Give Me Your Sh*t Book Recommendations
Bring me your printed turds, your verbal filth, your huddled crap no-one should re-read
As we limp into the final day of 2022, on the off chance that it’s useful I thought I’d share a year in reading and ask for some recommendations in a new way.
For the last few years I’ve been recording what I read purely because it’s a useful output of my state of mind and a way of observing patterns in reading that I might want to break.
This year there’s been a lot more short stories than any previous years, which is a direct consequence of George Saunders’ Story Club, and of course Substack itself has dramatically improved the quality of my online information diet and reading in a way that I’m massively appreciative of. I’ve mentioned some of the publications that have made me think differently or expanded my worldview or just amused or consoled me in the last year, so please go and pay them all some good attention and subscription groats if you can stretch to it.
I’d like to thank all of these writers, but also make a request of all of you.
In 2023, dear reader, I want your tips for pure verbal garbage
After seeing this from Saint Alan Moore, this year I’m going to do something different and ask for recommendations for absolute crap. One doesn’t become a chef eating only foie gras nor a musician from never listening to dire EDM, and as a good reader it’s high time I worked some utter verbal filth into my diet.
What’s the shittest book you read this year? What noxious dog turd has somehow found its way into print that I should waste a few hours of my life on? What has been so magnificently dire that reading it will be somehow illuminating? What is the written equivalent of the sort of humiliation you normally need a dominatrix for that I should subject myself to?
Fire up those engines and fling me some filth please, I’m all ears. And Happy New Year to all of you.
2022 in Reading
Geoff Dyer - Out of Sheer Rage
Emily St John Mandel - Station Eleven
Raven Leilani - Luster
William Gibson - Pattern Recognition
Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Miklos Banffy - They Were Counted/They Were Divided/They Were Found Wanting
Oscar Wilde - The Decay of Lying
Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and The Sun
Michael Herr - Dispatches
Virgil Abloh - “Insert complicated title here”
Don Delillo - Point Omega, Mao II, Zero K
Akala - Natives
Esther Perel - Mating in Captivity, The State of Affairs
Gillian Tett - Anthro-Vision
Min Jin Lee - Pachinko
Isaac Babel - Odessa Stories
Nella Larsen - Passing
Benjamin Labutet - When We Cease to Understand The World
Brian Michael Bendis + Alex Maleev - Daredevil: Unmasked
Kyle Harper - The Fate of Rome
Marlon James - Moon Witch, Spider King
Freddy Taylor - Don’t Put Yourself on Toast
Richard Powers - The Overstory
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
Sequoia Nagamatsu - How High We Go In The Dark
Alice Rawsthorn & Paola Antonelli - Design Emergency
Raymond Quenneau - Exercises in Style
William Macaskill - What We Owe the Future
Mohsin Hamid - The Last White Man
Maggie O’Farrell - Hamnet
Blaise Pascal - Human Happiness
Gabriel Garcia Márquez - News of A Kidnapping
Zadie Smith - Feel Free
Anne Beriault - Stone Boy
Isaac Babel - My First Goose
Tillie Olsen - I Stand Here Ironing
Zora Neale Hurston - The Gilded Six Bits
Anton Chekhov - The Lady with the Dog
Manuel Muñoz - Anyone Can Do It
Jane Austen - Persuasion
Machiavelli - On Conspiracies
Dickens - A Christmas Carol
Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction
If you really want a good stinker, read no further than "Lo!" by Charles Fort. It's supposed to explain all kinds of weird phenomena with theories such as teleportation and alternate dimensions, and it's written in an insufferably smug, self-satisfied tone. The way Fort cites sources is especially obnoxious; he will "prove" his claims by saying things like "see works by noted alchemists," or something similarly vague. I couldn't get further than ten pages but a very good friend of mine who read it all the way through says it is just as bad till the end.