Through hurricanes, conferences, grading, writing, and blogging, I managed to read the following books in 2017, many of which were unfamiliar to me. Some modern classics disappointed me (Such a Long Journey), others impressed me (Salvage the Bones). The best historical biography I read was Noah Feldman’s tome on James Madison, which explains the development of the fourth president’s thoughts on government with a lucidity that rends the veil of obscurity behind which the forgotten Framer has hidden.
Now I must go: I’ve got a new 900-page Stalin bio to crack.
Felix Holt: The Radical – George Eliot
The Lathe of Haven – Ursula K. Le Guin
Swing Time – Zadie Smith
To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party – Heather Cox Richardson
* Loving – Henry Green
* Howards End – E.M. Forster
Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free – V.S. Prichett
The Spell – Alan Holinghurst
The Hothouse by the East River – Muriel Spark
Doting – Henry Green
Go Tell It to the Mountain – James Baldwin
Moonglow – Michael Chabon
James Joyce – Edna O’Brien
Inside the Clinton White House: An Oral History – Russell Riley
* The Ambassadors – Henry James
Reconstruction – Eric Foner
My Struggle, Book 3 – Karl Ove Knausgaard
Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988 – Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus
Such a Long Journey – Rohinton Mimstry
Universal Harvester – John Darnielle
Richard Nixon: A Life – John A. Farrell
Bette Davis – David Thomson
The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France – David Andress
Ingrid Bergman – David Thomson
* The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
The Girl with Green Eyes – Edna O’Brien
The Little Red Chairs – Edna O’Brien
Renoir: A Life – Pascal Merigeau
Tree of Smoke – Denis Johnson
A Colony in a Nation – Chris Hayes
Ike and McCarthy – David A. Nichols
* Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
This Vast Southern Empire – Matthew Karp
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character – Kay Redfield Jamison
The Persian Boy – Mary Renault
The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing
* The Day of the Locust – Nathaniel West
Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room– Geoff Dyer
House of Names – Colm Toibin
The Last of the Wine – Mary Renault
Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity – David Friedman
All the Conspirators – Christopher Isherwood
The Memorial – Christopher Isherwood
Isherwood – Peter Parker
The End of Eddy – Édouard Louis
Sula – Toni Morrison
* The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Fire From Heaven – Mary REnault
The Farewell Symphony – Edmund White
Anagrams – Lorrie Moore
Call Me By Your Name – Andre Aciman
The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency – Chris Whipple
The Ministry of Fear – Graham Greene
Solo Faces – James Salter
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference – David Garrow
Bette and Joan: Divine Feud – Shaun Considine
Race and Reunion – David Blight
Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
* Orlando – Virginia Woolf
The Comforters – Muriel Spark
Grant – Ron Chernow
Man Walks Into a Room – Nicole Krauss
The Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic – Charles N. Edel
The Three Lives of James Madison – Noah Feldman
Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture – R. Moore
Grant & I – Robert Forster
Napoleon – Andrew Roberts
Shelley: The Pursuit – Richard Holmes
Salvage the Bones – Jesmyn Ward
* Reread
Humanizing The Vacuum 