****2014: Best Reads, Worst Reads, Stats, and Thoughts about Your Reading

I was planning on posting this tomorrow, but as some people are starting to post 2015 plans, I thought it must be time to look back at our 2014 reading

This thread is a place to let you share your thoughts about your best books, worst books, stats, and any other information you would like to share about your reading for the year. Some people like to pick a number (i.e., 5 best, 10 best, etc.), others prefer not to limit themselves to a number. Feel free to recap in a way that works for you.

I am hoping to finish a couple more books before year end, so I won't be doing my recap until New Year's Eve, but if you are ready, we are looking forward to your lists.

I'm still hoping to read a few more too, but I'm starting to work on my statistics so I have a head start . . .

This was a low reading year for me, the lowest since I began keeping track in '97. There might be a few more additions before the end of the year but it still will be less than 40. For this reason I'm not going to bother with stats at all this year. And no should have, would have...etc. It is what it is. Still, I have read some great books. I always find lists hard to do, a comparing of apples and oranges and trying to decide on just one....if you know what I mean. So, here is a fruit bowl:

For literary fiction that packs a powerful emotional punch: Enon by Paul Tinker (2013, US).
For literary fiction that is an unusual and interesting read: Before I Burn by Gaute Heivoll (T 2014, Norwegian)
For literary fiction that is a a wonderful Gothic romp: The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates (2014, US)
For literary fiction that is a terrific love story: Leon and Louise by Alex Capus (2011, Swiss/German)
For literary fiction that is cleverly disguised as a crime novel but adds historical and cultural insight:The Cutting Season by Attica Locke (2012, US)

For science fiction that is a wonderful, fast-paced, mind-bending romp: Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance, the "Southern Reach" trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer (2014, US)
For very good science fiction by a first time author: The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne

For crime fiction, best police procedural: Bitter Wash Road by Garry Disher (in the US this is titled "Hell to Pay")(2014 US ed., Australian)
For crime fiction that offered the most cultural insights: Gunshot Road by Adrian Hylund (2011 US ed, 2nd novel in series after Moonlight Downs, Australian)
For enjoyable crime fiction by a first time author: North of Boston by Elisabeth Elo (2014, US)

For nonfiction that was the most pleasurable: My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead (2014)

*edited to fix touchstones.

>3 avaland: A "low" reading year for me too. I'm not a big quantity reader in any case, but I found myself either reading quite far into a couple that I ended up abandoning, or picking very long diaries or histories... Non-reading life has been hard work this year, and my reading time definitely shortened. Anyway - I haven't read as many as I perhaps wanted to back at the year's start.

There's still a week and a bit to go so I'm going to come back here perhaps with a few 'best reads' and standouts probably after Christmas. Just wanted to say that 'Before I Burn' looks quite original and interesting, so I've wishlisted that one already for starters...

You just know this is going to be one of those threads that heaps piles on to the wishlist!

>4 Polaris-: I abandoned at least three or four, and read half of the stories in several collections, so I know what you mean. With regards to Before I Burn, my "nearly one word review" was "unusual and very satisfying" and you reminded me that I never posted my comments on the book's page (I've been a real slacker this year).

I'm looking forward to other readers' lists and comments.

3, avaland -
Not having a good reading year is always disappointing but that just means a good reading year lies ahead. But please do post your stats anyway! I might have only read 9 books in 2013 but I still managed to do stats on them. In fact, it's less work! Anyway, no pressure, just encouragement. Here's to a better reading year in 2015 though.

Here are my picks from the books I've read this year:

-- Best literary fiction - The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
-- Best gothic - Dracula by Bram Stoker
-- Best non-fiction - The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin
-- Best classic - Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
-- Best and funniest history mystery - The Pigeon Pie Mystery by Julia Stuart
-- Best cozy - Assaulted Pretzel by Laura Bradford
-- Best ghost story - The Small Hand and Dolly by Susan Hill
-- Best vampire - Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith
-- Least fav overall - Blackberry Pie Murder by Joanne Fluke
-- Worst use of academese - Ottomania by Roderick Cavaliero

My list of the moment:

A top six:
1. The Book of Job - because, well, I think I was just surprised and impressed to find something special here
2. The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng - Fiction on audio. This was wonderful, but I the reader made it special
3. Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas - mostly I'm just impressed by the amount of information here.
4. Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz - Audio. I think about this still, all the time.
5. When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant - Fiction. A re-read. Love this take on pre-Israel Israel.
6. Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss - Audio. Another book I just find myself thinking about all the time.

Ok, I had 27 books I felt were worth mentioning. So, I need to make up lists for the other 21...

I thought it was interesting, looking over my books read, how emotionally attached I find myself to many audio books. I've read 27 and three are listed above. Here are the other bests

Audio
4. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander - because it's very important and an eye-opener
5. One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson - because I just loved listening to this.
6. Incognito : The Secret Lives of the Brain - David Eagleman - because it is a fascinating look at our brain
7. Anne Frank Remembered by Miep Gies & Alison Leslie Gold - because I was moved
8. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie - juvenile fiction. Because it was fun
9. A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead - on woman of the French resistance in Auschwitz. Because it was moving.
10. Blood and Thunder : An Epic of the American West - Hampton Sides - a long but great hisory
11. Moonwalking with Einstein : The Art and Science of Remembering Everything - Joshua Foer - because it was unpredictably useful
12. A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America by Stacy Schiff - because this long book grew on me.

Memoirs - sort of
1. Maus I & Maus II by Art Spiegelman - a terrific re-read
2. A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz
3. The Linen Way by Melissa Green - because this was so intense
4. This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett - because I got so attached to this.
5. The Liars' Club by Mary Karr - because it's beautifully written

In fiction, two of these are in those top six. There is also one in the audio list that I'm skipping here (the Sherman Alexie)

Fiction
3. My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok - a re-read that was better than I remembered
4. The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok - not a re-read, but so glad I read this.
5. Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky - for it's potential, it's tragic surround story, and what was almost there
6. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler - only the 2nd new fiction on my list
7. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak - young adult. Because it was so well done.

Miscellaneous
The Paris Review 84 Summer 1982 - I think I mainly liked how much richer this seemed then the new issues.

It's usually a few days into the New Year before I finish getting my "What I read" list together, and I expect to finish at least a couple more books before then, but here are my current best-ofs for my year's reading, for which me has been the Year of Memoirs:

Best book, best non-fiction, best memoir

Clothes. Clothes. Clothes. Music. Music. Music. Boys. Boys. Boys. by Viv Albertine

Memoir runners-up (4 of 'em!)

Bedsit Disco Queen by Tracey Thorn
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
Li Na: My Life by Li Na

Other non-fiction runner-up

Dirty Politics by Nicky Hager

Best fiction, best novel

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Runners-up, best novel

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Best short story collections

ShameJoy by Julie Hill
A Quiet Day and other stories by P. S. Cottier

Best poetry collection

Cinema by Helen Rickerby

(I've read far less poetry this year than usual because of all the poetry - not listed here - that I read during the selection process for The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, but Cinema would have been a highlight in any year. I have a whole bunch of unread collections I want to get to grips with over the summer holidays.)

My favorites:

Fiction
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, paired with The Hours by Michael Cunningham -- the stream-of-conscious narrative that weaves the emotional struggles of several people on a June day in post-WWI London, paired with a riff where the original characters and storylines are shuffled and reimagined. Also appreciated that the three main characters in The Hours are an homage to the participants in general to a novel: author, character, reader.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -- the classic (anti-)war novel narrated by 19-year-old Paul Baumer, a German soldier serving in the trenches near the front during WWI. It’s brutal, thoughtful and illustrative regarding not only battle and the dead but also how the living are forever changed.

Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay by Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana -- Proulx's 1997 short story paired with McMurtry's/Ossana's 2005 adapted screenplay about closeted gays in the 1963 American West, plus essays about writing from each of the three.

Here by Richard McGuire -- an entirely graphic (well, maybe 1% words) exploration of what might have happened on the site of what is, in 2014, a corner in an American home’s living room, presented in a non-linear narrative of the gassy soup of 3-trillion years ago through extinct animals to a future 22,000+ years from now.

Nonfiction
Columbine by Dave Cullen -- riveting and respectful account of the 1999 Columbine school shooting: the lead-up, the incident, the aftermath.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande -- addresses the big picture of aging/mortality (“What makes life worth living?”) so as to guide the smaller decisions (treatments, living circumstances) toward a higher quality of life, not necessarily a longer quantity. Philosophical, informative, poignant ... and inexplicably optimistic.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry -- a 360-degree look at the 1918 influenza pandemic and its aftermath, including the biology of viruses (“less than a fully living organism but more than an inert collection of chemicals”); the effects of WWI training and troop movements on the epidemic and vice versa; the (mostly harmful) actions of various levels of government; all amid the shockingly non-scientific state of the American practice of medicine at the time (with heavy emphasis on the handful of doctors who changed that).

The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War by Richard Rubin -- about a dozen short biographies drawn from the author’s interviews with the last living (now all deceased) American veterans of WWI, aged 101 to 113, interspersed with some light history of the war to give context.

The Science of Good Cooking by America’s Test Kitchen -- like a huge issue of Cook’s Illustrated magazine, this deconstructs the science behind 50 fundamental concepts essential to good cooking, including experiments and recipes.

The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler -- subtitled, The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade, this is an excellent exploration of the social and legal intolerance of unwed pregnancy and motherhood in 1950s-‘60s USA, with a collection of oral histories from those birth mothers.

------------

Two made my Worst list: Where’d You Go, Bernadette (which began as a fun satire about Seattle, the tech industry and private schools, but devolved into plot-convenienced YA) and Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening (marketed as a gardening/cross-cultural friendship memoir but is pretty much a cancer memoir).

These titles are from my favourite reads this year. There are a lot, I had a good year.

Non-fiction
A Fortunate Life by A. B. Facey
Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves
Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin
Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens
An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield

Fiction
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Silas Marner by George Eliot
The Disappeared by Kim Echlin
The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
The Fine Colour of Rust by P. A. O'Reilly
Tempest-Tost by Robertson Davies
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

Mystery
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan C. Bradley
The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

Children's literature
The Cheshire Cheese Cat : a Dickens of a Tale by Carmen Agra Deedy
The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd

I had several in the "worst" list for varying reasons. The most disappointing was The perfect summer : England 1911, just before the storm by Juliet Nicolson, granddaughter to Vita Sackville-West.

I may finish two more books before the year is over, but I think it is doubtful.

I read a lot of great books-

Favorite Fiction
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

Favorite Mystery
The Secret Place by Tana French
The Cuckoos Calling by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)
The Crocodile Bird by Ruth Rendell

Favorite WWI
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally

Favorite Surprise Favorite
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

Favorite Non-Fiction
Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

Favorite Audio
Macbeth: A Novel by A. J. Hartley, David Hewson, Narrated by Alan Cumming

Most Disappointing
The Man in My Basement by Walter Mosley

Books Read Total = 64
Print/Kindle = 42; Audio = 22; Women authors = 33; WWI related = 13

Edited to update stats

I may finish one more book, but it's doubtful. So here are my stats. I had another great reading year!

Year-end stats:
Books read: 83
30,622 pages read this year; average of 86 pages per day; average book length 414 pages
# of different authors: 74
Male/female ratio: 28/46, 62% women authors
New-to-me authors: 55
Nonfiction/fiction: 18/65
Format: audio - 9, kindle–owned - 18, kindle-library – 8, books off the shelf – 45, library books - 4

Best fiction:
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley
Mapp and Lucia series
Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor

Best new releases:
Lila by Marilynne Robinson
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt

Best Classics:
Alberta and Jacob by Cora Sandel
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
Evelina by Frances Burney

Rereads that I loved again:
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Sense and Sensibility: an annotated Edition by Jane Austen and Patricia Meyer Spacks

Proud I read these challenging (and long) books:
Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman
Brontes: Wild Genius on the Moors by Juliet Barker
A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman

Best mysteries:
Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey
Maisie Dobbs series (read books 1 and 2)
The Secret Place by Tana French

Best nonfiction:
Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall
Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore
A Royal Experiment: The Private Life of King George III by Janice Hadlow

Best disaster book:
In the Kingdom of Ice by Hampton Sides

Books about books:
My Life in MIddlmarch by Rebecca Mead
Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman

Best audiobook:
The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Sad to see end:
Sharon Kay Penman series – I’ve finished all her historical fiction

Outside of comfort zone but appreciated:
Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary (elephants, elephants, and more elephants)
Land of Spices by Kate O’brien (I loved a book about nuns???)

Book I’m most likely to reread again and again
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

Ahhhh – best “comfort read”:
Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym

Worsts:
Oranges are not the only fruit by Jeanette Winterson
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
The Quiet American by Graham Greene

So bad it was abandoned:
The World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter

Time for those 2014 Statts:

I read 74 books

There were 7 five star reads
The Fall Albert Camus
Exile and Kingdom Albert Camus
Dubliners James Joyce
The boke named The governour: Devised by Sir Thomas Elyot, knight
The Prussian Officer and other stories D H Lawrence
Aretino's dialogues Pietro Aretino
Works of Aretino; Letters and sonnets

There were 7, 4.5 star reads
Thomas More; a biography
The Grass is singing Doris Lessing
We Yevgeny Zamyatin
Confessions of an English opium-eater and other writings Thomas de quincey
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
Under my skin; Volume 1 of my autobiography Doris Lessing
Bring up the Bodies Hilary Mantel

There were 25 four star reads (too numerous to list)

With the Literary Centennial group I read 13 books, (four of which were poetry books}, which were published in 1914. There were two 5 star reads and 6 four star reads from this selection and it introduced me to a few new authors who I will follow up:
Anatole France
Herman Hesse
Ezra Pound
Theodore Dreiser
Richard Aldington

My reading of books by H G Wells has taken in 23 books and I am up to 1909 in the history of their publication

I finished my reading of Albert Camus and started on Doris Lessing

I would have liked to have read a few more books; it feels like my 16th century reading is going at a snails pace, I am barely halfway through the century and so my target of finishing the year with Shakespeare and Spenser will have to be re-introduced for next year. There were some highlights though; Pietro Aretino's books were a guilty pleasure and the more sober Sir Thomas Elyot was better than reading any history of the period.

Of the 74 books only thirteen were written by female authors

I finished 97 books, well off the pace of recent years for some reason. Three-fourths of these were novels and about half were by authors I had never read before. Only 12 were by women, which isn't surprising considering that most of the books I read were published before the 20th century, a fourth of them before the 19th century.

More than half the books I read were works in translation, with French, Greek and Spanish predominating.

Top 5 Fiction
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Amadis of Gaul by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo
Insatiability by Stanislaw Witkiewicz

Top 5 Non-Fiction
The Histories by Herodotus
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Worst Fiction
The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis
Eroma by Piers Anthony

Worst Non-Fiction
Facundo; or, Civilization and Barbarism by Domingo Sarmiento
Sex! The Punctuation Mark of Life by Lucretia Torva

Many of the books I read came from "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die," though not nearly as many as I had planned. I will continue to read from this list if for no other reason than to protect the investment in time and money I have put into collecting them. But instead of reading the more obscure, or reading them chronologically, I think I will try to fill in the major works that I haven't read yet.

I've enjoyed my chronological reading of early works of science fiction, and it will continue. I'll probably be more selective, however, because there are some important works of 20th century SF I'll never get to if I don't pick up the pace.

My parallel chronological reading of fantasy and horror didn't get very far, so I'll be dropping it to concentrate on other categories.

I didn't read nearly as much as I had planned for LT group projects. I'll definitely continue with the Literary Centennials since I am the group administrator, but others may go by the wayside, at least for a while.

Reading (and in many cases re-reading) the Greek classics has been a slow process, but definitely worthwhile, so it will continue in 2015.

Overall, looking at the list of books I read in 2014 I see very few household names. While that's good to an extent, there are a number of major works of literature that I still need to read, especially from the 20th century. There are also a number of authors I've been collecting because I enjoyed their works, but my structured reading has kept me from getting back to them. So one of my reading resolutions for 2015 is to be a bit less structured so I can enjoy the landmark works of literature and the personal favorites that I've been putting off. After all, at my age it no longer makes any sense to save the best for last: each book I pick up could be the last.

OK, it's time for my best of the year and other categories. As long-time Club Readers know, I have a lot of trouble narrowing down my list, so here goes. Also, these are more or less in the order I read them.

ETA Touchstones don't seem to be working. I'll come back later and try to get them to work. Or you can go to my thread, where they seem to be working.

Best of the Best

Fiction
Showdown by Jorge Amado
The Beast Within by Emile Zola
Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe
The Queen's Necklace, The Pendragon Legend, and Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb
The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson
Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
6598501::The Treasure by Selma Lagerlof
Stories by Anton Chekhov
The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal
The Dead Girls by Jorge Ibarguengoitia
The Captain's Daughter by Alexander Pushkin
The Power and the Glory and The Human Factor by Graham Greene
News from the Empire by Fernando del Paso
In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge
Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge

Nonfiction
The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Autonauts of the Cosmoroute by Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop
The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland by Hugh Thomson

The Best of the Rest

Fiction
The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye
The Sundial by Shirley Jackson
Oliver VII by Antal Szerb
Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth
If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
The Women's War by Alexandre Dumas
The Edge of the Storm by Agustin Yanez
The Complete Short Novels by Anton Chekhov
The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Nonfiction
Neanderthal Man by Svante Paabo
Journey to a War by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm

Runners-Up

Fiction
New Grub Street by George Gissing
Tent of Miracles, Home Is the Sailor, and The Violent Land by Jorge Amado
The Wine-Dark Sea by Leonardo Sciascia
The Human Comedy: Selected Stories by Honore de Balzac
No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe
The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka
The Saga of Gosta Berling by Selma Lagerlof
The Quality of Mercy by Barry Unsworth
The Forbidden Kingdom by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff
Time Present and Time Past by Deirdre Madden
The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Lucky Us by Amy Bloom
The President by Miguel Angel Asturias
Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique
Ninety Three by Victor Hugo
The Mongolian Conspiracy by Rafael Bernal
The Wild Ass's Skin and The Chouans by Honore de Balzac
Love in a Bottle by Antal Szerb
The Topless Tower by Silvina Ocampo

Nonfiction
Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin
What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World by Jon Young
Six Drawing Lessons by William Kentridge
In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means edited by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky
A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland

Fun, Fun, Fun
Lots of mysteries by Denise Mina, Manuel Vazquez Montalban, and Janwillem van de Wetering
Angelica's Smile by Andrea Camilleri
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man by Thomas Mann

Disappointments
Boy Snow Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova
The Reconstruction of Nations; Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 by Timothy Snyder
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark
The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914 by Bela Zombory-Moldovan
The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov

The year started off well - good quality and pace. Things slowed down, though. Several books were abandoned, and I seemed to be hitting more disappointments than winners.

Highlights:
One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde. Laugh-out-loud and fun. My favorite in the series so far.

Gillespie and I by Jane Harris. Concerns I'd be disappointed after seeing so many glowing comments were gladly unfounded.

Needed by Nobody by Tova Höjdestrand (non-fiction)

Lowlights: Not the worst books I read during the year, but the biggest disappointments came from Michael Chabon, Gary Shteyngart, and Jeffrey Eugenides.

Looking forward to 2015!

End of the Year Wrap-Up

Yay lists and stats!!

Total books read: 69
Fiction: 56
Nonfiction: 13
Library Books: 35

Best Fiction
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Night Film by Marisha Pessl
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger
The Martian by Andy Weir
The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde

Best Nonfiction
In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson
The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
Sally Ride: America's First Woman in Space by Lynn Sherr

And the Not-So-Great...
Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell
The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman
Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's Learned by Lena Dunham
Naked by Betsy Franco
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
Fledgling by Octavia Butler

Overall, I am very happy with the books I read. I was able to add a lot of books to my TBR list based on what others in the group have been reading, which is great. I have discovered a lot of books and authors I would not have known about otherwise.

My goals for 2015 include catching up on my Early Reviewers books, reading more books from my TBR list that I own, and to read more globally.

Here's to a great 2015! Happy New Year :)

Looking back over this year it feels like one of my greatest years ever for reading: Fortune smiled on me with a plenitude of wonderful books. It will be a difficult year to follow up.

I am winding down my previous preoccupation with "pagan influences" although this topic is bound to pop up again from time to time. There were no less than five books with "dream" in the title this year. It is true that dream literature captures my imagination and there may be more in this vein in future. Many classics appear on my list, many of which were major tomes but in the end proved to be very rewarding. Also there were many examples of modern and postmodern fiction which turned out to be some of my favorite books of the year. Women authors got short shrift in 2014, and I am not sure whether that is even relevant. Difficult to analyze. English books dominated in the original language department, but I did manage 5 translations from Greek and 2 from Polish — a new trend perhaps.

Overall favorites in retrospect:

Fiction
Night Train to Lisbon: A Novel by Pascal Mercier (2008)
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-1960)
Odyssey of Homer tr. by Robert Fitzgerald (9th C. BC)
The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban (1987)
Piano Stories by Felisberto Hernández (1993)
The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830)
Geoffrey Chaucer: Dream Visions and Other Poems (2007)
Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas (2000)
The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears (2002)

Nonfiction
The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino (1982)
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates (1964)
The Glorious Adventure by Richard Halliburton (1927)
Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski (2004)
The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories (c. 430 BC, 2007)
Alexandria: City of Memory by Michael Haag (2004)
The Landmark Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War (411 BC, 1996)

Statistics
63 books read
36 (57%) novels and other literature (epics, drama, dream visions, short stories, etc.)
27 (43%) nonfiction

58 (92%) by men
5 (8%) by women

Stars:
7 ★★★★★
17 ★★★★½
25 ★★★★
11 ★★★½
1 ★★★
1 ★
1 ½

By original language: 21 American English, 18 British English, 1 Danish, 8 French, 3 German, 5 Greek, 1 Italian, 1 Latin, 2 Polish, 3 Spanish

By date of first publication
5 BC
1 5th C.
1 1500s
11 1800s
24 1900s
23 2000s

Favorite Book Cover

I read 138 books, which is comparable with the last few years. It's less than I was expecting this year, though, as I figured all that downtime after my surgery with nothing to do but read would push that number up considerably. I did get a lot of reading done during those eight weeks, but there seemed to be a sort of rebound effect, where my reading slacked off a little afterward. But numbers aren't the important thing, of course (although the fullness of my TBR shelves might disagree). And I did read some really good stuff this year.

My favorite books of the year (based on the fact that I gave them all 4 1/2 stars):

Fiction:

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology edited by Christopher Golden
Locke & Key Volume 6: Alpha & Omega by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez
Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It by David Wong
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Attwood
Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
The Killing Moon by N.K, Jemisin
Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Non-Fiction:

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Shulz

OK, so, maybe not the best-ever year for non-fiction, but I find the fiction list entertainingly diverse. And there were a lot of books that didn't quite make the top picks, but which were still pretty darned good.

Most Disappointing Books of the Year:

Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers by Amir D. Aczel, because the ostensible topic sounded interesting, but the author's self-centered ramblings and mystical musings weren't.

And The Pretender: Rebirth by Steven Long Mitchell & Craig W. Van Sickle, because, while my expectations for books based on TV series are usually pretty low, it failed to meet them by a mile.

2014 Reading Year in Review

This time last year I had just finished rereading Pride and Prejudice, and joked that it was the best book ever written and I was ruined for everything else. Turns out not to be that much of a joke after all--2014 will go down as a solidly mediocre year in reading for me. Not one single 5 star read. Here's to a better 2015!

In total, I read 75 books, which is at the low end of my usual range. However, it's actually worse, as 19 of those were actually audiobooks. I think my reading less was a combination of being busy with other things, wasting too much time on the internet, and just not being that excited with what I was reading.

More stats:

20 non-fiction, 55 fiction
41 female authors, 30 male authors, 4 mixed

12 Canadian authors
34 UK
2 Australian
4 Irish
14 US
1 French
1 UK-Sri Lankan
1 Algerian
1 Italian
1 Scottish (I know, should go in with the UK, but the book was just strongly Scottish)
1 Iranian
1 French Polynesian
1 Swedish

Different authors - 72

New to me authors - 54

Author discoveries: Tana French, Jim Crace, Maggie O'Farrell.

Best Non-Fiction:

Being Wrong:Adventures in the Margins of Error, Kathryn Schultz
Without You, There is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite, Suki Kim
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick

Best Fiction:

Broken Harbour, Tana French
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
Harvest, Jim Crace
Chocky, John Wyndham
Before I Go to Sleep, SJ Watson
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
Bear, Marian Engel
Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O'Farrell
The Edwardians, Vita Sackville-West

And finally, I did much better this year with my TBR pile--I read 51 TBR books, and bought only 53 (a significantly lower number than the past several years). That's a TBR increase of only 2 books (and doesn't include the smallish purge of the pile I did midyear). Let's see if I can read more than I bring in for 2015.