2009 Reading Round Up
The fact that my 2008 Reading Round Up post is still on the main page of my livejournal is a source of both amusement and some shame to me.
As last year, books I'd particularly recommend are marked with an asterisk.
1. Mark Gatiss - Black Butterfly
2. Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising (annual re-read)
3. Stella Gibbons - Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm and other stories
4. Agatha Christie - Poirot Investigates
5. W.E. Johns - Gimlet Off The Map (NOTE: I only have one more Gimlet book to read now. I'm saving it. It has Gimlet vs. zombies. In conclusion, Capt. W.E. Johns > me.)
6. Miranda Carter - Anthony Blunt: His Lives*
7. Helen Humphries - The Frozen Thames*
8. John Banville - The Untouchable
9. Stefan Zweig - Burning Secret
10. Theresa Whistler - Rushavenn Time (reread)*
11. Italo Calvino - Italian Folktales
12. Enid Blyton - the 'Secret' series (x5)
13. Boris Akunin - The Coronation
14. Boris Akunin - Pelagia and the Red Rooster
15. Frank Tallis - Darkness Rising
16. David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
17. John Buchan - Mr Standfast
18. Patrick O'Brian - H.M.S. Surprise
19. Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities* (NOTE: Dickens I actually like :S How bizarre. The fact that I have an enormous crush on Sydney Carton should come as no surprise to anyone. One day I'll get round to that Scarlet Pimpernel crossover....)
20. Tim Brooke-Taylor - Rule Britannia
21. Baroness Orczy - The Laughing Cavalier
22. Erle Stanley Gardner - The D.A. Takes A Chance
23. Baroness Orczy - The First Sir Percy
24. Baroness Orczy - The Scarlet Pimpernel Leads The Band
25. Baroness Orczy - The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel
26. Arthur C. Clarke - The City and the Stars
27. Erle Stanley Gardner - The Case of the Cautious Coquette
28. Erle Stanley Gardner - The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink
29. Hampton Stone - The Corpse That Refused To Stay Dead
30. Hampton Stone - The Swinger Who Swung By The Neck (NOTE: Oh, Lizzu. I have now lost the respect of anyone who reads this list, and it's all your fault.)
31. Patrick Leigh Fermor - A Time To Keep Silence*
32. Bohumil Hrabal - Too Loud a Solitude
33. David A. McIntee - Mission: Impractical
34. H.G. Wells - The Red Room and Other Stories
35. H.G. Wells - The Island of Doctor Moreau
36. Robert Rankin - Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls
37. W.E. Johns - Biggles Takes Charge
38. W.E. Johns - Biggles Works It Out
39. David Ashton - Fall From Grace
40. Robert Rankin - The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse
41. Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb
42. W.E. Johns - Biggles Flies South
43. Harry Harrison - Stars and Stripes Forever*
44. W.E. Johns - Biggles In The Baltic
45. W.E. Johns - Biggles Sees It Through
46. Baroness Orczy - I Will Repay
47. Baroness Orczy - The Elusive Pimpernel
48. Evelyn Waugh - Scoop*
49. W.E. Johns - Biggles Defies The Swastika (reread)
50. Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker*
51. W.E. Johns - Biggles Takes A Holiday (reread)
52. W.E. Johns - Biggles Gets His Men (reread)
53. W.E. Johns - Biggles Follows On (reread)
54. W.E. Johns - Biggles In The Blue (reread)
55. W.E. Johns - Biggles, Foreign Legionnaire (reread)
56. W.E. Johns - Biggles In Australia (reread)
57. W.E. Johns - No Rest For Biggles
58. W.E. Johns - Biggles In Mexico
59. W.E. Johns - Biggles at World's End
60. W.E. Johns - Biggles Takes A Hand
61. W.E. Johns - Biggles Looks Back**** (aka OMG VON STALHEIN THE GYPSY VIOLINIST THIS IS THE BEST BOOK EVER.)
62. Siegfried Sassoon - Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man*
63. Alec Waugh - The Loom of Youth
64. Siegfried Sassoon - Memoirs of an Infantry Officer*
65. W.E. Johns - Biggles In Borneo
66. W.E. Johns - Biggles in the Orient
67. Siegfried Sassoon - Sherston's Progress*
68. Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front
69. Max Egremont - Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography*
70. Richard Slobodin - Rivers
71. Patrick Leigh Fermor - Between the Woods and the Water*
72. Steve Lyons - Doctor Who PDA - The Witch Hunters
73. Graham Greene - Brighton Rock
74. Hilary Mantel - A Place of Greater Safety***
75. Marguerite Yourcenar - Memoirs of Hadrian*
76. Antal Szerb - The Queen's Necklace
77. Boris Akunin - She-Lover of Death
78. Hugh Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
79. Pat Barker - Regeneration (reread)*
80. Pat Barker - The Eye In The Door (reread)*
81. Pat Barker - The Ghost Road (reread)*
82. Robert Shearman - love songs for the shy and cynical*
83. David Andrass - The Terror
84. Jules Claretie - Camille Desmoulins and his Wife
85. Edmond & Jules de Goncourt - Pages from the Goncourt Journals
So, ten less than last year
Best author(s) you discovered this year:
Hilary Mantel. Hilary Mantel. Hilary Mantel. You may note a certain theme to my answers this year.
Best new book you read this year: top 3
Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety. Predictably. The responsibility for this one goes to her, who has already talked all about the awesomeness of Hilary Mantel in her end-of-year-reading-round-up, so I'm just going to sound really derivative for a bit, okay? It's just an *astonishing* book. I read it in late summer, and then reread it for Yuletide after doing a little bit of research on the background (more on this later), and was even more impressed with it second time than I was first. It's one of those books that keeps giving more layers of complexity, more subtleties, more textual links and cross-references woven seamlessly into the texture, and all couched in this beautiful lucid, totally distinctive prose style. There was a point during rereading when I was sending her emails every half hour or so with lots of capslock and messages like OMG HOW DID I NOT NOTICE THAT REALLY IMPORTANT PARALLELING BETWEEN CAMILLE AND ANNE DE THEROIGNE, prompting her to laugh at me quite a lot. It's a book that just gets me absurdly over-excited, basically, and makes me want to tell the world about its amazingness. So consider yourself told.
Also, Hilary Mantel fangirls Robespierre even more than I do (HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE). Yay.
Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives. Okay, this one's almost certainly Sam West's fault. I am clinically incapable of disliking any character he plays. (Probably even including that time he played a serial killer in Waking The Dead. NO SERIOUSLY WHAT >_<). So when he played Anthony Blunt in the delightfully overly-dramatic dramatisation of the Cambridge Spy Ring, I became very much interested in Anthony Blunt. Which lead in turn to my reading Miranda Carter's excellent biography, which seemed to me to strike a delicate balance between understanding and condemnation, a very difficult line to tread on such a recent and contentious subject.
I'm now going to blatently cheat in this category, because I couldn't choose between the following books as to what's going to be my final choice:
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker - made my brain dribble out of my ears a little bit, but in a good way. The opening section, on the traveller's vision of leaving earth, was absolutely breathtaking.
Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston Trilogy - beautiful prose, and filled with the most hard-breaking longing for vanished things. Made me want to give Sass a hug, but that's hardly unusual.
Robert Shearman, love songs for the shy and cynical - I shan't try to summarise in a glib sentence. Beautiful and weird. One of them actually made me tear-up, which is NO MEAN FEAT, but I'm not telling which one because it says rather more about me than I'm entirely happy with on a public journal :D
Book you wish you’d skipped
Ummmm....nothing really to speak of, this year. The books I'm a bit blah about tend to be the ones that are part of a series I want to have read all of (eg. the infinite number of Scarlet Pimpernel books - individually they're not what you'd call brilliant, often, but they're enjoyable enough, and in any case I want to get all the canon under my belt some time so I can do my EPIC FRENCH REVOLUTION CROSSOVER FANFIC AHAHAHAHA wherein Sydney Carton joins the League and is enormously snarky and possibly gets set up with Sir Andrew Ffoulkes in an 'oh God why doesn't my best friend love me' relationship of convenience. This may also be the universe where the League rescue Danton and Camille and the others from the guillotine. yeah, I know the League aren't overly fond of revolutionaries or Republicans, but Camille *is* Marguerite's cousin. WHAT. IT'S TRUE.)
Um, where was I.
So I don't think there are any books I particularly wish I'd skipped this year. Hurrah.
Reading goals for next year
I think I'm going to stop having reading goals. I never get round to fulfilling them, largely because my reading habits always consist of picking up books when I feel like them and flitting on to something else as my whimsy takes me. (which would be why the piles of half-finished books beside my bed are now threatening to overbalance and smother me in my sleep.) So, I might try to read more classics this year. I might read the whole of Chesterton. I might just try to finish the (majority) of the Biggles books I own but haven't yet read. Who can say?
As last year, books I'd particularly recommend are marked with an asterisk.
1. Mark Gatiss - Black Butterfly
2. Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising (annual re-read)
3. Stella Gibbons - Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm and other stories
4. Agatha Christie - Poirot Investigates
5. W.E. Johns - Gimlet Off The Map (NOTE: I only have one more Gimlet book to read now. I'm saving it. It has Gimlet vs. zombies. In conclusion, Capt. W.E. Johns > me.)
6. Miranda Carter - Anthony Blunt: His Lives*
7. Helen Humphries - The Frozen Thames*
8. John Banville - The Untouchable
9. Stefan Zweig - Burning Secret
10. Theresa Whistler - Rushavenn Time (reread)*
11. Italo Calvino - Italian Folktales
12. Enid Blyton - the 'Secret' series (x5)
13. Boris Akunin - The Coronation
14. Boris Akunin - Pelagia and the Red Rooster
15. Frank Tallis - Darkness Rising
16. David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
17. John Buchan - Mr Standfast
18. Patrick O'Brian - H.M.S. Surprise
19. Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities* (NOTE: Dickens I actually like :S How bizarre. The fact that I have an enormous crush on Sydney Carton should come as no surprise to anyone. One day I'll get round to that Scarlet Pimpernel crossover....)
20. Tim Brooke-Taylor - Rule Britannia
21. Baroness Orczy - The Laughing Cavalier
22. Erle Stanley Gardner - The D.A. Takes A Chance
23. Baroness Orczy - The First Sir Percy
24. Baroness Orczy - The Scarlet Pimpernel Leads The Band
25. Baroness Orczy - The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel
26. Arthur C. Clarke - The City and the Stars
27. Erle Stanley Gardner - The Case of the Cautious Coquette
28. Erle Stanley Gardner - The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink
29. Hampton Stone - The Corpse That Refused To Stay Dead
30. Hampton Stone - The Swinger Who Swung By The Neck (NOTE: Oh, Lizzu. I have now lost the respect of anyone who reads this list, and it's all your fault.)
31. Patrick Leigh Fermor - A Time To Keep Silence*
32. Bohumil Hrabal - Too Loud a Solitude
33. David A. McIntee - Mission: Impractical
34. H.G. Wells - The Red Room and Other Stories
35. H.G. Wells - The Island of Doctor Moreau
36. Robert Rankin - Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls
37. W.E. Johns - Biggles Takes Charge
38. W.E. Johns - Biggles Works It Out
39. David Ashton - Fall From Grace
40. Robert Rankin - The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse
41. Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb
42. W.E. Johns - Biggles Flies South
43. Harry Harrison - Stars and Stripes Forever*
44. W.E. Johns - Biggles In The Baltic
45. W.E. Johns - Biggles Sees It Through
46. Baroness Orczy - I Will Repay
47. Baroness Orczy - The Elusive Pimpernel
48. Evelyn Waugh - Scoop*
49. W.E. Johns - Biggles Defies The Swastika (reread)
50. Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker*
51. W.E. Johns - Biggles Takes A Holiday (reread)
52. W.E. Johns - Biggles Gets His Men (reread)
53. W.E. Johns - Biggles Follows On (reread)
54. W.E. Johns - Biggles In The Blue (reread)
55. W.E. Johns - Biggles, Foreign Legionnaire (reread)
56. W.E. Johns - Biggles In Australia (reread)
57. W.E. Johns - No Rest For Biggles
58. W.E. Johns - Biggles In Mexico
59. W.E. Johns - Biggles at World's End
60. W.E. Johns - Biggles Takes A Hand
61. W.E. Johns - Biggles Looks Back**** (aka OMG VON STALHEIN THE GYPSY VIOLINIST THIS IS THE BEST BOOK EVER.)
62. Siegfried Sassoon - Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man*
63. Alec Waugh - The Loom of Youth
64. Siegfried Sassoon - Memoirs of an Infantry Officer*
65. W.E. Johns - Biggles In Borneo
66. W.E. Johns - Biggles in the Orient
67. Siegfried Sassoon - Sherston's Progress*
68. Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front
69. Max Egremont - Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography*
70. Richard Slobodin - Rivers
71. Patrick Leigh Fermor - Between the Woods and the Water*
72. Steve Lyons - Doctor Who PDA - The Witch Hunters
73. Graham Greene - Brighton Rock
74. Hilary Mantel - A Place of Greater Safety***
75. Marguerite Yourcenar - Memoirs of Hadrian*
76. Antal Szerb - The Queen's Necklace
77. Boris Akunin - She-Lover of Death
78. Hugh Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
79. Pat Barker - Regeneration (reread)*
80. Pat Barker - The Eye In The Door (reread)*
81. Pat Barker - The Ghost Road (reread)*
82. Robert Shearman - love songs for the shy and cynical*
83. David Andrass - The Terror
84. Jules Claretie - Camille Desmoulins and his Wife
85. Edmond & Jules de Goncourt - Pages from the Goncourt Journals
So, ten less than last year
Best author(s) you discovered this year:
Hilary Mantel. Hilary Mantel. Hilary Mantel. You may note a certain theme to my answers this year.
Best new book you read this year: top 3
Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety. Predictably. The responsibility for this one goes to her, who has already talked all about the awesomeness of Hilary Mantel in her end-of-year-reading-round-up, so I'm just going to sound really derivative for a bit, okay? It's just an *astonishing* book. I read it in late summer, and then reread it for Yuletide after doing a little bit of research on the background (more on this later), and was even more impressed with it second time than I was first. It's one of those books that keeps giving more layers of complexity, more subtleties, more textual links and cross-references woven seamlessly into the texture, and all couched in this beautiful lucid, totally distinctive prose style. There was a point during rereading when I was sending her emails every half hour or so with lots of capslock and messages like OMG HOW DID I NOT NOTICE THAT REALLY IMPORTANT PARALLELING BETWEEN CAMILLE AND ANNE DE THEROIGNE, prompting her to laugh at me quite a lot. It's a book that just gets me absurdly over-excited, basically, and makes me want to tell the world about its amazingness. So consider yourself told.
Also, Hilary Mantel fangirls Robespierre even more than I do (HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE). Yay.
Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives. Okay, this one's almost certainly Sam West's fault. I am clinically incapable of disliking any character he plays. (Probably even including that time he played a serial killer in Waking The Dead. NO SERIOUSLY WHAT >_<). So when he played Anthony Blunt in the delightfully overly-dramatic dramatisation of the Cambridge Spy Ring, I became very much interested in Anthony Blunt. Which lead in turn to my reading Miranda Carter's excellent biography, which seemed to me to strike a delicate balance between understanding and condemnation, a very difficult line to tread on such a recent and contentious subject.
I'm now going to blatently cheat in this category, because I couldn't choose between the following books as to what's going to be my final choice:
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker - made my brain dribble out of my ears a little bit, but in a good way. The opening section, on the traveller's vision of leaving earth, was absolutely breathtaking.
Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston Trilogy - beautiful prose, and filled with the most hard-breaking longing for vanished things. Made me want to give Sass a hug, but that's hardly unusual.
Robert Shearman, love songs for the shy and cynical - I shan't try to summarise in a glib sentence. Beautiful and weird. One of them actually made me tear-up, which is NO MEAN FEAT, but I'm not telling which one because it says rather more about me than I'm entirely happy with on a public journal :D
Book you wish you’d skipped
Ummmm....nothing really to speak of, this year. The books I'm a bit blah about tend to be the ones that are part of a series I want to have read all of (eg. the infinite number of Scarlet Pimpernel books - individually they're not what you'd call brilliant, often, but they're enjoyable enough, and in any case I want to get all the canon under my belt some time so I can do my EPIC FRENCH REVOLUTION CROSSOVER FANFIC AHAHAHAHA wherein Sydney Carton joins the League and is enormously snarky and possibly gets set up with Sir Andrew Ffoulkes in an 'oh God why doesn't my best friend love me' relationship of convenience. This may also be the universe where the League rescue Danton and Camille and the others from the guillotine. yeah, I know the League aren't overly fond of revolutionaries or Republicans, but Camille *is* Marguerite's cousin. WHAT. IT'S TRUE.)
Um, where was I.
So I don't think there are any books I particularly wish I'd skipped this year. Hurrah.
Reading goals for next year
I think I'm going to stop having reading goals. I never get round to fulfilling them, largely because my reading habits always consist of picking up books when I feel like them and flitting on to something else as my whimsy takes me. (which would be why the piles of half-finished books beside my bed are now threatening to overbalance and smother me in my sleep.) So, I might try to read more classics this year. I might read the whole of Chesterton. I might just try to finish the (majority) of the Biggles books I own but haven't yet read. Who can say?