My Reading List for 2014
HAPPY NEW YEAR! After some fussing and moving things around, here it is, my to-read list for 2014. (You can find this list, add the books to your own shelves, and watch my progress through the year at my shelf on Goodreads). Commentary follows.
179 Ways to Save a Novel: Matters of Vital Concern to Fiction Writers by Peter Selgin
A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson
Beautiful Disaster (Beautiful, #1) by Jamie McGuire
Confessions of a Scary Mommy: An Honest and Irreverent Look at Motherhood: The Good, The Bad, and the Scary by Jill Smokler
Confessions of a Shopaholic (Shopaholic, #1) by Sophie Kinsella
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Divergent (Divergent, #1) by Veronica Roth
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garci Marquez
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
On Writing by Stephen King
Pieces of the Heart by Karen White
Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making by John Fox
Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys by Dan Kindlon
Rise of the Machines–Human Authors in a Digital World by Kristen Lamb
Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
Strange Brew by Mary Kay Andrews
The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be The Artist You Truly Are by Danny Gregory
The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile by Noah Lukeman
The Five Destinies of Carlos Moreno by George Weinstein
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
The Reading Group: A Novel by Elizabeth Noble
The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
The Violets of March by Sarah Jio
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner
Voyager (Outlander, #3) by Diana Gabaldon
Writing from Life by Susan Wittig Albert
Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass
Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
A few of the books on my list, and my trusty Kindle!
Whew! You can see that this is quite a list with a lot of variety, which is how I like to read. It’s pretty ambitious, especially for a slow reader like me (and P.S. I’ll be writing at least one book this year myself). When I look at this list, I’m torn between how many things are missing and how overwhelming the list already is. There are a few mitigating factors for the overwhelm, at least. First, I’m including audiobooks that I will listen to in the car and while cleaning house, both Voyager and Strange Brew are already in my audible library (along with MKA’s Ladies’ Night, which I’m listening to currently but started in 2013). There are a few re-reads of old classics I haven’t read in several years: The Sound and the Fury, Mrs. Dalloway, Man’s Search for Meaning, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Stephen King’s On Writing.
The list is heavy on Women’s Fiction (duh), and I’ve included some quintessential chick-lit by Sophie Kinsella and New Adult fiction by Jamie McGuire, as well. I’m trying to deepen my understanding of genre this year. I also started out with a goal to read one non-fiction book for writers each month, and if you count Viktor Frankl, I’ll come close with eleven. Everything else is a mish-mash of recommendations from friends, comic relief, parenting stuff, and last but definitely not least, The Five Destinies of Carlos Moreno written by my friend George. All the books on craft and working left less room for fiction than I would like, but that’s an occupational hazard. It will be interesting to see if that pushes me to read faster so I can finish the list and add more fun books.
So what do you think? Do you have your own list of books to read this year? Any books in common with my list? What recommendations would you make for 2015 based on what I have listed here? I love reading your comments!
Enjoy good reading in 2014!
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I’m M.J. (Manda) Pullen, an author and mom in the Atlanta, Georgia area. I blog with humor and honesty about writing, publishing, parenthood, life in general and the many lessons I’ve learned the hard way. If you enjoy reading this blog, please sign up for the RSS or sign up for my monthly updates here (and enter the monthly giveaway). Thanks for reading, commenting and sharing!
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