The following is a list of what I read over the course of the past year. Broken down into four sections – fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and significant articles and essays – this list outlines the range of texts I read during 2019. It is not comprehensive; there were other titles I read. But these are the ones that stick out.
Fiction
1. All for Nothing, Walter Kempowski
2. Burmese Days, George Orwell
3. The Post-office Girl, Stefan Zweig
4. Satin Island, Tom McCarthy
5. Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday
6. “The Egg”, Andy Weir
7. “A Letter from the Sea of Love, August 16, 1977”, Rafael Alvarez
8. The Magic Christian, Terry Southern
9. You know you want this: "Cat person" and other stories, Kristen Roupenian
10. A Clergyman’s Daughter, George Orwell
11. Outline, Rachel Cusk
12. Coming Up for Air, George Orwell
13. The Topeka School, Ben Lerner
14. Animal Farm, George Orwell
15. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
16. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Nonfiction
17. Why Orwell Matters, Christopher Hitchens
18. Aguirre, Wrath of God (BFI Films), Eric Ames
19. A Very Short Introduction to The Beats, David Sterritt
20. Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction, Brian Dillon
21. A Very Short Introduction to War & Technology, Alex Roland
22. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, Slavoj Žižek
23. A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, Jeffrey Meyers
24. Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature, Elizabeth Hardwick
25. Amusing ourselves to death : public discourse in the age of show business, Neil Postman
26. Birth of a Nation (BFI Film Classics), Paul McEwan
27. The End of the End of the Earth: Essays, Jonathan Franzen
28. The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell
29. Why I Write, George Orwell
30. Why I Am Not A Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto, Jessa Crispin
31. Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, Hunter S. Thompson
32. The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
33. The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
34. Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
35. A Very Short Introduction to the Spanish Civil War, Helen Graham
36. A Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley
Poetry
37. “The Waste Land”, T.S. Eliot
38. Selected poems and two plays of William Butler Yeats, W. B. Yeats
39. Return to the City of White Donkeys, James Tate
40. Book of Longing, Leonard Cohen
Articles & Essays
41. “A Hanging” (1931), George Orwell
42. “Shooting an Elephant” (1936), George Orwell
43. “Goodbye to All That: Why Americans are Not Taught History” (1998), Christopher Hitchens
44. “Dylan” (1967), Ellen Willis
45. “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (2013), Mark Fisher
46. “In Praise of Idleness” (1932), Bertrand Russell
47. “Wages Against Housework” (1975), Silvia Federici
48. “The Abolition of Work” (1985), Bob Black
49. “Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities” (1980) , Stanley Fish
50. “Men Explain Things to Me” (2014), Rebecca Solnit
51. “How Change Happens” (2019), Rebecca Solnit
52. “What If We Stopped Pretending” (2019), Jonathan Franzen
53. “In Praise of Form: Towards a New Post-Humanist Art” (2019), Taney Roniger
54. “Art as Art”, Ad Reinhardt
55. “Anorexia nervosa and a bearded female Saint” (1982), J. Hubert Lacey
56. “Bearded Woman, Female Christ: Gendered Transformations in the Legends and Cult of Saint Wilgefortis” (2014), Lewis Wallace
57. “On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance” (1960), Karl Popper
58. “Politics and the English Language” (1946), George Orwell
59. “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage” (2001), David Foster Wallace
