Favorite Books of 2016

I'm not really good at introducing lists.

So here are some favorite books I read during 2016. Let me know what you think! What should I read in 2017? What were some of your favorites of the year?


Biggest surprise: The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton

Favorite book every white person should read: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Favorite book by an author I read for the first time: Austerlitz by W. G. Seabald

Most beautiful prose on fly fishing I’ve ever read (and some of the most beautiful prose period): A River Runs Through It by Norman MacLean

Favorite canonical novel I should have read a long time ago: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Favorite graphic novel: Saga: Volume 5 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Favorite novel I should have finished by now: The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa

Favorite oral history: Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

Favorite essay collection: The Death of Adam by Marilynne Robinson

Favorite short story collection: The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley


Favorite poetry collection: Requiem for Used Ignition Cap by J. Scott Brownlee

Weekly Discoveries (From a Few Months Ago)

// The Best of BBC's Planet Earth -





// Favorite Mash-Up -







// Favorite Live Stream -







// Favorite Video Essay -







// Another Favorite Video Essay -








// Favorite (And Most Necessary at the Moment) Documentary -

Favorite Books of 2015

Here are my favorite books I read in 2015:

The Musical Brain by César Aira

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community by Wendell Berry

Falconer by John Cheever

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust

I Scrape the Window of Nothingness: New and Selected Poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

Disturbances in the Field by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Memento Mori by Muriel Spark

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews