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​All the Books I Read in 2014

You might think literature is a dying art, but there are more books now than ever. This year the stacks on stacks piled up around me. Here's a list, in chronological order, of what I read.

Photo via Flickr user net_efekt

The first book I read in any given year serves as a sort of header for my attitude and way of being over the next 12 months. This year, I welcomed in 2014 with a biography on Charles Manson. If any year deserved such an influence, it was this one, with so much relative strangeness passing in human life that sometimes it seems difficult to remember how to even read.

I'm finding it harder to tell if the way I am reading is changing or if the world is, or both, or neither. Regardless, there are more books now than ever, and as a result, I believe reading is more sacred now than ever. The more it feels like an arcane science, buried among the machines, the more I have to remember to do it. It's like exercise, or going to a museum—it brings on a feeling of time that seems to belong to nothing but itself. And god knows we need more of that.

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As I have in previous years, here is a not-best-of list, but everything I read following the Manson book, with some stops for thoughts on memorable highlights along the way.

Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson by Jeff Guinn

Brief by Alexandra Chasin

A Hundred Thousand Hours by Gro Dahle

The Errant Astrologers by Felipe Benitez Reyes

Tarnac by Jean-Marie Gleize

Say, Cut, Map by Ken Baumann

Hans Ulrich Obrist & Matthew Barney: The Conversation Series Vol. 27 by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli

Cartilage and Skin by Michael James Rizza

EarthBound by Ken Baumann

Goings by Gordon Lish

Expectation by Jeffrey Deshell

Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus

Rain of the Future by Valerie Meyer

Wet Land by Lucas de Lima

Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream by Kim Hyesoon

Crystal Eaters by Shane Jones

Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer by Abraham Smith

Scarecrone by Melissa Broder

Awakening to the Great Sleep War by Gert Jonke

Left Hand by Paul Curran

Gerald's Party by Robert Coover

Once I start reading something I typically like to stay with it and only it until I reach the end. For some reason with this particular Coover, I found myself drifting in and out of the narrative every five or six pages. I think it was partially a function of the the plot, which pretends to be basic—a noir-ish dinner party in which people end up getting killed in strange circumstances—but is in fact anything but. Coover's most known for his satire and deconstruction of the major campy genres, but this one in particular takes on an epic, acid-bath-like quality, more like a petri dish of absurd send ups of human behavior and destroyed takes on social custom than any kind of linear exhibit or who-dun-it? The amount of linguistic mechanics Coover packs into every page here feels like a Ulysses-sized redux of the board game Clue. It provides an orgry-like handbook of styles so dense it took me most of the year to swallow it all, and though I honestly didn't love it along the way, I've maybe thought more about the book in full than most any other I read this year. It's a nice reminder that you don't have to love something in order to be affected by it.

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Complete Minimal Poems by Aram Saroyan

The Ants by Sawako Nakayasu

Every Day Is For The Thief by Teju Cole

If I Don't Breathe, How Do I Sleep by Joe Wenderoth

The Constitution by Brian Foley

Century Swept Brutal by Zach Savich

Theoretical Animals by Gary J. Shipley

Guantanamo by Frank Smith

The Garden by Ed Steck

A Sentimental Novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet

List by Matthew Roberson

Labor by Jill Magi

Dark Back of Time by Javier Marias

The Noble Hustle by Colson Whitehead

With My Dog Eyes by Hilda Hilst

Letters from a Seducer by Hilda Hilst

Does Not Love by James Tad Adcox

Young God by Katherine Faw Morris

The Luminol Reels by Laura Ellen Joyce

Spooky Plan by Drew Kalbach

The Last Time Will Be The First by Jeff Alessandrelli

You Can Make Anything Sad by Spencer Madsen

OK by Victor Vasquez

Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled by Cassandra Troyan

The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World by Brian Allen Carr

The Illiterate by Agota Kristof

My Struggle, Vol. 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard (1/5 th)

I don't usually stop reading a book once I start it, but my struggle with My Struggle was that I don't give a shit about reading a 40-year-old's Livejournal. You were young once and wanted to fuck chicks but now you have a wife and a kid and life is hard? Cool story, bro. This book embodies everything I hate about contemporary literature: worship of the self, merciless documentation of the self, idolization of the penis, reality fetish of quasi-celebs. If this kind of thing is all that's left for the future, take me out back and shoot me.

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Works by Edouard Levé

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard

Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood

Newcomer by Nathaniel Farrell

I Live In A Hut by S.E. Smith

Place Names by Jean Ricardou

What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going by Damion Searls

Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard

The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft

Around August, I hit a wall and stopped reading for a long while. I don't know whether it was a function of time or place or context, but for some reason I couldn't keep my brain stuck for very long on any page, and began to believe I could understand to some extent how reading has been dying: There is so much you almost can't remember where to look, and when you do figure out where to look, it's hard to keep your brain there. Which is maybe the perfect state to be in when you stumble upon a collection of H.P. Lovecraft for the first time since you were 15. Rediscovering his influence was like breathing in exquisite gas: bizarre, transcendental horror tropes and paranoid ruminations; fragments of cryptic knowledge unlocking worlds hidden without our world; promise of blood but in a cosmic death-sense more than headline news murder; above all, ornate language and complex diction out the eyes—it was like this was the stuff I'd been looking for my whole life, which happened to be right where I started. God, how I wish more literature showed a Lovecraft influence over, say, Chekhov or Hemingway or whoever.

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This is the Water by Yannick Murphy

Valis by Philip K. Dick

Matt Meets Vik by Timothy Willis Sanders

Of: Vol. 1 by Ossian Foley

The Static Herd by Beth Steidle

In the Deep by Pierre Guyotat

Rome by Dorothea Lasky

Wolf In White Van by John Darnielle

Kill Manual (Kept In Lacerated Light) by Cassandra Troyan

The second of a pair of slim, mutative texts released by Troyan this year, Kill Manual maximizes the internet-influenced confession-mania archetype that kind of became a thing this year, and bends it over and fills it full of blood and cum. Shifting styles between instant message, Craigslist ad, psychoanalysis reports, all caps diatribes, stolen quotes, fragmentary death threats, and a whole other slew of stabby concrete poetry, Kill Manual takes the Sade-ian end of the oversharing shtick, turning one's own private human pain into a diorama reflecting the environments and brains that birthed it. Unlike Knausgaard, Troyan infects the struggle of the self into a living, breathing language-system, spitting and shrieking and cackling rather than just whining and worshipping, using reality's death threat against itself.

With the Animals by Noelle Revaz (reread)

The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink

John the Posthumous by Jason Schwartz

Wild Grass on the Riverbank by Hiromi Itō

Half Out Where by Joseph Aguilar

Lake of Earth by William Vandenberg

Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard

My God Is This A Man by Laura Sims

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House of Deer by Sasha Steensen

Forest of Fortune by Jim Ruland

Colony Collapse Metaphor by Philip Jenks

The Baltimore Atrocities by John Dermot Woods

A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall by Will Chancellor

Diana's Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik

Bribery by Steven Zultanski

Not far astray from the field of Troyan, Zultanski's Bribery extends the cram-the-terror-of-reality-into-an-epic-poem genre with his own take on arranging language that's full of wild sex, violence, and psychosis into a time-shattering diatribe that seems not far from if Manson had written his biography himself. Wielding lyrics that feel like a collage of all the worst shit that happened this year crammed into a single id-like brain, Zultanski totally shreds through his own American perspective by both apologizing for being a piece of shit and reveling in it, the voice of the mind of human crime in an age where you can stab someone to death and then go eat at Chili's.

No Other by Mark Gluth

The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes

I could tell from the description of this book that it would be way up my alley: A journalist tracks down a mysterious and highly regarded rare-film librarian, who, in the 90s, inexplicably burned his collection of never-before-seen films by famous directors like Welles, Lynch, and Jodorowsky. In conversation, as the journalist tries to piece together his motivation, we are made witness to a series of close descriptions of lost films, all of which somehow seem to mutate together, and in some ways share relation to a series of disappeared children among the local community. Rombes's knowledge and caretaking of film history, as well as the strange feeling that comes from imagining lost artworks by some of our greatest directors, makes this debut novel addictive reading.

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House of Coates by Brad Zellar

Discomfort by Evelyn Hampton

You Da One by Jennifer Tamayo

Binary Star by Sarah Gerard

Invisible Reveille by Carina Finn

Cats and Dogs by Andrew James Weatherhead

Apart From by M Kitchell

Tex by Beau Rice

Songs of S. by Robert Seydel

A Picture Is Always A Book by Robert Seydel

These two books were released in conjunction following the author's abrupt death at age 50 in 2011, and together document two distinct examples of his tendency to write in various adopted personas. Each book contains fragments compiled from different notebooks the author kept— Songs of S. working in the mode of a man named S., and A Picture Is Always a Book working as a woman named Ruth. The latter is particularly compelling, in that the pages of the notebook are presented in full color image, allowing the Joseph Cornell-like feel of each page's exhibit to appear as it would if you were holding the doodle-laced manuscript yourself. Descriptions of dreams here seem more like reality and the reality more like dreams, and together the effect is like an enchanted closet, an eye into a set of worlds somewhat akin to the innate privacy and incubating perspectives of Henry Darger and Emily Dickinson. It serves as a refreshing way to close a year, remembering how much pure weight can come from a single well-aimed fragment in a catalog of hell.

The Infernal by Mark Doten

Watch out for this one early next year: It feels like Doten pulled the Steeply and Marathe sections out of Infinite Jest and expanded their feel into a military database of privileged information, culling the War on Terror and Facebook's death march into a high-level rolodex of worlds within our world. A great and hopeful mark for the direction of 2015, where anything can happen.

Follow Blake Butler on Twitter.