Book List 2010, The Whole Bloody Thing
Here's the whole list for 2010. The whole thing! Pretty sad, even sadder than my movie list. Last year I got to 40 books by the second half of the year. In 2011, I must do better! An asterix means a reread (although oftener than not, this year, that was a reread in another language).
1 Consider the Oyster; M.F.K. Fisher - The end-of-2009, beginning-of-2010 was all about the MFK. Really, I should have read Consider the Oyster and Consider the Lobster one after the other, huh?
2 The Gastronomical Me; M.F.K. Fisher - This one is a food autobiography, and made me wish a little that I had this other Frances' life.
3 The Berlin Stories; Christopher Isherwood - Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains, in one volume, part of which later became Cabaret.
4 Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man; Christopher Hitchens - I'm gonna give you one little taste of an only-tangentially-Paine-related thing from this book. Hitchens suggests that (based on Paine's decision to go to sea) that the Patrick O'Brien novels provide examples of the tendency for radicals to choose an oceangoing life.
5 By Hook or by Crook: A Journey in Search of English; David Crystal - A book about English, could you ever figure it out? This is a good bit lighter than the Crystal on English that I read last year, and more meandering. I'm glad I had the foundation of the first, though.
6 The Thin Man; Dashiell Hammett - somehow I got over the incredibly trashy cover the library in Glasgow lent me...if I could find an image of it, I'd show you. I had pretty high hopes for this, and I did enjoy it, but I found Nick and Nora maybe not quite as charming as I was expecting.
7 The Importance of Being Eton; Nick Fraser - somehow I thought I ought to read about Britain, as soon as I arrived there? The books (about the particular advantages accorded to those boys who attended Eton) became a bit more central to public discourse once an Old Etonian once again became British PM a few months later.
8 Double Indemnity; James M. Cain - My god, I LOVED this movie, so maybe the book was bound to be a bit of a disappointment? Regardless, I enjoyed it, and it certainly added a few layers that the film version couldn't fit in. But my love for Billy Wilder adaptations, apparently it knows no bounds!
9 * Pyongyang; Guy Deslile - I have indeed read this before, but never in French. My french school in Glasgow happened to have a really good library of Bandes Dessinées, so I gave this one a shot, once again.
10 The End of the Affair; Graham Greene - I really enjoyed the experience of this book, it might be my favourite of the Greenes I read this year. I did lose interest somewhat towards the end, when the Catholicism started coming in thicker, but I found the ending itself charming in spite of it all.
11 The Comedians; Graham Greene - I read this still early in 2010, still close after the Haitian earthquake. It was a bit strange to read about a world long since passed, but at the same time perhaps still evident in the way that country has turned out. Perhaps now more so than ever, now that Baby Doc has returned to Haiti, the results of which we shall watch for...
12 * Shenzhen; Guy Deslile - more Guy Deslisle in French. I sure learned a lot of good slang phrases from reading these two BDs!
13 Eating for England; Nigel Slater - Nigel Slater goes through a list of the things he remembers eating, throughout his life. Lots of candy, biscuits and talk of farmers markets...Slater is a big fan of grocery shopping online, and it certainly led me to think that food delivery is a much more reasonable option than I'd previously thought.
14 A Short History of Nearly Everything; Bill Bryson - Before leaving for Ireland for a week, I went to the Oxfam bookshop on Byres rd to see if I could find a single book that could occupy me for a week, but would still reside at a comfortably vacation-level of engagement. Bryson filled that niche most admirably.
15 Lady Chatterly's Lover; D.H. Lawrence - a birthday present for the ages! Jeremy bought me the lovely Penguin hardcover (oh how I wish for a full set of those) and I read it upon my return to Scotland. It's one of those books that's almost impossible to parse because of its cultural import (like watching Casablanca for the first time) but I found it most absorbing.
16 Work Suspended/Scott-King's Europe; Evelyn Waugh - These are short stories, and quite harsh, dark little stories, too.
17 Solo; Rana Dasgupta - This was a beautifully-written book, but I find myself curiously unable to bring it to mind, even with the crutch of an amazon summary. What does that even SAY?
18 Words; Jean-Paul Sartre - Autobio by Sartre of his childhood. I bought it in Edinburgh with the next book on the list, and ended up keeping that one and ditching this one. So. There you are.
19 The Prime of Life; Simone de Beauvoir - I found this endlessly compelling. It made me feel like every night I haven't spent sleeping in the open on a roof in Greece with Jean Paul Sartre has been a night wasted.
20 A Handful of Dust; Evelyn Waugh - oh good GOD. Has a sadder book been written? You could probably summarize this with the phrase "terrible people do terrible things to one another". It felt almost venomous.
21 Lucky Jim; Kingsley Amis - I adore Kingsley Amis' nonfiction writing about drink (on last year's list) but I really couldn't ever get into this novel about the academic life in mid-20th C Britain.
22 * The Great Gatsby; F. Scott Fitzgerald - Well, yes, what can you really say at this point?
23 The Graduate; Charles Wells - Here, I returned to Canada. I know I'm always on about movie adaptations, but this is one of those examples of the film being VASTLY more famous than the book. It's remarkably faithful, for the record.
24 Moral Relativism; Steven Lukes - This is from the Big Ideas, Small Books series, and it's definitely got an introductory feel. I almost found its cursory look at cognitive relativism (w/r/t things like the culture wars) more interesting than the views of moral relativism further explored in the rest of the book.
25 Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol; Ian Gately - Some fascinating stuff, and I'm glad that I've got it in the house now as a reference work. If I've got anything critical to say, it's that it's a bit...journalist-y. He maybe could have disguised his origins a bit better?
26 Behind the Scenes at the Museum; Kate Atkinson - I think I read more fiction (as a % of the whole) this year than in any other year in which I'd kept a list. My mum recommended this to me as it's set in York, and I'd just been there for the first time a few months previous. A bit wrenching, as a story, but definitely worthwhile.
27 Other Voices, Other Rooms; Truman Capote - Thinking of this book just makes me fixate on this photo of Capote. And maybe makes me want to visit the US deep south, sometime?
28 Island of Dr Moreau; H.G. Wells - Maybe suffered from my problem of constantly comparing it to Lord of the Flies, somehow. The violence, I surmise. Has lots more in common with the tropical, amazonian parts of Waugh's Handful of Dust, now that I think about it. But Pendrick is more competent, as a protagonist.
29 When You Are Engulfed In Flames; David Sedaris - Sedaris has been diminishing returns for me, from Me Talk Pretty onwards. I didn't even read his animal fables book, as he's one of those (distressingly many!) writers whose nonfiction essays I enjoy but whose fiction puts me off.
30 The Sweet Life in Paris; David Lebovitz - Maybe nothing has made me want to live in Paris LESS than this book, by a transplanted American pastry chef. He makes the food sound lovely, but the general tone of his impressions of Parisians seems designed to make me hate them.
31 Savage Grace; Natalie Robins & Steven M.C. Aronson - I'm really not much for what you might call True Crime, as a genre. But every once in a while, I find myself reading something along those lines. It's like falling into a wikipedia hole and reading about serial killers for three hours. It happens! (Please quote this when I go on my inevitable killing spree)
32 She Came to Stay; Simone de Beauvoir - OK so I've got this problem with thinly-disguised autobiography. (I guess I like books to choose one side or the other, to DECLARE themselves. I mean, I don't even mind embellished autobio along Dave Eggers lines, so much) This book is fiction, but it's clearly based on the very part of de Beauvoir's life she described in the autobio I read earlier in the year. No! I shan't stand for it!
33 Our Man in Havana; Graham Greene - Funny, yes, and not an egregious amount of Catholicism (really my main criterion for the enjoyment of Greene novels). Sometimes hard to keep it separate in my mind from The Comedians, although they are very different.
34 Love in a Cold Climate; Nancy Mitford - I got excited about reading Mitford's stuff after getting into the bright young things sometime in 2009. I didn't find it as fascinating as I thought I might, but it's certainly a worthy enough story. Sort of wish I'd been reading it whilst watching Downton Abbey...
35 The Hipless Boy; Sully - A little slip of a graphic novel that somehow felt dated already, even though it'd only come out the year before.
36 Musicophilia; Oliver Sacks - My utter lack of knowledge of music and how it works probably hampered my ability to get much out of this book. As enjoyable as any other Sacks, but definitely meant for people know at least something - anything! - about music. My fault, not his.
37 How We Decide; Jonah Lehrer - This is one of those books, where you'd like to think that after you read it you'll be able to overcome all of your weird hardwired or socially-constructed decision-making problems, but the truth is, it's not a self-help tome. There's no list to follow.
38 The Black Prince; Iris Murdoch - Oh my GOD. This was maybe my favourite book of the year, and certainly my favourite novel. I don't think I was expecting something so...visceral, so bouncy and exciting. But it retains it's "literaryness", and not just as a veneer. The perfect package of a novel.
39 The Sea, The Sea; Iris Murdoch - There's got to be a tiny bit of disappointment when you've just been so blown away by something else by the same author. And yes, there was. But I did enjoy the process, and will keep reading the rest of her work, until it all runs out on me.
40 An Unfinished Woman; Lillian Hellman - There is more left out of this book than is left in. This might be a general symptom of memoir, especially when other famous folks are involved, but it was jarring to find her one day working as a publishing lackey, the next to being a successful playwright and partner to Dashiell Hammett.
41 Zeitoun; Dave Eggers - So maddening! As much of a cliché as it is to mention this, these are the sorts of things we'd like to to think don't happen to people who live in the 'civilized' world. The fallout feels especially heart-rending.
42 The Big Short; Michael Lewis - It's interesting to read something about the financial crisis and realize that the people you're being asked to identify with are those who - yes! - recognized what was going on before everyone else did, but rather than trying to prevent what was happening, their interest was in profiting from others bad investments. Not precisely revolutionary. It's not as if the heroes are brave regulators, just those who are befuddled by the lack of regulation and took advantage at the last minute.
43 Life Among the Savages; Shirley Jackson - I read almost all of this on the 24 hour train ride back to PEI from Toronto. I'd been looking for it forever, and Joey gave it to me for christmas! What a pal! In any case, this is way more cute and funny than any memoir of rural childrearing by the author of bleak sci-fi stories has any right to be!
1 Consider the Oyster; M.F.K. Fisher - The end-of-2009, beginning-of-2010 was all about the MFK. Really, I should have read Consider the Oyster and Consider the Lobster one after the other, huh?
2 The Gastronomical Me; M.F.K. Fisher - This one is a food autobiography, and made me wish a little that I had this other Frances' life.
3 The Berlin Stories; Christopher Isherwood - Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains, in one volume, part of which later became Cabaret.
4 Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man; Christopher Hitchens - I'm gonna give you one little taste of an only-tangentially-Paine-related thing from this book. Hitchens suggests that (based on Paine's decision to go to sea) that the Patrick O'Brien novels provide examples of the tendency for radicals to choose an oceangoing life.
5 By Hook or by Crook: A Journey in Search of English; David Crystal - A book about English, could you ever figure it out? This is a good bit lighter than the Crystal on English that I read last year, and more meandering. I'm glad I had the foundation of the first, though.
6 The Thin Man; Dashiell Hammett - somehow I got over the incredibly trashy cover the library in Glasgow lent me...if I could find an image of it, I'd show you. I had pretty high hopes for this, and I did enjoy it, but I found Nick and Nora maybe not quite as charming as I was expecting.
7 The Importance of Being Eton; Nick Fraser - somehow I thought I ought to read about Britain, as soon as I arrived there? The books (about the particular advantages accorded to those boys who attended Eton) became a bit more central to public discourse once an Old Etonian once again became British PM a few months later.
8 Double Indemnity; James M. Cain - My god, I LOVED this movie, so maybe the book was bound to be a bit of a disappointment? Regardless, I enjoyed it, and it certainly added a few layers that the film version couldn't fit in. But my love for Billy Wilder adaptations, apparently it knows no bounds!
9 * Pyongyang; Guy Deslile - I have indeed read this before, but never in French. My french school in Glasgow happened to have a really good library of Bandes Dessinées, so I gave this one a shot, once again.
10 The End of the Affair; Graham Greene - I really enjoyed the experience of this book, it might be my favourite of the Greenes I read this year. I did lose interest somewhat towards the end, when the Catholicism started coming in thicker, but I found the ending itself charming in spite of it all.
11 The Comedians; Graham Greene - I read this still early in 2010, still close after the Haitian earthquake. It was a bit strange to read about a world long since passed, but at the same time perhaps still evident in the way that country has turned out. Perhaps now more so than ever, now that Baby Doc has returned to Haiti, the results of which we shall watch for...
12 * Shenzhen; Guy Deslile - more Guy Deslisle in French. I sure learned a lot of good slang phrases from reading these two BDs!
13 Eating for England; Nigel Slater - Nigel Slater goes through a list of the things he remembers eating, throughout his life. Lots of candy, biscuits and talk of farmers markets...Slater is a big fan of grocery shopping online, and it certainly led me to think that food delivery is a much more reasonable option than I'd previously thought.
14 A Short History of Nearly Everything; Bill Bryson - Before leaving for Ireland for a week, I went to the Oxfam bookshop on Byres rd to see if I could find a single book that could occupy me for a week, but would still reside at a comfortably vacation-level of engagement. Bryson filled that niche most admirably.
15 Lady Chatterly's Lover; D.H. Lawrence - a birthday present for the ages! Jeremy bought me the lovely Penguin hardcover (oh how I wish for a full set of those) and I read it upon my return to Scotland. It's one of those books that's almost impossible to parse because of its cultural import (like watching Casablanca for the first time) but I found it most absorbing.
16 Work Suspended/Scott-King's Europe; Evelyn Waugh - These are short stories, and quite harsh, dark little stories, too.
17 Solo; Rana Dasgupta - This was a beautifully-written book, but I find myself curiously unable to bring it to mind, even with the crutch of an amazon summary. What does that even SAY?
18 Words; Jean-Paul Sartre - Autobio by Sartre of his childhood. I bought it in Edinburgh with the next book on the list, and ended up keeping that one and ditching this one. So. There you are.
19 The Prime of Life; Simone de Beauvoir - I found this endlessly compelling. It made me feel like every night I haven't spent sleeping in the open on a roof in Greece with Jean Paul Sartre has been a night wasted.
20 A Handful of Dust; Evelyn Waugh - oh good GOD. Has a sadder book been written? You could probably summarize this with the phrase "terrible people do terrible things to one another". It felt almost venomous.
21 Lucky Jim; Kingsley Amis - I adore Kingsley Amis' nonfiction writing about drink (on last year's list) but I really couldn't ever get into this novel about the academic life in mid-20th C Britain.
22 * The Great Gatsby; F. Scott Fitzgerald - Well, yes, what can you really say at this point?
23 The Graduate; Charles Wells - Here, I returned to Canada. I know I'm always on about movie adaptations, but this is one of those examples of the film being VASTLY more famous than the book. It's remarkably faithful, for the record.
24 Moral Relativism; Steven Lukes - This is from the Big Ideas, Small Books series, and it's definitely got an introductory feel. I almost found its cursory look at cognitive relativism (w/r/t things like the culture wars) more interesting than the views of moral relativism further explored in the rest of the book.
25 Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol; Ian Gately - Some fascinating stuff, and I'm glad that I've got it in the house now as a reference work. If I've got anything critical to say, it's that it's a bit...journalist-y. He maybe could have disguised his origins a bit better?
26 Behind the Scenes at the Museum; Kate Atkinson - I think I read more fiction (as a % of the whole) this year than in any other year in which I'd kept a list. My mum recommended this to me as it's set in York, and I'd just been there for the first time a few months previous. A bit wrenching, as a story, but definitely worthwhile.
27 Other Voices, Other Rooms; Truman Capote - Thinking of this book just makes me fixate on this photo of Capote. And maybe makes me want to visit the US deep south, sometime?
28 Island of Dr Moreau; H.G. Wells - Maybe suffered from my problem of constantly comparing it to Lord of the Flies, somehow. The violence, I surmise. Has lots more in common with the tropical, amazonian parts of Waugh's Handful of Dust, now that I think about it. But Pendrick is more competent, as a protagonist.
29 When You Are Engulfed In Flames; David Sedaris - Sedaris has been diminishing returns for me, from Me Talk Pretty onwards. I didn't even read his animal fables book, as he's one of those (distressingly many!) writers whose nonfiction essays I enjoy but whose fiction puts me off.
30 The Sweet Life in Paris; David Lebovitz - Maybe nothing has made me want to live in Paris LESS than this book, by a transplanted American pastry chef. He makes the food sound lovely, but the general tone of his impressions of Parisians seems designed to make me hate them.
31 Savage Grace; Natalie Robins & Steven M.C. Aronson - I'm really not much for what you might call True Crime, as a genre. But every once in a while, I find myself reading something along those lines. It's like falling into a wikipedia hole and reading about serial killers for three hours. It happens! (Please quote this when I go on my inevitable killing spree)
32 She Came to Stay; Simone de Beauvoir - OK so I've got this problem with thinly-disguised autobiography. (I guess I like books to choose one side or the other, to DECLARE themselves. I mean, I don't even mind embellished autobio along Dave Eggers lines, so much) This book is fiction, but it's clearly based on the very part of de Beauvoir's life she described in the autobio I read earlier in the year. No! I shan't stand for it!
33 Our Man in Havana; Graham Greene - Funny, yes, and not an egregious amount of Catholicism (really my main criterion for the enjoyment of Greene novels). Sometimes hard to keep it separate in my mind from The Comedians, although they are very different.
34 Love in a Cold Climate; Nancy Mitford - I got excited about reading Mitford's stuff after getting into the bright young things sometime in 2009. I didn't find it as fascinating as I thought I might, but it's certainly a worthy enough story. Sort of wish I'd been reading it whilst watching Downton Abbey...
35 The Hipless Boy; Sully - A little slip of a graphic novel that somehow felt dated already, even though it'd only come out the year before.
36 Musicophilia; Oliver Sacks - My utter lack of knowledge of music and how it works probably hampered my ability to get much out of this book. As enjoyable as any other Sacks, but definitely meant for people know at least something - anything! - about music. My fault, not his.
37 How We Decide; Jonah Lehrer - This is one of those books, where you'd like to think that after you read it you'll be able to overcome all of your weird hardwired or socially-constructed decision-making problems, but the truth is, it's not a self-help tome. There's no list to follow.
38 The Black Prince; Iris Murdoch - Oh my GOD. This was maybe my favourite book of the year, and certainly my favourite novel. I don't think I was expecting something so...visceral, so bouncy and exciting. But it retains it's "literaryness", and not just as a veneer. The perfect package of a novel.
39 The Sea, The Sea; Iris Murdoch - There's got to be a tiny bit of disappointment when you've just been so blown away by something else by the same author. And yes, there was. But I did enjoy the process, and will keep reading the rest of her work, until it all runs out on me.
40 An Unfinished Woman; Lillian Hellman - There is more left out of this book than is left in. This might be a general symptom of memoir, especially when other famous folks are involved, but it was jarring to find her one day working as a publishing lackey, the next to being a successful playwright and partner to Dashiell Hammett.
41 Zeitoun; Dave Eggers - So maddening! As much of a cliché as it is to mention this, these are the sorts of things we'd like to to think don't happen to people who live in the 'civilized' world. The fallout feels especially heart-rending.
42 The Big Short; Michael Lewis - It's interesting to read something about the financial crisis and realize that the people you're being asked to identify with are those who - yes! - recognized what was going on before everyone else did, but rather than trying to prevent what was happening, their interest was in profiting from others bad investments. Not precisely revolutionary. It's not as if the heroes are brave regulators, just those who are befuddled by the lack of regulation and took advantage at the last minute.
43 Life Among the Savages; Shirley Jackson - I read almost all of this on the 24 hour train ride back to PEI from Toronto. I'd been looking for it forever, and Joey gave it to me for christmas! What a pal! In any case, this is way more cute and funny than any memoir of rural childrearing by the author of bleak sci-fi stories has any right to be!