Friday, January 1, 2016

2015 Book Roundup

New year, aka, time to throw a book list wrap-up at you.

Fiction highlights were Amelia Gray's new one, Gutshot, which I'm fairly sure I can credit with kicking my ass back into fiction-writing gear, and beginning Karl Ove Knausgaard's opus, My Struggle, which I think most people either love or hate for its painstaking attention to mundane detail. I don't know what it says about me, but I love it and can't wait for the U.S release of all its volumes. Poetry is, as usual, all over the map, but a standout for me was discovering the badass that is Cate Marvin. Similarly, with chapbooks, Amorak Huey's The Insomniac Circus slayed me with its cleverness. I often have a hard time finding nonfiction that blows me away. Jan Bondeson's Buried Alive was great for its subject matter and intrigued me enough to want to read more on the longstanding fear of being buried alive. Five Days at Memorial also drew me in - a good work of journalism that isn't totally without bias, but that doesn't overtly try to lead the reader to one conclusion or another.

Seeing as I did not meet any 2015 reading goals, I'll merely set out to have a literary and fulfilling 2016. :D

Fiction

Three Hundred Million – Blake Butler
The Poorhouse Fair – John Updike
Umbrella – Will Self
The Strange Library – Haruki Murakami
My Struggle: Book 1 – Karl Ove Knausgaard
My Struggle: Book 2 – Karl Ove Knausgaard
Gutshot – Amelia Gray
Against the Country – Ben Metcalf
Binary Star – Sarah Gerard
Can’t and Won’t – Lydia Davis
The Cure for Suicide – Jesse Ball
The Heart Goes Last – Margaret Atwood
Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel
Slade House – David Mitchell
New American Stories – Ben Marcus
In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods – Matt Bell

Poetry

One Thousand Things Worth Knowing – Paul Muldoon
Strike/Slip – Don McKay
The Glacier’s Wake – Katy Didden
Twigs and Knucklebones – Sarah Lindsay
Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower – Sarah Lindsay
Strike Sparks: Selected Poems – Sharon Olds
The Keys to the Jail – Keetje Kuipers
Gurlesque – Lara Glenum
Not For Mothers Only – Rebecca Wolff
[insert] boy – Danez Smith
Heliopause – Heather Christle
Deep Lane – Mark Doty
Count the Waves – Sandra Beasley
The Bone Folders – T.A. Noonan
Confluence – Sandra Marchetti
Stationed Near the Gateway – Margaret Bashaar
The Lunatic – Charles Simic
Apocryphal – Lisa Marie Basile
Oracle – Cate Marvin
New Exercises – Franck Andre Jamme
The Last Two Seconds – Mary Jo Bang
World’s Tallest Disaster – Cate Marvin
Given – Arielle Greenberg
Satellite – Matthew Rohrer
Fragment of the Head of a Queen – Cate Marvin
Mr. West – Sarah Blake
The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems – Olena Kalytiak Davis
Erratic Facts – Kay Ryan

Non-Fiction

Deep Down Dark – Hector Tobar
Buried Alive – Jan Bondeson
Gods, Graves, and Scholars – C.W. Ceram
Yes Please – Amy Poehler
About Town: TNY and the World It Made: Ben Yagoda
Zine – Pagan Kennedy
Missoula – John Krakauer
The Bone Woman – Clea Koff
The Seven Good Years – Etgar Keret
Word Nerd – John D. Williams
The Invisible Sex – J.M. Adovasio
The Other Serious – Christy Wampole
Five Days at Memorial – Sheri Fink

Chapbooks

The Hows and Whys of My Failures – Dan Nowak
The Insomniac Circus – Amorak Huey
Mutant Neuron Codex Swarm – Juliet Cook and Robert Cole
Incident Reports – Caitlin Thomson
Blinded By Clouds – Risa Denenberg
war/lock – Lisa Marie Basille
wingless, scorched, and beautiful – Allie Marini Batts
Strangest Sea – Ariana den Bleyker
The Sheep Stealer – Jenn Blair
Orphans Burning Orphans – Gene Kwak
My Mother’s Child – Pamela Taylor
Traveling – M. Mack

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