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

David Park, The Light of Amsterdam

Jennie Erdal, The Missing Shade of Blue

Alison Moore, The Lighthouse 

Susan Wicksl, A Place to Stop

Chris Ware's Building Stories

Sean Borodale,  Bee Journal (poetry)

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn & Child

Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles

Tim Lott's Under the Same Stars

 Richard Holloway's memoir Leaving Alexandria

James Meek's The Heart Broke In

Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

The Illicit Happiness of Other People by Manu Joseph

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Zadie Smith's NW 

 Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers 

Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper

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