I'm going to take a page from Nick Hornby's articles from The Believer and start making a list of the books I've read in any given month. I can't quite list all of the books I've received from the publisher or bought on my own 'cause that would just take more time than I'm willing to give. I get books every day in the mail. Some of them I keep, some of them I pass on to others (if you ever want to be a recipient of these free ARCs, let me know and we can work something out). I got about 100 free books at Winter Institute alone last month. So I'll just list the books that I read. I used to keep a list every year of the books I'd read, but the last list I could find was from 2002, where I read 113 books. Back then I didn't include novel-length works of fanfiction or audio books, but I plan to include them this year.
Books read in January 2011
Open City by Teju Cole (reviewed here)
Where She Went by Gayle Forman (YA novel; I may be one of the very few readers who won't trash it in my review to come)
The Last Letter from Your Lover by Jojo Moyes (Light & fluffy & fun, but I probably won't review it)
Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee (review to come; also qualifies for the South India Challenge that I signed up for!)
Big Girl Small by Rachel DeWoskin (Amazing! Review to come)
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones (Loved it! Review to come)
My American Unhappiness (very interesting, review to come)
What There Is To Say, We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, edited by Suzanne Marrs (excellent stuff, review to come)
Clarity by Kim Harrington (a YA novel I read for work. Probably won't review it.)
The Matchmaker of Perigord by Julia Stuart (charming. mini review probably forthcoming)
The Three Stages of Amazement by Carol Edgarian (very good. review forthcoming)
Eleven books. Not bad. But considering I had four days of travel that month and I get can get a lot of reading done on airplanes, it should have been more.
We were talking about Nick Hornby and his lists last night at my book group. Specifically, all the list making in High Fidelity. I find "top" whatever lists very hard to make. How could I possibly pick my top favorite books? That's too generic a category. The only thing I ever enjoyed making lists about was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so maybe that's getting close to how the characters in High Fidelity feel about music. Top five Buffy episodes, top five big bads, top five seasons,...now that's fun.
ReplyDeleteSo glad you posted up the Eudora Welty book. I actually was able to access it today thanks to netgalley and can't wait to read it. I can't believe I didn't know about netgalley! i feel like doing a cartwheel!
ReplyDeleteGreat to see your enthusiasm for the books (and authors) you post about. Really liked your Bourdain story. I would be very interested in any ARC copies if possible. Keep up the good work!
ReplyDeleteCheers -
Jenny, great news about netgalley!
ReplyDeletePeter D, leave me some contact info and we can chat about my getting galleys to you once I've finished them, or passing along galleys from the pubs that I know I won't read.
Thanks - my contact info is captunderp at hotmail dot com and I look forward to hearing from you.
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