Category: Books

In 2017, I read 247 books, 214 of them for the first time. My top 31 in categories and then roughly in order are:

Novels

1. William T. Vollmann, Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (2001)
2. Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora (2015)
3. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
4. Henrietta Rose-Innes, Nineveh (2011)
5. Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928)
6. Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994)
7. Mohammad Rabie, Otared (2016)
8. Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (2013)
9. Shirley Jackson, The Sundial (1958)
10. Gwyneth Jones, Proof of Concept (2017)
11. Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo (2010)
12. Amir Tag Elsir, Telepathy (2015)
13. William T. Vollmann, Europe Central (2005)
14. Richard House, The Kills (2013)
15. Wu Ming, Manituana (2009)

Short stories

1. Sherman Alexie, The Lone-Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993)
2. M. John Harrison, You Should Come With Me Now (2017)

Comics

1. David F Walker, Sanford Greene, Flaviano, Lee Loughridge, John Rauch, Power Man and Iron Fist: The Boys Are Back In Town (2016)
2. Keziah Jones and Native Maqari, Captain Rugged (2014)
3. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Brian Stelfreeze, et al., Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, books 1–3 (2016–17)

Poetry

1. John A. Williams, Safari West: Poems (1998)

Non-fiction

1. China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (2017)
2. Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2015)
3. WReC, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (2015)
4. Dan Hassler-Forest, Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics: Transmedia Worldbuilding Beyond Capitalism (2016)
5. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Anthropocene (2016)
6. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015)
7. Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (2015)
8. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (2016)

2017 Portnoy compliancy figures
Titles by straight white men writing in English = 97
Titles by all of the rest of the world except straight white men writing in English = 124 (including just 54 titles by women)
Titles by multiple authors which thus do not fit these distinctions = 25

The full list of 2017’s 247 titles
Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (1964)
–. No Longer at Ease (1960)
–. Things Fall Apart (1958)
Sherman Alexie, The Lone-Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993)
Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)
Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky (2016)
Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013)
John Arcudi, Brian Michael Bendis, Mike Benson, Adam Glass, Pepe Larraz, Frank Miller, Dalibir Talajic, Billy Tan, Herb Trimpe, Lenil F Yu, Luke Cage: Avenger (2016)
Isaac Asimov, ed., More Soviet Science Fiction (1962)

Angela Baldassarre, Reel Canadians: Interviews from the Canadian Film World (2002)
Amiri Baraka, Dutchman (1964)
–. The Slave (1964)
Julian Barnes, England, England (1998)
Stephen Baxter, Voyage (1996)
Paul Beatty, The Sellout (2015)
Lauren Beukes, Dale Halvorsen, Ryan Kelly and Eva De LA Cruz, Survivors’ Club (2015–16)
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, After the Future (2011)
–. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (2012)
Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata (1985)
Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star (1909)
Roberto Bolaño, Monsieur Pain (1999)
Arna Bontemps, Sad-faced Boy (1937)
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Christopher Brookmyre, Quite Ugly One Morning (1996)
Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (1964)
John Edward Bruce, The Black Sleuth (1907–09)
Paul Buhle and David Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left (2001)
Andrew M Butler, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2014)

Terry Carr, ed., Universe Three (1973)
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (1999)
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, To Speak the Truth (1992)
Shadreck Chikoti, Azotus the Kingdom (2015)
Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015)
JM Coetzee, Foe (1986)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze, Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, book one (2016)
–. Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, book two (2017)
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Brian Stelfreeze, Chris Sprouse, Jonathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti, Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, The People’s Revolution (2017)
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907)
Iver P. Cooper, 1636: Seas of Fortune (2014)
James Crumley, The Wrong Case (1975)
–. The Last Good Kiss (1978)
–. Dancing Bear (1983)
Barry Curtis, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (2008)
George F. Custen, Twentieth Century’s Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culure of Hollywood (1997)

Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994)
Kamel Daoud, The Meersault Invertigation (2013)
Rjurik Davidson, Unwrapped Sky (2014)
Junot Díaz, Drown (1996)
–-. ed., Global Dystopias (2017)
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, eds, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007)
Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave (1845)
Sonya Dorman, Planet Patrol (1978)
Rachel Dwyer, Bollywood’s India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Contemporary India (2014)

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
Scott Eyman, The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926–1930 (1997)

John M. Faucette, The Age of Ruin (1968)
–. Black Science Fiction (2002)
–. Crown of Infinity (1968)
–. Disco Hustle (1978)
–. Siege of Earth (1971)
–. The Warriors of Terra (1970)
Jessie Redmon Fauset, Plum Bun (1928)
James Felder, Jaime Campis, John Ostrander, Roger Stern, Joe Bennett, Pasqual Ferry, Stephen Jones and Gabe Alberola, Luke Cage and Iron Fist and Heroes for Hire, volume 1 (2016)
Ellen Feldman, Scottsboro (2008)
Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (2015)
Audrey Fisch, The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative (2007)
Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (2016)
Rudolph Fisher, The Walls of Jericho (1928)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
Eric Flint and David Carrico, 1636: The Devil’s Opera (2013)
Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis, 1635: A Parcel of Rogues (2016)
Eric Flint and Charles E Gannon, 1635: The Papal Stakes (2012)
Eric Flint and Charles E Gannon, 1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies (2014)
Eric Flint, Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett, 1636: The Viennese Waltz (2014)
John Bellamy Foster, Richard York and Brett Clark, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (2011)
Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (2016)

Ed Guerrero, Do The Right Thing (2001)

Julian Jason Haladyn, Boredom and Art: Passions of the Will to Boredom (2015)
Edmond Hamilton, The Hidden World (1929)
–. The Other Side of the Moon (1929)
–. Return to the Stars (1968)
–. The Star Kings (1949)
Ian Hamilton, Writers in Hollywood, 1915–1951 (1990)
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
–. The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964)
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Anthropocene (2016)
Nick Harkaway, Tigerman (2014)
Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark (2001)
M. John Harrison, You Should Come With Me Now (2017)
Dan Hassler-Forest, Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics: Transmedia Worldbuilding Beyond Capitalism (2016)
Richard Heinberg, Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Decline in Earth’s Resources (2007)
DuBose Heyward, Porgy (1925)
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (1998)
Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (2016)
Richard House, The Kills (2013)
Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter (1930)
–. The Ways of White Folks (1933)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Aamer Hussein, Turquoise (2002)
George Hutchinson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (2007)

F Abiola Irele, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel (2009)
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)

Julian Jackson, La Grande Illusion (2009)
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
–. The Sundial (1958)
Harriet A Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861)
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981)
Tove Jannson, The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945)
NK Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms (2010)
–. The Kingdom of Gods (2011)
–. The Killing Moon (2012)
–. The Shadowed Sun (2012)
–. The Awakened Kingdom (2014)
–. The Fifth Season (2015)
–. Shades in Shadow (2015)
–. The Obelisk Gate (2016)
–. The Stone Sky (2017)
Gwyneth Jones, Proof of Concept (2017)
James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
Keziah Jones and Native Maqari, Captain Rugged (2014)

William Melvin Kelley, A Different Drummer (1959)
–. A Different Drummer (1959)
–. dem (1967)
Rachael King, The Sound of Butterflies (2006)
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (2014)
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014)

Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy, and Other Studies (1883)
Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)
–. Passing (1929)
Victor LaValle, Big Machine (2009)
– The Ballad of Black Tom (2016)
John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War (1965)
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy (2015)
David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue (1979)
David Levering Lewiss, ed., The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (1994)
John Ajvide Lindquist, Let the Right One In (2004)
Ivy Litvinov, She Knew She Was Right (1971)
Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (2002)
Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo (2010)
James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity (2006)
Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History (2015)
Roger Luckhurst, ed., Science Fiction: A Literary History (2017)

Graham McCann, Bounder! The Biography of Terry-Thomas (2008)
Ian McEwan, The Child in Time (1987)
Jimmy McDonough, Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer (2005)
Tom McDonough, ed., Boredom: Documents of Contemporary Art (2017)
Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928)
Marc McLaurin, DG Chichester, Gregory Wright, Scott Benefiet, Paris Cullins, Brian Pelletier, Richard Pace, Kirk Van Wormer and Steven Butler, Luke Cage: Second Chances, volume two
Shawn Malley, Excavating the Future (2018)
Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2015)
George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (2014)
Pamela Marvin, Lee: A Romance (1997)
Mark Maslin, Global Warming (2014)
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (2005)
China Miéville, London’s Overthrow (2012)
–. October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (2017)
Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011)
George Monbiot, How Did We Get Into This Mess? Politics, Equality, Nature (2017)
Michael Moorcock, The Brothel on Rosenstrasse (1982)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World (2015)
Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (2000)

Kim Newman, Quatermass and the Pit (2014)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986)
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011)
Flora Nwapa, Efuru (1966)

Geoffrey O’Brien, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir, expanded edition (1997)
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (1990)
Nnedi Okorafor, Binti: Home (2017)
–. Lagoon (2015)
John Ostrander, Joe Edkin, Pasqual Ferry, Scott Kolins, Martin Egeland, Mary Mitchell, Derece Aucoin and Chris Renaud, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and the Heroes for Hire, volume 2 (2017)

Alison Peirse, After Dracula: The 1930s Horror Film (2013)
Andrew Pulver, Night and the City (2010)
Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (2013)
Mohammad Rabie, Otared (2016)
Ali Rattansi, Multiculturalism (2011)
Eric Rhode, Tower of Babel: Speculations on the Cinema (1966)
Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312 (2012)
–. Aurora (2015)
–. The Wild Shore (1984)
Henrietta Rose-Innes, Nineveh (2011)
Rainer Rother and Annika Schaefer, eds, Future Imperfect: Science Fiction Film (2017)

Carl Sagan, Contact (1985)
Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria (2013)
William W Savage, Jr., Commies, Cowboys, and Jungle Queens: Comic Books and America 1945–54 (1990)
George S. Schuyler, Black No More (1932)
–. Black No More (1932)
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956)
Ousmane Sembene, God’s Bits of Wood (1960)
–. Tribal Scars (1975)
Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1974)
Steven Shaviro, Digital Music Video (2017)
–. Discognition (2016)
Patrick F Sheeran, The Informer (2002)
A Sivanandan, A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance (1982)
Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man (2002)
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937)
Theodore Sturgeon, Baby Is Three: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, volume 6 (1999)
–. A Saucer of Loneliness: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, volume 7 (2001)
–. Bright Segment: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, volume 8 (2002)
–. And Now the News…: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, volume 9 (2003)
–. The Man Who Lost the Sea: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, volume 10 (2005)
Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom (1999)
Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger, eds, Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (2017)
Amir Tag Elsir, Telepathy (2015)
Jim Thompson, Bad Boy (1953)
Tade Thompson, Rosewater (2016)
Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry (1929)
Lavie Tidhar, A Man Lies Dreaming (2014)
John Timberlake, Landscape and the Science Fiction Imaginary (2018)
Peter Toohey, Boredom: A Lively History (2011)
Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015)

Peter Van Greenaway, Judas! (1972)
–. A Man Called Scavener (1978)
Verso editors, The Right to the City: A Verso Report (2017)
William T. Vollmann, Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (2001)
–. Europe Central (2005)

Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
David F Walker, Sanford Greene, Flaviano, Lee Loughridge, John Rauch, Power Man and Iron Fist: The Boys Are Back In Town (2016)
David F walker, Flaviano, Sanford Greene and Scott Hepburn, Power Man and Iron Fist 2: Civil War II (2017)
David F Walker, Nelson Blake II and Marcio Menyz, Luke Cage: Sins of the Father (2017)
Cheryl A. Wall, The Harlem Renaissance (2016)
Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (2011)
Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (1946)
Rosie Warren, ed., Salvage 4 (2017)
Haydn Washington and John Cook, Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand (2011)
HG Wells, Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905)
Donald E. Westlake, The Comedy is Finished (2012)
Walter White, The Fire in the Flint (1924)
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016)
John A. Williams, Safari West: Poems (1998)
Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859)
WReC, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (2015)
Wu Ming, Manituana (2009)

Sol Yurick, The Warriors (1965)

David Zindell, The Broken God (1992)
–. The Wild (1995)
–. War in Heaven (1998)
Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008)
Slavoj Žižek, ed., An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (2016)

 

There were some changes.

Guidelines:

1. Nothing bigger than B format (goodbye, for now, The Book of Night Women, Four Hands and Plowing the Dark)
2. Only one book larger than your head (hello The Kills)
3. One book that is vaguely related to work so that when you start to fret about work you can read it until the feeling goes away even though it is not really work (hello When Harlem was in Vogue, even if you do break guideline 1 by about 5mm)
4. At least one Eric Flint, cos he writes the buggers quicker than you can find time to read them even though they are quick reads
5. At least one omnibus (hello Crumley), cos if you start one at home you only ever get through the first book in it and put it aside to read something else and then a year later find it looking rather forlorn under a stack of other books (also,  you can count it as reading three books if you are at all competitive about that kind of thing, like Andrea is)
6. No book that might start a fight if someone sees you reading it in public (so no Dick Gregory autobiography (he called it Nigger then dedicated it to his mum, saying that whenever she the heard the word she could imagine it was just someone advertising her son’s book))
7. At least one biography (hello Pamela Marvin’s book on Lee, because guideline 6.)
8. At least one book you have been meaning to read since you bought it 25 or more years ago (hello Madison Smartt Bell)
9. The final volume of the trilogy you don’t exactly like but don’t dislike either and have been reading during long flights this year just so it is done with (hello Zindell)
10. An old thriller you’ve now carried on several trips because it is densely packed and you only had hand luggage (hello Wouk) but never got round to reading cos the other books under 9 were kinda longer than you thought
11. At least one book by that author you really like but who you kinda stopped reading several years ago when you kinda hated the middle volume of his last trilogy (and then the last volume too when you finally made yourself plough through it)
12. A fat collection of short stories cos you never read those thing when you are at home, well, you start off meaning to read one story a day or something like that and then manage to keep it up
13. Several others
14. Something by Peter Van Greenaway
15. The book Andrea has been nagging you for a couple of years to dig out of whatever box it was stored in (hello Luther Blissett, now Wu Ming)
16. The smallest book you own not written by Mao or published on Bible paper