This year in reading has begun spectacularly with H.G. Parry's The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door.  It is as if Brideshead Revisited had been written by Diana Wynne Jones, with a dash of Sara Paretsky - her Camford is much stranger and more sinister than Oxbridge but just as drenched in nostalgia for the present even as it is lived, the characters are distinctive and endearing, and the plot is full of twists and suspense; Rivka Galchen's Little Labors is a tiny memoir/fragmentary essay/pillow book about early motherhood, all about the rhythm - of the life but also the prose - that made me want to read Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book again and maybe write one myself; Otherhood, essays on not being a mother, edited by Alie Benge, Lil O'Brien and Kathryn van Beek, various perspectives and stories, all absorbing, some especially so; More Miracle Than Bird, by Alice Miller, the story of Georgie Hyde-Lees and her relationship with Yeats, a strange story, told in a way that makes it both completely plausible and unsettlingly strange, hard even to know if the marriage represents a happy ending or not, except that I think a happy ending is what you have to make of an ending, an ending that is after all also always a beginning; What Language Do I Dream In, a memoir, by Elena Lappin, about growing up with many changes of country and language and the life of a translator who continues to move from language to language, told in engagingly short chapters, maybe more of them than would have made the perfect book; Music for the Dead and Resurrected, by Valzhyna Mort, spooky, incantatory poems; The Long Form, Kate Briggs, a book at first I sort of skimmed, then became more and more absorbed by, a detailed account of one day in the life of a young mother and newborn baby, in which almost nothing happens, and even the description of the book she is reading is a description of what happens in the book past the point where she gets up to, and the thinking that takes up so much of the novel, thinking about the novel form itself, is not so much the protagonist's own thinking but the narrator's in a way that I would expect to put me off but didn't at all; Finding a Likeness: How I got Somewhat Better at Art, Nicholson Baker, unexpectedly boring and I think his heart wasn't in it - was in the drawing, maybe, but not the book, an obligation after a successful book proposal, mostly just perfunctory captions for his drawings; Bound: A Memoir in Making and Remaking, by Maddie Ballard, a very small but somehow expansive and very peaceful book about sewing that I really loved; Hanging Out, Sheila Liming, about the different ways and places we can - and should! - hang out, with some good stories along the way, as in all good hanging out; Donna Leon, Wilful Behaviour (that title is a pun, and not a good one), always good (I suppose?) to re-enter the world of Brunetti, and his wife Paola, but this particular plot was not compelling and the case itself was just sad, really, a saddening read; The Adult, Bronwyn Fisher - I really loved this strangely deadpan, flat narrative about a strangely dispassionate eighteen year old caught up in a passionate relationship with an older woman, although, the older woman only being 27, I thought of her, too, as a child, almost, and this complicated my sense of the novel's judgement of her, a judgement, however, which was never quite made so I can't quite work out if it was my judgement I was resisting all along, but in any case, I was happy with the way it worked out for everyone involved, and I also loved the scenes between mother and daughter, the mother's way of getting things right while getting things wrong felt beautifully observed; Gabor Mate, Scattered Minds, on ADD, much of which rang very true, some of which I am of two (scattered) minds about; What Your Chickens Want You To Know, Andrea Graves, a guide to keeping chickens informed by both love and evolutionary biology; The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting, Evanna Lynch, an account of  her adolescent anorexia, brave and generous in its honesty, unsparing of her younger self but not unkind, and the tenderness she allows you to feel for her own younger self would help anyone I think dealing with the illness in themselves or others; Martin Gayford, How Painting Happens (And Why It Matters), a beautiful book full of reproduced paintings, and Gayford is always interesting in what he says about them and the discussions he has with the painters themselves; I will get up off of, Simina Banu, a book of poems, all starting with that opening phrase, about what's  stopping her getting up off of her chair, her monobloc, a useful word for a chair if you were writing a book with only the vowel o; Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook, her latest Jackson Brodie novel and very funny, with a twisty plot and Agatha Christie-like country house setting, but really not Agatha Christie like at all thank goodness; Remember Me: 140 Artists' Ideas for Planet Earth, maybe someone could find something in it, I didn't though I like the idea of it; Peter Schjeldahl, The Art of Dying, "I find myself thinking about death less than I used to"; George Eliot's Middlemarch, an extended summer reading project as part of a Middlemarch reading club, such a multi-faceted novel that discussions were endlessly interesting, as our views on characters shifted and changed, and we thought about the novel as a form, and the narrator's role, and corridors and windows and the accidents of timing and chance; here, also, I have to admit to having read all six books in the Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series by Maryrose Wood, all of which I thoroughly recommend, especially book 4 featuring dancing chickens; Skeletons, poems by Deborah Landau, most of which share the title "Skeleton" and are eight lines long and yes, are about mortality, but also about so much else, and are interspersed with poems of various length called "Flesh" that yes, are about desire and the pleasures of the body, but also about so much else; Story of a Poem, Matthew Zapruder, a memoir centred around the writing of a poem, actually about writing several poems,  including a lot of not very inspiring drafts, but full of inspiring stories about writing, and about fatherhood and about what it is to be in the world and what to do with different kinds of ambition and different forms love takes, all written with a kind of urgent simplicity I really love; Jenny Frame, The Countess, "reading for a friend," no really, a rather lame romance novel in which the butch/femme relationship is way too heteronormative and in which there is no real suspense because they talk about their feelings all the way through; Couplets, Maggie Millner, a much more entangled romance plot, and written in rhyming couplets, my sort of thing and I loved some of the rhymes, a little less than I would have thought I would; Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett, just so....so!  Bonkers and brilliant and boring except for that it isn't, somehow enthralling about the act of eating bananas for breakfast, completely voice-driven in the most wonderful way, a novel/series of stories about nothing very much at all; Small Rain, Garth Greenwell, my other Autumn obsession, can I keep saying books are enthralling, yes, and this was one of the most enthralling books I've ever read, a novel about a hospitalisation for a ruptured aorta, caught up in the strange time-warp of intense pain, somehow finding the poetry in this, with one of the loveliest parts of the book a five page meditation on a poem about a sparrow (Oppen's, not Catullus's); What We Owe the Future, William Macaskill, a logical argument for long-term thinking, which I follow, and agree with, in principle, but I do not live by principle alone, but I can live by most of these principles and I do so want to make the world a better place more than I make it a worse one; Art Monster, Marin Kosut, a somewhat eccentric, choppy, chaptery account of what the New York Art Scene is like for the unsuccessful or less successful artist, a likeable, approachable, sometimes funny, often searingly sad account of an art life that still slightly makes me want to have been an artist as if being a poet is not impoverishing enough (it isn't, very); In My Time of Dying, by Sebastian Junger, an extraordinary account of his near death (the "What" chapter) and an even more extraordinary discussion of the possibility of an afterlife (the "If" chapter), more terrifying than consoling in its analysis of the implications of quantum physics and the entanglement of particles - we can wipe out everything in an instant including not only the future but even the past; a re-reading of Proxies, the essay collection by Brian Blanchfield, which I haven't read for enough years it warrants a re-listing, these wonderful, plummeting essays which show how a person is made up of the thoughts they have and books they have read, as clearly as Karl Ove Knausgaard shows that to be human is to live in a moment, in a world of sensation; I've also been re-reading Blanchfield's poems in A Several World, the only poetry collection of his I  own (this is why it is important to own poetry collections), which do repay re-reading, and demand to be read slowly, and attentively, ideally with others, talking about the intricacies of them - Blanchfield himself admits to being "a poet's poet" and it is true,  he is no Billy Collins or Mary Oliver; Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic, a fierce, terrible, beautiful verse novel of ordinary people in wartime - "what is a child? a quiet between two bombardments"; The Next American Essay, John D'Agata, such an influential anthology I found that I already know most of the essays; Truth in Nonfiction, edited by David Lazar, a collection of really thought provoking and sometimes quite alarming essays about the difficult ethics of writing about the self and, inevitably, others; The art of Subtext, Charles Baxter,  with lots of detailed readings of odd passages of literature; Helen Garner, The Season, about football but also about being a grandmother when the grandchildren are growing up, and as engaging as all her writing always is; Ongoingness, the end of a diary, Sarah Manguso writing about keeping a diary in fragmentary pieces that are not at all like the diary entries she is describing but not including; The Guardians, Sarah Manguso's memoir about the death of a friend, a re-reading to see how it works structurally, the movement from narrative to reflection and back, the shifts in time, the aphoristic endings to many of the sections that look ahead to her 300 Arguments; Pride and Prejudice, an accidental re-reading of Jane Austen's novel which I just picked up to check for some details I wanted to remember and then got caught up in, as happens, always surprised with every reading how different a book it has become since I last read it, how differently Darcy's letter reads, and, this time, even how differently Elizabeth herself seems to me, so lacking really in purpose or interests apart from her judgements of other people, even her piano playing something she does as an accomplishment, with no real interest, it seems, in the music itself, and, for all her concern with morality, her one real interest, she is remarkably uncurious, really, even about morality as something you might think about and contest, about the philosophy of morality; Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, by Christian Wiman, whose elliptical, taut poetry occasionally strikes such a chord, but this is different, occasionally tender, occasionally profound, but only occasionally; The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates, essays on being a writer, travelling to Dakar, and then to Palestine, urgent, vivid reporting, but it is the reflective, vulnerable, uncertain writing about being in Dakar I loved reading most; Jane Austen's England, Roy and Lesley Adkins, for a project, full of social detail from the Regency period but best are the quotes from contemporary diarists; Torrey Peters Detransition Baby, a kind of contemporary Jane Austen, a comedy of manners, with touches of tragedy and a piercing realism, which could have ended with a more Jane Austen resolution, please, even though there is an aesthetic satisfaction in the ending; Camp Austen, Ted Scheimman, an extended magazine article really but a sweetly affectionate account of Jane Austen fandom and its crossover with academic Austen study; The Silence Factory, Bridget Collins, a strange, inventive, dark fantasy about the factory farming of spiders, that I somehow was less compelled by than her earlier works, perhaps because it was less emotion-driven, though there was a romance, but one I didn't quite believe in; A hobby of mine, Rishi Dastidar, which I really did find completely captivating, to the extent that I dreamed about it all night, which you wouldn't think you could do with what is a kind of conceptual art piece, but I did, I dreamed about  a hobby of mine being dreaming about a hobby of mine, truly! Perfection, by Vincenzo Latronico, a strange novel, about what it is to live a perfect life, as it would look on Instagram, about a hollowness at the heart of it, but is it to do with the way the life is lived or the way it is perceived and experienced? Told oddly, like a description of a novel, not the novel itself, with no dialogue, all recapitulation of events as if they had already taken place, as of course in most fiction they have, while never having had.  It ought to be almost unreadable, like Alain de Botton's un-novel novel about marriage, but I found it hard to put down, not that I was trying to!  I really liked it, though I found it disquieting, as I was reading and also afterwards, to think about - and you do want to think about it, it is a novel that provokes thought; Jill Climent, Consent, her memoir revising her earlier memoir about her marriage, from a very young age, to her much older husband, including excerpts from the earlier memoir printed as they were, but now questioned, from a different political stance.  This I really did find difficult to read; Sense and Sensibility, perhaps my favourite Jane Austen? with the funniest satire, of John Dashwood's good intentions and even better, Robert Ferrar's purchase of his toothpick case, and while I did find the piling on of Willoughby's villainy rather too much, it was needed to explain what would otherwise have been the so much greater villainy of his not loving Marianne; October's Child, Linda Bostrom Knausgaard, her account of her breakdown and hospitalisation, told with an oddly raw urgency that is also somehow oddly dispassionate, yet it does hold attention; Under the Henfluence, a book about chicken-keeping, rather a mixture of anecdote and facts, more interesting in some spots than others; If you should fail: A book of solace, Joe Moran, which I hoped I would find more consoling than I did, but my own shames and failures seem so particularly mine that somehow thinking about others' doesn't help; Straight Acting: The many queer lives of William Shakespeare, by Will Tosh, about Shakespeare's queer sexuality in the context of Renaissance culture; Swallow the Ghost, by Eugenie Montague, an oddly structured novel, in three quite different parts, a sort of murder mystery but not really. I liked the first part best, the story of the girl murdered between part one and two, with its odd repetitions that had me checking I wasn't reading the same page twice; On the Calculation of Volume, Solvej Balle, a novel I really loved, from the very start, with the quietly disturbing idea of a person trapped in a single, repeating day, and her efforts to get out of it, or reconcile to it, and what it does to your relationships with others, a very personal, isolating dystopia of your own that is also, almost, a utopia - it would be, I think, for most animals, for my cat for instance who would love every day to be exactly the same (I think​?), so perfectly realised and beautifully shaped and so haunting that I rather wish it wasn't the part of a seven-part series, which also means we know the answer to the  question the novel ends on, so beautifully ambiguously; Rose Tremain, Absolutely and Forever, the saddest, sweetest, funniest, most beautifully constructed romance, like a Shakespearean romance which doesn't work out, or not really, or not for everyone, which is true, come to think of it, of a Shakespearean romance, we just don't usually centre the story of who is left over; Anna James, Chronicles of Whetherwhy: the age of enchantment, a nicely worked out children's fantasy; No Cure for Being Human, Kate Bowler, a reckoning with existential dread, simply told and honestly worked through; The Last Journey, Stacy Gregg's brilliantly gripping children's story of cats on the run, terrific to read and obviously perfect for a massive cinema hit when (surely) someone makes it into a film; A Symphony of Queer Errands, Rachel O'Neill, a masterpiece of weird inventiveness; The Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh, a twisty, dark fairy-tale I really liked; Who Wants to Live Forever, Hanna Thomas Uose, an alarmingly plausible novel, with the starting premise of the invention of a new drug that would extend the human lifespan for two or so hundred years, looking into the implications through the stories of well realised characters, and I was interested even if somehow not as compelled as I would have thought I would be, maybe only because I am reading so many things at once; Screen Tests, Kate Zambreno, many very short essays, called "Stories," and four long essays, made up of even shorter fragments, that do amount to something in the end, but I like the shortest essays best - I am definitely still very interested in brevity, I find; Spring, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, as captivating as the first time I read it, the story of a single day in the life of a father of small children; Persuasion, continuing my rereading of Jane Austen, still with the same mixed feelings I seem to be having towards her writing, on the one hand, completely caught up always in the reading, and totally invested in the romance between the main characters, but on the other hand, feeling at a remove from Austen's judgements and judgementalism, and the judgements of class and status in particular, which, I know, she too judges, when the class deference becomes itself ignoble, but this too is a class judgement, just a more idealistic, more nineteenth century rather than eighteenth century judgement of class as a set of values and not just - but still also - a question of birth and money; I also do not find Anne a particularly sympathetic character, for all her selfless nursing of others and for all her harbouring of secret judgements she tactfully keeps to herself (sorry Persuasion lovers! I also don't like Anne Bronte); Rob Doyle, Autobibliography, but not quite really an autobiography of reading, a set of brief readings made over the course of the year interspersed with biographical stories of the reading history; A Book of Delights, Ross Gay, short essays of appreciation for all sorts of things, a terrific model for a form of writing that I think might be more fun to write than read; I remember, Joe Brainard, which I've known without having read it, and of course I like it, as I already did; Charles Handy, The View from Ninety, a bookyou can read when you are wanting an extra grandfather; Brian Dillon, Suppose a Sentence, really very lovely readings of sentences and books; Unhallowed Halls, Lili Wilkinson, very much genre fantasy, or genre Dark Academia; The Shapeless Unease: A year of not sleeping, by Samantha Harvey, whose Orbital I am still only part way through but this!  This was un-put-down-able, a mesmeric account of a year of insomnia, reading it was like a waking nightmare, and yet, somehow, I found it weirdly soothing to read, maybe because I am sleeping quite well myself, even falling asleep as I read this book on into the night, not wanting to stop; On the Bullet Train with Emily Bronte, Judith Pascoe, travels with Wuthering Heights, which becomes even stranger in translation; Moral Ambition, Rutger Bregman, which I read approvingly; Mild Vertigo, Mieko Kanai, about listlessness, which I often find rivetting, and I did like the minute details of daily life, but was not rivetted; Code Grey: Life, death and uncertainty in the ER, Farzon Nahvi, because medical emergencies are somehow soothing to read about, putting daily life in some kind of perspective; The Puzzle Solver: A scientist's desperate hunt to solve Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Tracie White, compellingly told, and an essential story to cover, with some promising leads, but no solution, yet; What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, Daniel Pool; The Truants, Kate Weinburg, beginning with a sex scene in a hearse and getting darker and twistier from then on; Emily Tesh, The Incandescent, more dark Academia fantasy, this one told from the perspective of a teacher not a student, which I liked for the weary realism of its accounts of marking, managing student emotion and constant monitoring of the protective wards set up around the school, combined with the whimsical quirkiness of the fantastic elements; H.G. Parry, A Far Better Thing, ending the year as I began it, with a Parry novel, and this perhaps the best yet - though I always say that!  A brilliantly strange and absorbing fantasy take on Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, with eerie echoes, there in the Dickens as well, with the inflammatory politics of the present day, and with the essential kindness and generosity that characterises all of Parry's writing;