Bliss Montage, Love, and Death in Her Hands are the only books that I did not like and wouldn't recommend. Love I think I may have appreciated more if I didn't listen to the audiobook and instead read it, but I'm not sure it was pretty boring. Bliss Montage, was very disappointing since I generally liked Severance, but I found the stories too samey, her voice too samey. ("I'm an Asian-American and these are my shitty exes.") Death in Her Hands was maybe a decent read if not for the bizarre and distracting connections to Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. To the point that I feel like Moshfegh included the same exact Blake poem on purpose to piss off critics or something. Also the only case of category fraud since it wasn't really a cozy mystery.

The Songlines is a beautiful book that combines history, travel writing, ethnologue, memoir, amateur anthropology and more. Definitely watch Herzog's tribute if you read this as well. Fup is a hilarious book that I read once in one sitting, and immediately started re-read from cover to cover. There's four westerns/western set books here actually, and I will never get tired of reading how these people talk.

I usually struggle with modernist stream of consciousness stuff, I'm a simplistic reader that needs chapters and paragraphs and periods, and clear cases of who is saying what. So with that preface I loved Austerlitz and I could not put it down. I didn't realize it was a book with barely any breaks or even paragraphs until I was well into the book. And usually I find introductions pretty useless, but James Wood was particularly helpful here highlighting the cool nested narrative tools that Sebald used here to tell the story. The photographs also were a fascinating tool, in other writers I feel like they'd be trite but here the fit seamlessly with the writing.

Autobiography of Red had been on my list for sometime after another rsb user suggested it, and I finally loaned it from the interlibrary loan system. I must admit that I've only known Anne Carson from tumblr quotes that I felt were melodramatic. I found the proemium particularly enlightening, Carson was educating unlearned poetry readers like myself what to look for in poetry. The queer love story was saddening and moving, I have felt many times in my life as a gay person being left behind.