I have a whole list of books that I want to discuss, but I thought it would be fun (and satisfyingly dilatory) to look back at the books I read while in Lesotho. Sure, as a kid I had endless summers to read, checking out 10 books at a time from the library and discovering everything from Charlotte Brontë to Mary Higgins Clark, but what glory to have a year of unimpeded, unregulated reading time as as adult! The only limit was the lack of access to bookstores, but the happy side-effect of that was picking up some books from the pile contributed by former volunteers and visitors that I probably would not have read otherwise.
So, here it is, my list from the year of magical reading:
September
True at First Light, Ernest Hemingway
Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl
Comfort Me with Apples, Ruth Reichl
The Little Book, James Selden
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
October
The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
(Two books? What happened in October? I blame Ellen and Will's arrival and Charles Dickens's verbosity.)
November
Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
Can You Forgive Her?, Anthony Trollope
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
The Sea, John Banville
December
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, ed. Jeffrey Eugenides
Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway
January
People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
Twilight, Stephanie Myers (one guilty 18 hour flight from D.C. to Jo'burg)
The Given Day, Dennis Lehane
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
The Final Solution, Michael Chabon
February
American Wife, Curtis Sittenfield
Rabbit, Run, John Updike
Unless, Carol Shields
Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett
Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
Moo, Jane Smiley
White Noise, DeLillo
Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
March
Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
April
The Ambassadors, Henry James
Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips
Net of Jewels, Ellen Gilchrist
Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
May
The White Lioness, Henning Mankel
The Smell of the Night, Andrea Camillieri
Christine Falls, Benjamin Black
The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever
The Wapshot Scandal, John Cheever
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenberger
Emma, Jane Austen
Written Lives, Javier MarÃas
June
A Homemade Life, Molly Wizenberg
Belong to Me, Marisa de los Santos
And....then apparently I stopped keeping track. So close to the end! 54 books, not counting whatever it was I read in June, July, and August.
Utterly subjective ratings:
Highly recommended (even if you're living somewhere a bit more hectic than a rondavel on the edge of Mokhotlong)
Fun (if you have close to unlimited reading time)
Skip it (would kind of resent having to read this again)
I suppose all of the others would fall somewhere in between.
The Illiterate Peanut by Bridget Rector is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Fun! We read a lot of the same ones. I'd mark Islands in the Stream blue -- but I love all Hemingway. I can't help it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the list! I've only read 8 of these (which is probably a commentary on how few classics I've read!!). I started but just couldn't get more than a hundred pages into 3 Cups of Tea--I really wanted to like this book but was annoyed by the author's self absorption--despite his good motives! I hate giving up on a book--but then I allow myself occasionally since there are so many other opportunities---so many books, so little time!
ReplyDelete