Unlike the year before, I compiled the 2009 list less from hope of starting conversation than for reasons of internal housekeeping. Last year’s list is really pretty thin, less than a book a week on average and many of them short; I’ve already read half as many books in the first two months of this year. I can’t account for this meagreness, except to hope I read a lot of short stories I didn’t keep track of, and to cite six summer weeks where I read only the work of Clarion contemporaries. Yet again, I’ve been less than scrupulous about listing graphic novel reads, though a few are grouped at the bottom.
Again, the rules: this doesn’t count books I re-read, books I read ¾ of and abandoned, or essay and story collections I dipped into once, twice, or repeatedly, but failed to finish cover to cover. Nothing’s here unless I read, for better or for worse, every word. That means excluding many fine books I wanted to pore over more closely, and at greater length, prolonging the pleasure so to speak, and collections where, for one reason or another, I left a few stories unread. Similarly, however, if I began reading a story collection the previous year, but didn’t finish it until this year, it appears here.
Titles are listed more or less in chronological order of completion, rather than when I started them, though I omit all dates, which might otherwise go an embarrassingly long way toward explaining sudden long lapses in reading.
Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All
Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, Les Intermittences d’Icare
Jean-François Prevost, Credo
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, L’Autre rive
Zachary Mexico, China Underground
Noël Devaulx, La Dame de Murcie
Noël Devaulx, Le Visiteur Insolite
Thomas McMahon, Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry
Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages
Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss
Jean Muno, Voice of Blood, Glove of Passion
Bernard Quiriny, L’Angoisse de la première phrase
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, Le Congrès de la fantomologie
Bill Morris, Motor City
Maurice Pons, Douce-amère
Pierrette Fleutiaux, Métamorphoses de la reine
Steve Erickson, Zeroville
Taichi Yamada, Strangers
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Loïc Secheresse, Raiju
Ludovic Debeurme, Lucille
Frédérik Peeters, Pachyderme
Lucie Durbiano, Le Rouge vous va si bien
Tom Siddell, Gunnerkrigg Court, Vol. 1
I love seeing people’s reading list for the year. I’m not familiar with most of the French authors. Are their books fantasy? Why did you not delve into the work of our Clarion teachers?
I did, I just didn’t finish whole books: stories here and there in anthologies, halves of collections. And I’ve since read more, just this year. But all the French is fantasy.