Reading List 2018

To read the review and comments about a specific book click on the book.

Contemporary Fiction:

  1. A Gentleman from Moscow, Amor Towles
  2. Heart Spring Mountain, Robin MacArthur
  3. The Power, Naomi Alderman
  4. Reservoir 13, Jon McGregor
  5. News of the World, Paulette Jiles
  6. Ghacher Ghocher, Vivek Shanbhag
  7. Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan
  8. Summer Hours at the Robbers Library, Sue Halpern
  9. The Flight Attendant, Chris Bohjalian
  10. The Cove, Cynan Jones
  11. The Overstory, Richard Powers
  12. The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes
  13. Kill My Mother, Jules Feiffer
  14. The Underneath, Melanie Finn
  15. The Bear and the Nightingale, Katherine Arden
  16. Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively
  17. Wild Mountain, Nancy Hayes Kilgore
  18. Berlin, Jason Lutes
  19. Sleep of Memory, Patrick Modiano
  20. Kudos, Rachel Cusk

Short Stories:

  1. Fresh Complaint, Jeffrey Eugenides
  2. Points North, Howard Frank Mosher
  3. Last Night, James Salter
  4. Unlocking the Air and Other Stories, Ursula LeGuin
  5. Through the Safety Net, Charles Baxter
  6. Florida, Lauren Groff
  7. Last Stories, William Trevor
  8. Some Trick: Thirteen Stories, Helen DeWitt
  9. Good Trouble, Joseph O’Neill

Classic Literature:

  1. The Iliad, Homer translated by Caroline Alexander
  2. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
  3. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
  4. Big Sur, Jack Kerouac
  5. A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
  6. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
  7. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin
  8. The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy
  9. House of the Sleeping Beauties, Yasunari Kawabata

Non-Fiction:

  1. The Unexpected President, Scott Greenberger
  2. Silence In the Age of Noise, Erling Kagge
  3. My 20th Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs, Kazuo Ishiguro
  4. Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve, Ben Blatt
  5. Are You My Mother, Alison Bechdel
  6. Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery
  7. Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, Dan Harris
  8. Vanishing Vermonters, Peter Miller
  9. Advice Not Given, Mark Epstein
  10. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
  11. Built, Roma Agrawal
  12. Legends of the Slow Explosion, Barron Wormser
  13. Do I Make Myself Clear, Harold Evans
  14. Everyday Holiness:  The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar, Alan Morinis
  15. Fasting and Feasting, The Life of Visionary Food Writer, Patience Gray, Adam Federman
  16. Breaking Bread: A Baker’s Journey Home in 75 Recipes, Martin Philip
  17. Girl Rising:  Changing the World One Girl at a Time, Tanya Lee Stone
  18. Spring, Karl Ove Knausgaard
  19. The Unpunished Vice: A Life in Reading, Edmund White
  20. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Ron Chernow
  21. Plagues and the Paradox of Progress, Tom Bollyky
  22. The Bridge: How the Roeblings Connected Brooklyn and New York, Peter Tomasi
  23. Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties, Madeleine May Kunin
  24. She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels, Kathleen Hill
  25. The Path of Insight Meditation, Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield
  26. Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany, Jane Mount
  27. Matters of Vital Interest: My Forty Year Friendship with Leonard Cohen, Eric Lerner
  28. I’d Rather Be Reading:  The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life, Anne Bogel
  29. Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage, Laura Waterman
  30. On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt 
  31. The Animal One Thousand Miles Long, Leith Tonino
  32. Howard’s End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home, Susan Hill
  33. The Library Book, Susan Orlean

Essays: 

  1. Bookshops: A Reader’s History,  Jorge Carrion
  2. True Stories and Other Essays, Francis Spufford
  3. Possessed, Elif Batuman
  4. Why I Write, George Orwell
  5. The Best American Essays, 2017 ed. Leslie Jamison
  6. The Book that Changed my Life, ed. Diane Osen
  7. Vacationland, John Hodgman
  8. Winter, Klaus Ove Knausgaard
  9. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee
  10. A Carnival of Losses: Notes on Nearing Ninety, Donald Hall
  11. Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces, Michael Chabon
  12. This is Water, David Foster Wallace
  13. The Essays: A Selection, Michel de Montaigne, tr. by M.A. Screech
  14. The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
  15. Calypso, David Sedaris

Poetry/Drama:

  1. Dream Palace, Herbert Morris
  2. The Surveyors, Mary Jo Salter
  3. Richard III, William Shakespeare
  4. Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare
  5. A Matter of Fifty Houses, Walter Hard
  6. Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney
  7. The Vermont Plays, Annie Baker
  8. What Was Lost, Herbert Morris
  9. Selected Delanty: Poems and Translations, Greg Delanty
  10. And Short the Season, Maxine Kumin
  11. Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems, Ted Kooser

Art and Architecture:

      1.  Joan Mitchell, Klaus Kertess   

      2.David Hockney Portraits, Sarah Howgate and Barbara Stern Shapiro

3. Richard Long: Walking the Line, Richard Long, Paul Moorhouse, and Denise Hooker

4. How do We Look, Mary Beard

5. Koren in the Wild, Ed Koren

6.  Living in the Desert, Phaedon

Science/Nature/Gardening:

  1. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Neil deGrasse Tyson
  2. Saving Tarboo Creek, Scott Freeman
  3. The 3000 Mile Garden, Leslie Land and Roger Phillips
  4. Grand Canyon, Jason Chin
  5. The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, David Quammen
  6. Life in the Garden, Penelope Lively
  7. The World in A Grain: The Story of Sand and How it Transformed Civilization, Vince Beiser
  8. City Green: Public Gardens of New York, Jane Garmey

Mysteries:

  1. Breakout, Richard Stark (Donald Westlake)
  2. The Wanted, Robert Crais
  3. The Knowledge, Martha Grimes 
  4. Robert B. Parker’s Little White Lies, Ace Atkins
  5. IQ, Joe Ide
  6. Righteous, Joe Ide
  7. Maigret’s Dead Man, Georges Simenon
  8. The Inheritance, Charles Finch
  9. The Temptation of Forgiveness, Donna Leon
  10. Darkest Fear, Harlan Coben
  11. The September Society, Charles Finch
  12. Bury the Lead, Archer Mayor
  13. Holy Ghost, John Sandford
  14. One False Move, Harlan Coben
  15. Dark Sacred Night, Michael Connelly
  16. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
  17. Deep Freeze, John Sandford
  18. Past Tense, Lee Child