Books I read this year:

• Anthem by Ayn Rand: Sort of boring.
• Anabolics by William Llewellyn: Helpful info about steroids.
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson:
• Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin: Nice book but not an easy read from what I remember.
• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: Bad book. I don’t get why I’m supposed to like the main characters.
• A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick: Awful, annoying read. Worst thing I’ve read in a long while. The characters are all extremely annoying.
• L’École des Sorciers by J.K. Rowling: It re-read the first Harry Potter book in French. It was a challenge but was as engaging as when I’d first read it in English.
• Short Fiction by H. P. Lovecraft: I got into the habit of reading these before bed. Few of them are particularly scary but most are decent reads. I managed to get through everything of his that I could find online save a few of his longer stories (the Curious Case and the Dream Quest come to mind).
• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro: Not a bad book but the way Klara was treated was just not realistic. People become so attached to dogs and even inanimate objects but a speaking AI who grows up with a child is abandoned? Also, throwing in some confusing world building at the end was an annoying choice.
• She Who Became the Sun and He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan: Okay books. Character behave in strange and hurtful ways (especially in the second book) but the prose is tolerable. I have issues with the characterization of Zhu. She goes from a purely ambitious character to having hints of somehow being a liberator character.
• Uncle Vanya by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov: I read this before seeing the play on Broadway. Short, easy read.
• Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones: Howl is annoying but the book isn’t so bad.
• The Koran- A Very Short Introduction by Michael Cook: Interesting read. I don’t play on reading the Koran any time soon though.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum: I read this before going to see the Wiz. I’d never seen any of the movies or plays based on this book and only was familiar with the character and story though its influence on pop culture. Reading it, I realized Howl’s Moving Castle takes a lot from this author.
• The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: I find Wilde’s character over-witty and annoying.
• The Vegetarian by Han Kang: Strange book. I wasn’t as disturbed as my fellow book club members but I wouldn’t recommend it.
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Great book. Wasn’t sure what I was expecting going into this book but I didn’t expect it to be so funny.
• Richard II by William Shakespeare: I’m still working on getting through my remaining history plays.
• The Story of Art: A long read, basically a text book. I’m probably going to have to return to this multiple times to fully digest it but it inspired me to start visiting the Met and the MoMA semi-regularly for a couple months. As it warms up, I’ll hopefully pick this book and habit back up.
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë: One of my favorites this year.
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys: Not a bad read but pretty frustrating. This may just be a matter of my taste, but it formed a poor contrast with Jane Eyre. Maybe I just like the straightforward 19th century style of its sequel. I definitely disliked the feeling of confusion I had about the feelings of Antoinette and Rochester.
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: This was such an engaging book I got through it all in one weekend.
• Complete Poems by Emily Brontë: I picked this up because I liked here prose so much. From what I understand, little of her work was published during her lifetime and most of the poems take place in a fictional world that is never fully explained. I struggled with this as I do all poetry and the footnotes were useless. I’m happy I struggled through it though, and there were a few I really liked.
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets: I read the Folger’s edition which mostly provided useful notes. Surprisingly accessible when read with patience.
• The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer (translated by Robert Fagles): When writing about such great works, I especially feel my own stupidity. With that said, here are my thoughts: The Illiad a bit repetitive and boring. Hector is clearly a better man than Achilles and I was sad when he died. I was surprised how much combatants focused on stripping dead bodies of armor and weapons. In the Odyssey, I was surprised by how hospitable everyone is. The Odyssey is of course, the far more interesting of the two. Both books were a pleasure to read and Fagles deserved great credit.
• The Oresteia by Aeschylus (translated by Robert Fagles): I don’t know why I found this such a struggle to read when I found Fagles' Theban plays so easy.
• Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi: The author builds an interesting world but can’t quite deliver in the story. The latter half of the book devotes a lot of time to an uninteresting romance and the ending didn’t make me interested enough in the sequel.
• The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris: Another unhappy ending. I didn’t really get the behavior of the main character. In the book club, others were making the point that the whole OBG concept is iffy.
• The Nature of Things by Lucretius: Easier to read than I expected. I expected to get a book on Epicurean philosophy but Lucretius is more interested in arguing for naturalism. The metaphysics is hard to follow but I imagine that’s because I’m missing lots of context.
• Seven Days in June by Tia Williams: Not especially good or bad or interesting.
• No Longer Human and The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai: Both are short, sweet, depressing reads. I loved them.
• And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie: The reveal at the end is hilariously absurd. I was literally laughing out loud. This was a good one though.
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier: This competes with Wurthering Heights as my favorite read of the year. The characters are interesting, the setting is colorful and interesting, and the main character’s personality really come through.
• Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End by Liu Cixin: I liked each book more than the preceeding. It’s near impossible to get these books from the library since the waiting list is so long but that’s for good reason. I normally hate reading Sci-Fi but these were amazing.
• Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks: I picked this up as a prepared to start taking ASL classes. It’s a short read and I basically skimmed it but it corrected some of my misconceptions about sign language.
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers: The ending is sort of sad and unsatisfying but overall a good read.
• Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond: I assumed this book would be more about recent history. An interesting read but I think I’ll have to return to it to fully digest.
• There there by Tommy Orange: I was pretty unhappy with the ending but the way the stories of the characters weave together is interesting.
• One state, two states by Benny Morris: As far as I can tell, a pretty even handed history of a complicated issue.
• Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance: I decided to pick this up after Trump chose him for VP.
• Cafe in Berlin and Ferien in Frankfurt by Andre Klein: These were both simple reads but I found them surprisingly difficult. I thought I’d be able to jump into reading German as easily as I had French after the Michel Thomas course but it’s been quite difficult. I need to invest way more time into it if I want to get any good.

Books I’m still reading:

I ended the year still reading Anna Karenina. I’m also going to continue reading Byzantium as part of my history self-teaching. I also want to finish the French and German language learning picks I made. In particular, I have Andre Klein’s series in mind for German; and the French Harry Potter translations, for French. I may return to Lingua Latina but only if I have the time. I also want to finish the Shakespeare poetry book I got.

Looking forward to next year:

I’m actually going to get through the Catechism this year. I’ll also be reading and reviewing a bunch of manga and light novels. Aside from that, I have no particular intentions aside from reading widely.