What I Read in 2009

Perhaps of personal archaeological interest merely – back in 2009 I kept track of every book I read. Herewith, the list, which I recently found going through a pile of old papers. A couple of notes: 1) I was freelancing back then, which meant I had much more time to read. Now that I teach full-time, I read rather less. 2) if I was reading a book for review, it’s marked (for review). 3) If I was rereading a book, it’s marked (again). 4) Books that seemed particularly good I marked with an asterisk – I don’t know if I’d necessarily find all of the asterisked books equally worthy of an asterisk now, though many of them are obviously great (Kafka, etc) or have since become part of my personal canon.

January 

Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda’s Road to 9/11*

James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia

Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty

Gilbert Adair, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd

PG Wodehouse, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

Ken Bruen, The Dramatist

Peter Carey, My Life As a Fake

Eoin McNamee, Twelve Twenty Three

Will Self, Feeding Frenzy

Claire Kilroy, Tenderwire

Dale Peck, Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction *

Anita Shreve, Testimony (for radio review)

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao*

February

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable: Reflections on Friendship, Sex, and Survival

Peter Carey, Wrong About Japan: A Father’s Journey with his Son

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone

Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008

Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror

Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance

Katrina vanden Heuvel, ed., A Just Response: The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy, and September 11, 2001

Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden

Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time

Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy

Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

Barry H. Leeds, The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer

Norman Stone, World War One: A Short History*

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929

Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

March 

Janet Browne, Darwin’s Origin of Species: A Biography

Garry Wills, Saint Augustine

Bill McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World: Everything You Never Wanted to Know

Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism & Requiem for the Twin Towers

Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Mark Leonard, What Does China Think?

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women*

Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

Rick Moody, The Ice Storm

Fintan O’Toole, After the Ball*

Eileen Warburton, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds

R.F. Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change, 1970-2000

Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

Richard Laymon, Allhallow’s Eve

Robert Stone, Bay of Souls

Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet

Ian Buruma, The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West

Saul Bellow, The Bellarosa Connection

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath*

April 

Gene Kerrigan, Dark Times in the City (for review)

Toby Litt, I play the drums in a band called okay

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

Michael Chabon, The Final Solution

Toby Litt, Exhibitionism

Toby Litt, Journey into Space

Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man

Will Self, Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe

James Lasdun, It’s Beginning to Hurt (for review)

Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama

Jay McInerney, How It Ended

Jay McInerney, Model Behaviour

May

Claire Kilroy, All Names Have Been Changed

John Boyne, The House of Special Purpose

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

Martin Amis, House of Meetings (again)

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction

Alaa Al Aswani, Friendly Fire (for review)

Joan Didion, Democracy (again)

June

Zachary Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis

Nick McDonell, The Third Brother

David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

Paul Howard, We Need to Talk About Ross

Edgar Allan Poe, Spirits of the Dead: Tales and Poems

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark

Aravind Adiga, Between the Assassinations (for review)

Dale Peck, Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye*

Dale Peck, Martin & John

Zadie Smith, ed., The Burned Children of America

Christopher Isherwood, All the Conspirators*

Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows (again)

July

E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest

Arundhati Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy (for review)

Irvine Welsh, Reheated Cabbage (for review)

E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910

Graydon Carter, ed., Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood: Rebels, Reds, and Graduates and the Wild Stories Behind the Making of 13 Iconic Films

Justine Delaney Wilson, The High Society: Drugs and the Irish Middle Class

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

August

Alan Moore & Brian Bolland, Batman: The Killing Joke

Rob Long, Conversations With My Agent

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (again)

Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk

Henry James, Washington Square*

Henrik Ibsen, When We Dead Awaken

Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera

Albert Camus, The Plague*

Euripides (trans. WS Merwin), Iphigenia At Aulis

Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Franz Kafka, The Trial*

D.H. Lawrence, Selected Letters

Diderot (trans. Jacques Barzun), Rameau’s Nephew

Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir

Moliére (trans. George Graveley), The Would-Be Gentleman

Aristophanes (trans. David Barrett), The Frogs

Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot*

John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture*

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent*

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

John Carey, William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies* (for review)

Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory

Clive James, From the Land of Shadows

John Updike, Bech at Bay*

Erich Heller, Kafka

Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

September

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilisation*

Sebastian Faulks, A Week in December (for review)

John Updike, Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism

Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain *

John Banville, The Infinities*

Andrew Sullivan, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back *

Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

Robert B. Parker, A Savage Place

Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones (unfinished; read the first 200pp)

Anne Marie Hourihane, She Moves Through the Boom

John Banville, Athena *

Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics

October

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Rick Moody, The Black Veil (terrible)

Adam Mars-Jones, Venus Envy: On the Womb and the Bomb*

Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning *

Francine Prose, Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles

David Hare, Berlin/Wall

Thomas M. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World

Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

J.G. Ballard, Crash

David Hare, The Power of Yes: A Dramatist Seeks to Understand the Financial Crisis*

David Murphy & Martina Devlin, Banksters: How a Powerful Elite Squandered Ireland’s Wealth

Edmund White, My Lives

November

Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us *

Fintan O’Toole, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger*

David McWilliams, Follow the Money*

Julie O’Toole, Heroin: A True Story of Drug Addiction, Hope and Triumph

Chris Binchy, Open-Handed

E.L. Doctorow, Homer and Langley (for review)

Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (for review)

Elizabeth Wurtzel, More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction*

Abraham J. Twerski, M.D., Addictive Thinking: Understanding Self-Deception*

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking

Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura

Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Mark O’Rowe, Howie the Rookie *

Stephen King, The Dark Half (again)

Alan Glynn, Winterland

Stephen King, “The Mist”

December

Jason O’Toole, The Last Days of Katy French

Philip Roth, The Humbling

Philip Roth, Indignation *

Vladimir Nabokov, The Enchanter

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America – A Memoir

Colm Toibin, Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar

Mark Harrold, Parenting and Privilege: Raising Children in an Affluent Society

Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (165)

Len Deighton, Billion-Dollar Brain

Declan Hughes, The Wrong Kind of Blood

Harlan Ellison, The Glass Teat

Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy: The Unmaking of a President