Happy New Year! I'm spending today lounging in front of the fire at my parents house, surrounded by cats. I thought it would be a good time to share my annual book list!
I love looking back over what I've read in a year. As usual my taste is all over the place, a mix of new and classics, heavy and light. As usual most were recommended by friends in the know, though a few were pleasant discoveries of my own. I think my favorite this year were How To Be A Woman, The Girl With The Glass Fee, The Uninvited Guests, Young Romantics, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and The White Guard.
Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Master and the Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Ugh, I couldn't even finish this one!)
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost by Ismail Kadare
Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris by Graham Robb
The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov (I guess most people prefer The Master and the Margarita? I liked that one as well but this book really stayed with me. It actually gave me a few bad dreams)
Radio Shangri-La by Lisa Napoli
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams (A re-read of an already favorite book)
Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation by Daisy Hay
The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra
Lunch in Paris: A Love Story with Recipes by Elizabeth Bard
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
Netsuke by Rikki Ducornet
Gourmet Rhapsody Muriel Barbery
The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope
The Detective by Jonathan L. Howard
The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones
A Monsters Notes by Laurie Sheck
The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner
Sunshine by Robin McKinley
The Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard
The Russian Dream Book of Color and Flight by Gina Ochsner
Owl in Love by Patrice Kindl
The Girl With The Glass Feet by Ali Shaw
The Red House by Mark Haddon (I really like everything I've read by Mark Hadden)
About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang by Adam Frank
Frnkenstein: by Mary Shelley
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling
The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran
What are some of your favorite books that you read this year?
So many books!
ReplyDeleteI've gotten out of the habit of reading novels (being a college student, there seems to only be time for non-fiction) so I'll comb through your list.
This year I loved: The Song of the Lark, Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf, and The Fourfold Way.
Reading non-school books in college is rough, I remember.
DeleteI haven't heard of any of those you've read, I'll have to look them up!
Oh I love a good book list! Looking forward to checking some of these titles out- especially the one by Mindy Kaling. My favorite reads for 2012 were The Memoir Project by Marion Roach Smith, MFK Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf, and Paul Bowels' Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue. I've been fascinated by reading older works and considering how much things have changed (or not) since those times. Happy New Year!
ReplyDeleteThe Mindy Kaling book had me chuckling out loud, it was fun. I haven't heard of any of yours, I'll have to look them up!
DeleteI LOVE MFK Fisher! She had such a way with her writing, and seemed to have such an appetite for life.You'll love her books!
DeleteEva luna by isabelle allende, it was amazing.
ReplyDeleteHaven't heard of that one, I'll have to look it up!
DeleteHow To Be A Woman was the last book I finished in 2012 - I got it for Christmas I wolfed it down in a couple of days! So good! I actually read a lot of autobiographies last year - my favorites were What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Haruki Murakami), Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal (Jeanette Winterson) and Half A Life (Darin Strauss).
ReplyDeleteHeh, yes I read most of How To Be A Woman on the plane home to my family's for the holidays. It was a nice distraction from flying!
DeleteI read What I Talk About When I Talk About Running when I started running a few years ago. It was the only Murakami book I hadn't read, and when I finished it I realized I didn't need to be a runner to read it! Enjoyed that one too!
If anyone, like you, is on Goodreads and are your "friend" you can compare books that you each read or want to read. It's pretty interesting to see.
ReplyDeleteinteresting list! :) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is one of my childhood guilty fright!
ReplyDeleteI'd never actually read it before!
DeleteI think we must have very similar taste, I love so many of these! I so enjoyed The Perilous Guard when I was younger. This year my three standout favorites were 'The Snow Child', 'The Orchardist', and 'Gillespie and I'. I also loved 'Three Weeks in December'. Now I'm off to check out the rest of the books on your list!
ReplyDeleteI will have to look into those! A client of mine recommended The Perilous Guard and I'm so glad she did, it was an enjoyable fall read while the days were all gloomy & rainy!
DeleteJulianna, you must make a goodreads account! :)
ReplyDeleteWell... I finally read Jane Eyre, The Hobbit, a bunch of Agatha Christie's books, The Complete Grimm's Fairytales.. and re-read The Wuthering Heights (one of my favorites!).
ReplyDelete