Note: Due to a move and other circumstances, I got lazy and did not update this list on a regular basis and so it has been created much later based on memory and so this may not be a complete list. That said, the reading (30-40 books a year typically in years past) has definitely gone down since 2012.
--
1st half of 2013
Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990-2011 - Sara Wheeler (Having come back from some travels myself, I enjoyed these essays of Sara Wheeler and her amazing adventures around the world over the years.)
The Fun Stuff - James Wood (Read 70-80% of the essays - Wood is one of my favorite literary critics and I really enjoyed reading this book, especially the one on Tolstoy and War & Peace since it is highly unlikely I will ever read that novel in this lifetime.)
Boston Noir 2 ed. Dennis Lehane (Did not read them all but read at least 60% of the stories)
2nd half of 2013
Where The Stress Falls - Essays - Susan Sontag (This is my first book of essays by Sontag and I really enjoyed almost every single essay. She is a true intellectual, with a wide variety of tastes in the arts, cinema, photography, and broadly culture, and I hope to read more of her essays in the years to come.)
I then went into a slump of sorts in Aug-Sep, where I didn't feel like reading anything literary and read a series of mystery thrillers.
Sidetracked: A Kurt Wallander Mystery - Henning Mankell
1st To Die - James Patterson
2nd Chance - James Patterson
Monday or Tuesday, short stories by Virginia Woolf
That's it, I think...a record low of 8 books read in the year!
===============================
Also perused...
Midnight Lantern by Tess Gallagher --- lovely poems of loss and life. I was revisiting her poetry after many years but while I re-read many of the early poems that I had read in the 90s (collected in Amplitude and Other Poems, which I own) and also caught up on her later poems, I don't think I read more than 40-50% of the book and hence this is on this list and not on the list of books read in 2013.
Cross - James Patterson --- was on a binge of reading some not-so-literary but mindless thriller novels in August-September but ultimately on the 3rd or 4th such book, this one, I got tired of them and gave up.
To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf --- I loved the read but it was slow reading and ultimately, I started reading bits and pieces here and there to enjoy the beauty in the prose but didn't quite read the novel properly to understand the full story or what was going on. It is a difficult read anyways, with lots of ruminations and no serious plot driving the story but I enjoyed what I read. Maybe some day I will come back to it although I am more tempted to read The Wave next - as and when I get back to her novels; maybe sometime later in 2014.
