I’ll still be talking about books there but I’ll also be discussing cooking and learning to garden and sew (not simultaneously) and riding my bicycle—generally, the growing wealth of things I’ve found to do and think about since I’ve realized, post-grad school, that there is more to life than sitting in a chair for 14 hours every day with my nose in a book. I will also be discussing, perhaps, the horror of overly long sentences; but that’s for another day.
My most, most favourite books of the past year:
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Vanity Fair, W.M. Thackeray
Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope (I’m almost but not quite finished this one…but it’s superlative. I hope Trollope will forgive me, wherever he is, for finding cause to doubt him when I was reading his Autobiography.)
Really good too:
The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot (re-read)
The Gone Away World, Nick Harkaway
Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy L. Sayers
Busman’s Honeymoon, Dorothy L. Sayers
Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons (re-read)
Fire in the Blood, Irene Nemirovsky
North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell
The Warden, Anthony Trollope
Least favourite:
The Dog of the South, Charles Portis (because parts of it were SO GOOD and the rest of it didn’t come remotely close to living up to its own high standard!!)
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, Roddy Doyle
After Dark, Haruki Murakami (Dear Murakami: You believed the hype; haven’t you heard how dangerous that is?)
The Kraken Wakes, John Wyndham
The Thief and the Dogs, Naguib Mahfouz
Birthday, Koji Suzuki
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg (If I were still an academic, I would be salivating all over Hogg’s double narrative…but as a “mere” reader, it just couldn’t hold me. Indeed, this book contains some of the sloggingest 250 pages I’ve ever read.)
Especially bad:
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
So, friends, take care. And please come see me in the land of sugary spreads and laziness. :) Thanks again for many good interwebby years!
-Colleen
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