I finished 38 books this year. I'll only write about the ones that mattered — a shorter list, but more honest.
Fiction
Marilynne Robinson — Gilead (re-read, my fourth). I come back to this book when I'm stuck. Not because it teaches me how to write — it's too singular for that — but because it reminds me what fiction is for. The voice Robinson finds for John Ames is one of the most fully realised in American literature, and re-reading it this time I noticed, more than before, how much of the novel's power comes from what Ames doesn't say about himself. He's more visible in his omissions than in his direct statements.
Jenny Offill — Dept. of Speculation. I came to this late, which I slightly regret. The fragmented structure is not a gimmick; it's the only structure that could hold this particular story's mixture of banality and grief. I read it in one afternoon and then sat very still for a while.
Tove Jansson — The True Deceiver. Short, cold, precise, and strange. Jansson is most famous for the Moomins but her adult fiction is extraordinary, and this is the best of it. Two women in a snowbound village trying to outmanoeuvre each other, neither fully understanding the other's motives, possibly neither fully understanding their own. I've thought about the ending for months.
Alice Munro — Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. I read Munro slowly, a story at a time, over several weeks. She is the writer I return to most often when I'm trying to understand how short fiction handles time — how you compress years into pages and expand hours into chapters without the reader noticing the seam.
Non-fiction
Robert Macfarlane — The Old Ways. I'd put off reading this for years, slightly suspicious of the nature-writing genre, and was wrong to. Macfarlane is genuinely interested in what paths mean — how walking shapes thinking, how landscape enters memory — and the writing is precise without being showy. The chapter on the Hebrides is exceptional.
Annie Dillard — The Writing Life. Short, compressed, and more honest about the difficulty of sustained work than almost anything else I've read on the subject. The passage about weasels is in here, which I'd read in excerpt but never in context. The context matters.
Penelope Fitzgerald — The Knox Brothers. A biography of Fitzgerald's father and uncles, four extraordinary men whose careers spanned most of the twentieth century. Remarkable for the control of the prose (it's deeply researched without feeling researched) and for the gentle way it handles her own marginal presence in the story she's telling. She appears in it occasionally as a child, observing from a distance, which tells you a great deal about how she thought about herself in relation to the people around her.
Worth mentioning
The collected letters of Flannery O'Connor, which I've been reading in small doses since the spring. Her letters are funnier than her fiction, which is saying something, and more revealing about her working methods. She was very clear-eyed about the difference between what she was trying to do and what she was capable of, which is a distinction most writers prefer not to examine too closely.
Also: a secondhand copy of a 1971 anthology of Swedish short fiction that I found in March and have been reading slowly since. No single story stands out; the overall effect, accumulated over months, is of a sustained attention to the small and the coastal and the cold. It has been useful in ways I can't fully articulate yet.