Monday, January 02, 2012

Looking back at 2011

Not the best of years reading wise with a fairly low number consumed. What was perhaps more disappointing was the failure to get a rythmn going during the year. Booker prizes passed me by as did most other literary events and at times it felt as if just finishing a book was a major challenge let alone keeping up with the world of literature.

Of course the hope is that this year will be different and that I will not only read more but get into the swing of things and stay there for a bit.

Anyway here's the list of stuff read last year:

January
1. The Islanders and A Fisher of Men by Yevgeny Zamyatin
2. 2017 by Olga Slavnikova
3. Short stories and Prose Poems by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
4. One Hot Summer in St Petersburg by Duncan Fallowell
5. Uncle's Dream and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6. The Village by Ivan Bunin
7. Master and Man and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy

February
8. Count D'Orgels Ball by Raymond Radiguet
9. Taking it to Heart by Marie Desplechin
10. The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
11. Holiday in a Coma by Frederic Beigbeder
12. Jezebel by Irene Nemirovsky
13. The Princess of Mantua by Marie Ferranti
14. A Day in the Country and Other Stories by Guy De Maupassant

March
15. The Terrorists by Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo
16. Parallel Lives by John Tagholm
17. The Long Good-Bye by Raymond Chandler
18. The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka by Josef Skovorecky
19. Talking about Detective Fiction by P.D. James
20. The Suspicions of Mr Wicher by Kate Summerscale
21. Headed for a Hearse by Jonathan Latimer

April
22. Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki
23. The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum by Heinrich Boll
24. Lineman Thiel and Other Tales by Gerhart Hauptmann
25. The Call of The Toad by Gunter Grass
26. Death in Venice, Tristan, Tonio Kroger by Thomas Mann
27. The Decision Book by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler

May.
28. Country Dance by Margiad Evans
29. The Death of Napoleon by Simon Leys
30. Dearest Father by Franz Kafka
31. The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee
32. Letters from a Lost Uncle by Mervyn Peake

June.
33. Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada
34. Laikonik Express by Nick Sweeney
35. Mercedes-Benz by Pawel Huelle
36. Paris Metro Tales edited by Helen Constantine

July.
37. How I won the Yellow Jumper by Ned Boulting
38. Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali
39. Can We Borrow Your Husband? by Graham Greene
40. The Hare With the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal
41. King of Tuzla by Arnold Jansen op de Haar
42. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
43. Les Belles Images by Simone de Beauvoir

August
44. The Whores of Coxcomb Hall by Egg Taylor
45. Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
46. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
47. Rome Tales stories translated by Hugh Shankland
48. The Ascent of Isaac Steward by Mike French
49. Stabat Mater by Tiziano Scarpa
50. The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

September
51. Hello America by JG Ballard
52. Busy Monsters by William Giraldi
53.
54.
55. The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin

October
56. The Wanderer by Knut Hamsen
57. Made in England by Gavin James Blower
58. A Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
59. Engineers of the Soul by Frank Westerman
60. Incognita by William Congreve

November
61. Unthology 2 by various authors
62. Ten Stories about Smoking by Stuart Evers
63. Dark Steps by Martin Pond
64. Departures by Tony Parsons
65. What we talk about when we talk about love by Raymond Carver
66. Break it Down by Lydia Davis

December
67. An introduction to English poetry by James Fenton