The following list catalogs what I read over the course of the past year. Broken down into four sections–fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and significant articles and essays–this list outlines the range of texts I read during 2017. It is not comprehensive; there were many other titles I read. But these are the ones that stick out.
Fiction
1. Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy
2. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
3. Point Omega, Don DeLillo
4. NW, Zadie Smith
5. Fat City, Leonard Gardner
6. Junky, William S. Burroughs
7. Seize the Day, Saul Bellow
8. Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coatzee
9. Eustace Chisholm and the Works, James Purdy
10. The Emerald Light in the Air: Stories, Donald Antrim
11. Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
12. The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
Nonfiction
13. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
14. The Hero with A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
15. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, T.D. Max
16. Paul's Boutique (33 1/3 Series), Dan LeRoy
17. How to be Alone, Jonathan Franzen
18. Olympia (BFI Film Series), Taylor Downing
19. Five Moral Pieces, Umberto Eco
20. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert
21. A History of the World in 6 Glasses, Tom Standage
22. The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History, Jonathan Franzen
23. Pulp Fiction (BFI Film Series), Dana Polan
24. Brazil (BFI Film Series), Paul McAuley
25. Taxi Driver (BFI Film Series), Amy Taubin
26. Farther Away: Essays, Jonathan Franzen
27. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace
28. Bad Feminist: Essays, Roxane Gay
29. Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag
30. The Velvet Underground and Nico (33 1/3 Series), Joe Harvard
31. Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction, Catherine Wilson
32. Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction, James Fulcher
33. Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible, Joseph A. Amato
34. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities, Stephen Jay Gould
35. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus
36. We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Poetry
37. The Angle of Yaw, Ben Lerner
38. The Dream of a Common Language, Adrienne Rich
39. Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine
40. Prelude to a Bruise, Saeed Jones
Essays + Articles
41. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (1984), Michel Foucault
42. “The System of Collecting” (1994), Jean Baudrillard
43. “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional” (1995), bell hooks
44. “The Death of the Author” (1967) , Roland Barthes
45. “The Rise of Fictionality” (2006), Catherine Gallagher
46. “Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? Parts 1-3” (2007), Errol Morris
47. “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” (1959), C.P. Snow
48. “‘The Two Cultures’ Today” (1994), Roger Kimball
49. “Modernity versus Postmodernity” (1981), Jürgen Habermas
50. “Why Does Fred Sandback's Work Make Me Cry?” (2006), Andrea Fraser
51. “American Action Painters” (1952), Harold Rosenberg
52. “The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense” (1998), Arthur C. Danto
DS Mangus
Artist / Designer / Writer
