What I've been reading

Late last year it started to irritate me that I could never remember what books I'd read. I could remember characters, or plots, or settings but never anything useful like a title, or an author. Which is hopeless when you're trying to tell someone you've read an excellent book set in Greece, or about an old woman. I borrow my books from the Parliamentary Library, which has a small but perfectly formed fiction collection. And it's literally 100 metres from my desk ... talk about enabling. Even if I wanted to break the reading habit (which I don't) it would be impossible with my supplier downstairs giving it away for free.

Anyway the only bad thing about the library is that it's a primarily research library, not a lending one, so they don't have a record of what you've borrowed. So I whinged for a bit about not being able to keep track, then decided to do something about it and installed Goodreads. It has an excellent scan function, so now I'm in a routine where before I drop my books back I scan the barcode with the iPad camera and put the book in my "2018" shelf on Goodreads. It is very simple, and means I can tell you that for the first six months of 2018 I read the following 61 books (in reverse chronological order, with the most recent at the top):

Leonard Woolf: A Biography	Victoria Glendinning
The End of the Day	Claire North
The Women in Black	Madeleine St. John
Re Jane	Patricia  Park
Primary School Confidential: Confessions From the Classroom	Mrs. Woog
Sorcerer to the Crown (Sorcerer Royal #1)	Zen Cho
One Fifth Avenue	Candace Bushnell
We Are Not Ourselves	Matthew  Thomas
Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd (Flavia de Luce, #8)	Alan Bradley
Relatively Famous	Roger Averill
The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen	Syrie James
King of the Badgers	Philip Hensher
Where There's A Will	John Mortimer
Ink and Bone	Lisa Unger
An Unkindness of Ghosts	Rivers Solomon
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)	Alan Bradley
The Passengers	Eleanor Limprecht
As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce, #7)	Alan Bradley
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (Flavia de Luce, #2)	Alan Bradley
How Hard Can It Be? (Kate Reddy, #2)	Allison Pearson
Love & Fame	Susie Boyt
Dying: A Memoir	Cory Taylor
Too Close To Home	Georgia Blain
The Girl With All the Gifts	M.R. Carey
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine	Gail Honeyman
This Side of Paradise	F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1)	Becky Chambers
Cooee	Vivienne Kelly
Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris	Edmund White
A Red Herring Without Mustard (Flavia de Luce, #3)	Alan Bradley
The Supernatural Enhancements	Edgar Cantero
The Secret Recipe for Second Chances	J.D. Barrett
Dyschronia	Jennifer Mills
The Wonder	Emma Donoghue
Breathless: An American Girl in Paris	Nancy K. Miller
The Days of Abandonment	Elena Ferrante
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society	Mary Ann Shaffer
Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1)	Ernest Cline
Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro
Eleanor & Park	Rainbow Rowell
Of Human Bondage	W. Somerset Maugham
Norse Mythology	Neil Gaiman
Wedding Night	Sophie Kinsella
Cosmo Cosmolino	Helen Garner
The Jane Austen Project	Kathleen A. Flynn
Finnikin of the Rock (Lumatere Chronicles, #1)	Melina Marchetta
The Group	Mary McCarthy
Diary of a Provincial Lady	E.M. Delafield
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August	Claire North
Stardust	Neil Gaiman
When We Were Orphans	Kazuo Ishiguro
The Outcasts of Time	Ian Mortimer
DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense	Joyce Carol Oates
Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark, #1)	Veronica Roth
Let Me Be Frank With You	Richard Ford
Landline	Rainbow Rowell
The Forgotten Garden	Kate Morton
The Distant Hours	Kate Morton
I've Got Your Number	Sophie Kinsella
She's Not There	Joy Fielding
Then We Came to the End	Joshua Ferris

Most of them are reasonably lightweight - I read for pleasure not for learning - and I haven't included about another twenty that I started and then decided life was too short to read a boring book (most literary prize winners end up in this group because I am a philistine and book judges are mental). Also this list doesn't include the really crappy ones I download from the ACT public library for when I travel ... this is mostly anything by M.C. Beaton, the Phyrne Fisher series and many with the words 'regency' and 'romance' in the title. Embarrassing, but I can't read anything remotely intellectual in a plane or an airport. I think it's the avgas.

If I had to pick three books off this list as worth reading I would say The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which we did for book club and loved;  When We Were Orphans  - bits of which still stay with me randomly; and the most recent one - a biography of Leonard Woolf who I knew absolutely nothing about (and cared less to be honest) but Victoria Glendinning is such a superb biographer that I loved every page.