What I Read, and How I Did It

38 books total, which is quite a bit less than the 68 I read last year. But I have a feeling that I actually read more this year, just that more of my reading was consumed with short stories, excerpts, chapters, articles, plays (8 Shakespeare plays, for instance). I kept a partial log of all those, but it got exhausting after a while. The other part is that 19th century novels made up the largest bulk of what I read.

There are books here by people from England, Scotland, Japan, USA, Turkey, France, Germany and Australia. Only 3 were written by women. 21 were written in the 19th century, 11 in the 20th, 6 in the 21st.

The List
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
In Xanadu - William Dalrymple
Cosmopolis - Don DeLillo
Palm -of-the-Hand Stories - Yasunari Kawabata
Hard Times - Charles Dickens
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea - Yukio Mishima
Lying Awake - Mark Salzman
The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
Kokoro - Natsume Soseki
The Language of God - Francis Collins
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Mountains Beyond Mountains - Tracy Kidder
South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami
The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
Daniel Deronda - George Eliot
The Aspern Papers - Henry James
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Other Colors - Orhan Pamuk
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Washington Square - Henry James
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens
Goldfinger - Ian Fleming
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
The Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Autobiographies - Charles Darwin
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
Archive Fever - Jacques Derrida
Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Europeans - Henry James
A Fraction of the Whole - Steve Toltz

Top Ten (in no particular order)
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
The Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Other Colors - Orhan Pamuk
The Aspern Papers - Henry James

There were very few books that were easy to eliminate off-hand this year. The quality of what I read was quite high over the year! I might do another post on book covers, since that's something that's become more interesting to me over the last year. If they were in particular order, Moby Dick would be at the top as the best book I read over the whole year. In part its because its such a strange book, but especially when I was reading it in the middle of a dozen other novels in the 19th century, none of which are very similar to it at all, at least in form.

After last year's list, I made a list of what I wanted to read in the next year. Out of the ten books/authors listed I only ended up reading Dickens (much, much more Dickens than I expected) and Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. What about this year? First, I anticipate finishing Origin of Species, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, and Discipline and Punish. But here are some other titles I have sitting on my shelves that I'd like to read this year :

2666 by Roberto Bolano.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon.
Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill.
Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee.
Underground by Haruki Murakami
The Octopus - Frank Norris
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro.
All the Names - Jose Saramago.
Dona Flor and her Two Husbands - Jorge Amado.

Funny that the last three were on the list last year, too!