Clearing the Decks

According to some loose but not completely unreliable calculations (x-refing my 'books I enjoyed' column on the right with the occasional Guardian review of books I didn't enjoy so much but liked well enough to finish) I read at least 56 books in the last year:

Over Seventy - P G Wodehouse

We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler

The Voyage Out - Virginia Woolf

Solitude - Anthony Storr

Doppler - Erland Loe

Good Evening Mrs Craven - Mollie Panter Downes

The Sherlock Holmes omnibus

A small fat anthology of G K Chesterton

A Single Man - Christopher Isherwood

The Hot Gates - William Golding

The Murder Room - P D James

Dear Committee Members - Julie Schumacher

Dearest Andrew – letters from Vita Sackville West to long distance penpal Andrew Reiber

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark

Hotel Du Lac - Anita Brookner

The Calculus Diaries - Jennifer Ouellette

The Face on the Cutting Room Floor - Cameron McCabe (Ernest Borneman)

Christopher and Columbus - Elizabeth Von Arnim

More Work for the Undertaker - Margery Allingham

A Woman of No Importance - Oscar Wilde

Two Cheers for Democracy - E M Forster

A Wanderer in Venice - E V Lucas

The Fascination of London, The Kensington District - G E Mitton

Monday or Tuesday - Virginia Woolf

Tolkien's Gown - Rick Gekoski

Nice Work - David Lodge

Dear Reader – Paul Fournel (translation by David Bellos

The Ballad of Peckham Rye - Muriel Spark

Six Against the Yard - The Detection Club (Allingham, Sayers and others)

In the Mountains - Elizabeth Von Arnim

Elizabeth in Rugen - Elizabeth Von Arnim

With a Zero at its Heart - Charles Lambert

The Provincial Lady (and sequels) - E M Delafield

Money, The Unauthorised Biography - Felix Martin

Curtain (Poirot's Last Case) - Agatha Christie

The Pale Horse – Agatha Christie

Nudge - Sunstein and Thaler

Satin Island - Tom McCarthy

A Spool of Blue Thread - Anne Tyler

Dead Man's Folly - Agatha Christie

Sleeping Murder - Agatha Christie

The Floating Admiral - Sayers, Christie, Chesterton and Others

The Finishing School – Muriel Spark

Taken At the Flood – Agatha Christie

Passages from the Autobiography of a Shakespeare Student - R M Theobald, M.A.

The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac - Eugene Field

The Blank Wall - Elizabeth Sanxay Holding

The Enchanted Places - Christopher Milne

Foxglove Summer - Ben Aaronovitch

The ABC Murders - Agatha Christie

The Gap in the Curtain - John Buchan

A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway

Spotted Hemlock – Gladys Mitchell

Quiet, the Power of Introverts in a World that Won’t Stop Talking – Susan Cain

Alarms and Diversions - James Thurber

A Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James

Of the 56, 28 were by women, 26 by men and two were compilations with a mixed team. 19 were non fiction (which surprised me, I didn't think I read that much non-fiction) and 37 fiction. 

Last years resolution - to read more recently published works - went quite well, up from 4 to 7 (and if I finish 'The Fishermen' by midnight I'll have doubled up on last year, but I'm not going to dash through a book I'm enjoying just to say I completed it in 2015).

Most were of a pretty good standard (and the Booker nominees not as pretentious as I might have feared) but I have to fall in with everyone else in saying that A Brief History was the best book I read this year, and head and shoulders above the others shortlisted. A truly epic and complex novel written incredibly well. I won't be surprised if it crops up next to Dickens and co in the 'top hundred best ever' lists in a few years.

My favourite however - because it's not the same thing - was either Tolkien's Gown or A Gap in the Curtain.

So Happy New Year to anyone who might be following this blog - or who just stumbled across it - and I'll see you in 2016.

There is no reason for including this except I drew it.