Happy New Year

It's been a mixed sort of year. A permanent job (I've been temping forever) with a better pension and more money. Some great holidays both with other people and by myself, but I also lost a cousin this year who was still in his 50s, and his stepdad had a heart attack shortly afterwards and is waiting on an operation in mid-January. We also had a health scare for one of my aunts but that was stabilised, thankfully, with medication.

I've done quite a lot of decluttering - I counted items in and out (not food or toiletries but things that must be kept and cleaned and given permanent house room) and more than twice as many things went out as in, which is good. It also encouraged me to read the books already on my shelves and let some go once read or if I knew I wouldn't get round to them. 

As usual though, here is the list of books I did read:

The Stoat - Lynn Brock
To the Holy Shrines - Sir Richard Burton
Agatha Christie - Lucy Wolsey
Sound - A Story of Hearing Lost and Found - Bella Bathurst
A Surfeit of Suspects - George Bellairs
The Kiss - Anton Chekov
Techniques of Persuasion - J A C Brown
Appointment with Death - Agatha Christie
Everything is Washable (almost) - Sali Hughes
Lonelyheart 4122 - Colin Watson
Charity Ends at Home - Colin Watson
Still More Commonplace - Mary Stocks
The Flaxborough Crab - Colin Watson
Broomsticks over Flaxborough - Colin Watson
Littlejohn on Leave - George Bellairs
How to Run Your Home Without Help - Kay Smallshaw
Deadly Company - Ann Granger
Snobbery with Violence - Colin Watson
Tribes - David Lammy
The Aspern Papers - Henry James
How to Be Alone - Jonathan Franzen
The Naked Nuns - Colin Watson
Novelist(a) - Claire Askew
Murder in the Falling Snow - Various
Christmas is Murder - Val Mc Dermid

Orchids on Your Budget - Marjorie Hillis

Death at Dykes Corner - E C R Lorac
Blue Murder - Colin Watson
Plaster Sinners - Colin Watson
Whatever’s Going on in Mumblesby - Colin Watson
Music - W H Hadow
Reality is not what it appears - Carlo Rovelli
A Deadly Affair - Agatha Christie
Mr Bazalgette's Agent - Leonard Merrick
Camera Lucida - Barthes
The Detective's Daughter - Lesley Thomson
Poirot - Anne Hart
Hercule Poirot's Christmas - Agatha Christie
The Adventures of Dr Thorndyke - R Austin Freeman
A Kind of Vanishing - Lesley Thomson
Size Matters Not - Warwick Davies
The Big Four - Agatha Christie
The Pilgrims - Mary Shelley
Content With What I Have - C Henry Warren
The Empty Space - Peter Brook
Literature, Money and the Market - Paul Delaney
Death of an Author - E C R Lorac
Death of Jezebel - Christianna Brand
Checkmate to Murder - E C R Lorac
Cross River Traffic - Chris Roberts
Goodbye Things - Fumio Sasaki
Lions and Shadows - Christopher Isherwood
The Ice Age - Margaret Drabble
Evil Under the Sun - Agatha Christie
The Mystery of Three Quarters - Sophie Hannah
The No-Spend Year - Michelle McGagh
The Devil and the C I D - E C R Lorac
Ghost Girl - Lesley Thomson
The Practice of Writing - David Lodge
Pall for a Painter - E C R Lorac
Artists in Crime - Ngaio Marsh
Murder having Once been Done - Ruth Rendell
Photo-Finish - Ngaio Marsh
And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
Pereira Maintains - Antonio Tabucchi
Sparkling Cyanide - Agatha Christie
Rock Crystal - Adalbert Stifter
Glimpses of Bengal - Rabindranath Tagore
K is for Killer - Sue Grafton
The Murder on the Burrows - E C R Lorac
The Hopkins Manuscript - R C Sherriff
The Assault on Jerusalem - Steven Runciman
Selective Memory - Katherine Whitehorn
A Backward Glance - Edith Wharton
Nightwalking – John Lewis Stempel
You Should Have Left - Daniel Kehlmann
Do It Yourself Doom - Stephen Prickett
Dead Famous – Greg Jenner
The Art of Travel - Alain de Botton
Anaximander- Carlo Rovelli
The Unpunished Vice - Edmund White
Unnatural Death - Dorothy L Sayers
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club - Dorothy L Sayers
A Sentimental Journey - Sterne
Great Granny Webster - Caroline Blackwood
Gilbert Keith Chesterton - Maisie Ward
The Fashion in Shrouds - Margery Allingham
What Katy Did Next - Susan Coolidge
Clover - Susan Coolidge
Tokyo Express - Seicho Matsumoto
Games Without Rules - Michael Gilbert

91 books read in total, as ever a lot of crime - 43 murder mysteries and three crime adjacent books, being biographies of Christie, Chesterton and Hercule Poirot. 56 fiction books overall, and 35 non fiction. 

Six books in translation, which is fairly good for me, especially since I made no real effort to seek books in translation this time. 

This year we also have an even split between men and women, and just one anthology containing both. 

Standout books include Games Without Rules by Michael Gilbert. Gilbert wrote Smallbone Deceased, one of my favourite of the British Library Classics. Games Without Rules is written and set later, and is a low key but very engaging and inventive series of short spy stories - I'm sure I've read the last of these before in anthologies, but it's much more effective as the culmination of a series when you've got fond of the characters.

I also really enjoyed A Backward Glance by Edith Wharton and Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood. Lorac is consistently entertaining, although some of her books are better than others, and the same might be said for Colin Watson, who I mainlined early on in the year. I also loved Pereira Maintains and You Should Have Left. 

Conversely The Big Four was every bit as terrible as I remembered (I don't normally diss books here, but given how much I love Christie, and her phenomenal success, and the fact she's not alive to be hurt, I'm making an exception), and although Nightwalking had some interesting ideas and is an attractive physical object it felt terribly padded. There's really not much original material in the book.

And that's me. I haven't made any plans for next year except to continue reading from my shelves a bit more and get the ones I likely won't read again out to the bookswap, and to hopefully read a full book in Italian - even if it's just a very short one or a child's one - by this time next year.

So here's to 2024.