This year, I have read 304 books (300 of them for the first time):
all of the world … 137 (but only 100 women)
…except straight white men writing in English 136
and multi-authored or otherwise don’t fit 31
And here, in roughly this order, are my top 13:
M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir (2023)
Anthony Joseph, Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon (2018)
Karen Joy Fowler, Booth (2022)
Shaun Tan, The Arrival (2006)
Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (2013)
Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob (2014)
Chester Himes, Blind Man with a Pistol (1969)
Oliver Postgate, Seeing Things: An Autobiography (2000)
Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form & Emptiness (2021)
Nick Gilbert, Roadrunner: Radio On, Road Movies and the A4 (2023)
Rachel Heiman, Driving After Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb (2015)
Jessy Randall, Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science (2022)
John Dickson Carr, The Hollow Man aka The Three Coffins (1935)
The total is higher than usual, probably because fulfilling the the absurdly large book challenge of 2023 meant I overcompensated with a surfeit of graphic novels, novellas and short novels/collections, but for anyone interested, here is the complete list
Anthology of Fear: 20 Haunting Stories for Winter Nights (1988)
Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, Ace of Spades (2021)
Steve Alten, Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror (1997)
–. Meg: Origins (2011)
Perry Anderson, The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (2017)
Julia Armfield, Our Wives under the Sea (2022)
Margaret Atwood, Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain, Angel Catbird, volume one (2016)
Raffaella Baccoloni and Tom Moylan, eds, Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (2003)
Margaret Fairless Barber, The Roadmender (1900)
Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier (2019)
–. That Old Country Music (2020)
Sebastian Barry, Old God’s Time (2023)
Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (2017)
Jacques-Henri Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie (1788)
Michael Bérubé, The Ex-Human: Science Fiction and Detachment from Our Species (2024)
Tim Bradstreet et al., Robert E. Howard’s Savage Sword, volume one (2012)
Mary Bright, Keynotes (1893)
Edward Brooke-Hitching, The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History (2020)
Xan Brooks, The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times (2017)
Mikita Brottman, Offensive Films, revised edition (2005)
Eric Brown, Engineman (1994)
John Brunner, The Great Steamboat Race (1983)
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworlds and Catastrophes: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2002)
Charles Burns, Black Hole (1995–2005)
James M. Cain, The Cocktail Waitress (2012)
Italo Calvino, Adam, One Afternoon (1952)
Ramsey Campbell, The House on Nazareth Hill (1996)
Louise Candlish, Our House (2018)
John Dickson Carr, Hag’s Nook (1933)
–. The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933)
–. The Eight of Swords (1934)
–. The Blind Barber (1934)
–. Death-Watch (1935)
–. The Hollow Man aka The Three Coffins (1935)
–. The Arabian Nights Murder (1936)
–. (as Carter Dickson), The Punch and Judy Murders (1937)
–. The Crooked Hinge (1938)
–. The Dead Man’s Knock (1958)
–. The House at Satan’s Elbow (1965)
–. Panic in Box C (1966)
William Carroll, Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema (2022)
James Chapman, Dr. No: The First James Bond Film (2022)
Jason Ciaramella et al, Joe Hill’s The Cape (2012)
Kimberly Cleveland, Africanfuturism: African Imaginings of Other Times, Spaces, and Worlds (2024)
Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr, #Misanthropocene 24 Theses (2014)
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (2008)
–. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2009)
–. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay (2010)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1849–50)
Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley, Attila, My Attila! (1896)
Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class (2021)
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)
Gary Day, Class (2001)
Abigail Dean, Girl A (2021)
Kelly Sue Deconick and David Lopez, Captain Marvel: Higher, Faster, Further, More (2014)
Emma Donoghue, Room (2010)
Gardner Dozois, ed., Best New SF 7 (1993)
Alice Dunbar Nelson, Ye Game and Playe of Chesse, and Other Stories (2020)
Amantine Aurore Dupin, Indiana (1832)
Jennifer Egan, The Keep (2006)
Dave Eggers, The Every (2021)
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-wage USA (2001)
–. Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream (2005)
George Eliot, The Lifted Veil (1859)
Berit Ellingsen, Not Dark Yet (2015)
Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon et al, Preacher, volume one (1996–7)
–., Preacher, volume two (1997–8)
–., Preacher, volume three (1998)
Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night (2019)
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence (2021)
Henrietta Everett, Iras: A Mystery (1896)
Peter Falk, Just One More Thing: Stories From My Life (2006)
Mick Farren, Armageddon Crazy (1989)
Howard Fast, Tony and the Wonderful Door (1952)
Julia Constance Fletcher, The Head of Medusa (1880)
Eric Flint, The Philosophical Strangler (2001)
Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg, Toussaint Louverture: Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (2017)
Sesshu Foster and Arturo Romo, ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines (2021)
Karen Joy Fowler, Booth (2022)
Julia Frankau, Twilight (1916)
Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays To Be Privileged (2020)
Neil Gaiman et al., The Books of Magic (1990–1)
Nick Gilbert, Roadrunner: Radio On, Road Movies and the A4 (2023)
Natalia Ginzburg, A Place to Live and Other Selected Essays (2002)
Tariq Goddard, The Picture of Contented New Wealth: A Metaphysical Horror (2009)
Thomas J. Gorman, Growing Up Working Class: Hidden Injuries and the Development of Angry White Men and Women (2017)
Sean Austin Grattan, Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Fiction (2017)
Alasdair Gray, A History Maker (1994)
Isabel Greenberg, Glass Town (2020)
Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman, Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition (2017)
Assad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (2018)
Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (1933)
–. Woman in the Dark (1933)
–. The Return of the Thin Man (1935/1938)
Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (1999)
M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir (2023)
Dan Hassler-Forest, Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer (2021)
–. Janelle Monáe’s Queer Afrofuturism: Defying Every Label (2022)
Mary Hawker, Cecilia de Noël (1891)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
Terry Hayes, I am Pilgrim (2012)
Jane Healey, The Animals at Lockwood Manor (2020)
Rachel Heiman, Driving After Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb (2015)
Elyce Rae Helford and Christopher Weedman, eds, Liminal Noir in Classical World Cinema (2023)
James Herbert, The Secret of Crickley Hall (2006)
Werner Herzog, The Twilight World (2021)
David M. Higgins, Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood (2021)
Natsuo Higuchi, Takekurabe (1895)
Chester Himes, The Big Gold Dream (1960)
–. All Shot Up (1960)
–. Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965)
–. The Heat’s On (1966)
–. Blind Man with a Pistol (1969)
Robert E. Howard, Skull-Face (1929)
Dorothy B. Hughes, The Expendable Man (1963)
Rian Hughes, XX (2020)
Cédric Hugrée, Etienne Penissat and Alexis Spire, Social Class in Europe: New Inequalities in the Old World (2017)
Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre (2019)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021)
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
–. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)
Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (2005)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
Sebastien Japrisot, One Deadly Summer (1977)
Chantal Jaquet, Transclasses: A Theory of Social Non-Reproduction (2014)
Stefan Jaworzyn, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Companion (2003)
Amy Jeffs, Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain (2021)
Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle (2014)
–. Villanelle: Hollowpoint (2014)
–. Villanelle: Shanghai (2015)
–. Villanelle: Odessa (2016)
–. Killing Eve: No Tomorrow (2018)
–. Killing Eve: Die For Me (2020)
Lisa Jewell, The Family Upstairs (2019)
Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (2002)
Ragnar Jónasson, Snow Blind (2010)
Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (2011)
–. The Establishment, And How They Get Away With It (2014)
Stephen Graham Jones, Don’t Fear the Reaper (2023)
Anthony Joseph, Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon (2018)
Christina Jurado, ed., The APEX Book of World SF 5 (2018)
Danny Katch, Socialism … Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation (2015)
Geoff King, Indiewood, U.S.A.: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (2009)
–. Indie 2.0: Change and Continuity in Contemporary American Indie Film (2014)
William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman, The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World and Changed History (2013)
Hari Kunzru, The Impressionist (2002)
Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005)
–. The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006)
–. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2007)
Lastesis, Set Fear on Fire (2021)
Victor Lavalle, The Devil In Silver (2012)
Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton, eds, Beyond the Ruins: The Fight Against Environmental Breakdown (2021)
Ann Leckie, Provenance (2017)
Ann Lee, Atla: A Story of the Lost Island (1886)
Jeff Lemire, Essex County: Tales from the Farm (2008)
–. Essex County: Ghost Stories (2008)
–. Essex County: The Country Nurse (2009)
–. Sweet Tooth: Into the Woods (2009–10)
–. Sweet Tooth: In Captivity (2010)
–. Sweet Tooth: Animal Armies (2010–11)
Hervé Le Tellier, The Anomaly (2020)
Andrea Levy, Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994)
–. Never Far From Nowhere (1996)
Julia Leyda, Anthroposcreens: Mediating the Climate Unconscious (2023)
Clarice Lispector, First Stories (2015)
–. Family Ties (1960)
–. The Foreign Legion (1964)
–. Covert Joy (1971)
–. Where Were You at Night (1974)
–. The Via Crucis of the Body (1974)
–. Vision of Splendor: Light Impressions (1975)
–. Last Stories (2015)
Saci Lloyd, The Carbon Diaries: 2015 (2009)
Sarah Lotz, The Three (2014)
–. Day Four (2015)
Paul McAuley, Austral (2017)
Darren McGarvey, Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass (2017)
Maureen F. McHugh, Mission Child (1998)
Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin, Social Mobility and Its Enemies (2018)
Andreas Malm, How to Blow up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (2021)
Barry N. Malzberg, The Men Inside (1973)
–. The Gamesman (1975)
Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility (2022)
Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories (1920)
Robert Markley, Kim Stanley Robinson (2019)
Mónica Martín, The Rebirth of Utopia in 21st-Century Cinema (2023)
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (1986)
Pascal Mérigeau, Jean Renoir: A Biography (2016)
Andrew Miller, Dup Steps (2015)
Andrew Milner, Class (1999)
David Mitchell, number9dream (2001)
Michael Moorcock, London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction (2012)
Michael Moorcock et al, The New Nature of the Catastrophe (1993)
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic (2020)
–. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (2022)
Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (2013)
Bethany C. Morrow, Cherish Farrah (2022)
Bob Mortimer, And Away… (2021)
–., The Satsuma Complex (2022)
Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse, Gone Fishing: Life, Death and the Thrill of the Catch (2019)
Tom Moylan, Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation (2021)
Abir Mukherjee, A Rising Man (2016)
Benjamin Myers, The Perfect Golden Circle, or The Strange Rites of an English Summer (2022)
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (before 1021)
Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go In The Dark (2022)
Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay, eds, IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2000)
Violet Nicolson, The Garden of Kam (1901)
Claire North, 84K (2018)
Charlotte Northedge, The People Before (2022)
Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching (2009)
Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form & Emptiness (2021)
Violet Paget, A Phantom Lover (1886)
Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel (2017)
Hoa Pham, The Other Shore (2014)
Frederik Pohl, Outnumbering the Dead (1991)
Dana Polan, Pulp Fiction (2000)
Abraham Polonsky and Mitchell A. Wilson (as Emmett Hogarth), The Goose is Cooked (1940)
Oliver Postgate, Seeing Things: An Autobiography (2000)
Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, The Long War (2013)
–. The Long Mars (2014)
–. The Long Utopia (2015)
–. The Long Cosmos (2016)
Lisa Purse, Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (2013)
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009)
Jessy Randall, Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science (2022)
Ian Rankin, West Wind (1990)
Olga Ravn, The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century (2020)
Steven Rawle, Transnational Kaiju: Exploitation, Globalisation and Cult Monster Movies (2022)
Pearl Richards, Some Emotions and a Moral (1891)
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Discomfort of Evening (2018)
Rebecca Roanhorse, Tread of Angels (2022)
Adam Roberts, The This (2022)
David Roediger, Class, Race and Marxism (2017)
David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta A. Niu and Christopher T. Fan, eds, Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Forms and Formulations (2024)
Valentina Romanzi, American Nightmares: Dystopia in Twenty-First-Century US Fiction (2022)
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021)
Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (2009)
Kristin Ross, The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life (2023)
William Michael Rossetti, ed., The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori 1816, Relating to Byron, Shelley, etc. (1911)
Catherine Rottenberg, ed., This Is Not A Feminism Textbook (2023)
Jed Rubenfeld, The Interpretation of Murder (2006)
Joanna Russ, And Chaos Died (1970)
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2000–1)
–. Persepolis: The Story of a Return (2002–3)
Mike Savage, Niall Cunningham, Fiona Devine, Sam Friedman, Daniel Laurison, Lisa McKenzie, Andrew Miles, Helene Snee and Paul Wakeling, Social Class in the 21st Century (2015)
Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism (2015)
Kim Sherwood, Double or Nothing (2022)
Ludovico Silva, Marx’s Literary Style (1975)
Clifford D. Simak, Cosmic Engineers (1939/50)
–. Time Is The Simplest Thing (1961)
–. Night of the Puudly (1962)–. The Werewolf Principle (1967)
–. Why Call Them Back From Heaven (1967)
–. A Heritage of Stars (1977)
–. Catface (1978)
–. The Visitors (1980)
–. Special Deliverance (1982)
–. Brother and Other Stories (1986)
–. The Marathon Photograph (1986)
–. Off-Planet (1988)
Gail Simon and J. Calafiore, Leaving Megalopolis, volume one (2013–4)
Curt Siodmak, Hauser’s Memory (1968)
Maj Sjöwal and Per Wahlöö, The Man Who Went Up In Smoke (1966)
William Sloane, To Walk the Night (1937)
–. The Edge of Running Water (1939)
Zadie Smith, The Embassy of Cambodia (2013)
–. Grand Union (2019)
–. Fraud (2023)
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built (2002)
–. Light Perpetual (2021)
Caitlin Starling, The Death of Jane Lawrence (2021)
Evdokia Stefanopoulou, The Science Fiction Film in Contemporary Hollywood: A Social Semiotics of Bodies and Worlds (2023)
Mark Steven, Class War: A Literary History (2023)
Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm (1911)
Henry and Elizabeth Stommel, Volcano Weather: The Story of 1816, the Year Without Summer (1983)
Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or, The Murder At Road Hill House (2008)
Michael Swanwick, Griffin’s Egg (1991)
Edwin R. Sweeney, From Cochise to Geronimo: The Chiricahua Apaches, 1874–1886 (2010)
Leo Szilard, The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories (1961)
Robert T. Tally, The Fiction of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse (2024)
Shaun Tan, The Arrival (2006)
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory (2022)
William Tenn, Immodest Proposals: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, volume 1 (2001)
Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob (2014)
Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts (2015)
Tomás Vergara, Alterity and Capitalism in Speculative Fiction: Estranging Contemporary History (2024)
William T. Vollmann, Imperial (2009)
Éric Vuillard, The Order of the Day (2017)
Catriona Ward, The Last House on Needless Street (2021)
Robert Ward, Red Baker (1985)
Ruth Ware, The Turn of the Key (2019)
Rosie Warren, ed., Salvage 13: Give Dust a Tongue (2023)
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger (2009)
Tom Watson, Metronome (2022)
Hadas Weiss, We Have Never Been Middle Class: How Social Mobility Misleads Us (2019)
John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (1990)
Jack Williamson, After World’s End (1938)
Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (2014)
Aubertine Woodward Moore, Echoes from Mist-Land: Or, the Nibelungen Lay, Revealed to Lovers of Romance and Chivalry (1877)
Erik Olin Wright, Understanding Class (2015)
Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes and Gerry Canavan, eds, Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction (2022)
Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Equality (1958)
Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret (2000)
Mark Bould 