Books read in 2006
In case you hadn't noticed, I also write a book blog and I've just completed my 2006 round-up. I read exactly 100 books last year, and here's the evidence. What a sad case I am.
| Flaubert’s Parrot | Julian Barnes |
| The Silent Traveller in | Chiang Yee |
| The Pickwick papers | Charles Dickens |
| Exodus | |
| To The Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf |
| A Study in Scarlet | Arthur Conan Doyle |
| The | |
| Midnight’s Children | Salman Rushdie |
| Rabbit, Run | John Updike |
| A Wizard of Earthsea | Ursula K LeGuin |
| The Moviegoer | Walker Percy |
| Freakonomics | Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner |
| The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown |
| The Final Solution | Michael Chabon |
| Vertigo (BFI Film Classics) | Charles Barr |
| 1001 Albums You Must Listen to Before You Die | Robert Dimery (Ed.) |
| Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (BFI Film Classics) | David Robinson |
| Bride of Frankenstein (BFI Film Classics) | Alberto Manguel |
| Maus – A Survivor’s Tale | Art Speigelman |
| Ubik | Philip K. Dick |
| The Big Sleep (BFI Film Classics) | David Thomson |
| The Swimming-Pool Library | Alan Hollinghurst |
| Ender’s Game | Orson Scott Card |
| Pulp Fiction (BFI Film Classics) | Dana Spolan |
| | DBC |
| | Michael Eaton |
| A Year With | Tim Parks |
| First Abolish the Customer | Bob Ellis |
| Little Dorrit | Charles Dickens |
| Invasion of the Body Snatchers | Jack Finney |
| Zofloya, The Moor | Charlotte Dacre |
| George Melies, Father of Film Fantasy | David Robinson |
| | Ian McEwan |
| The Code of the Woosters | P.G. Wodehouse |
| Right Ho, Jeeves | P.G. Wodehouse |
| Port Out Starboard Home | Michael Quinion |
| Cosmopolis | Don DeLillo |
| The | Horace Walpole |
| Losing It – The Inside Story of the Labor Party in Opposition | Annabel Crabb |
| Play It As It Lays | Joan Didion |
| Aberystwyth Mon Amour | Malcolm Pryce |
| Wrong About | Peter Carey |
| The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (BFI Film Classics) | A.L. Kennedy |
| Film Noir | Alain Silver and James Ursini |
| | John Milton |
| Ivan The Terrible (BFI Film Classics) | Ivan Tsivian |
| The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte |
| 1919 | John Dos Passos |
| Wide | Jean Rhys |
| Lady Sings The Blues | Billie Holiday with William Duffy |
| Leviticus | |
| Day of the Locust | Nathaniel West |
| Asterix the | Goscinny and Uderzo |
| Mapp and Lucia | E.F. Benson |
| Venus in Furs | Leopold von Sacher-Masoch |
| Disgrace | J.M. Coetzee |
| Vathek | William Beckford |
| The Time Machine | H.G. Wells |
| A Confederacy of Dunces | John Kennedy Toole |
| The Essential Calvin and Hobbes | Bill Watterson |
| Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | Philip K. Dick |
| Cold Comfort Farm | Stella Gibbons |
| The Outsider | Albert Camus |
| | Iain Sinclair |
| Notes from Underground | Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
| The Eyre Affair | Jasper Fforde |
| The Last Party – Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock | John Harris |
| 31 Songs | Nick Hornby |
| Running Wild | J.G. Ballard |
| Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell | Susanna Clarke |
| The Lost Decade and other stories | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| The Adventures of Caleb Williams, or Things As They Are | William Godwin |
| The Accidental Woman | Jonathan Coe |
| The Long Tail | Chris Anderson |
| Monsieur Monde Vanishes | Georges Simenon |
| The Painted Bird | Jerzy Kosinski |
| The Uxbridge English Dictionary | John Naismith et al |
| The Clerkenwell Tales | Peter Ackroyd |
| God Bless You, Mr Rosewater | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Words and Music – A History of Pop in the Shape of a City | Paul Morley |
| Vile Bodies | Evelyn Waugh |
| The Silent Traveller in | Chiang Yee |
| Apocalypse Movies | Kim Newman |
| The Conformist | Alberto Moravia |
| A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens |
| Decline and Fall | Evelyn Waugh |
| The Eye | George Bataille (aka Lord Auch) |
| Riders of the Purple Sage | Zane Grey |
| The Floating Brothel | |
| The Man Who Was Thursday | G.K. Chesterton |
| Aesop’s Fables | Aesop |
| The Loved One | Evelyn Waugh |
| Elizabeth Costello | J.M. Coetzee |
| A Room With A View | E.M. Forster |
| The Nun | Denis Diderot |
| I Married A Communist | Philip Roth |
| Slow Man | J.M. Coetzee |
| Where Angels Fear To Tread | E.M. Forster |
| Metamorphosis | Franz Kafka |
posted by Tom Goodfellow @ 4:23 PM
7 Comments:
Wow - what an impressive list! Of your 100 I think I have only read 7.5 of those titles (0.5 because I have only read the first part of Maus). The seven:
A Study in Scarlet (I love Sherlock Holmes)
A Wizard of Earthsea (ditto Ursula Le Guin)
The Da Vinci Code (meh)
Ender's Game
Asterix the Gaul
A Room with a View
The Loved One.
Did you really read ALL of Paradise Lost? And I see a lot of Evelyn Waugh and Charles Dickens, too - were they first reads, or re-reads?
All first reads except for Jane Eyre and, er, Calvin & Hobbes. Re-read Dickens? Life's too short.
Yep, all of Paradise Lost. It's not that long, and better than you'd expect.
Can you tell that Eng Lit was my uni subject before librarianship?
Fair enough re Dickens. The only one I've read is David Copperfield (school read, though). Might have to try A Tale of Two Cities some time...
As for Paradise Lost, I was always put off by the twelve (or however many) book thing, but I went and looked at it online after reading your post, and you're right, it isn't that long.. hmm...
As for Eng Lit, I would never have guessed ;)
Hi Tom,
Loved the list but have to say- I LOVE Dickens- try 'Bleak House' and see whether the initial description of fog puts you off (the majority) or hooks you (me!).
Also a huge Conan Doyle and Wodehouse fan. It was fun to see what someone else read in a year- very impressive!
cheers
Leslie
PS I have read 32 of your titles, but over time not just last year...not sad, inspiring!
Thanks Leslie, glancing at your profile I'd say our taste in books is pretty similar - Possession is one of my all time favourites too. I remember reading the ending on a bus in London and crying like a big girl. Lovely.
Bleak House - read it, loved it. I go to London every year and every time I'm at Ludgate Hill I imagine a great lumbering dinosaur emerging from the mist...
Possession. What can I say about that book? It was, simply, one of the best books I have ever read, and that's saying something.
On my few trips to London (I used to live in Cambridge and Oxfordshire), I'm always catapulted back into Dickensian times...'cept for the death, disease and poverty- only the nice stuff, of course!
I think I'll start trying to read some of the books on your list... ;)
Cheers
From a fellow Eng Lit major,
Leslie
I need to clarify my earlier comment that life's too short to re-read Dickens. I revere his work and have always enjoyed it. When I say life's too short what I mean is that his books are so darn looong.
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