I originally planned to post this for Gregorian New Years, but that didn’t happen. So then I thought, given the theme of this blog, isn’t Chinese New Year even better? So to start off my Chinese New Year celebrations, here is a list of books, stories, and essays I read during the last Chinese lunar year.

I got the idea for this list from a wonderful Belgian man named Paul who, along with his wife Monique, were my fellow English teachers at SW Jiatong University 西南交通大学 during my first year and a half in Chengdu. His lists were kept in a notebook and written with a neat hand. My handwriting is atrocious and i lose notebooks with maddening consistency, so I’ve opted for a technological solution that, so far, is working well. He only recorded books he had read. I’m trying to be a bit more inclusive–mainly as an aid for my own memory, but I hope you enjoy it as well.

To be honest, I didn’t include everything. I left out anything I only read part of, reread for the second or higher time (unless I haven’t read them since I was a child), wasn’t in English, or was specifically historical or Chinese medical in topic. That’s not meant as an insult to those books; that’s just not what this blog is really about. If I ever make a similar list for my professional blog (stephenboyanton.com) then they’ll go there. I also left out anything I read by clicking on a Facebook link. That’s not entirely fair, since I actually read some very good essays via FB links this year. Unfortunately, one of the many problems created by the digital revolution is that it’s very hard to keep track of what you’ve looked at (so I won’t expect any of you to include this blog in your lists of things you read this year). Finally, I should note that while I can encourage reading almost everything on this list, there are a few exceptions (like everything by Kafka) that I didn’t really care for.

Without further ado, here’s the list–alphabetical by author and then title:

1. Conrad Aiken, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow”
2. Sherwood Anderson, “I’m a Fool”
3. Sherwood Anderson, “I Want to Know Why”
4. W.H. Auden, Collected Poetry (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets)
5. Laura Adams Armer, Waterless Mountain
6. Margaret Atwood, “Death by Landscape”
7. Margaret Atwood, “Why do you Write?”
8. Charles Baudelaire, “The Generous Gamester”
9. Richard Bausch, “Letter to a Young Writer”
10. Elizabeth Bowen, “Tears, Idle Tears”
11. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
12. Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451
13. Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles 
14. Ray Bradbury, On Writing: Collected Talks
15. Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked this Way Comes
16. Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
17. Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer
18. Albert Camus, “The Guest”
19. Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland
20. Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking Glass
21. Lewis Caroll, “The Hunting of the Snark”
22. Joyce Cary, “A Special Occassion”
23. Willa Cather, My Ántonia
24. Willa Cather, “Paul’s Case”
25. Willa Cather, “A Wagner Matinee”
26. Anton Chekov, Selected Short Stories
27. Classic Fairy Tales (Norton Critical Editions)
28. John Collier, “Thus I Refute Beelzy”
29. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
30. Joseph Conrad, “The Inn of the Two Witches”
31. Joseph Conrad, “Nigger of the “Narcissus” (including the preface)
32. Joseph Conrad, “Youth”
33. Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer”
34. Joseph Conrad, “The Shadow Line”
35. Amy Cunningham, “Why Women Smile”
36. Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
37. Philip K. Dick, Selected Stories 
38. Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
39. Lord Dunsany, “The Guest”
40. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
41. William Faulkner, Faulkner at the University
42. William Faulkner, “Nobel Prize Address”
43. William Faulkner, “That Evening Sun”
44. Annie Finch ed., Measure for Measure (poetry anthology)
45. E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops”
46. Benjamin Franklin, “Learning to Write”
47. Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors
48. Paul Gallico, “The Enchanted Doll”
49. John Galsworthy, “The Japanese Quince”
50. Dana Gioia, “Notes on the New Formalism”
51. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
52. Graham Greene, The Quiet American
53. Graham Greene, “The Destructors”
54. Ernest Hemmingway, “Hills like White Elephants”
55. Alice Hoffman, “The Wedding of Snow and Ice”
56. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Collected Poetry (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets)
57. Langston Hughes, Collected Poetry (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets)
58. Langston Hughes, Not without Laughter
59. Michael Hurley and Michael O’Neill, The Cambridge Guide to Poetic Form
60. Zora Neale Hurston, “How it feels to be Colored Me”
61. Zora Neale Hurston, “The Conscience of the Court”
62. Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”
63. James Joyce, “A Little Cloud”
64. James Joyce, “Araby”
65. Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”
66. Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”
67. John Keats, Collected Poetry (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets)
68. Tim Kreider, “The ‘Busy’ Trap”
69. D.H. Lawrence, “The Rocking-Horse Winner”
70. Ursula Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World
71. Ursula Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
72. Ursula Le Guin, Steering the Craft
73. Ursula Le Guin, The Telling
74. Ursula Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real (short stories)
75. Ursula Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind
76. Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
77. Ursula Le Guin, Words are my Matter
78. Stanislav Lem, Solaris
79. George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblins
80. Katherine Mansfield, “Miss Brill”
81. Leo Marx, “Melville’s Parable of the Walls”
82. Charles L. McNichols, Crazy Weather
83. Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”
84. N. Scott Momaday, “The Way to Rainy Mountain”
85. Bharati Mukherjee, “The Management of Grief”
86. Flannery O’Connor, “Greenleaf”
87. Frank O’Connor, “The Drunkard”
88. George Orwell, Animal Farm
89. Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense (2nd ed)
90. Laurence Perrine, Story and Structure (2nd ed)
91. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”
92. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Pit and the Pendulum”
93. Ron Rash, “Their Ancient Glittering Eyes”
94. Phillip Roth, “Defender of the Faith”
95. “Saki” (H.H. Munro), “The Quest”
96. Jean Paul Sarte, “The Wall”
97. William Shakespeare, Macbeth
98. William Shakespeare, The Tempest
99. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
100. William Shakespeare, Sonnets
101. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”
102. Sunsan Sontag, “On Style”
103. Mark Strand and Evan Boland, The Making of a Poem
104. Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic
105. Rabindranath Tagore, “The Living and the Dead”
106. Hernando Téllez, “Just Lather, That’s All”
107. Paul Theroux, “Being a Man”
108. Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851 and 1863 versions)
109. James Thurber, “The Catbird Seat”
110. J.R.R. Tolkien, “Farmer Giles of Ham”
111. J.R.R. Tolkien, “Leaf by Niggle”
112. J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”
113. J.R.R. Tolkien, “Smith of Wotton Major”
114. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
115. H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
116. T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone
117. Thomas Wolfe, “The Lost Boy”
118. Virginia Woolf, “The Modern Novel”
119. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
120. William Butler Yeats, all of his poetry in the Norton Anthology of English Literature