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
• Less – Andrew Sean Greer *
• Help me! – Marianne Power *
• 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
• Memory Wall – Anthony Doerr
• Kitchen – Banana Yoshimoto (in translation)
• 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

Thanks for tweeting about this, Allegra Huston!