2011 – A Year of Reading

It is the dawn of a new year and it is time to take stock of the old year – in my case to think back on books and reading. 2011 was an interesting reading year for me. I wanted to read 60 books. I read around 67 books. I say ‘around’ because I am not sure. I might have missed out a few books that I read at the beginning of the year. This is the highest number of books that I have read in any year Numbers don’t mean much in terms of reading – I will come back to this topic in a while – but it still made me happy to read more than what I had planned.

 

The breakup of my reading was as follows :

 

Abridged Classics – 2

Biography / Memoir – 4

Books about Books – 1

Classics – 8

Comics – 2

Essay Collections – 3

Fairytales / Mythology – 2

Graphic Novels – 2

Literary Fiction – 11

Mystery – 7

Romance / Love stories – 3

Philosophy – 1

Poetry – 1

Short Story Collections – 3

Thrillers – 4

YA (Young Adult) literature – 13

 

I seem to have read a lot of literary fiction, YA, mysteries and classics. Interesting!

 

I read 41 books written by male authors, 25 books written by women authors and 1 book jointly written by a male and a woman author. I read 48 books written in English and 20 which were translations.

 

I participated in one reading challenge – ‘Read-a-Myth’ challenge hosted by Jo from ‘Bibliojunkie’ and Bina from ‘If You Can Read This’. I also participated in two read-alongs – ‘The End of Mr.Y’ readalong hosted by Jo from ‘Bibliojunkie’, and the Effi Briest readalong hosted by Caroline from Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy from Lizzy’s Literary Life. I also took part in German Literature Month hosted by Caroline and Lizzy. Those were a lot of challenges and read-alongs for me. I normally try to do one in a year, because when I am under pressure, my reading goes south. But luckily this year, the read-alongs and challenges inspired me to read more. I loved German Literature Month, especially, because it introduced me to a lot of fascinating new writers and wonderful works of literature.

 

I liked most of the books that I read. I am one of those readers who likes all the books he reads – the way children like all sweets There were only two exceptions. I was disappointed by ‘River of Death’ by Alistair Maclean and ‘Those in Peril’ by Wilbur Smith. Maclean is one of my favourite thriller writers, but ‘River of Death’ is one of his later books and he seemed to have written it casually and the storytelling was formulaic. The same could be said of Wilbur Smith’s ‘Those in Peril’, though the premise of the novel was quite interesting.

 

Which were my favourite books of the year? It is difficult question, when you like most of the books you read. When I looked at the list of books that I read and made some hard decisions and tried to whittle down the list to a list of favourites, the following books came out.

 

My favourite novels were :

 

When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant

 

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

 

Night Gardening by E.L.Swann

 

Possession by A.S.Byatt

 

Suspicion by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

 

Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink

 

My favourite YA (Young Adult) novels were :

 

Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma

 

The Gates by John Connolly

 

Unhooking the Moon by Gregory Hughes

 

Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature by Robin Brande

 

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

 

Matched by Ally Condie

 

My favourite novellas were :

 

Immensee by Theodor Storm

 

Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist

 

My favourite short story collections were :

 

Nothing But Love : Love Stories from the New Yorker edited by Roger Angell

 

The Greatest Romance Stories ever Told edited by Nancy Butler

 

I also loved some of the stories from ‘Great German Short Novels and Stories’ edited by Victor Lange – especially ‘Immensee’ by Theodor Storm.

 

I read only one book of poetry – ‘Odes to Common Things’ by Pablo Neruda – which was gifted to me by one of my dear friends. I loved the poems, the sketches accompanying them and the beautiful way the book was produced.

 

What about my favourite non-fiction books?

 

I loved ’31 Songs’ by Nick Hornby – it is a beautiful ode sung in the honour of music by a music fan. I loved ‘Reading Like a Writer’ by Francine Prose – especially the books that prose discusses in them. I want to read some of those books. I loved the three cricket memoirs I read. My favourite was ‘What I Love About Cricket : One Man’s vain attempt to explain cricket to a teenager who couldn’t give a toss’ by Sandy Balfour. Unfortunately I haven’t reviewed this book. The description in this book of a catch taken by Paul Collingwood is one of the most beautiful descriptions of a cricket scene that I have ever read. The other two cricket memoirs I read – Malcolm Speed’s ‘Sticky Wicket’ and Matthew Hayden’s ‘Standing My Ground’ were quite interesting too. I also liked Masha Gessen’s ‘Perfect Rigour’ – an account of Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman’s successful attempt to prove the Poincare conjecture.

 

Some of my favourite parts from other books would include the first 120-odd pages of ‘The Marriage Plot’ by Jeffrey Eugenides, which was really wonderful, parts of the romance novel ‘Love Letters’ by Katie Fforde because it is a story about books, writers, novels, bookshops and literary festivals, some of the beautiful passages from ‘The Infinities’ by John Banville (can anyone write more beautiful prose?), some of the beautiful passages from ‘Love Virtually’ by Daniel Glattauer, a novel which is wholly made up of emails, some of the powerful prose of Emily Maguire’s ‘Taming the Beast’, which led me to Maguire beautiful essay ‘Solitude is Bliss’ and which made me want to read other novels of hers and the interesting premise of ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ by Marie Corelli, the literary superstar of yesteryears.

 

One of my favourites which deserves a separate post by itself is the essay ‘Sweets’ by Robert Lynd. I first read this essay in school and loved it. I have since searched for Lynd’s essay collections or this essay but haven’t been able to find them. Even Gutenberg doesn’t seem to have them. Then I found an old anthology called ‘Contemporary English Prose’ (which had extracts and stories which were more than 60 years old – nothing contemporary about it ) and to my great delight this essay was there. I went home and read it and it gave me as much pleasure as it did when I read it the first time. It was like meeting an old childhood friend after many years and discovering that talking with the friend was as delightful as before and continuing our conversation with this friend from where we left off all those years back.

 

As a reader, for most of the year, I stuck to the Aristotlean Golden Mean – reading mostly books of 300 pages or less. There were a few exceptions though – ‘Forbidden’ by Tabitha Suzuma, ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ by Marie Corelli, ‘The Book of Lost Things’ John Connolly, ‘The Marriage Plot’ by Jeffrey Eugenides, ‘Possession‘ by A.S.Byatt, ‘The End of Mr.Y’ by Scarlett Thomas and ‘Nothing But You’ edited by Roger Angell were all 500 pages or above.

 

During the course of my reading I (armchair) travelled to different countries – America, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Russia,  Taiwan,  South Africa, South Korea. Quite an impressive list, isn’t it

 

I hope to read more in 2012. I will try to touch 70 books. I also want to read atleast two chunksters – which according to me are books which are 800 pages above. The chunksters I am looking at are ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy (my fourth attempt), ‘In Search of Lost Time’ by Marcel Proust (my second attempt) and ‘The Pickwick Papers’ by Charles Dickens (my first attempt). I am also hoping that I am not worried about reading more number of books but focus on reading more good books and sometimes choosing a thicker book over a thinner one. I will have to wait and see how my reading pans out this year.

 

How was your reading year in 2011? I hope you had a wonderful time reading wonderful books and exploring fascinating writers. I can’t wait to hear about your reading year.

 

Wish you a very Happy and Wonderful New Year! Hope your New Year is filled with lots of wonderful books, delightful stories and luscious prose and gorgeous poetry, and beautiful ‘aha’ reading moments