Back when I was even more obsessive-compulsive than I am now, I used to carefully note every book I read with the dates I started and finished reading it, along with a brief comment on each one. That became way too much of a chore, especially since I always have 2-3 books going at any given time. What you see below represents a bunch of things I've been reading, but it only includes the stuff I remembered to put down. I've starred the books I really liked.
July 2010
Unlearning Meditation. Jason Siff
The Kindly Ones. Jonathan Littell (abandoned)
Blame. Michelle Huneven
June 2010
The Passage. Justin Cronin
The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff. Joseph Epstein
The Imperfectionists. Tom Rachman
People of the Book. Geraldine Brooks
The Healing of America. T. R. Reid
The Heart of Power. David Blumenthal & James Morone
The Schopenhauer Cure. Irvin Yalom
The Heights. Peter Hedges
Split Image. Robert B. Parker
May 2010
Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction. Christopher Janaway
For Whom the Bell Tolls. Ernest Hemingway
The Ask. Sam Lipsyte
April 2010
The Hole We're In. Gabrielle Zevin
Next. James Hymes
Model Home. Eric Puchner
Stoner. John Williams
March 2010
Horns. Joe Hill
The Privileges. Jonathan Dee
The Girl on the Boat. P. G. Wodehouse
Losing the News. Alex Jones
February 2010
Swimming. Nicola Keegan
The Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins
January 2010
How Markets Fail. John Cassidy
Blue Boy. Rakesh Satyal
Our Story Begins. Tobias Wolff
The Professional. Robert B. Parker
Freud. Jonathan Lear
December 2009
Five Skies. Ron Carlson
The House of Mirth. Edith Wharton
The Ascent of Money. Niall Ferguson
Juliet, Naked. Nick Hornby
November 2009
Wolf Hall. Hilary Mantel
Generosity. Richard Powers
The Financial Lives of the Poets. Jess Walter
What is Ancient Philosophy? Pierre Hadot
Blandings Castle. P.G. Wodehouse
On Desire. William Irvine
October 2009
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Wells Tower
Oil on the Brain. Lisa Margonelli
Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. Michael Klare
September 2009
This is Where I Leave You. Jonathan Tropper
The Classical World. Robin Lane Fox
Don't Worry, Be Stoic. Peter Vernezze
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. David Wroblewski
August 2009
Await Your Reply. Dan Chaon
The Hot Rock. Donald Westlake
Why Can't We Be Good? Jacob Needleman
That Old Cape Magic. Richard Russo
The Price of Salt. Patricia Highsmith
What We Talk about When We Talk About Love. Raymond Carver
The Ten-Year Nap. Meg Wolitzer
A Guide to the Good Life. William B. Irvine
Last Night at the Lobster. Stewart O'Nan
How I Became a Famous Novelist. Steve Hely
Financial Shock. Mark Zandi
July 2009
The Song Is You. Arthur Philipps
The Family Man. Elinor Lipman
Empire Falls. Richard Russo
The Signal. Ron Carlson
Morality Tale. Sylvia Brownrigg
The Comfort of Strangers. Ian McEwan
The Razor's Edge. Somerset Maugham
Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth Gilbert
June 2009
Revolutionary Road. Richard Yates
Shop Class as Soulcraft. Matthew Crawford
Anna Karenina. Leo Tolstoy
Voltaire Almighty. Roger Pearson
May
2009
A Tolerable Anarchy. Jedediah Purdy
The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde
Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. Winifred
Gallagher
April
2009
Are We Rome? Cullen Murphy
The Book of Dahlia. Elisa Albert
Six Bad Things. Charlie Huston
Caught Stealing. Charlie Huston
The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has
Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America. Ron
Brownstein
The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters. Chip
Kidd
March
2009
Blue Angel. Francune Prose
Crooked Little Vein. Warren Ellis
The Mind Body Problem (Contemporary American
Fiction). Rebecca Goldstein
Wodehouse: A Life. Robert McCrum
(abandoned)
Music for Torching. A.M. Homes
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Dave Eggers
February 2009
The Big Sort. Bill
Bishop
The Echo Maker.
Richard Powers
Less. Marc
Lesser
Weight. Jeannete Winterson.
Tales of the City. Armistead
Maupin(abandoned)
The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen
January
2009
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do
Again. David
Foster Wallace
All The Days and Nights. William Maxwell
Cost. Roxana Robinson
Beat the Reaper.
Josh Bazell
Shakespeare Wrote for Money. Nick Hornby
Plum Pie. P. G.
Wodehouse
Aldous Huxley.
Dana Sawyer
December
2008
Infinite Jest.
David Foster Wallace
Gods Behaving Badly. Marie
Phillips
November 2008
Uneasy Money. P.G.
Wodehouse
The Drunkard's Walk. Leonard Mlodinow
(abandoned)
The Portable Dorothy Parker. Dorothy Parker
Outliers. Malcolm
Gladwell (abandoned)
Why Read Marx Today? Jonathan Wolff
Save the World on Your Own Time. Stanley Fish (abandoned)
Girl Factory. Jim
Krusoe
Blue Heaven. Joe
Keenan (abandoned)
Rough Weather.
Robert Parker
Crooked River Burning. Mark Winegardner
October 2008
The Age of Reagan.
Sean Wilentz (abandoned)
The Thing Itself: On the Search for
Authenticity.
Richard Todd
Bill the Conqueror. P.G. Wodehouse
Dear American Airlines. Jonathan Miles
Something Fishy.
P. G. Wodehouse
September 2008
The Girl on the Boat. P.G. Wodehouse
Zen Heart. Ezra
Bayda
August 2008
Dancing With Life.
Phillip Moffitt
Jill the Reckless.
P.G.
Wodehouse
July 2008
War and Peace. Leo
Tolstoy (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky,
translators)
Blandings Castle.
P.G. Wodehouse
Heavy Weather.
P.G.
Wodehouse
June 2008
Pro Football Prospectus 2008. Aaron Schatz
Hot Water. P.G.
Wodehouse
Authenticity: Clearing the Junk. Venerable Yifa
Summer Lightning.
P.G. Wodehouse
Biography of the Dollar. Craig Karmin
My Stroke of Insight. Jill Bolte Taylor
(skimmed)
Uncle Dynamite.
P.G. Wodehouse
May 2008
Then We Came to the End. Joshua Ferris
Wake Up Now.
Stephan Bodian
Happiness is an Inside Job. Sylvia
Boorstein
War and Peace. Leo
Tolstoy
Piccadilly Jim.
P.G. Wodehouse
Laughing Gas. P.G.
Wodehouse
Big Money. P.G.
Wodehouse
Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy
into a Joke.
Rusell Peterson.
Sixty Poems.
Charles Simic
Beautiful Children. Charles Bock
True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact
Society. Farhad
Manjoo
April 2008
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel. Amy Hempel
Sixty Poems.
Charles Simic
The End of the Affair. Graham Greene
Ambivalent Zen.
Lawrence Shainberg
Consumed. Benjamin
Barber (abandoned)
Wittgenstein's Poker. David Edmonds and John Eidinow
(abandoned)
Ending the Pursuit of Happiness. Barry Magid
What's the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank
Pigs Have Wings.
P.G. Wodehouse
Mulliner Nights.
P.G. Wodehouse
Who's Your City?
Richard Florida
The Really Hard Problem. Owen Flanagan
(abandoned)
March 2008
Knockemstiff.
Donald Ray Pollock
Psmith in the City. P.G. Wodehouse
The Courtier and the Heretic. Matthew Stewart
The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. Andre Comte-Sponville
A Fraction of the Whole. Steve Toltz
The Political Brain. Drew Westen
Supercalitalism.
Robert Reich
February 2008
Ruling Your World: Ancient Strategies for Modern
Life. Sakyong
Mipham
Wake Up Now.
Stephan Bodian
Mediated. Thomas De Zengotita
Jitterbug Perfume.
Tom Robbins
The Benchley Roundup. Robert
Benchley
January 2008
The Road. Cormac
McCarthy
The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Michael Chabon
Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon. Garrison Keillor
The Abstinence Teacher. Tom Perrotta
Matrimony: A Novel. Joshua Henkin
Benchley Lost and Found. Robert Benchley
The Great Gatsby.
F. Scott
Fitzgerald
December 2007
Supercalitalism.
Robert Reich
Summer Moonshine.
P.G. Wodehouse
The Art of Power.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Honor: A History.
James Bowman
Love Monkey. Kyle
Smith
Huey Long. T.
Harry Williams
Cities and the Creative Class. Richard Florida
Meet Mr. Mulliner.
P.G. Wodehouse
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme
Court. Jeffrey
Toobin
(abandoned)
November 2007
Radiant Mind: Awakening Unconditioned
Awareness. Peter
Fenner
Tao Te Ching: A New Translation. Lao Tzu (Sam Hamill,
translator)
The Prince of Providence. Mike Stanton
The End of Mr. Y.
Scarlett Thomas
The House of Medici. Christopher
Hibbert
October 2007
Then and Now.
Robert B. Parker
The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need. Paul Pearsall
A People's History of the United States. Howard Zinn (skimmed)
In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and
Savage. Joseph
Epstein
Meditation Now or Never. Steve Hagen
The Book of Longing. Leonard Cohen
The 48 Laws of Power. Robert Greene
The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet
Within. Stephen
Fry
September 2007
The Happiness Hypothesis. Jonathan Haidt
Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of
Dreams. Nick
Tosches
Rousseau's Dog.
David Edmonds and John Eidinow (abandoned)
The Modern Prince.
Carnes
Lord
August 2007
The House That George Built. Wilfrid Sheed
The Prince.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New
Daleville. Witold
Rybczynski
The Savage Detectives. Roberto Bolano
(abandoned)
The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties, &
Fate. Tad
Brennan
Cultural Amnesia.
Clive James
Pro Football Prospectus 2007. Aaron Schatz
July 2007
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in
America. Louis
Menand
Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate
Greed in Iraq. T.
Christian Miller
Everyman. Philip
Roth
Claudius The God.
Robert Graves
Spare Change.
Robert Parker
Ukridge. P. G.
Wodehouse
Blind into Baghdad. James
Fallows
June 2007
Understanding Iraq. William R. Polk
Full Catastrophe Living. Jon Kabat-Zinn
I, Claudius.
Robert Graves
High Profile.
Robert Parker
The Emperor's Handbook: A New Translation of the
Meditations. Marcus Aurelius (David Hicks, and C.
Scot Hicks, translators)
Envy. Kathryn Harrison
Lucky Jim.
Kingsley
Amis
May 2007
Leave it to
Psmith. P.
G. Wodehouse
Theft. Peter
Carey (abandoned)
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons
Everything.
Christopher Hitchens
Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha,
God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen's Treasury of the Right
Dharma Eye. Brad
Warner
The Club Dumas.
Arturo Perez-Reverte and Sonia Soto
My Lucky Star. Joe
Keenan
You Suck: A Love Story. Christopher
Moore
Something Fresh.
P.G.
Wodehouse
April 2007
Strangers to Ourselves. Timothy Wilson (abandoned)
The Meaning of Life. Terry Eagleton
The Ode Less Traveled: Unlocking the Poet Within
. Stephen Fry
(Abandoned, but
only because I got it from the library, and it's really
the sort of book one needs to hold on to for a while in
order to get real use of.)
Money in the Bank.
P.G. Wodehouse
The Meaning of Life. Terry Eagleton
Revenge. Stephen
Fry
Boomsday.
Christopher Buckley
The Luck of the Bodkins. P.G.
Wodehouse
March 2007
A Damsel in Distress. P.G. Wodehouse
Bambi vs. Godzilla. David Mamet (abandoned)
Ronald Reagan.
John Patrick Diggins
A Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess
Uncle Fred in the Springtime. P.G. Wodehouse
Absurdistan. Gary
Shteyngart
February 2007
Black Maps. Peter
Spiegelman (abandoned)
Uncle Fred in the Springtime. P.G. Wodehouse
What Makes You Not a Buddhist. Dzongsar Jamyang
Kyentse
Open to Desire.
Mark Epstein
Bloodsucking Fiends. Christopher
Moore
Beauty Junkies.
Alex Kuczynski (abandoned)
Lord Emsworth and Others. P.G.
Wodehouse
January 2007
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Shunryu Suzuki
Scoop. Evelyn
Waugh (abandoned)
Prayers for Rain.
Dennis Lehane
Cocktail Time.
P.G. Wodehouse
Gone, Baby, Gone.
Dennis Lehane
Sacred. Dennis
Lehane
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big
History. David
Christian (abandoned)
Spring Fever. P.G.
Wodehouse
December 2006
Full Moon. P.G.
Wodehouse
The Emperor's Children. Claire Messud
Citizen Vince.
Jess Walter
Mediated. Thomas
De Zengotita
On Beauty. Zadie
Smith
Darkness Take My Hand. Dennis Lehane
Do Butlers Burgle Banks? P. G. Wodehouse
Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Marisha Pessl
Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness. Bhante Henepola
Gunaratana
November 2006
Housekeeping vs. The Dirt. Nick Hornby
Mindfulness in Plain English. Henepola
Gunaratana
Chips off the Old Benchley. Robert Benchley
Shakedown Beach.
Eric Dezenhall
Wanting Enlightenment is a Big Mistake. Seung Sahn
The Way to Win: Taking the White House in
2008. Mark
Halperin and John F.
Harris
October 2006
The Sirens of Titan. Kurt Vonnegut
Hundred-Dollar Baby. Robert Parker
Lolita. Vladimir
Nabokov
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. Michael Lewis
How to Raise an Ox. Francis Cook
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Shunryu
Suzuki
September 2006
Pornocopia.
Laurence O'Toole
On Bullshit. Harry
G. Frankfurt
A Drink Before The War. Dennis Lehane
Mount Appetite.
Bill Gaston
Friendship: An Expose. Joseph Epstein
The Substance of Style. Virginia
Postrel
Shutter Island.
Dennis Lehane
Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories. Chuck
Palahniuk
August 2006
The Omnivore's Dilemma. Michael Pollan
The Ruins. Scott
Smith
Buddhism is Not What You Think. Steve Hagen
Pro Football Prospectus 2006. Aaron Schatz
One Party Country.
Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten
I also started on the
last book by P.G. Wodehouse featuring the character
Jeeves. Once I finish it, I'll have read all of
Wodehouse's Jeeves
stories . Finding
all of the books has been something of a challenge, but
it was well worth it. Wodehouse was a genius of reserved
English comedy, and I feel really lucky to have
accidentally stumbled across his work. This is great
stuff.
July 2006
An Army of Davids.
Glenn Reynolds
The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi. Susan Moon
Enlightenment Blues. Andre van der
Braak
Blue Screen.
Robert B.
Parker
March 2006
Arthur and George.
Julian
Barnes
February 2006
Cell. Stephen
King
The Happiness Hypothesis. Jonathan Haidt
Benjamin Franklin.
Walter
Isaacson
January 2006
Next Man Up. John
Feinstein
The River of Doubt. Candice Millard
Ordinary Mind.
Barry
Magid
November 2005
No Country for Old Men. Cormac Mccarthy
October 2005
Me Talk Pretty One Day. David Sedaris
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Edmund
Morris
September 2005
Mornings on Horseback. David
Mccullough
Theodore Roosevelt. Louis
Auchincloss
School Days.
Robert B. Parker
Pay Attention, For Goodness' Sake. Sylvia
Boorstein
August 2005
Everything Arises, Everything Falls Away. Ajahn Chah
The Historian.
Elizabeth Kostova
My Friend Leonard.
James Frey
It's Up to You: The Practice of Self-Reflection on the
Buddhist Path.
Dzigar
Kongrul