Tuesday 2 January 2018

No more champagne, and the fireworks are through...

Although I didn't notice myself it looks like doing an MA in English Literature has actually led, a little ironically, to my reading slightly less than last year. Here is the list:

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived - Adam Rutherford
A life in Letters – George Orwell.
A Month in the Country – J L Carr
A Preface to Paradise Lost - C S Lewis
A Woman Surgeon – L Martindale
Aliens – edited by Jim Al Khalili
Apple of my Eye – Helene Hanff
Ask a Policeman - Members of the Detection Club circa '33
Breakfast at Sothebys – Philip Hook
Chronicles on Our Troubled Times - Thomas Piketty
Coriolanus - Livy
Coriolanus -  William Shakespeare
Death at the Opera - Gladys Mitchell
Death on the Riviera - John Bude
Doreen - Barbara Noble
Dumb Witness - Agatha Christie
Estuary - Rachel Lichtenstein
Foe - Coetzee
Good Parcel of English Soil - Richard Mabey
Goodbye to all Cats - PG Wodehouse
Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day - Arnold Bennett
Jacob's Room is full of Books - Susan Hill
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Kim - Rudyard Kipling
Kinsey and Me – Sue Grafton
Letter From New York - Helene Hanff
Lives in Writing – David Lodge
London Belongs to Me - Norman Collins
Lost Children - Edith Pargeter
Making it Up as I go Along - Marian Keyes
Memoirs of a Novelist - Virginia Woolf
Murder Underground - Mavis Doriel Hay
Music – Andrew Gant
Mystery in White – J Jefferson Farjeon
Paradise Lost - John Milton
Pax Britannica - Jan Morris
Resorting to Murder - Detection Club Members
Respectable – Lynsey Hanley
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Silent Nights - Detection Club Members
Silent Witness - Agatha Christie
Smile - Oliver Burkeman
Something Fresh - P G Wodehouse
Sounds and Sweet Airs - Anna Beer
Summer Lightning - P G Wodehouse
Talking About Detective Fiction - P D James
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The British Museum is Falling Down - David Lodge
The Cat Inside - William S Burroughs
The Cornish Coast Murder - John Bude
The Crime at Black Dudley - Margery Allingham
The Devil at Saxon Wall - Gladys Mitchell
The Devils Elbow – Gladys Mitchell
The Ghost Network - Catie Disabato
The Hanging Tree – Ben Aaronovitch
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying - Marie Kondo
The Persuaders - The Hidden Industry that Wants to Change your Mind - James Garvey
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
The Plague and I - Betty MacDonald
The Rebecca Notebook and other Memories - Daphne duMaurier
The Santa Klaus Murder - Mavis Doriel Hay
The Scoop and Behind the Screen - Dorothy L Sayers, Christie, Berkeley and others
The Secret House of Death - Ruth Rendell
The Story of Classic Crime in 100 books - Martin Edwards
The Waxworks Murder - John Dickson Carr
The World in the Evening - Christopher Isherwood
The Year of the Ladybird - Graham Joyce
Thirteen Guests - J Jefferson Farjeon
Three Act Tragedy - Agatha Christie
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere - Jan Morris
Underfoot in Show Business – Helene Hanff
Ways of Seeing – John Berger
When Last I died – Gladys Mitchell
Whoops! Why everyone owes everyone and no-one can afford to pay John Lanchester
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

Which is 76 books in comparison to last years 110. I think part of the explanation is that a) I haven't included text books because I don't read them in full and b) last year I reread a lot of Agatha Christie, which tends to go down quick.

The Agatha Christie effect probably also accounts for the men catching up the women this year. In fact they overtook. 37 books by men to 34 by women, with 5 by a joint team or group.

32 on the list were non fiction and 44 fiction, which means that my non fiction reading has dropped very little compared to my fiction reading. It's also the year - thanks to reading Sounds and Sweet Airs, that I discovered Fanny Hensel (nee Mendelssohn) and Barbara Strozzi.  

Favourite book of 2017?  London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins.

Happy New Year Everyone. 

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