In a departure from the usual, I thought I would list all the books I’ve read this year. I choose books mainly based on recommendations from friends, followed by recommendations from reviews in the papers and on the radio, and then from suggestions on my Kindle. This year, however, I wanted to include in my reading some classics that I had never looked at properly before. Here’s the list, in reverse order. I’ve marked the ones that surpassed my expectations with *, and any that I thought were overrated with !
- White Oleander – Janet Fitch
- Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
- Vox – Christina Dalcher
- I am, I am, I am – Maggie O’Farrell
- Less – Andrew Sean Greer
- Release – Patrick Ness
- The Spare Room – Helen Garner
- Conversations with Friends – Sally Rooney
- The Power of Acceptance – Annemarie Postma
- The Happiest Kids in the World: Bringing Up Children the Dutch Way – Rina Mae Acosta and Michele Hutchison
- Letting Go – David R Hawkins
- C’est La Vie – Fabrice Midal (in translation)
- Journey by Moonlight – Antal Szerb (in translation)
- Four Seasons in Rome – Anthony Doerr
- The Forgetting Time – Sharon Guskin
- The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing
- The Jane Austen Book Club – Karen Joy Fowler
- Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
- Say My Name – Allegra Huston
- The Wife Between Us – Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
- Notes on a Nervous Planet – Matt Haig
- The Year of Living Danishly – Helen Russell
- There are No Grown-ups – Pamela Druckerman
- David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
- Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe *
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (in translation)
- Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K Jerome
- Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
- On the Road – Jack Kerouac !
- Men Explain Things to Me – Rebecca Solnit
- Hunger – Roxane Gay
- Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel (in translation) !
- Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
- Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
- Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
- The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
- The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*** – Sarah Knight
- Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
- Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabukov
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (in translation) *
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë !
- The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
- Middlemarch – George Eliot *
- Beloved – Toni Morrison
- The Photographer’s Wife – Suzanne Joinson
- The Gustav Sonata – Rose Tremain
- A Dark-Adapted Eye – Barbara Vine
- Where Have All the Boys Gone? – Jenny Colgan
- We Should All Be Feminists – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- The Doll’s House – Tania Carver
- All the Single Ladies – Rebecca Traister
- Lullaby – Leila Slimani (in translation)
- The Paris Wife – Paula McLain
- The Return – Victoria Hislop !
- Home Fire – Kamila Shamsie
- The Sun also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
- The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafron (in translation) !
- The Hours – Michael Cunningham
- Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
- The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
- My Education – Susan Choi
- Station Eleven – Emily St John Mandel
- The Power – Naomi Alderman
- Force of Nature – Jane Harper
- Then She Was Gone – Lisa Jewell
- How to Break Up with your Phone – Catherine Price *
- I See You – Clare Mackintosh
- The Anchoress – Robyn Cadwallader
- Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine – Gail Honeyman
- The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
- Friend Request – Laura Marshall
- Anatomy of a Scandal – Sarah Vaughan
