Read Your Own Books 2009

Here is my list of books which I hope to read this year…

Struck out = finished; Bold = currently reading.

1. Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal - J.R. Ackerley
2. Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow
3. Six Memos for the Next Millenium - Italo Calvino
4. The Plague - Albert Camus
5. Tokyo Cancelled - Rana Dasgupta
6. Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
8. The Collector - John Fowles
9. Black Mass - John Gray
10. Aleksandar Hemon - The Lazarus Project
11. Travels with Herodotus - Ryszard Kapuscinski
12. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
13. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
14. The Member of the Wedding - Carson McCullers
15. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
16. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima
17. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
18. Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre
19. Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck
20. Couples - John Updike

Books which are not on The List which I have completed:

1. The Glass Demon - Helen Grant
2. A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle (I absolutely loved this. Will be purchasing more Holmes in the immediate future.)

Maybe this year I’ll stick to the list and actually finish everything on it! FINGERS CROSSED!!!

So, I have just finished reading my first book… except it is not one from the list. Which kind of defeats the point of making a list, but hey!

Hence, I am starting a list for books I have read which aren’t from The List:

1. The Glass Demon - Helen Grant.

This book isn’t actually released until May 2010. I managed to get a review copy while I was working at Puffin Books. It’s a teen / adult thriller-y book set in the Eifel region of Germany. It’s got German folklore and murder and intrigue. It’s got loads of Dan-Brown-stylee really short chapters so you get through it really quick. Don’t let the mention of Dan Brown put you off though… it’s actually quite well written if this is your kind of thing and even if it isn’t, it’s still an enjoyable read. The author’s debut novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, won at least one award and I’d quite like to read that one as well…

This isn’t really the kind of thing I’d generally pick up to read but since I had it, I decided to read it and was pleasantly surprised.

I can’t work out if I won or failed in 2009. I’ll go for winning. Here’s how it turned out:

A list for 2009:

In bold, are the ones I have started reading but then stopped for whatever reason. (I tend to read many books at the same time, as you can see…)
The struck out are those I have finished.

A list of books I plan to read in 2009:

1. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
2. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
3. Status Anxiety - Alain de Botton
4. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
5. The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus
6. The Plague - Albert Camus
7. Breakfast at Tiffany’s - Truman Capote
8. Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
10. The Collector - John Fowles
11. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
12. Deep Simplicity - John Gribbin
13. Chocolat - Joanne Harris
14. Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
15. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
16. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
18. Ascent - Jed Mercurio
19. Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
20. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
21. Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre
22. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
23. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
24. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
25. Old School - Tobias Wolff
26. Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates

Random other books (not on the list) which I read:

1. The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith
2. Slumberland - Paul Beatty
3. Metropole - Ferenc Karinthy
4. Fup - Jim Dodge
5. Cards on the Table - Agatha Christie
6. Pastoralia - George Saunders
7. The Moving Toyshop - Edmund Crispin
8. Why Are You Doing This? - Jason
9. Charlotte’s Web - E. B. White
10. The Man in the Brown Suit - Agatha Christie
11. After the Funeral - Agatha Christie
12. Casino Royale - Ian Fleming
13. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster

So, for 2010, my list is as follows. Some stuff from last years list and some new stuff:

1. Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal - J.R. Ackerley
2. Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow
3. Six Memos for the Next Millenium - Italo Calvino
4. The Plague - Albert Camus
5. Tokyo Cancelled - Rana Dasgupta
6. Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
8. The Collector - John Fowles
9. Black Mass - John Gray
10. Aleksandar Hemon - The Lazarus Project
11. Travels with Herodotus - Ryszard Kapuscinski
12. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
13. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
14. Carson McCullers - The Member of the Wedding
15. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
16. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima
17. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
18. Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre
19. Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck
20. Couples - John Updike

Maybe this year I’ll stick to my list and actually finish it!