After my last post explaining the 2013 reading challenge, and now having completed the challenge, I thought I would write a few words about the thirty books which I completed this year. As you may know, yesterday morning I was still reading (or so I thought) book number 29 of 30... It was only upon waking up this morning and checking my list that I realised goodreads has messed up slightly somewhere along the line and not included all of my books in my list. Why? I have no idea. All it means is that I have actually read more than thirty books this year. There may still be some missing but I will try to make the following list as accurate as possible!
Here are the books I have read this year (vaguely in order of reading):
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
The Harvard Lampoon - The Hunger Pains
Peter Cole - Religious Experience
Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho
J.G. Ballard - High Rise
Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata - Death Note Black Ed. Vol. II
Linwood Barclay - The Accident
John Steinbeck - The Pearl
Richard Appiganesi - Introducing Freud
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
Jung Chang - Wild Swans
David Talbot Rice - Islamic Art
Walter M. Miller Jr. - A Canticle For Leibowitz
Paul French - Midnight in Peking
Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata - Death Note Black Ed. Vol. III
J.G. Ballard - Concrete Island
John Green - The Fault in our Stars
Koji Suzuki - Ring
Xinran - The Good Women of China
Gabrielle Zevin - Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
Ryu Murakami - In the Miso Soup
Alejandro Casona - La Dama del Alba (The Lady of the Dawn)
Haruki Murakami - The Elephant Vanishes
Tani E. Barlow - I Myself am a Woman: The Selected Writings of Ding Ling
Vercors - Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea)
Adeline Yen Mah - Chinese Cinderella
Ted Hughes - The Iron Man
Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata - Death Note Black Ed. Vol. IV
Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata - Death Note Black Ed. Vol. V
Hubert Selby Jr. - Requiem For a Dream
Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club
John Steinbeck - The Wayward Bus
Italicized titles are my top ten books of the year. Looking back, there's quite a variety, even within the top ten! You can find a more detailed review of American Psycho here, not a book I would recommend to everyone but one that really drew me in as it got darker and darker, much like J.G. Ballard's 'High Rise', the story of a 40-floor apartment block which gradually degenerates into anarchy. 'A Clockwork Orange' was one I have been meaning to read for ages and it took me a while to get into it because of the language, however once I was used to it I couldn't put it down and loved it. I mostly read 'A Canticle For Leibowitz' on various aeroplanes this summer and would highly recommend it, though I think some understanding might be missed if you have no knowledge whatsoever of Latin (just my opinion, don't be too put off if you know no Latin but fancy it anyway). Xinran's 'The Good Women of China' is a collection of true-life stories, each telling the tale of a woman in China. Some of the stories are sad, some are quite harrowing, but they are all fascinating.
We are studying Casona's 'La Dama del Alba' this year at school and I am loving it. Casona's work is not well known in the English-speaking world but this play, which explores life, death, love and family, is well worth a read if you speak Spanish (I am yet to see a copy in English, unfortunately I don't think it has been translated). Murakami's collection of short stories in 'The Elephant Vanishes' range from strange to stranger, and I cannot wait to be able to read them in the original Japanese as I have learned some interesting things recently about his writing style in Japanese. We studied 'The Iron Man' in year three but I never remember going beyond the first chapter or so, so I read it this Christmas and am glad to say it's still one of my all-time favourites. Great for children, and adults too. 'Requiem For a Dream' exceeded all my expectations (I was looking forward to it, and had already seen the film), a book with a lasting impression and another one with fantastic language! Finally, John Steinbeck's 'The Wayward Bus', the final book I read in 2013, complete with Steinbeck's usual mix of characters, excellent descriptive language and Californian countryside, well worth a read.
All in all, I have read some fantastic books in the past year, and hope to read even more in 2014. I have quite a lot lined up, both fiction and non-fiction, so hopefully I will be posting plenty of reviews and recommendations!
