2011: The year in books

[decemberthirty]

When I made my annual reading list at the end of 2010, I was terribly disappointed to realize that I had only read 22 books that year. So in 2011, for the first time ever, I set a numerical goal for my reading: 30 books. I made it, though not by much; I read a grand total of 32 books in 2011. It was interesting to read with a goal in mind. I don't think it made much difference in my overall reading patterns. I still chose books by whim and according to mood, and I still went through phases when I got on a roll and read a ton, and other phases when I got bogged down in particular books and read much more slowly. But I stayed aware of the fact that I was counting books this year, and there were occasions when I knew I was falling behind and so deliberately chose short books or books I thought would be quick reads. I would never want to let a goal like that keep me from reading long or difficult books, but overall I thought it worked well enough that I decided to set a new goal for next year: 33 books since I'm 33 years old.

Enough prefacing! Here is the list! Books marked with an (R) are books that I re-read this year, and links lead back to whatever post most closely resembles a review of each book:

1. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
2. Mothers and Sons by Colm Tóibín
3. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
4. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell
5. The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell
6. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
7. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
8. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
9. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
10. East Wind Melts the Ice by Liza Dalby
11. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
12. At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill
13. The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
14. Here We Are in Paradise by Tony Earley
15. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
16. Tinkers by Paul Harding
17. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
18. Regeneration by Pat Barker (R)
19. The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker (R)
20. The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (R)
21. Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
22. Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata
23. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
24. Maurice by E.M. Forster (R)
25. Close Range by Annie Proulx (R)
26. The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds
27. Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz
28. Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
29. The Snapper by Roddy Doyle
30. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
31. Micro Fiction ed. by Jerome Stern
32. Dance on My Grave by Aidan Chambers (a post about this book is forthcoming!) (R)

Not a bad list, all in all. As usual, there is very little nonfiction (Dillard, Dalby), a few short story collections (Tóibín, Earley, Proulx, Stern), and a huge preponderance of novels (everything else). I re-read far more books than usual this year, and also read more work in translation than I often do (Schlink, Kawabata, Mahfouz, Hrabal).

These were my favorites:

The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell: a lovely and often overlooked little gem of a novel about a friendship between two boys in Chicago in the 1920s. Maxwell tells a fairly simple story with great tenderness and subtlety.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: Woolf's prose is always gorgeous but none of her books have moved me until this one. This book performs a wonderful act of alchemy by which the ordinary matter of every day is somehow transformed into the loftiest mysteries of life. A haunting book.

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster: Oh, how I love Forster. This books is a clever comedy of manners under which lurks a deeper story about the need for authenticity, the difficulty of breaking with convention, and the transforming power of love.

Happy 2012 to all of you!

Comments

[loca.livejournal.com]

That's an impressive list that puts the rest of us to shame! Good work! :D

[decemberthirty.livejournal.com]

Thanks! But I'm not really trying to outdo anybody else or put anyone to shame...

[sarabear4.livejournal.com]

Great list there! Very impressed :-)

[moondancedryad.livejournal.com]

I think that is quite a list!

[undergroundsea.livejournal.com]

I still look for Maurice when I'm inside the bookshop :) I need to get on it and just order it :) for some reason it will feel more special though just to find it :) My penguin challenge is horribly stalled on Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald. Dating got massively in the way of reading in quiet moments.

[decemberthirty.livejournal.com]

Ha! Dating has a way of doing that! I guessed that was what had happened with your reading project. :)

I've never read Tender Is the Night, so if you ever do finish it you'll have to let me know how it is.

[undergroundsea.livejournal.com]

Reading other books in between hasn't helped either! :) At the moment, I can't recommend it all that highly. Though it has lost some of its charm because I keep putting it down and taking time to pick it back up again, it really wasn't what I was after. I keep imagining it to be something else entirely, much like that film A Good Woman, where Americans in Europe get into a bit of a dramatic muddle. Right now it's still very slow moving, and more about the characters themselves and their social scene and standing, as opposed to any real action.