My Year In Books
Shortly before Christmas goodreads emailed me a report listing the 22 books that I had read during the calendar year.
(Click on the book links to read my reviews).
Transgressive Fiction/Black Humour
As my second book, Necropolis, due out this spring (date to confirmed soon) is a work of dark fiction, a significant proportion of the books (27%) that I read last year were of the Transgressive Fiction/Black Humour variety. They were:
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Haunted by Chuck Palahaniuk
Damned by Chuck Palahniuk
Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis
Beat Generation
Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Queer by William S. Burroughs
Indie Books
Barry Braithwaite’s Last Life by A R Lowe
The Earth Shifter by Lada Ray
Others
Candide by Voltaire
Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck
The Pearl by John Steinbeck
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Red House by Mark Haddon
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
Pure by Andrew Miller
Pulp by Charles Bukowski
Biggest Disappointments
I enjoyed 19 of the 22 books that I read last year. The exceptions were Pure, The Red House & The Men Who Stare At Goats. The following 2 shared the honour of Biggest Disappointment of the year. I appreciate that many readers will disagree with me on these, especially regarding my choice of Pure, the winner of The Costa Prize in 2011.
Paris’s oldest cemetery, Les Innocents, is overflowing, the city’s deceased having been piled in there for years, resulting in the surrounding area having been permanently permeated more….
Having greatly enjoyed A Spot of Bother and The Curious Incident by the same author, I was very much looking forward to reading The Red House more…
Favourite Book of 2013
This was a difficult decision as I really enjoyed so many of the books that I read last year. After much deliberation I decided that Fight Club, Maggie Cassidy and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich were my favourites. The one that made the biggest impression on me was Solzhenitsyn’s controversial and morose novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a book that I am yet to review.
I look forward to hearing about your 2013 reading experiences.
An excellent blog post Guy, which reminds me that I really should start using Goodreads more fully. It must be nice to be able to look back on your reading history for the last year. I have an immense joy of reading as you know because I’ve shared it with you on a previous blog of mine. However, my problem is that I have a poor memory (I blame my age – haha!). I have been reading a lot of Indie books this year as I love to discover new authors and to try out a variety of genres. Included amongst those was your first book, Charles Middleworth, which was a very enjoyable read, and I’m looking forward to reading your next book.
I know you are a big reading fan Diane. It is great that you found the time to read so many Indie books last year, what with you being so busy with your own writing and writing related work. The benefits of having a poor memory, if indeed you do, is that you can enjoy all the books you read the first time just as much second time around. I will definitely be reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich again in the not too distant future. Hope to see you on goodreads soon, it is a great place.
Hey, good reviews! The Red House is going on my next list.
I hope you enjoy it more than me Flo. Haddon is/was one of my favourite authors. Thank you for the comment.