Books I've Read This Year -- 2012

[nightdog_barks]

Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, Charles King
A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire, Anton Chekhov
Theatre of Fish: Travels Through Newfoundland and Labrador, John Gimlette
Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, Wade Davis
Blackout, Connie Willis
All Clear, Connie Willis
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay, John Gimlette
Fieldwork: A Novel, Mischa Berlinski
Among Others, Jo Walton
Eva Moves the Furniture, Margot Livesey
Mr. Timothy, Louis Bayard
Witches on the Road Tonight, Sheri Holman
Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry, Donald Hall
Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45, Max Hastings
Gods Without Men, Hari Kunzru
The Razor's Edge, W. Somerset Maugham
Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace, John Gimlette
Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York, Richard Zacks
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson
A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, Tony Horwitz
House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann, Evelyn Juer
Collected Poems, Jack Gilbert
Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel
The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography, Selina Hastings
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, Ben Fountain
Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein
Farthing, Jo Walton
Lucky in the Corner, Carol Anshaw
The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography, Stephen Fry
Train Dreams, Denis Johnson
Barney's Version, Mordecai Richler
Swan Song, Robert R. McCammon
State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
Canada, Richard Ford
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Manning Marable
Feast Day of Fools, James Lee Burke
So Cold the River, Michael Koryta
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce
Prairie Fever: British Aristocrats in the American West 1830 - 1890, Peter Pagnamenta
The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock
Liar & Spy, by Rebecca Stead
Sutton, J.R. Moehringer
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Rebecca Solnit
Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge, John Gimlette
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, Robert Caro
Carry the One, Carol Anshaw
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, Tony Horwitz
Swamplandia!, Karen Russell
San Miguel, T.C. Boyle
The City & The City, China Miéville

Comments

[namaste]

Our library here has a "checkout history" that I'll rely on to help figure out my reading history this year. (You have to turn it "on," which I didn't do until last month.)

Right now I'm down to the last few pages of "The Marriage Plot."

[nightdog_barks]

A checkout history sounds like a great idea ... I need to start revisiting our local library. *g* And I loved The Marriage Plot! There's an interview with Jeffrey Eugenides in the winter Paris Review that I still haven't read ...

[namaste]

I liked Middlesex better, but then I connected to it since I was living in the same neighborhood as the one from the book at the time it came out. Mitchell was just a little too much "writer stand in" for me to really believe in the characters as independent from their creator.