The Full List!

Okay – here’s my complete Advent list – all the windows hanging open! The best 24 books I read this year. Or, put better, the books I had the best time reading this year. That’s a much better way of saying it. There’s nothing absolute and final about these judgements. We can only say how books actually worked out for us, as we read them… But these were the real treats of 2014 for me:

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair – Nina Sankovitch

The Dr Who Annual 1980

Fan Girl – Rainbow Rowell

Adventures with the Wife in Space – Neil Perryman

The Fault in Our Stars – John Green

The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt

The Beach Reading Series – Mark Abramson

Man on the Run – Tom Doyle

The New Arrival – Sarah Beeson

Doctor Who: Engines of War – George Mann

The Collected Works of A.J Fikry – Gabrielle Levin

The Little Beach Street Bakery – Jenny Colgan

Until the End of Time – Danielle Steel

The Storyteller – Jodi Picoult

IQ84 Books 1&2 – Haruki Murakami

Love, Nina – Nina Stibbe

The Unpredictable Consequences of Love – Jill Mansell

The Voices – F.R Tallis

One Night in Italy – Lucy Diamond

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves – Karen Joy Fowler

Jaunt! – Andy Davidson

The End of Your Life Book Club – Will Schwalbe

There’s Something I’ve Been Dying to Tell You – Lynda Bellingham

The Hare with the Amber Eyes – Edmund De Waal

So… there’s my list of 24. Interesting to see that…

Nine are non-fiction,

Just over half are by women,

And only seven were read as actual books. That’s fewer than usual. The rest were all e-books, and one was on audio.

Memoirs and rom-coms won the day for me this year… though with Murakami, Tartt, Levin and Fowler I was scoring stuff I’d be inclined (if forced to) call ‘literary’ pretty highly. Fantasy / horror / sf were really quite low down on my list this year – with only George’s Daleks and Tallis’ ghostly voices creeping into my list.  Very little children’s fiction – old or new – stood out this year – except for two great Teen novels that made it into my list.

What’s most apparent is the fact that I took a decision early in the year to read mostly brand new books. It’s been a very illuminating business. There are some very readable blockbusters out there, and some of them are so marked down in price it would be rude to say no. While some are stonking reads… others are just piles of piss stacked as high as they can get.

Choose wisely what you read and what you spend your time with. Every one of the books on my ‘best’ list (out of more than 150 I’ve read in total this year) are the ones that I chose most advisedly – listening to that quiet, insistent inner voice that, if I’m lucky, guides me magically, intuitively, to the books that I know will be worth my time. I keep trying to listen to that voice – over and above the shouting of the dross.

Next year – and I mean it this time – I hope to make a go of really exploring the books from the Beach House, and the accumulated books that will return from storage when our house is rebuilt and redecorated at last…

Happy Christmas again – and I hope you get some time to devote to your reading!