Sunday, 1 January 2017

Happy New Year

Personally I have made no New Year's Resolutions except Dry January, but I do have a list of books I read in 2016. As with last year they're either from my 'books I enjoyed this year' column or reviews elsewhere, so I may have missed a couple.

(I suppose I could make a New Year's resolution to note down every book I read but that won't happen and why make resolutions I'm sure I'll break?)

Books in 2016

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics - Carlo Rovelli
The Mystery of the Blue Train - Agatha Christie
Dumb Witness - Agatha Christie
They Do it With Mirrors - Agatha Christie
Peril at End House -Yet Another Agatha Christie
This is not the End of the Book - Umberto Eco & Jean Claude Carriere
Gratitude - Oliver Sacks
Third Girl - Agatha Christie
The Murder on the Links - Christie again
London War Notes - Mollie Panter-Downes
Appointment with Death - Christie again. It's a project now.
Cards on the Table - Agatha Christie
The Road to Little Dribbling - Bill Bryson
Lord Edgware Dies - Agatha Christie
Persuasion - Jane Austen
A House to Let - Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Proctor
No Logo - Naomi Klein
Crooked House - Agatha Christie
The Body in the Library - Agatha Christie
Absent in the Spring - Mary Westmacott (Christie's pseudonym)
Evil Under the Sun - Agatha Christie
Plain Murder - C S Forester
The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens
Coffin, Scarcely Used - Colin Watson
Agatha Christie's Autobiography - Christie
Future Perfect - Steven Johnson
The War on Cliche - Martin Amis
Asking for the Moon - Reginald Hill
The Man in the Brown Suit - Agatha Christie
Letters from the Sea and From Foreign Lands - Thomas Cook
Free Lunch - David Smith
Five Little Pigs - Agatha Christie
Thinking About it Only Makes it Worse - David Mitchell
The Anatomy of Murder - Sayers, Iles, and other members of the Detection Club
Ouch!: What you don't know about money and why it matters (more than you think) - Paul Knott
The Monogram Murders - Sophie Hannah
The Undercover Economist - Tim Harford
An Avenue of Stone - Pamela Hansford Johnson
Coroner's Pidgin - Margery Allingham
Swallow This - Joanna Blythman
A Three Pipe Problem - Julian Symons
Mrs McGinty's Dead - Agatha Christie
Rumpole at Christmas - John Mortimer
Whose Body - Dorothy L Sayers
Clouds of Witness - Dorothy L Sayers
Unnatural Death - Dorothy L Sayers
On Reading, Writing and Living With Books - Woolf, Forster, Dickens et al
Mathematics with Love - Mary Stopes-Roe
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
Nehru's Letters to His Sister - introduction by Krishna Nehru Hutheesing
The Sittaford Mystery - Agatha Christie
A Murder is Announced - Agatha Christie
Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie
How Pleasure Works - Paul Bloom
Earthbound, the Bakerloo Line - Paul Morley
Towards Zero - Agatha Christie
Postern of Fate - Agatha Christie
Symposium - Muriel Spark
The Golden Age of Murder - Martin Edwards
Oxford - Jan Morris
Latest Readings - Clive James
The Hollow - Agatha Christie
Antigone - Sophocles
Antigone - Jean Anouilh
What We Talk About When We Talk About the Tube, The District Line - John Lanchester
The Intelligent Man's Guide to the Post War World - G D H Cole
Buttoned Up, The East London Line - by Jop van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers
The Science of Discworld – Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen
Reaper Man – Terry Pratchett
The Lost Continent – Terry Pratchett
The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins
Lords and Ladies – Terry Pratchett
The Blue Riband, The Piccadilly Line - Peter York
Heads and Straights, the Circle Line - Lucy Wadham
N or M – Agatha Christie
And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
Death on the Cherwell - Mavis Doriel Hay
Witches Abroad - Terry Pratchett
House - Bound - Winifred Peck
At Bertram's Hotel - Agatha Christie
The Memorial - Christopher Isherwood
The Poisoned Chocolates Case - Anthony Berkeley
Sad Cypress - Agatha Christie
Fear Stalks the Village - Ethel Lina White
A Philosophy of Walking - Frederic Gros
Kingsley Amis – Ending Up          
After the funeral – Agatha Christie         
A Northern Line Minute – William Leith              
Waterloo-City, City-Waterloo – Leanne Shapton              
The Burden, Mary Westmacott
The Rose and the Yew Tree, Mary Westmacott 
Murder on the Orient Express  
The Attenbury Emeralds – Jill Paton Walsh          
Moriarty – Anthony Horowitz    
Hickory Dickory Dock – Agatha Christie  
By The Pricking Of My Thumbs – Agatha Christie              
Elephants Can Remember – Agatha Christie       
Silenic Drift – Iain Sinclair             
The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat –Erle Stanley Gardner  
Come Tell Me How You Live – Agatha Christie Mallowan               
Endless Night – Agatha Christie
Introducing Personal Finance - Michael Tallard  
A Clubbable Woman – Reginald Hill         
The Humbling – Philip Roth         
The Black Book – Lawrence Durrell          
Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks – John Curran          
Poirot Investigates – Agatha Christie      
Death in the Clouds – Agatha Christie    
New Graves at Great Norne - Henry Wade         
The 32 Stops - Danny Dorling (Central Line)         



A few things jump out from the list. The first is that there's a lot of Agatha Christie, and that this might also account for the fact that of the above 110 books 61 were written by women, and only 45 by men (the remaining 4 were co-authored). 

73 were fiction and 37 non fiction - again I've read more non fiction that I realised, and again it's about half the amount of fiction I read. 

The best book I read this year was The Intelligent Man's Guide to the Post War World by G D H Cole, but my favourite was The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards, which I fully intended to review and then didn't.

My least favourite was..

..but I've deleted this section without posting. Let's start 2017 on a positive note.

Happy New Year



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