“Reading is first and foremost non-reading,” writes Pierre Bayard in How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. “Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.”

Last year I gave more attention to books I didn’t read than to the books I actually did read, and then my friend Alan Jacobs wrote a great post called “Who’s counting?” about why he doesn’t make year-end lists. Here’s one part in particular that I liked:

What about short stories and poems and essays and even blog posts? In any given year, those short-form genres may shape your thoughts and feelings, may contribute to your flourishing, more than any work that happens to be book-length. One of Pascal’s pensées or one Psalm may matter more than a dozen books.

I’m starting to come around to something filmmaker Errol Morris once said:

I believe that there are no good movies, no good books, no good music compositions just great scenes, great passages, great moments.

I don’t really want to believe it, but I think that believing it would set me free in some way. (In 2021, I made a list of “10 great ideas from books that didn’t crack my top 21,” and, sure enough, I find that list to be more interesting than the actual list of books I read.)

All that said, I’ve had these reading lists going since 2006 and I just can’t let the tradition die.

So here goes:

The best of the best

G.C. Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books, written over 225 years ago.

Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, a marvelous little book about a bedridden woman who observes a snail while she slowly convalesces from a debilitating illness.

Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, a book that felt like it was written just for me.

Charles Portis’s novel Gringos, which I read for the third time.

The just right Goldilocks joy of quarterly-ish magazines like The Believer and The Idler.

Non-fiction 

Elisa Gabbert’s outstanding essay collection, Any Person Is the Only Self.

Ted Gioia’s How to Listen to Jazz.

Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

Brian Dillon’s book of essays about essays, Essayism.

Jesse David Fox’s Comedy Book.

John McPhee’s Oranges.

Katherine Rundell’s Why You Should Read Children’s Books.

Nick Hornby’s Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius.

Bassist Stuart David’s memoir In the All-Night Café: A Memoir of Belle and Sebastian’s Formative Year.

Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own, a very strange and interesting book published in 1934, about her using seven years of diary writing to investigate what she really wanted out of life.

Timothy Denevi’s Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism.

Book One of Montaigne’s Essays. (Had to put Book Two down for a bit once I hit the 200-page “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.”)

Helpful self-help

W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis.

Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals. (Oliver supplied me with the most helpful question of the year: “What would it mean to be done for the day?”)

Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control helped me finally understand perfectionism.

Matt Farley’s book about creativity, The Motern Method, which made me think a lot about quality and quantity.

Novels

I started the year off right with Matt Bucher’s The Belan Deck — a mediation on A.I. and powerpoint and life that reads like David Markson’s commonplace notecard novels meets Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine.

I read Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac after visiting Los Alamos. It’s great.

Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel’s Dayswork, a fragmentary novel about a woman during the pandemic writing facts about Herman Melville on sticky notes.

Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things was weirder than the movie.

Jen Beagin’s novel Big Swiss didn’t quite stick the landing for me, but it made me laugh a bunch and I think it could make an outstanding TV series.

(I was about to lament how little fiction I read this year, and then I remembered I spent a month reading freaking Middlemarch.)

Art books

Adam Moss’s The Work of Art.

Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Three, the final installment in his sketchbook series.

John Hendrix’s graphic novel biography about the remarkable friendship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, The Mythmakers.

Cartoonist Edward Steed’s collection, Forces of Nature.

Amy Sillman’s Faux Pas.

Amos Kennedy’s Citizen Printer, the most lavish book yet published with my name on the cover.

* * *

Last year I wrote, “This year I would like to be more reckless than ever — I would consider it a great triumph, actually, if I finished fewer books, if I sampled and skimmed and scraped more books, and saved finishing for books where I can’t stop turning the pages.”

I failed, again, as I always do, but I’m getting closer. (Why didn’t I just stop reading Middlemarch? Why did I even pick up Middlemarch? Not my cup of tea!)

Here’s to another year of trying to read at whim!