So here is the list, in the reverse order that I read them in:
| Jennifer Saunders | Bonkers: My Life in Laughs |
| David Lodge | A Man of Parts |
| A.S. Byatt | Ragnarok |
| Charlotte Bronte | Villette |
| Terry Pratchett | Snuff (Discworld, #39; City Watch #8) |
| Catherine Lowell | The Madwoman Upstairs |
| David Profumo | Bringing The House Down: A Family Memoir |
| Nigel Williams | R.I.P. |
| Daphne Merkin | The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontes, and the Importance of Handbags |
| Claire Fuller | Bitter Orange |
| Juliet Barker | The Brontes |
| Barney Norris | Turning for Home |
| Matt Haig | How to Stop Time |
| Brian Martin | Holt College: An Oxford Novel |
| Jonathan Bate | Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life |
| Angela Meyer | A Superior Spectre |
| Tim Winton | Eyrie |
| Pamela Holmes | The Huntingfield Paintress |
| Gail Godwin | Grief Cottage: A Novel |
| Audrey Niffenegger | Her Fearful Symmetry |
| Joshua Ferris | The Unnamed |
| Frank Herbert | Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1) |
| Tim Winton | The Boy Behind the Curtain |
| David Nicholls | Us |
| Damon Tweedy | Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine |
| Juliet Marillier | Dreamer's Pool (Blackthorn & Grim #1) |
| Jacqueline Lunn | The Unknown Woman |
| Jennifer Egan | A Visit from the Goon Squad |
| Jennifer Egan | Manhattan Beach |
| Jane Harper | Force of Nature (Aaron Falk, #2) |
| Katharine Murphy | On Disruption |
| Douglas Coupland | Generation A |
| Lionel Shriver | Property: A Collection |
| Julia Baird | Victoria The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire |
| A.M. Homes | May We Be Forgiven |
| Victoria Glendinning | Rebecca West: A Life |
| Virginia Woolf | To the Lighthouse |
| Sally Brampton | Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression |
| Laura Shapiro | What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories |
| Philip Hensher | Kitchen Venom |
| Fredrik Backman | My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises |
| Philip Hensher | Tales of Persuasion |
As usual, it is all over the place. Literary, light, non-fiction, biography, memoir, old, new. I do sometimes follow trails; you can see a Bronte theme, and the biography of Leonard Woolf I read at the beginning of the year led to both To the Lighthouse and Rebecca West, which then led to A Man of Parts, which is about H.G. Wells (and it's great, by the way, highly recommend). Janet Malcolm's biography of Sylvia Plath (which isn't on this list for some reason, clearly my system is not infallible!) led to the Hughes biography. Both very good books but clearly there are a number of perspectives you can take on those two lives.
If I had to pick the three best - to be honest I can't even remember what most of them were about, which tells you something - it would be Tim Winton's Eyrie, Julia Baird's biography of Queen Victoria and Sally Brampton's memoir. My criteria for a good book is that it made some kind of memorable impact, which isn't very scientific, but there you have it. None of them were dreadful (I don't finish bad books, I just stop reading, and they don't go on my list) but some were a bit forgettable.
Ok, I've sussed you out at last. You're identical triplets. That's how you can work in a clearly high-powered job, parent, run two houses, make a quilt and a scarf every weekend and also read all those books. Unless you're perhaps an alien - that's another possibility.
ReplyDelete