31 December 2012

Reading project for 2013

image from here
Going into bookshops, I've been bewildered by the unknown names of the authors of recently-published novels. Where to start?? Recently the Guardian newspaper had a list of publishers' favourite books from 2012, and this gives a starting place, so for 2013 - my Year of Catching Up With Myself - one of my projects is to read some of the books on this list (six? ten?). Here they are, in a somewhat subjective order (some are linked to reviews in the Guardian) -

Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways 
Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod
Ian Sansom's Paper: An Elegy
Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (a thriller)
Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt
Susan Wicksl, A Place to Stop
Chris Ware's Building Stories
Sean Borodale,  Bee Journal (poetry)
Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn & Child
Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles
 Richard Holloway's memoir Leaving Alexandria
James Meek's The Heart Broke In
Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds
 Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers 
Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword
Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station

 John Lanchester, Capital
Sombrero Fallout by Richard Brautigan
Steve Roud and Julia Bishop's New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs
The Nolympics by Nicholas Lezard
John Banville's Ancient Light
Denis Johnson's Train Dreams
at
Labels: ,

2 comments:

Jane Housham said...

I can only recommend Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl from actually having read it -- thought it was brilliant. I guess you'd be best off having read Wolf Hall before you tackled Bring up the Bodies. I would like to read the Macfarlane.

Hope you enjoy your reads.

1 January 2013 at 14:38
Linda B. said...

Oops - I seem to have missed all of these. A good list to have to hand!

2 January 2013 at 08:13

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)