Books in 2012: My Year of Eating My Words!
(Quick, quick, let me post this while LJ is actually live!)
Books read in 2012: 128
First book of the year: Titus Groan (Gormenghast Trilogy) by Mervyn Peake
Last book of the year: Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (re50-read)
Favourite book (not counting re-reads): The Girl You Left Behind by Jojo Moyes (fiction) and Bess of Hardwick: First Lady of Chatsworth by Mary S. Lovell (non-fiction)
Most spectacular waste of money: Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
Best series of the year: The Pink Carnation books by Lauren Willig (I know!)
Themes: Ghosts, French Revolution, sci-fi
Kindle: 46
Library Books: 59 (hey, there has to be at least one perk to my job!)
So the surprise discovery of the year for me was finding that, bar the rather dreadful titular novel, Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation series is not only readable but brilliant fun! In fact, the only reason that I stopped at The Orchid Affair (book 8) is that the Kindle eBook version of book 9, The Garden Intrigue, was ridiculously overpriced.
Conversely, I finally gave in and read the other two books in C. Guy Clayton’s ‘Blakeney Papers’ trilogy, a sort of masochistic Scarlet Pimpernel spin-off series. Final verdict: bad, better, worse.
Hits: After You by Natascha McElhone (I love this actress); Murder at Mansfield Park and Tom All Alone’s by Lynn Shepherd; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë; Déjà Vu by Ian Hocking; The Camomile Lawn by Mary Wesley; The Blood Detective by Dan Waddell (family history not vampires); North and South by John Jakes (civil war not cotton spinning); Suspiciously Reserved by Samantha Adkins (an updated version of Emma that works); Sovay by Celia Rees and The Pale Assassin by Patricia Elliott (YA F-Rev); Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain; The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker (2012’s Marmite nomination); The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman; The Reinvention of Ivy Brown by Roberta Taylor; Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch; Georgy Girl by Margaret Foster (film’s pretty good too); Jane Eyre Laid Bare by Charlotte Bronte/Eve Sinclair (ha!); The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks; Thursdays in the Park by Hilary Boyd; The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger; Hello Bunny Alice by Laura Wilson; World’s End by Donald James Wheal; Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente; Spreading my Wings by Diana Barnato Walker
Misses: Gave up on the Morland Dynasty by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles (my grandmother is reading them instead); Host by Peter James (sub-Hollywood pap); Cut to the Quick by Kate Ross (overhyped); A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens (the literary snob’s Scarlet Pimpernel); Indiscretion by Jude Morgan; The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (film’s probably better, even with Harry Potter); Girl, 20 by Kingsley Amis; The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton; Havisham by Ronald Frame