Forget the 100 books that the BBC thinks most of us won't have read. These are the books that I actually did read this year. As ever, it's not a particularly edifying list - a mixture of old and new; "literary" and trash; mostly fiction; a light dusting of "improving" books. For me, reading is less about learning and improvement and almost entirely about immersing myself in story - being the people, living the lives, exploring the places that one life on this earth (and my cautious nature) will not afford me. As I did last year, I have highlighted the books I particularly enjoyed.
There are a couple here that I thought were particularly terrible, but I'm not going to single them out!
There are a couple here that I thought were particularly terrible, but I'm not going to single them out!
Val McDermid, The Wire in the Blood
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Meera Syal, Anita and Me
E Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means
Penelope Wilcock, The Wounds of God
Jennifer Johnston, The Captains and the Kings
Paul Auster, Travels in the Scriptorium
Wm Paul Young, The Shack
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
John Bell, 10 Things they never told me about Jesus
Mary Lawson, The Other Side of the Bridge
Alexander McCall Smith, The Comfort of Saturdays
Barack Obama, Dreams from my Father
David Lodge, Deaf Sentence
Peter Owen Jones, Letters from an Extreme Pilgrim
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Maeve Binchy, The Copper Beech
Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck
Elinor Lipman, The Pursuit of Alice Thrift
Jane Brocket, The Gentle Art of Quilt Making
Adrian Plass and Jeff Lucas, Seriously Funny
Arthur Japin, The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi
Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
Rose Lynas (ed), Votewise Now
Patricia Cornwell, The Scarpetta Factor
Elizabeth Noble, The Reading Group
Deboragh Moggagh, Smile
Mary Ann Schaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn
Nicola Upson, An Expert in Murder
C P Snow, The Affair
Ian Adams, Cave Refectory Road
Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology
Mitch Albarn, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Alexander McCall Smith, The Lost Art of Gratitude
A S Byatt, The Children's Book
Richard Holloway, Looking in the Distance
Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?
Agatha Christie, Postern of Fate
Agatha Christie, The Clocks
Chris Stewart, Driving Over Lemons
Julian Barnes, Cross Channel
Madeleine Wickham, The Gatecrasher
Joanna Trollope, The Girl from the South
George Eliot, Silas Marner
Roddy Doyle, Paula Spencer
Anita Shreve, Testimony
Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
Wow! That's an impressive list. I've only read 6 of them, including the ones we've read together. Never having been successful at keeping my own list, I've added a page to my blog to see if it helps me do any better this year.
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