Books I’ve finished since January 2019, in reading order by year:
2024
Hymn to Life (1974) by James Schulyer
Like Air (2023) Azusa Kuwahara
****The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Room to Dream (2018) by David Lynch & Kristine McKenna
The Art Spirit (1923) by Robert Henri
Creativity (2020) by John Cleese
Down the Garden Path (1932) by Beverley Nichols
Hell, I Love Everybody (2023) by James Tate
Gratitude (2015) by Oliver Sacks
24 Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927) by Stefan Zweig
The Magicians (2023) by Blexbolex
Train Dreams (2011) by Denis Johnson
The Man Without Talent (1986) by Yoshiharu Tsuge
Making Movies (1995) by Sidney Lumet
Mike Nichols: A Life (2021) by Mark Harris
Salka Valka (1931) by Halldór Laxness
Kitchen Confidential (2000) by Anthony Bourdain
Fat City (1969) by Leonard Gardner
Victoria (1898) by Knut Hamsun
*Whatsa Paintoonist? (2017) by Jerry Moriarty
The Writing Life (1989) by Annie Dillard
Blurry (2024) by Dash Shaw
Born Standing Up (2007) by Steve Martin
How to Relax (2015) by Thich Nhat Hanh
On Writing (1986) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Army of Giants (2024) by Matthew Rohrer
Q&A (2024) by Adrian Tomine
What It Is (2008) by Lynda Barry
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (2020) by Adrian Tomine
Invisible Cities (1972) by Italo Calvino
2023
The Immeasurable Equation (1972) by Sun Ra
Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988) by Italo Calvino
*A Chess Story (1941) by Stefan Zweig
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975) by Georges Perec
The Mad Farmer Poems (1970-1994) by Wendell Berry
Songs for Schizoid Siblings (1958) by Lionel Ziprin
Meditations (180 AD) by Marcus Aurelius
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) by Maya Angelou
That That (2015) by Ken Mikolowski
Mid-American Chants (1918) by Sherwood Anderson
Selected Poems (1960) by e.e. cummings
Sorry, Tree (2007) by Eileen Myles
Album of Early Verse, 1890-1900 (1920) by Paul Valéry
***The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Essays: First Series (1841) by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Swann in Love (1913) by Marcel Proust
A Doll’s House (1879) by Henrik Ibsen
Weeping Gang Bliss Void Yab-Yum (2019) by Devendra Banhart
My Face for the World to See (1958) by Alfred Hayes
The Divorce (2008) by César Aira
Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) by Luigi Pirandello
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
Field Guide (1973) by Robert Hass
Ten Walks/Two Talks (2010) by Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch
Sculpting in Time (1984) by Andrei Tarkovsky
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe (1912-1935) by Fernando Pessoa
White Nights (1848) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Birthday (2000) by César Aira
Building Stories (2012) by Chris Ware
**The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
**Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters (1955) by J.D. Salinger
**Seymour: An Introduction (1959) by J.D. Salinger
**Franny and Zooey (1961) by J.D. Salinger
Monica (2023) by Daniel Clowes
**The Essential Haiku (1994) ed. Robert Hass
2022
*Niels Lyhne (1880) by Jens Peter Jacobsen
Tao Te Ching (~400 BCE) transl. Ursula K. Le Guin
Essays Two (2021) by Lydia Davis
Kingdom (2018) by Jon McNaught
Three Tall Women (1994) by Edward Albee
Artforum (2014) by César Aira
A Possible World (2002) by Kenneth Koch
What Cartooning Really Is: The Major Interviews with Charles M. Schulz (2020) ed. Gary Groth
Collected Monologues (1872-1884) by Charles Cros
The Beginning of the World (2022) by Andy Sebela
Ghosts (1983) by Paul Auster
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer (1996) by Ben Katchor
The Book of Disquiet (1935) by Fernando Pessoa
Portrait of a Drunk (2020) by O. Schrauwen, Ruppert & Mulot
The Walk (1917) by Robert Walser
The Government Lake (2019) by James Tate
Journey into the Past (1972) by Stefan Zweig
Acting Class (2022) by Nick Drnaso
Late Fame (1895) by Arthur Schnitzler
*Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville
The Devil (1889) by Leo Tolstoy
Four Quartets (1941) by T.S. Eliot
Shuna’s Journey (1983) by Hayao Miyazaki
The Weight of the World (1981) by Peter Handke
And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon (1835-1842) by Nikolai Gogol
*The Walk (1917) by Robert Walser
2021
Stunt (2019) by Michael DeForge
Animal Days (2021) by Joshua Beckman
How to Write One Song (2020) by Jeff Tweedy
Destroyer & Preserver (2011) by Matthew Rohrer
Some Trees (1956) by John Ashbery
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789) by William Blake
A Season in Hell (1873) by Arthur Rimbaud
The Lost Writings (1917-1924) by Franz Kafka
After Ikkyū (1996) by Jim Harrison
Notes on the Cinematograph (1975) by Robert Bresson
What the Living Do (1997) by Marie Howe
Knots (1970) by R.D. Laing
There You Are (2017) by Joanne Kyger
Heaven No Hell (2021) by Michael DeForge
Giant Moth Perishes (2021) by Geoffrey Nutter
Anna Karenina (1877) by Leo Tolstoy
Amok (1922) by Stefan Zweig
Atlas of Poetic Botany (2016) by Francis Hallé
Decisive Moments in History (1927) by Stefan Zweig
Leave Society (2021) by Tao Lin
*I Remember (1970) by Joe Brainard
The Seagull (1895) by Anton Chekhov
Novel 11, Book 18 (1992) by Dag Solstad
The City of Belgium (2018) by Brecht Evens
A Schoolboy’s Diary (1904) by Robert Walser
Of Walking in Ice (1978) by Werner Herzog
Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman
Amanda Paradise (2021) by CAConrad
Pnin (1957) by Vladimir Nabokov
2020
Swan (2012) by Mary Oliver
Essays One (2019) by Lydia Davis
**The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bartleby the Scrivener (1853) by Herman Melville
Being There (1970) by Jerzy Kosiński
The Sky Contains the Plans (2020) by Matthew Rohrer
Narrow Road to the Interior (1689) by Matsuo Bashō
Kokomo (2019) by Laura Theobald
A Chess Story (1941) by Stefan Zweig
Songs Without Words (1936) by Lynd Ward
Prelude to a Million Years (1933) by Lynd Ward
Whatsa Paintoonist? (2017) by Jerry Moriarty
Burning Secret (1913) by Stefan Zweig
The Spring of My Life (1827?) by Kobayashi Issa
Through a Life (2018) by Tom Haugomat
*Train Ride (1971) by Ted Berrigan
The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) by Carlo Collodi
Fear (1925) by Stefan Zweig
Independent People (1934) by Halldór Laxness
*Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters (1955) by J.D. Salinger
*Seymour: An Introduction (1959) by J.D. Salinger
Actual Air (1999) by David Berman
Black Boy (1945) by Richard Wright
High Windows (1974) by Philip Larkin
Pan (1894) by Knut Hamsun
The Mezzanine (1988) by Nicholson Baker
Consolations (2014) by David Whyte
The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro (1915) by Fernando Pessoa
Micrograms (2011) by Jorge Carrera Andrade
Beowulf (~1000) transl. Seamus Heaney
Conversations (2007) by César Aira
Making Comics (2019) by Lynda Barry
Justice (2015) by Tomaž Šalamun
Journey into the Past (1972) by Stefan Zweig
Parade (2002) by Hiromi Kawakami
*Here (2014) by Richard McGuire
A Thousand Mornings (2012) by Mary Oliver
Panther (2014) by Brecht Evens
The Dhammapada (100 BCE) transl. Gil Fronsdal
An Invitation for Me to Think (1942) by Alexander Vvendensky
Niels Lyhne (1880) by Jens Peter Jacobsen
2019
Chris Ware: Conversations (2016) ed. Jean Braithwaite
Dead Man’s Float (2016) by Jim Harrison
The Princess of 72nd Street (1979) by Elaine Kraf
One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan (~1800) transl. John Stevens
Why Art? (2018) by Eleanor Davis
Baby, I Don’t Care (2018) by Chelsey Minnis
*Franny and Zooey (1961) by J.D. Salinger
What We See When We Read (2014) by Peter Mendelsund
Pale Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov
Strange Weather in Tokyo (2001) by Hiromi Kawakami
Things Are Happening (1998) by Joshua Beckman
Conversations With Gordon Lish (2018) ed. David Winters & Jason Lucarelli
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) by Edward Albee
Parallel Lives (2018) by Olivier Schrauwen
The Cloven Viscount (1952) by Italo Calvino
Days & Days (2019) by Michael Dickman
Asterios Polyp (2009) by David Mazzucchelli
*Arcadia (1993) by Tom Stoppard
Sequential Drawings (2016) by Richard McGuire
Seasons (2013) by Blexbolex
Vacation (2018) by Blexbolex
A Hummock in the Malookas (1995) by Matthew Rohrer
Ballad (2013) by Blexbolex
In Love (1953) by Alfred Hayes
Rusty Brown (2019) by Chris Ware
Dunce (2019) by Mary Ruefle
Family Happiness (1859) by Leo Tolstoy
*The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
* = re-reads