2010 Reading list

Another year, another 46 or so books read. I've started exchanging the books I can't keep at paperbackswap.com. So far I've got a stack of 17 exchanged books for 2011 plus many other new books that have lingered from prior years.

I only listened to one audio book this year but it was a biggie! At 64 hours of recording (or 1136 pages) Atlas Shrugged was something to get through. I guess you either love or hate Ayn Rand. I fall in the latter category. I got to the end and I know who John Galt is but I have to say I did not enjoy most of the journey. [Actually there was another audio book - Around the World in 80 days which we listened to whilst driving between Texas and New Mexico]

Lucy and I read three novels together - Trumpet of the Swan, Little House in the Big Woods and Where the Mountain meets the moon. She loved them all and can't wait to do more in the Little House series.

My top three fiction for the year are: A Fine Balance, Divided Kingdom, The Man who was Thursday.

I also discovered the Diary of a Nobody which is very similar to one of my favourite books Three Men in a Boat so I will be reading the Diary again in the future.

For non-fiction I would highly recommend Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. It inspired me to grow more food in our garden and it introduced us to home cheese making.


Here's the 2010 list in reverse reading order:

What Is a Family	Schaeffer, Edith
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon	Lin, Grace *
The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment	Jacobs, A.J.
A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary	Botton, Alain de *
Praise	McGahan, Andrew
The Castle	Kafka, Franz
The Everlasting God: A Character Study of God in the Old and New Testaments	Knox, D. Broughton
The Best of Myles	O'Brien, Flann
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court	Twain, Mark
Atlas Shrugged	Rand, Ayn
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls	Pipher, Mary Bray
Steady Days: A Journey Toward Intentional, Professional Motherhood	Martin, Jamie C.
Nightmare Abbey & Crotchet Castle (Penguin English Library El 45)	Peacock, Thomas Love
The Fifth Mountain	Coelho, Paulo
The Blue Flower and The Bookshop	Fitzgerald, Penelope
The Lynne Truss Treasury: Columns and Three Comic Novels	Truss, Lynne
Let the Great World Spin	McCann, Colum
At Home in Mitford (Mitford Years, #1)	Karon, Jan
Little House in the Big Woods (Little House, #1)	Wilder, Laura Ingalls
A Moveable Feast	Hemingway, Ernest
Frugal Luxuries by the Seasons: Celebrate the Holidays with Elegance and Simplicity--on Any Income	McBride, Tracey
The Diary of a Nobody	Grossmith, George
The Hunter	Leigh, Julia
Granta 111: Going Back	Granta
The Land of Green Plums	Müller, Herta
Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics	Reist, Melinda Tankard
Divided Kingdom	Thomson, Rupert
Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls	Reist, Melinda Tankard
Around the World in 80 Days	Plummer, Christopher
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Persepolis, #1)	Satrapi, Marjane
The Big Sleep	Chandler, Raymond
A Fine Balance	Mistry, Rohinton
Living With the Underworld	Bolt, Peter
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare	Chesterton, G.K.
Father Brown: The Essential Tales {15 Tales}	Chesterton, G.K.
It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita	Armstrong, Heather B.
The Brotherhood of the Grape	Fante, John
No Ordinary View	Reed, Naomi
My Seventh Monsoon: a Himalayan journey of faith and mission	Reed, Naomi
Jazz Notes: Improvisations on Blue Like Jazz	Miller, Donald
A Deeper Shade of Blue: A Woman's Guide to Recognizing and Treating Depression in Her Childbearing Years	Nonacs, Ruta
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary	Winchester, Simon
Angels: God's secret agents	Graham, Billy
Gilead	Robinson, Marilynne
The Trumpet of the Swan	White, E.B.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life	Kingsolver, Barbara
Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World	Koeppel, Dan
Madame Bovary	Flaubert, Gustave