From a recent book group read:
“The most terrifying words you could hear in our house came out of Anouk’s mouth when you had a birthday coming up. ‘I’m making you something,’ she’d say, and no smile was wide enough to conceal the oceans of dread bubbling beneath.”
–Steven Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole (p. 367)
BG=Book Group selection. I’m in two book groups (and sometimes a third), so a lot of my reading is driven by that. These are numbered in chronological order, from January to December. I don’t read very fast, so 29 books in a year is pretty good for me (but several of them are very short novels, and a few were revisits).
1. The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (Susanna Clarke)
2. The Book of Lost Things (John Connolly) BG
3. Ghostwritten (David Mitchell)
4. The Ship Captain’s Wife (Martha Hodes) BG
5. Passing for Normal (Amy S. Wilensky) BG
6. Triangle: The Fire that Changed America (David von Drehle)
7. Kindred (Octavia Butler) BG–re-read.
8. Mapping Fate (Alice Wexler) BG–re-read.
9. Don’t Let’s Go Down to the Dogs Tonight (Alexandra Fuller) BG
10. Memory Keeper’s Daughter (Kim Edwards) BG
11. Anil’s Ghost (Michael Ondaatje) BG
12. The Center Cannot Hold (Elyn Saks) BG
13. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay (Michael Chabon) BG
14. Sarah Canary (Karen Joy Fowler)
15. Lying Awake (Mark Salzman)
16. The Bookshop (Penelope Fitzgerald)
17. The Museum at Purgatory (Nick Bantock)
18. Moving Violations (John Hockenberry) BG
19. A Guide for the Perplexed (Jonathan Levi)
20. The Sensualist (Barbara Hodgson)
21. Wheeling the Deal: The Outrageous Legend of Gordon Zahler, Hollywood’s Flashiest Quadriplegic (Chip Jacobs)
22. Daughter of Fortune (Isabel Allende) BG
23. My Body Politic (Simi Linton) BG
24. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) BG
25. Memoirs of a Spacewoman (Naomi Mitchison)
26. March (Geraldine Brooks)
27. Sister Moon (Karen Joy Fowler)
28. Riven Rock (TC Boyle) BG
29. Eavesdropping (Stephen Kuusisto) BG–re-read
There’s an old picture of me and Nell dressed as Hester Prynne and baby Pearl from the Scarlet Letter at the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog–click through the slideshow of literary Halloween costumes, we’re hard to miss! We won best mother-child costume at our very first MOMS Club meeting in those costumes, in 2000. The dress on Nell was her baptismal gown; the Scarlet Letter on my chest was embroidered by my mother when I was in high school, which tells you how long I’ve been dressing as Hester Prynne, every few years…
I love that sound around 11am, when little boxes get delivered by the postal carrier to my doorstep. Today’s little box held three copies of a new book I’ve got a chapter in. Very nice-looking paperbacks, all shiny, good size and shape, nifty cover illustration (see at left)–yup, I’m in there, chapter 15. Cool.
My segment is about disability history archives and museums online (adapted from an article I wrote a few years back for a special issue of Public Historian), but the other chapters are really diverse, with fun titles like “Collecting Eyewear on eBay,” “Tales from the Thrift,” and “I Want my MP3s.” I’m really looking forward to checking some of them out.
Apparently these are the books most frequently listed as “Not Read” on librarything. You’re supposed to bold the ones you’ve finished, italicize the ones that you’ve started but not finished, and star the ones you also have on your tbr shelves…
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
*The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
The ones I’ve read are mostly things I read for a book group or for school–like I don’t think I would have picked up “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” on my own. There are a lot I haven’t read, but have seen in multiple film adaptations (like the Jane Austens). I’ve heard parts of Freakonomics in Peter’s car on CD, and I have all of the Librivox version of Pride and Prejudice on my iPod, so I listen to bits of that when the mood strikes. Peter has read Dune, Watership Down, Catch-22, 1984, and The Hobbit, so he’s got those covered. Oh, and we saw an exhibit based on Jared Diamond’s Collapse at the Natural History Museum, and he’s on the radio a lot here–local professor. I think Peter read Guns, Germs, and Steel, too, come to think of it.
Julie, consider yourself tagged.
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