society is excessive and unneeded, I think that I would be fine if Grantham somehow secured a monetary deal where he just makes these commercial voiceovers and never has to work again.

 

30. Bad Behavior (Mary Gaitskill): Feel like I ‘missed’ something important, in that Gaitskill is a renowned author yet I found this jarringly bad. Stories seemed to end abruptly, inconclusively, lacking any real sense of moral purpose. You could argue, I guess, the nihilism is the point, although I don’t feel like that conclusion is earned by any of these stories. Enjoyed thinking the portrayals of sex work in this book asinine, out-of-touch, and privileged only to google Gaitskill and discover she’s a former prostitute. The one story in this I did like was about a young woman who lives bleakly with her parents and sister who decides to finally get a job, only for this to be a secretary position at a law firm where her boss masturbates onto her. Summarizing it like that makes it sound maybe cheap and rife with unnecessary shock value, but Gaitskill crafts it in a way that I found heart-wrenching.

 

31. Under the Sea (Mark Leidner): Had previously only read Leidner’s poetry, which I enjoyed. I liked this collection and enjoyed the ‘playwright’-seeming influence: all of these stories are plot-driven, locomotive, moving engines with a tight focus on dialogue. Not sure exactly what I mean by this, except that I feel most of the stories in this collection could’ve been stripped of description/scenery and reduced to plays and they would still function, if not thrive.

 

32. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God (Etgar Keret): Started this with the soft suspicion that it was a ‘NPR’ book. Feel vaguely that Etgar Keret is a ‘high-level’ writer that Ira Glass probably talks about. Upon reading, there’s nothing specific I would object to or find bad except this continued nagging imp on my shoulder that NPR would probably praise this book. I don’t know how to formulate my hatred for NPR in a way that makes sense.

 

33. sad sad boy (Michael O'Brien): This is another Back Patio Press classic, meaning I classify it as ‘anti-poetry’ in the same vein as Liver Mush, where it avoids the stale profundity so often associated with the medium but also achieves enough of a balance of the whimsical and the emotional to avoid lapsing into banal, ‘schoolboy pissing in the sink’ territory. The title is fitting as this whole collection openly indulges in its own sad boy melodrama but is self-aware of this sadness enough to come across as clever and moving.

 

34. Nudes (Elle Nash): My cat was a kitten and teething while I read this and, for some reason, tore this specific book to shit. These were involving stories about sexual exploitation, drug abuse, eating disorders, all thematically twined together with what I interpreted as a running critique of America. Anti-capitalist writing runs the risk of corniness, in my opinion, of shooting easy targets, but I appreciated how Nash used that lens to strengthen already punch-y ideas: the story “Define Hungry” starts with the speaker listing all her bills in what very closely triggered my most disliked trope of post-internet writing (complaining about your college debt), only to climax with her getting caught by grocery store security attempting to smuggle out an ice cream cake beneath her clothes as a guise for pregnancy in a vivid climax of sticky, melting oozing.

 

35. Underworld (Don DeLillo): This is the other ‘big boy book’ I read this year, in addition to Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s a kaleidoscopic romp, the ‘hook’ being that it works backwards, the plot moving in reverse, which I respect as a narrative gimmick in that DeLillo didn’t use it as a throwaway on a short story or novella but instead an ~800 page behemoth. He truly committed to the bit, here. However, holding to the values I established in my Gravity’s Rainbow review, I do think that the worth of these big boy diaper books ultimately rests in what you get out of them. After reading, I genuinely feel that you could pick up any Don DeLillo much shorter than this one and get the same literary mileage out of it—if you don’t want to spend a month of your life sifting through a page count that rounds up to a thousand, you could probably read any of his briefer works and save yourself the trouble.

 

36. The Years (Annie Ernaux): This was my first Ernaux, and I was shocked by how simple and obvious her style is despite having never encountered anything like it in any other format—it’s basically an ethereal ranting that transcends any previously established standard point of view. This is not first-person, third-person, or even second-person POV: it’s a weird ‘universal-person’ perspective in which the narrator is the royal ‘we’. I liked it, reminded me of my more political days when I got kicked out of a bar for raving about neoliberalism and Obama drone bombing babies.

 

37. The Grief Performance (Emily Kendal Frey): Mostly tight, economic, ‘2-4 syllables per line’ kinds of poems, where the writer must pack a neutron star of dense meaning into each piece for the reader to not feel ripped off for paying $17 on Amazon. As always I struggle to articulate what makes poetry collections good or bad, but this one was worth the $17 on Amazon, for me.

 

38. Obscene Gestures for Women (Janet Kauffman): Felt like this lives up to the reputation of its Vintage Contemporaries publisher label, in that it’s a collection of refined short stories clearly written at the highest skill level an author can achieve. I appreciate that despite her evident talent, Kauffman also isn’t afraid to dip her stories into zany goofiness: she doesn’t depreciate her own writing by taking it too seriously. Excerpt I liked was story where woman with bad teeth argues that her oral health isn’t a personal but a political problem, telling her dentist that her mouth can’t improve until the world does. Also, as expected of a story collection called Obscene Gestures for Women, I think Kauffman has some excellent titles here. A few that I liked: ‘In the Discorruption of Flesh’, ‘How Sunlight Figures In’, ‘The Sky Is Still Overhead’.

 

39. Notes from a Wood-Paneled Basement (Alan Ten-Hoeve): Feel biased in that this kind of poetry collection seems rare and infrequent to me, tackling themes far removed from the usual indie lit scene of sex and drugs in order to focus on the quiet moments of fatherhood. The book is also interlaced with flashbacks to the narrator’s ‘fucked’ childhood, which I probably would have been less interested in had they been the bulk of the collection, but the way Alan mingles them throughout was refreshing and helped maintain my enthusiasm. Also enjoyed that while I did just use ‘fucked’ as a descriptor, these are also pretty mundane snapshots of the life of a divorced kid in America—Alan is skillfully grounded and authentic as a writer, excited to see more ‘dad lit’ from him. 

 

40. Light While There Is Light: An American History (Keith Waldrop): Title for this seems insanely misleading, feel like it’s prepping you for an NPR-acclaimed ‘masterpiece’ when in fact this is one of the funniest, most indescribably bizarre books I read this year. This is nothing more or less than a fictionalized autobiography (dare I say this is…autofiction?), yet easily one of my favorites. Recommend reading.

 

41. Castle Faggot (Derek McCormack): Scrolled through Goodreads and a 1-Star Review says: ‘Well curiosity killed the cat. This was a complete waste of my time. Recommended for people who like shit.’ By contrast, a 5-Star Review: ‘i cannot imagine having a middle of the road opinion about this book. you will either hate it or spend a lot of money buying copies for all your friends. best kept in the bathroom, near or even in the toilet.’

 

42. A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (Harry Crews): Insanely bleak portrayal of early 20th century America. Like, I knew it was bad back then, what with the farms, great depressions, and lack of refrigeration, didn’t realize it was this bad. There is literally a segment where the narrator gets boiled alive as a child, he is accidentally tossed into a cauldron of water so scalding it strips the flesh from his muscles and leaves him bedridden for months. Seems comically bad. When I was growing up, I was middle-class suburban. I had absolutely no obstacles in life aside from deep anger issues that I would resolve by smashing my head against driveways, bricks, concrete, etc whenever I got mad, usually over things like video games, Pokemon cards, etc.

 

43. Everything Was Fine Until Whatever (Chelsea Martin): Mix of prose and poetry that seems to have been written with a ‘punch-line’ bent, I felt: the emphasis here is less on figurative language, narrative techniques, whatever, but a kind of ‘standup routine’ of funny, shocking, relatable anecdotes. Because of the potentially ‘meme-y’, ‘Reddit’ nature of this format, I enjoyed the variety of rhetorical techniques Martin utilizes for each piece—this could’ve gotten stale really quickly, but things are mixed up frequently enough that each segment is unique. Prose is broken up by full pages of art, poems can be a quick two lines or explosive bombs of caps locked oversized font; there’re even little footnotes sprinkled like easter eggs throughout containing lines such as ‘I accidentally shat on a person once. There, I said it.’ Even a meta-approach like this, where the collection feels less like a traditional book and more like an art collage, risks the Reddit, but despite Martin’s dispersal of technique I thought her writing remained solid and skilled. Particularly liked her almost journalistic emphasis of concrete details to render abstract, individual emotions more real: in a story where the narrator starts fasting and breaks up with her boyfriend out of the boredom that would be otherwise replaced by hunger, Martin concludes: ‘I was alone and my body was a large part of who I was, that seemed clear, but the sequence of things was all wrong and there was no food inside to make me feel less confused about this.’

 

44. Wittgenstein’s Nephew (Thomas Bernhard): There is a lot of Bernhard ‘love’ in online alt-lit circles that I am frustratingly unable to relate to. I still have not yet ‘gotten’ it. I do vaguely remember liking the sheer intensity of shittalking in Woodcutters, but my brain was less developed then and I’d probably need to reread.

 

45. You Are Having a Good Time (Amie Barrodale): Completely serviceable, ‘The New Yorker’-tier collection of short stories that hits all the right narrative/thematic beats without being stuffy and sounding like it could be read in the voice of an NPR host. There’s a Raymond Carver-esque ‘quietness’ to this collection, a minimalism that feels, to me, like being alone and sober in a one-bedroom apartment on a Friday night, the only light the television’s aquarium glow. The story I recall liking the most was ‘The Imp’, which climaxes with the narrator beating his wife for maybe texting her ex before locking himself in the bathroom and hallucinating an imp: ‘She was dirty and slimy like something that had been in the drain for decades. She was made of hair and slime. She had her hands around my throat.’

 

46. Satellite (Matthew Rohrer): The second Matthew Rohrer poetry book I read this year. Reading Rohrer feels, to me, the way that other people describe cracking a beer, there’s this refreshing carbonation, a mild but pronounced ‘ooooohhh yeahhh’. I find no pleasure in beer. If I drink a beer, I need to drink 10, 15, 20. I need to drink until I sweat and puke and piss myself.

 

47. 62: A Model Kit (Julio Cortazar): Obscure-seeming novel to me, my previous exposure to Cortazar was in a high school AP English class where we read ‘Continuity of Parks’ because it was ‘real’ magical realism and not the watered down, CIA-backed bullshit pushed on us by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Quick Goodreads search of 62 brought me this comment: ‘always feels like you are on a mild LSD trip.’

 

48. Woman Running in the Mountains (Yuko Tsushima): My experience with Japanese literature is almost solely limited to books about deranged, lonely men unable to cope with their sexuality, so it’s funny to me that this is the almost formulaically perfect opposite of that. A young woman gets pregnant from a married coworker; rather than let herself be crushed by the social stigma of single-motherhood, she uses it as an opportunity for self-actualization and independence. Was intrigued by how Tsushima addresses her central moral question of infidelity through thematic omission; the protagonist simply continues to have mindless, indifferent sex with disappointing men in a portrayal that lacks direct condemnation or valorization. This is just what real people do, Tsushima argues, I think: they get lonely and horny. They have sex, they have babies. Regardless of it all, human life is miraculous, and you should always try to build yourself into a stronger person. An ultimately stronger message, I feel maybe, than Yuko Tsushima’s fascist freak loneliness, which I have also always admired. Made me want to have a baby, made me want to be a father—interestingly, so too did 2022’s blockbuster release Avatar 2: The Way of Water.

 

49. Several Gravities (Keith Waldrop): Read this after deeply enjoying Waldrop’s Light While There Is Light. The introduction of that book said Waldrop was primarily a poet, so I felt interested in comparing his work and so bought this (expensive) book with minimal research, not realizing it was less poetry and more a collage collection. Still appreciated it, although it definitely didn’t resonate the way his other book did for me. I just don’t get collages…I like when online people do them and they have like, pictures of William Dafoe spliced with horses, but I feel way more artistically skeptical of them when compiled into glossy hardcovers I have to pay $40 for.

 

50. Can You Relax in My House (Michael Earl Craig): As I’ve established, I like Matthew Rohrer a lot, and Rohrer helps run Fence Books who published this, so I figured it might be worth checking out. Had a lukewarm time getting into this, Michael Earl Craig frequently does this meta-thing where he forces you to acknowledge that you are, indeed, reading poetry (there is literally a poem titled ‘in my poetry’) that went over my head, but eventually his writing did click, enough that I was willing to read another, better-seeming book by him for this list. Michael Earl Craig’s bio says he’s a ferrier, which I literally took to mean he ferries boats or something, but it actually means ‘a specialist in equine hoof care’, according to Wikipedia.

 

51. The Novelist (Jordan Castro): I’ve blogged about this previously. I liked it. Biggest criticism is the marketing around the book. Blurbs and interviews kept assigning a like, philosophical importance to it, remember skimming interviews that made The Novelist seem like an opaquely dense rebuttal to Kierkegaard or something, when it’s actually a light, pleasant, genuinely funny read that I breezed through. Also, the poop—good god, people wouldn’t shut up about the poop scenes. There’s like, one section so brief I can barely even recall where the narrator takes a shit, yet every critic acted like this is a 500-page magnum opus on shitting. If I have to read another blurb about Castro’s ‘scatological irreverence’ or whatever I will set my copy of The Novelist on fire.

 

52. Bad Poet (Brian Alan Ellis): Felt like there was a ‘Rupi Kaur’-like effect happening here where these didn’t necessarily need to be poems, they could’ve easily been forgettable one-off tweets about depression, but Brian decided to instead employ the poetic formatting of line breaks and enjambment to add a pretentious breathiness to otherwise garden-variety thoughts. Genuinely not saying this as a criticism. I think this is an interesting/intelligently deconstructive approach to the medium as a whole, wrapped up neatly with the self-aware bow of ‘bad poet’. Ultimately did not care for this collection, and again I don’t think that means it’s bad or that it failed to accomplish what it set out to do. Feel interested in how particularly alienated I felt from this trendy-seeming portrayal of ‘relatable’ depression, where the infinite sadness of having to be alive is watered down to pop culture references. Crippling sadness seems like it should be more unique and special than a throwaway joke about not owning a box spring, and that kind of ends up being Brian’s point.

 

53. The Divorce (Cesar Aira): Not confident that I can recall a single concrete detail about this. I liked the book Ghosts by Aira better, which balanced its more abstract, magical realist thrusts with graspable everyday events like insane lines at the grocery store, drinking beer, and invisible ghosts with exaggeratedly huge cocks.

 

54. Dogwalker (Arthur Bradford): Liked this, I think. Seemed thematically reminiscent of the experience of going to rural county fairs, feeling hot and sweaty confined within rusting amusement rides. This collection has lots of drunk driving, freak show circus performances, and people fucking dogs, but portrayed through a tightly restrained prose that never feels like Bradford is earning cheap hits through shock value alone. 

 

55. Half an Inch of Water (Percival Everett): Everett’s author photo seems insane, he has the pretentious ‘aloof literary’ pose of a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina going on, but there’s also a pet raven on his shoulder. This maybe summarizes my take on these stories. I felt cynical, wondering if literary success can be guaranteed just by having a basic knowledge of rugged things like horseback riding and getting chased by mountain lions while hiking, but I also felt like these are all technically perfect stories. Overall, I don’t think I’m capable of disliking a writer who poses his author photos with his pet raven.

 

56. The Topeka School (Ben Lerner): I’d previously read Lerner’s poetry and his autofiction Leaving the Atocha Station, which I liked. In this context, Topeka School feels like his ‘Infinite Jest’, in which Lerner puts way too much into one novel in a weighty grab at literary significance. Most absurd-seeming parts were subplot about how Donald Trump is bad (I don’t disagree with this sentiment, it just feels out-of-touch and doomed to rely on low-hanging lobs at Trump’s presidency as a central core for a novel) and a scene where one of the narrators explains eating pussy through the academic conventions of linguistic phonetics. At the same time, there’s a running theme of self-aware inadequacy—always present in Ben’s books—that might serve to prematurely counter these critiques. For instance, the main characters are psychologists with deeply-established psychological issues, such that the reoccurring thematic joke is how over-analysis/awareness of yourself isn’t a substitute for a solution: if anything, it can be a defense mechanism preventing necessary behavioral change. The frequent acts of performatism in this book are steeped in rage and inadequacy, such that Ben’s constant white savorism seem meta and deconstructive of the too-easy liberal impulse to swap your personality disorder with broadly performative and ultimately meaningless action.

 

57. Hotel Splendid (Marie Redonnet): One of three novels that are the first English translated works of Redonnet, an established novelist in France, is what the Amazon product description for this says. These books, while not narratively connected, are presented as a kind of series, a palate-sampling of Redonnet, so I decided to read all three. I don’t often read multiple works by the same author in short time intervals; my stance is that there are maybe a few thousand books I’ll realistically have time to read in the course of my life, so the best method to get a sense of literature is to try nibbling fractals of works to get through as much as possible, only honing into multiple titles if I truly enjoy the writer. Hotel Splendid is about three aging sisters fighting to maintain their hotel, which is actively being swallowed by the swamp it borders. The book is intensely repetitive, maybe verging on being boringly so—basically, the hotel is dilapidated, the sisters are old, the pipes break and need to be repaired, then the toilets clog, then there’s a surge of guests, then it’s winter and the pipes freeze, then the garden is swallowed in a spring sludge, then the toilets clog. Despite its short length, reading this and then her other two novels might be a bit much, as this repetitive, Sisyphean slog is Redonnet’s trademark unifying theme between these companion pieces. In terms of fictional places I’d want to live in, I think I’d choose either the swamp hotel in this book or the haunted mansion from the first Resident Evil video game.

 

58. Shoplifting from American Apparel. (Tao Lin): Reread this in an attempt to further ‘reckon’ with Tao Lin, whose cultural oeuvre disrupted modern alt lit and continues to be a source of controversy to this day. Tao Lin’s Bed is one of my favorite books ever, a short story collection that I can confidently say deserves sharing shelf space with the likes of Joy Williams and Lorrie Moore. Shoplifting is a dramatic departure from Bed’s style, in that Tao alters nearly everything I liked about his writing, yet it still, fundamentally, remains very ‘Tao Lin’. His removed, desolate-seeming insight on human interaction is persistently moving regardless of what context it’s in, novella, short story, metaphor-heavy or stylistically minimalist, etc. I still don’t understand how or why this works, I don’t think, but I feel confident that it does.

 

59. Ruthless Little Things (Elizabeth V. Aldrich): The author, Eris, died this year. In the tiny, frog pool-shallow murk that is ‘online lit’, I believe she was/is genuinely influential and good for the community. I think she had/has a tangible impact on the lives of actual humans, many of them. I don’t want to suggest that this should be the metric for what a life is worth. Just want to say that this sucks. This is a person I never actually knew, she is data I interacted with on a website, and she’s still gone, she’s not there and never will be again. Have ‘anime character’-like thoughts on this, stereotypical taglines like ‘you punk—I’ll kill you for dying on me.’ Recommend these three poems  in dedication to Eris by g.g. roland.  

 

60. La Serenissima (Wallace Barker): Felt a lot of initial resistance toward this due to the inherent-seeming tension between being a book that wants an emotional rise from its readers and being a book about taking a bunch of vacations. A lot of these pieces are about being depressed because the speaker has to like, send emails for his remote work job while on vacation. Wallace Barker wants me to feel bad that he can afford multiple vacations to Mexico—give me a fucking break. Once I got past this, though, I ended up really liking the collection, finding these poems stylistically educational in how they blend a kind of rapid, dream-like freeflow to elevate otherwise boring concepts (going on vacation, drinking on vacation, feeling happy on vacation, feeling bleak on vacation) into the profound and moving.

 

61. The Oblivion Ha-Ha (James Tate): Back in ~2015, I accidentally stole a book of collected James Tate poem from my college library by failing to return it for 7 years, mostly because I really like the poem ‘Consumed’ in it, being probably the first poem that I actually ‘got’. So finally this year I decided to buy the collection ‘Consumed’ was originally published in and return the stolen collected works. This book reminded me that James Tate is good, he occupies for me that Matthew Rohrer-like sphere of poetry that doesn’t take itself too seriously, that uses the often impenetrable nature of the medium for humor and absurdity rather than an obtuse denseness locking the reader out.

 

62. Tlooth (Harry Matthews): The introduction to Light While There Is Light mentions Tlooth, among a few others, as ‘perfect’ short novels in the same category as Light While There Is Light. Feel interested by this category and intend to read every book mentioned in that introduction, one of the few introductions for a novel I have ever bothered to read. As its weird title might suggest, Tlooth is a bizarre adventure that globe-trots from Siberian prisons to Afghanistan to Venice. The conclusion threw me off by revealing the protagonist’s gender to be opposite from what I’d assumed for the ~200 pages that make up this novel, which I thought was probably a product of my preconceived sexism, but a brief search on Wikipedia shows that it’s written in an intentionally obfuscating style. Found this approach interesting and reminiscent of Pynchon and David Foster Wallace in how it defies reader expectations and actively tries to make their engagement with the text a pain in the ass.

 

63. Ten Mornings and The Convergence of the Virgins (Stephen Sturgeon): Lots of internet writers attempt to curate an ‘alternative’, ‘unconventional’ online brand, but I feel like Stephen is legitimately deeply unwell as a person. I also think that of all the poets associated with ‘alt-lit’, he probably has the best classical understanding of the medium, he is the most ‘authentic’ poet within the scene (using these terms loosely, I doubt Sturgeon would identify with the ‘alt-lit’ label, which is already pretty nonsensical and overused). These are two tiny chapbooks that I counted as one because fuck you, I read 100 books this year including Gravity’s Rainbow and Underworld. I think Sturgeon in general deserves greater success/recognition, he is one of the few writers I feel should get paid money to write and do nothing else. (All other writers should have manual labor construction jobs.)

 

64. The Ice at the Bottom of the World (Mark Richard): Expected—based on intense title, prestigious awards listed on cover, and blurbs describing Richard as ‘a stylistic daredevil’—a boring slog, was relieved to instead discover an electric, funny, and often insane collection. Enjoyed the relentless barrage of ‘Lorrie Moore’-seeming antics, like one story’s pair of brothers abandoned by their parents and left to the supervision of an ‘Uncle Trash’ who burn down their house, and another where hired hands on a farm accidentally witness their boss’s horse shit itself to death and are forced, through a series of increasing hijinks, to hide its corpse by way of secretly floating it down a nearby channel. In addition to learning new narrative and stylistic possibilities, thought that this was just plain fun to read.

 

65. Man in the Holocene (Max Frisch): Alone in his mountainside lodging, an aging man is cut off from the rest of his village and larger society as a whole during a cataclysmic summer flood. According to Wikipedia, key themes are man’s ‘insignificance and meaninglessness’. This seems like an obvious and stale topic, but Frisch’s hyper-tragic portrayal of dying old and alone ended up truly disturbing me. Felt especially ‘bothered’ by scene where the protagonist attempts to make a familiar day hike, only to become irrevocably lost and almost die alone and pathetic in his own backwoods. Finished and immediately sent my brothers incoherent messages panicking about what we are going to do about our own parents once they ‘get old’, what any of us will do once we get old.

 

66. Flagged and Removed (Darcie Wilder): Not sure if this Craigslist-themed collection is posts Darcie Wilder personally found on the site and curated or if they’re fictional testimonies she wrote—don’t care enough to research. It might say on the back or product description, whatever. I remain interested in how either possibility is interesting in its own way. Thought this was fun and unique, some of these entries made me authentically laugh, some of them made me authentically sad.

 

67. Did You Ever Have a Family (Bill Clegg): Seems like the highest success you can achieve as a writer who publishes stuff on the internet is getting Bill Clegg as your agent. Despite this, I don’t like Bill Clegg as a writer, there is nothing in his work that is for me. I’ve had this book on my nightstand since ~2016 and only found the motivation to push through due to this reading challenge. In a technical sense it’s fine, if anything that’s my complaint—it feels inorganic and lifeless, like a text algorithmically generated to hit all the New York Times bestseller checks: small town in New England, split narratives, tragic mystery unpacked through the confessional trauma of each speaker. Felt baffled by the heavy use of figurative cliches, enough that I even tweeted about the line ‘spilling the beans’. I don’t think this is a bad book, which is maybe my problem: this is written to be a good book that critics like and book clubs widely circulate, and it maybe loses something because of that. Also, feels utterly insane that 4 characters central to the plot have names starting with ‘L’, Luke, Lydia, Liz, and Lolly, feel this must break some sort of rule. 

 

68. Modern Massacres (Timothy Willis Sanders): For the longest time, thought bafflingly that Timothy Willis Sanders and Willis Plummer were the same person, a conception confused, probably, because Willis Plummer was the editor for Western Beefs of North America which published a short story (from this book?) by Timothy Willis Sanders. Enjoyed this book and its framework of a ‘modern massacre’, the most accurate summation I have heard for the contemporary social experience of being utterly, irrevocably humiliated by your own actions.

 

69. I'm Not Hungry but I Could Eat (Christopher Gonzalez): Had an initial, visceral ‘eye roll’ toward this as it starts with heavy ‘straight white people suck, am I right?’ tones reminiscent of condescending Twitter posts (I’m not white, I’m Slavic, I’m a person of color as defined by the Coalition of Communities of Color, and while I’ve only been sexually attracted to women my whole life, I kissed a guy at a college party once, and people would often criticize me in high school for my effeminate mannerisms, deeming them ‘too gay’). However, this impression would turn out to be completely false, as Gonzalez’s commitment here isn’t to potshots at poor, vulnerable white people like me but tackling deeper themes of identity and self-doubt. When each story concludes, there is no narcissistic escape of victimization, in which responsibility is thrust outward and forgotten—instead, Gonzalez traps us with his character’s anxiety, giving this collection a claustrophobic loneliness.

 

70. Selected Stories (Troy James Weaver): Series of quick, punchy, effective short-short stories. While a lot of flash fiction risks leaving me baffled and dangling, these stories were all, for me, rounded and effective. The darker themes of sex and drugs—which a lesser writer might have used as a shock value crutch in the place of actually interesting prose—were satisfying balanced with Troy’s strong understanding of language. Particularly liked story in this about trying heroin for the first time ending with the narrator wondering what the spoon will look like when he’s hungry enough to eat, this almost jarringly specific fixation on the spoon instead of concrete food/appetite struck me as smart and emblematic of what makes Troy clever/good.

 

71. A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts (Wang Yin): Compilation of Yin’s poems from 1988-2021. Was interested in the general formatting of this collection, where newer poems are placed first and each section moves us backwards through the poet’s oeuvre. Regardless of the time period, I felt that all of Yin’s work has an archaic-seeming sincerity to it, much different from glitzy, postmodern poetry. Images are sharp and obvious, emotions are laid completely bare without subterfuge or an indulgently clever ‘poetry voice’ winking at you. Enjoyed the line from a poem titled ‘#5’: ‘In the midst of this a lonely planet my lonely self / in great pain’. Literally me.

 

72. Forever Valley (Marie Redonnet): The second book by Redonnet I read this year. Like Hotel Splendid, the narrative core of this book is futile repetition: a young girl lives in a mountain valley utterly isolated from society, its sole source of income is a prostitute dancehall where she works, she works at the prostitute dancehall, the men who patron the prostitute dancehall start to dwindle due to economic forces, the owner goes insane, the young girl continues working there, things continue to grow bleaker, the young girl also lives with a priest who goes insane then dies. I do admire Redonnet’s masterful depictions of these brutal little worlds where the reader can’t even imagine the possibility of hope, I like the almost comedically bleak subject matter of hotels sinking into swamps and raving insane priests.

 

73. What Narcissism Means to Me (Tony Hoagland): Poems that had a ‘Beat-era’, Frank O’Hara quality, to me—could be completely, laughably wrong in my classification of this. The back cover lauds Tony for bringing ‘his inquisitive, ironical perspectives not only to the personal life, but also the fields of American culture’, but in general he came across as less clever and more of just an asshole, to me. Lots of self-indulgent and weak language here, one line sticks out to me where Hoagland compares America to a commercial. Maybe the narcissism is the point.

 

74. Donald Goines (Calvin Westra): Enjoyed Westra’s debut novel Family Annihilator and was excited at how stylistically different this book seemed in comparison, reminding me of the gap between Tao Lin’s early, middle, and late writing, how an author can shift styles drastically but not detrimentally. Oddly also made me think of A Clockwork Orange, a book I have not read in over a decade, in how it establishes its own private linguistic system (majority of characters in this book are named after exotic birds, various invented slang replaces real world terms, etc). Was impressed by how the slapstick, exaggerated depiction of drugs—many scenes of characters slicing their flesh apart in order to shove drugs into the festering open wounds reminiscent of early D.A.R.E propaganda—ended up as one of the most affecting and accurate portrayals of abuse I’ve read. Don’t think I would typically notice/care about this kind of thing, but Donald Goines also has a really elegant-seeming structure that bounces between multiple perspectives/flashbacks without ever losing its narrative thrust, i.e., I never got bored when the plot went on a tangent to establish high school backstories or whatever. Westra has impressed and excited me as a writer thus far.

 

75. House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories (Yasunari Kawabata): Felt that this collection of three long ‘short’ stories tended to drag. Liked the line from the first story (which seems to be a quote from a poem?) ‘the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned’. Thought the last story, ‘Of Birds and Beasts’, was the strongest, where a man who collects exotic animals ruminates on a failed romance—enjoyed the grisly scenes of constant animal death, which were shocking in their unimportance, a tiny bird is killed by the temperature of its bath, a puppy is suffocated when its mother rolls over in her sleep.

 

76. Letters to Wendy's (Joe Wenderoth): Genuinely thought this would be a meme book—the title implies a sort of Reddit comedy where a socially maladjusted man’s Wendy’s obsession culminates in a cohesive, feel-good funny narrative that perhaps disparages capitalism but ultimately elevates the consumer experience. In a refreshing surprise to me, this book is the exact opposite of that. I’ve raved enough about the strain of Dennis Cooper ‘edgy’ books pervasive to the online lit community, how writers can lean on mindless gore and shocking sex perversions as a substitute for engaging prose, but Wenderoth is earnestly disturbing here, with a refined insanity that sublimates instead of cheaply shocks.

 

77. You Will Never Be Forgotten (Mary South): Accidentally bought a copy of this when my girlfriend already owned a copy. Now we have two copies, and I have $20 less. A pretty standard, promising, ‘The New Yorker’-tier collection. A lot of the stories had a sci-fi/fantastical bent meant, I gathered, to emphasize the greater themes about ‘society’, like the first story where mediocre men named Keith are mass-produced in a factory. Only parts I truly struggled with were when South tried to tie in like, social media and the internet for a broader social commentary, felt like these were cudgeled attempts to force this collection to be ‘relevant’ (marketable).

 

78. Kick the Latch (Kathryn Scanlan): Kind of torn on this one. Vividly enjoyed Scanlan’s book The Dominant Animal. This book, meanwhile, is based on phone and personal interviews she did with a woman who’d spent her life on the horse racetrack. Didn’t realize this going in, and so I started expecting Scanlan’s usual linguistic whip, only to find a much different experience. Kick the Latch lacks the Lydia Davis-like snappy, frenetic punch of Scanlan’s flash fiction, but it’s also a slow-building, powerful narrative about how fucked it is to work with horses. One time my buddy and I took the train to upstate New York to visit his equestrian girlfriend and I recall being afraid of the horses, remember the ones in heat sounded like ancient dinosaurs, their horny groans a primal resonation across the farm. A horse could kick you in the fucking head and you would die. I don’t like horses.

 

79. A High Wind in Jamaica (Richard Hughes): Was earnestly surprised to discover that this book was written in 1929, as its humor and insights all seem staggeringly relevant and contemporary. Wealthy English children living in colonized Jamaica are sent back home to their parents after a tropical hurricane, only to be abducted by pirates. While that premise sounded to me cheekily ‘Peter Pan’ and uninteresting, I was struck by Hughes’ realism. The pirates are tragic buffoons, the children pure evil, the British justice system arbitrary and bureaucratic. Recommend for the sheer timelessness-seeming nature of the narrative alone. 

 

80. Name and Noun (Stephanie Yue Duhem): I’m a natural sucker for the poetic wordplay, neatly summarized by the title, that defines this collection—Duhem transforms what could easily be annoying puns into an experiment of linguistic unraveling, taking a stylistic risk I feel is rare in the current online lit scene (Duhem is a cyberwriter). As I’ve expressed already, the mainstream internet writing approach is a kind of ‘anti-poetry’, shying away from the compromised, uncool, obtuse ‘purple prose’ of ‘The New Yorker’ literature, which is fine, I like many writers of this genre, but it’s refreshing to see Duhem succeed at a contrary approach here. She seems like a genuine ‘smart’ poet—dare I say one of those MFA-wielding, CIA-backed, ‘real’ poets.

 

81. Night Train - Very Short Stories (A.L. Snijders): Translated by Lydia Davis, a writer I very much like, such that I couldn’t help but feel underwhelmed. Snijders gives us funny little snippets of Dutch life, what the back of the book classifies as ‘mini-stories’. Nothing that did much for me, although admittedly Snijder’s modesty, both tonal and in the scope of his mundane, ant-focused narratives, didn’t make this a slog by any means either.

 

82. Waste (Eugene Marten): Very Gordon Lish-seeming book. I would’ve thought that regardless because Lish blurbs it, but the prose vividly reminded me of the other Lish-ish book I read this year, Preparation for the Next Life, by his son Atticus. Waste is about a janitor working in an office complex, and potentially the best custodian-focused book I’ve ever read outside of Calvin Westra’s Family Annihilator. Particularly liked the constant characterization of the narrator’s workplace as ‘The Building’, an omnisciently callous presence looming at all times over the stark prose, a hollow megacomplex of abandoned cubicles and trash chutes stuffed with corpses. Marten has a touch for well-researched hyper-realism, down to the jangle of paperclips as the janitor empties his last trash bin of the night in the fluorescent glow of an empty office. This, then, helps the more jarring segments of the book (there is corpse-fucking, there’s sex with dead people, etc) avoid teenage edginess and land as genuinely chilling sequences I still don’t like to think back on.

 

83. Phrasis (Wendy Xu): Published by Fence Books, such that I assumed it could be easily sorted into the same zany yet elegant category as Matthew Rohrer and Michael Earl Craig that I am partial to. Liked the constant hammering of colloquialisms, lots of casual ‘shits’ and ‘fucks’ throughout, juxtaposed by Xu’s clearly refined, literary understanding of what poetry ‘is’ (there are ‘big boy’ themes happening in this collection, as evidenced by blurbs praising Xu’s ‘uncanny detail’, ‘fragment as the unit composition’, and ‘interior work’). Trying to grapplingly summarize why I like Fence Books’ taste both here and in general: I think that what all of these releases have is some form of ‘anti-poetry’, yet executed in a way that nevertheless understands, respects, and even parasitically uses the medium, such that it is ultimately able to, virus-like, decompose what we think poetry ‘is’ from within until it blooms into something new.

 

84. Goon Dog (Jon Berger): Feel like an unnecessary amount of online debates—both political and personal—center jobs and the identity of work, where there’s a sliding scale of value/importance to art and opinions based on how much ‘skin’ one has in ‘the game’. Minimum wage laborers, construction workers, people who do things with their hands and develop lasting back problems take priority over those with cushy software jobs where they earn disproportionate sums typing emails. I think there’s some phenomenon of like, protestant insecurity at play here where we read headlines about resounding poverty across the world and need to repent for our 9-5 remote work desk jobs. In this sense, I think Jon might be ‘the realest’ writer out there, in that he is not, traditionally I don’t think, a ‘writer.’ I might be failing to separate the art/artist and reading too much into the characters of Jon’s novel, who have all failed high school, dropped into vocational degrees, and partied and drank themselves through the corroded heart of rural America, but I get the sense that Jon did not ride a cushy middle class upbringing into a creative writing BA he then milked into an MFA and PhD—Jon, probably, flunked his English classes and went to remedial summer school. Regardless, the perspective he offers in this collection is quite unlike anything else in the current online alt-lit scene. These are charming, sincere stories that happen in the alien landscape of the rural Midwest, in the guts of rotting barns, in the festering wounds of stupid teenagers stabbing one another out of sheer summer boredom. I especially appreciated the contrast between Goon Dog’s idealism and its realism, how its characters fantasize about the cartoonish escapism of shooting anime beam attacks from their palms while their mothers wither away with Alzheimer’s. This could’ve easily been a much ‘grittier’ collection but favors a childlike sincerity I found unique and worthwhile.

 

85. 99 poems to cure whatever's wrong with you or create the problems you need. (Sam Pink): Pink seems so consequentially foundational as a writer in the ‘online scene’ that I don’t know if I can contribute anything useful in the way of opinion on his writing. I know by now that I will probably always like something written by Pink. I know I am likely to enjoy writing inspired by him. But there’s an oversaturating effect here, caused only by his talent, where I often get burnt out on Pink-ish writing and writers and need to distance myself from them, maybe similar to how if you read a few Raymond Carver short story collections too quickly, you tend to distance yourself from minimalism for a while. Alternatively, Pink is also a good palate cleanser, and if I’m ever stuck on reading motivation, I default to him for a quick reminder of why writing is good: because it can be anything it wants. At this point in my reading challenge, it was late October and nothing mattered. Interest rates were up. Every week at my office job someone else was laid off. I was not drinking beer, such that there were no longer any Fridays in my life—Friday means release, escape, it is a carbonated rushing out from yourself that cannot exist without beer. I went trick-or-treating with my girlfriend and her 7-year old daughter and felt exaggeratedly despondent watching the sky darken. When we had walked too far and tired her out, 7-year old began wailing ‘No more candy, no more candy’, begging to return home—seems like a Sam Pink poem.

 

86. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (Patty Yumi Cottrell): Feel like my complaint with 90% of literature is how seriously it takes itself, so this intrigued me by posing the opposite problem. This is a book about a sister returning to her smalltown home from NYC to reckon with the suicide of her adopted brother—a tagline that seems spawned by computer algorithm to reach New York Times bestseller status. Yet Cottrell is insistently irreverent throughout the novel. She refuses us readers an emotional release, often even parodying the grief of the situation by rendering its actors tragic clowns (funny detail I remember/liked: the rich parents are also penny pinchers, and so replaced all the real furniture in their mansion with wicker chairs). The issue for me is less the humorous approach and more that most of the jokes didn’t personally land. That’s OK—I don’t like Seinfeld much either.

 

87. Nightwork (Christine Schutt): What I classify as a ‘Garielle Lutz’-esque collection, in that it fits Lutz’s ideal of writing established in the super famous lonely sentence essay. I don’t dislike this microscopic approach to writing, where the writer’s attention is atomized to the syllabic level of each word, but I don’t think I love it either, having gone through my own personal phase of this where I thought otherwise unengaging, bare pieces I wrote were genius simply through virtue of how many glottal sounds I used in a row. I don’t want to reduce Schutt to her syntax, though, as these are all narratively provocative pieces as well, with an emphasis on parents thrusting sexuality in their kid’s faces, moms kissing sons. Felt lost by the majority of them, not in a ‘I cannot resonate with this piece’ preachy manner, just empirically unable to understand what was happening, attempting to read these after work drinking 17 beers.

 

88. Yes, Master (Michael Earl Craig): Second poetry collection by Michael I read this year. Liked immediately the ‘goblin’-like title, imagined myself as a henchman, nodding my head in obsequious enjoyment while reading. Liked this better than the first book I read by him, feel like there’s a less meta approach here and more of a commitment to full, actualized poems that also do not compromise their value by being too ‘poet-y’. These pieces were satisfying in the way of a good punchline but never alienating like when my dad tries to explain full episodes of South Park to me; they’re absurd, clever, funny, without encroaching too much on your face like a wagging finger.

 

89. No one belongs here more than you. (Miranda July): Endured an emotional rollercoaster with this one. Grabbed it off girlfriend’s bookshelf to read because the texture/formatting of the cover reminded me of Tao Lin’s Bed, and also dimly recalled Miranda July blurbing that book (?). Then, several stories in, flippantly checked the author bio and realized Miranda July is a famous filmmaker person. This infuriated me to no end—an already famous director, established in their own art scene, has encroached in the finite world of transgressive lit. Intuited that this somehow directly, negatively impacted me, as a self-proclaimed writer: probably I’m not getting published because too many people without day jobs, too many vanity ‘artists’ with impressively long Wikipedia pages and preestablished fame, are stealing my spot. I then finished this book and liked it, overall. I felt the stories with more blatantly insane premises hit harder, whereas the ones intended to be concrete, moving, and ‘serious’ lost my interest. I deeply liked ‘Something That Needs Nothing’ and thought ‘How to Tell Stories to Children’ was boring, for example.

 

90. Shithead Laureate (Homeless): Feel slightly biased toward these poems in terms of how much they center rats, trash, garbage, etc. I’m a fucked little rodent and a sucker for this kind of filth. I did object to recurring trend I noticed with how Homeless handles figurative language. I’d define it, I guess, as a ‘mixed metaphor’, although I’m not confident in the accuracy of that diagnosis. As an example, one poem starts with ‘A heart filled with / a dead hamster emptiness / cartwheels across / the grassy landscape of my youth / like a little girl doing cartwheels’. I really, really like the image of a dead hamster emptiness, but I’m confused here because I’m already imagining an abstract, figurative entity—an isolated heart that is filled with a rodent lack—and then being told that this, then, is like something else (a little girl doing cartwheels). It’s a dead hamster heart that is rolling across the speaker’s youth that is also like a little girl doing cartwheels? Probably being extremely pedantic here, I just felt like there were some authentically powerful images that ended up sabotaged by being drawn out/confused.

 

91. Rose Mellie Rose (Marie Redonnet): The final Redonnet I read this year, and also the most different from her other two books. Felt that there was less of her trademark, relentlessly-building repetition, in that while things in this world are constantly falling to pieces, they are at least doing so unpredictably: rather than the clockwork mechanism of the Hotel Splendid’s pipes breaking, we’re given a much more organic, character-driven story here. Finished reading in late November, my 100-book deadline fast approaching, and thought some variation of ‘oh no, god, oh no.’

 

92. Winesburg, Ohio (Sherwood Anderson): Insane book. Published in 1919, takes a primordial lens to America within a small Ohio town. Was struck by how enduring the themes are, and not the typical ones like love, romance, hope, whatever—there has always been and always will be a town drunk, people everywhere will forever be breaking into exaggerated brokenhearted weeping, this book showed me. Enjoyed the story titled ‘Adventure’ that ends with a woman turning over in bed, ‘trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that many people die must live and die alone, even in Winesburg,’ and the story ‘Respectability’, which introduces the character William Walsh as ‘a man of courage. A thing had happened to him that made him hate life, and he hated it wholeheartedly, with the abandon of a poet.’

 

93. Baby Don't Care (Chelsey Minnis): Following my run of trying to read more authors published by Fence Books, I bought this (published by Wave Books—I think it should be illegal for book publishers to include ‘book’ in their name). Felt disappointed, if only because the premise is a gimmick that never clicked with me. These poems are written to resemble ‘old Hollywood movies,’ according to multiple reviews I skimmed, a classification that seems vague and confusing, but I guess obvious once you read these poems, which use words like ‘darling’ a lot. I don’t think there’s any lack of talent on display here, just that a gimmick is effectively a joke, and if I don’t get that joke, which in this case is a feminist detangling of classic 1950s cinema stereotypes, then I will be incapable of appreciating the larger work as a whole. I don’t like Seinfeld either, I generally feel alien-like and murky because of how little I relate to anything in this world. At corporate jobs I’ve worked in the past, we often had to announce our ‘interests’ during meetings as a ‘group-building exercise’. One time, I split into teams and partnered with the office reformed heroin addict (every office has a reformed heroin addict), who glared at me when I when I attempted to initiate our bonding activity and said ‘I’m not doing this shit’.  

 

94. that ex (Rachelle Toarmino): Was getting desperate to finish my 100-book challenge and so began cultivating the shortest-seeming books I could grab off my girlfriend’s bookshelf. My girlfriend is the same height as the famous actor, Danny DeVito, and has huge tits, she’s less than five feet tall.

 

95. Bliss Montage (Ling Ma): Felt, overall, pedantic and trivializing about this collection. Frequently caught myself frowningly thinking tropes like ‘show don’t tell’, mentally wagging my finger as I criticized the long-winded story openings, the unengaging prose. Enjoyed the first story in this, in which the speaker lives with her 100 ex-boyfriends: I thought Ma here perfectly toed the magical realism line, allowing fantastical exaggeration to cement and solidify the harsher truths of abuse and shittiness.

 

96. Written Lives (Javier Marias): Literary equivalent of a shittalking blogpost—I liked it a lot. Marias does quick summations here of both prestigious and lesser-known writers, emphasizing personal history over literary analysis. Excerpts that come to mind: Faulkner naming his 5-day old dead baby Alabama and Marias roasting Yukio Mishima for failing to kill himself properly and efficiently.

 

97. Ice Cream Man (Dax Flame): Seems like this can be read in two entirely different ways, raising interesting-seeming questions to me about literature, the author vs the speaker, what’s real in fiction and how much it matters. Without context, this is a cute, short book about a failed movie star turned disgruntled ice cream worker, enhanced by its alien-like robot monotone narrator, whose objectivism helps to highlight the absurdity of how we’re all little rats who need to have jobs to exist in this world. However, this is also a book by a successful youtuber who thrived in the early 2010s, only to see dwindling popularity severe enough that he has to seek the day job that is the premise of this book—ice cream man. On the one hand, I want to treat this book as an isolated, fiction about a fallen actor working a drudging ice cream job that deploys monotonous minimalism reminiscent of some of the best alt-lit authors. On the other, after watching the guy’s youtube, I realize the prose and story aren’t a narrative technique, but literally why he was a famous youtube star (he’s awkward and unable to read social cues in an autistic-seeming way). Anyway, enjoyed this and found it earnestly surprising that I haven’t seen it circulate in any ‘alt-lit’ discussions—this book bizarrely mirrors almost every successful ‘alt-lit’ convention I’ve seen despite being seemingly 100% detached from the community at large.

 

98. Midwestern Infinity Doctrine (Jessica Baer): Collection of frazzled, alien-seeming anecdotes—liked the thematic focus on transmissions, whether they be interstellar or just the ruined signals of your own failed brain. This is another Apocalypse Party book and it shows, in the best of ways, I feel. Overall structure/presentation of the book highlights the thematic link between beach sand and stars, dust and grit, to me, fractals of light in otherwise washed darkness—reminded me intensely of the video game Metal Gear Solid’s boss fight against Sniper Wolf, a lonely snowstorm of intense back-and-forth sniper mechanics lost within millions of pixels.

 

99. I'll Tell You in Person (Chloe Caldwell): Essay collection that starts with a meandering, baffling-seeming ‘introduction’ justifying its existence—i.e., explores ‘the point’ of writing selfish anecdotes of being a New York-based, at times drug-addicted, otherwise socially successful white woman with no broader philosophical meaning—by citing Caldwell's experiences at, of all things, a Martha’s Vineyard Writer’s workshop. My pessimism persisted as a lot of these essays just seemed bland, in fundamental structural terms they often defused their own impact. I felt disappointed when Caldwell would conclude what should’ve been a poignant point from her own perspective with song lyrics or a quote from another essay, felt like she was leaning her rhetorical weight on someone else’s shoulders. Still found myself delicately surprised by how much the book grew on me. Feel like there is a ‘chicken soup of the soul’ effect here or something where the overall intimacy and warmth of the writing overcame the ‘live, laugh, love’ cheesiness, she has a fantastic piece about heroin addiction that downplays the drug aspect and instead seems entirely focused on the bad acne caused by opioid abuse, which I found surreal, goofy, and affecting.

 

100. I Hope You Enjoy the Food (Zac Smith): Chose this cookbook written by Zac Smith for the final book I read this year because fuck you, I read 100 books this year, that’s a lot of books.