This is a ranked list of the books I finished reading in 2021:

1. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
2. Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
3. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
4. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
5. Hard Times, Charles Dickens
6. As You Like It, William Shakespeare
7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Unknown
8. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
9. The Old Weird America, Greil Marcus
10. Hawkeye, Matt Fraction
11. The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford
12. Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson
13. The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
14. All of the Marvels, Douglas Wolk
15. Shakey, Jimmy McDonough
16. Watching the River Flow, Paul Williams
17. Performing Artist 1960-1973, 1974-1986, & 1986-1990 & Beyond, Paul Williams
18. Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth T. Jackson
19. The ABC Murders, Agatha Christie
20. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, Donald Richie
21. Alright Alright Alright, Melissa Maerz
22. When We Were Good, Robert Cantwell
23. Bob Dylan, Greil Marcus
24. Sketches by Boz, Charles Dickens
25. Neil Young: Love to Burn, Paul Williams
26. Hellboy Vol. 1, Mike Mignola
27. True Believer, Abraham Riesman
28. Revolution in the Air & Still on the Road, Clinton Heylin
29. One More Night, Andrew Muir
30. The Time Machine Did It, John Swartzwelder

And here are the books I’m still working on, in order of how long I’ve been reading them:

1. Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon
2. The Fourth World Omnibus, Jack Kirby
3. The Path to Power, Robert Caro
4. City of Quartz, Mike Davis
5. Emerson: The Mind on Fire, Robert D. Richardson
6. The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia
7. Don Quixote, Cervantes
8. American Renaissance, FO Matthiessen
9. The Ramayana: A New Retelling, Linda Egenes & Kumuda Reddy
10. James Joyce, Richard Ellman
11. Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein
12. Debt: the First 5000 Years, David Graeber
13. Crisis on Infinite Earths (plus Crossovers), Marv Wolfman, etc
14. Bach: The Learned Musician, Christoph Wolff
15. The Story of the Stone (Dream of the Red Chamber), Cao Xueqin
16. Dickens, Peter Ackroyd
17. The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens
18. Chaucer: A European Life, Marion Turner
19. The Canterbury Tales (Riverside), Geoffrey Chaucer
20. The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, Robert E. Howard
21. The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber & David Wengrow
22. The Annotated Arabian Nights, trans. Yasmine Seale
23. The Arabian Nights: A Companion, Robert Irwin
24. Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald
25. Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut
26. Norwood, Charles Portis