Reading Year in Review – 2011

I finished the KJV Bible this year and, as I counted each book individually in the list below, provides and inflated figure of 123 books this year. A more realistic measurement comes from discounting all of the the biblical books except each of the gospels plus Revelation, giving a toal of 101 valid books. Pretty solid, especially given the number of great big Victorian doorstops included.

Best Book: Phineas Finn, just edging out Winter's Bone and The Stranger's Child

Worst Book: The Seven Basic Plots (Easy choice, this)

Longest Book: Dombey and Son (1040 pages)

Non-Fiction Books: 14

Australian Authors: 1 (!)

Female Authors: 25 (up from a pathetic 12 last year)

1 Can You Forgive Her? - Anthony Trollope
2 Summer Crossing - Truman Capote
3 The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery
4 Oroonoko - Aphra Behn
5 Libra - Don DeLillo
6 The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
7 Case Histories - Kate Atkinson
8 The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or the murder at Road Hill House - Kate Summerscale
9 Loving - Henry Green
10 News of a Kidnapping - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
11 Living - Henry Green
12 Raffles - E.W. Hornung
13 Party Going - Henry Green
14 Mr Standfast - John Buchan
15 Matthew
16 The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver
17 The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
18 The Story of the Night - Colm Toibin
19 Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively
20 By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept - Elizabeth Smart
21 Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges
22 Mark
23 The Unfortunate Traveller - Thomas Nashe
24 The Famished Road - Ben Okri
25 Blow Your House Down - Pat Barker
26 Luke
27 The Bone People - Keri Hulme
28 John
29 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
30 An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
31 Room - Emma Donoghue
32 Acts of the Apostles
33 Such Darling Dodos - Angus Wilson
34 Death In Venice - Thomas Mann
35 Romans
36 The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith
37 The Children Of Men - P.D. James
38 Phineas Finn - Anthony Trollope
39 1 Corinthians
40 Go Tell It On The Mountain - James Baldwin
41 2 Corinthians
42 Galatians
43 Ephesians
44 Philippians
45 Colossians
46 The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
47 1 Thessalonians
48 2 Thessalonians
49 Slow Chocolate Autopsy - Iain Sinclair & Dave McKean
50 The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England - Ian Mortimer
51 Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi - Geoff Dyer
52 Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth
53 The Island of Doctor Moreau - H.G. Wells
54 1 Timothy
55 2 Timothy
56 Titus
57 Philemon
58 Winter’s Bone - Daniel Woodrell
59 Under The Net - Iris Murdoch
60 Hebrews
61 James
62 1 Peter
63 2 Peter
64 1 John
65 2 John
66 3 John
67 Jude
68 Quarantine - Jim Crace
69 Revelation
70 Family and Friends - Anita Brookner
71 Don Juan - Lord Byron
72 The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
73 The History of Mr Polly - H.G. Wells
74 The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
75 Landscape of Farewell - Alex Miller
76 The Getaway - Jim Thompson
77 Hideous Kinky - Esther Freud
78 Mr Weston’s Good Wine - T.F. Powys
79 The Stranger’s Child - Alan Hollinghurst
80 An Education - Lynn Barber
81 A Landing On The Sun - Michael Frayn
82 Nicholas Nickleby - Charles Dickens
83 The Empty Family - Colm Toibin
84 The Matisse Stories - A.S. Byatt
85 Wish You Were Here - Graham Swift
86 Adventures in the Screen Trade - William Goldman
87 Love etc - Julian Barnes
88 Erewhon - Samuel Butler
89 Morbo; the story of Spanish football - Phil Ball
90 Mondo Desperado - Patrick McCabe
91 The Blackwater Lightship - Colm Toibin
92 Tor!; the story of German football - Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger
93 How I Escaped My Certain Fate - Stewart Lee
94 The Psychopath Test - Jon Ronson
95 Dombey and Son - Charles Dickens
96 Reflections in a Golden Eye - Carson McCullers
97 Which Lie Did I Tell? - William Goldman
98 Cheri - Colette
99 Diary - Chuck Palahniuk
100 Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
101 Deliverance - James Dickey
102 Tono-Bungay - H.G. Wells
103 The Seven Basic Plots; why we tell stories - Christopher Booker
104 Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
105 Kim - Rudyard Kipling
106 Is Heathcliff a Murderer? - John Sutherland
107 The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
108 The Happy Prince and other stories - Oscar Wilde
109 The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
110 The Big Money - John Dos Passos
111 Notre Dame of Paris - Victor Hugo
112 The Comforters - Muriel Spark
113 Innocence - Penelope Fitzgerald
114 Skinny Dip - Carl Hiaasen
115 The Soft Machine - William Burroughs
116 H.G. – The History of Mr Wells - Michael Foot
117 Craven House - Patrick Hamilton
118 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - Alan Sillitoe
119 Lucia’s Progress - EF Benson
120 All That I Am - Anna Funder
121 Hell’s Angels - Hunter S. Thompson
122 Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Joan Didion
123 The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes