My year in books, unnecessarily charted
Right, let’s assume I’m not going to finish any more books between now and the end of the year. What a ridiculous assumption. Anyway, here’s my 2014-in-reading wrap-up (which won’t cover the books I read between now and the end of the year. I promise to update you if any of them are earth-shattering).
This year I started reading 95 books and got to the end of 87 of them. Nineteen of them were published in 2014. For most of the year I was doing the Australian Women Writers Challenge (my wrap-up of that is here), which made a lot of difference to what I read. I was also in a slipstream book club, shortlisted for two prizes which meant I wanted to read the other shortlistees, concerned with climate change and shipwrecks (thanks to books I’m working on), and a few weeks back I signed up to TBR20 (more on that here).
My favourite books of the year were:
Familiar by J Robert Lennon – reality and unreality bundled in together in a masterful bit of genre blurring
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov – as my Goodreads review said, ‘Yes, very good’
Gone by Jennifer Mills – chilling and enigmatic and just bloody great
Anguli Ma by Chi Vu – Australia looked utterly different while I was reading this Vietnamese gothic horror set in Footscray
Beloved by Toni Morrison – I feel like an idiot for not reading this sooner. I had no idea
Sea Hearts (also published as The Brides of Rollrock Island) by Margo Lanagan – a bleak fairytale that eviscerates the relationship between women and men
One foot wrong by Sofie Laguna – horrible, beautiful, bewitching and repulsive (look, sorry if you came here looking for feel-good heartwarmers…)
The sixth extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert – read this book about how humans are killing everything, how in the scheme of things it matters less than you think, and marvel at Kolbert’s light, dry wit
Cold Light by Frank Moorhouse – there’s not much I like better than the Edith Campbell Berry trilogy.
And now to the entirely unnecessary charts…
This year I started reading 95 books and got to the end of 87 of them. Nineteen of them were published in 2014. For most of the year I was doing the Australian Women Writers Challenge (my wrap-up of that is here), which made a lot of difference to what I read. I was also in a slipstream book club, shortlisted for two prizes which meant I wanted to read the other shortlistees, concerned with climate change and shipwrecks (thanks to books I’m working on), and a few weeks back I signed up to TBR20 (more on that here).
My favourite books of the year were:
Familiar by J Robert Lennon – reality and unreality bundled in together in a masterful bit of genre blurring
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov – as my Goodreads review said, ‘Yes, very good’
Gone by Jennifer Mills – chilling and enigmatic and just bloody great
Anguli Ma by Chi Vu – Australia looked utterly different while I was reading this Vietnamese gothic horror set in Footscray
Beloved by Toni Morrison – I feel like an idiot for not reading this sooner. I had no idea
Sea Hearts (also published as The Brides of Rollrock Island) by Margo Lanagan – a bleak fairytale that eviscerates the relationship between women and men
One foot wrong by Sofie Laguna – horrible, beautiful, bewitching and repulsive (look, sorry if you came here looking for feel-good heartwarmers…)
The sixth extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert – read this book about how humans are killing everything, how in the scheme of things it matters less than you think, and marvel at Kolbert’s light, dry wit
Cold Light by Frank Moorhouse – there’s not much I like better than the Edith Campbell Berry trilogy.
And now to the entirely unnecessary charts…
Not everyone is one or the other
Australian Women Writers Challenge may have skewed my reading…
Most of those ‘real’ books were bought at The Sun or Readings.
There’s no way these stats are right…
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