After I retired I decided to keep a list of the books I have been reading.
I think that, like the music a person listens to, the books a person reads says a lot about them. The first thing that we used to like to do when we made new friends was to look through each others record collection and the books on the shelf.
These are the books I’ve been reading over the last year:
| 146. The Woman who died a lot | Jasper Fforde |
| 147. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki | Haruki Murakami |
| 148. On the Road – original scroll | Jack Kerouac |
| 149. Discomfort zone | Jonathan Frantzen |
| 150. The Establishment and how they get away with it | Owen Jones |
| 151. The Kill List | Frederick Forsythe |
| 152. The Song of the Quarkbeast | Jasper Fforde |
| 153. One of our Thursdays is missing | Jasper Fforde |
| 154. No Matter What | Sally Donovan |
| 155. The story of my heart | Richard Jefferies |
| 156. Time must have a stop | Aldous Huxley |
| 157. Immortal coils | Kurt Vonnegut |
| 158. Chavs | Owen Jones |
| 159. Revival | Stephen King |
| 160. In God I doubt | John Humphrys |
| 161. Phil Ochs Death of a rebel | Marc Elliott |
| 162. In Watermelon Sugar | Richard Brautigan |
| 163. Blues for Mr Charlie | James Baldwin |
| 164. Stone Mattress | Margaret Atwood |
| 165. The Music of Captain Beefheart | Chris Wade |
| 166. Something rotten | Jasper Fforde |
| 167. From Here to Infinity – Scientific Horizons | Martin Rees |
| 168. Laughter and forgetting | Milan Kundera |
| 169. Saturday Night & Sunday Morning | Alan Sillitoe |
| 170. Black dogs | Ian McEwan |
| 171. This Boy | Alan Johnson |
| 172. Please Mr Postman | Alan Johnson |
| 173. If this isn’t nice what is? | Kurt Vonnegut Jnr |
| 174. Lunar Notes | Zoot Horn Rollo |
| 175. The Martian | Andy Weir |
| 176. Afterlife | Colin Wilson |
| 177. Revolution | Russell Brand |
| 178. The buried giant | Kasuo Ishiguro |
| 179. Sons and lovers | D H Lawrence |
| 180. Women | Charles Bukowski |
| 181. Collected stories | Philip K Dick |
| 182. Murder on the Marco polo | Clive Leatherdale |
| 183. The colour purple | Maya Angelou |
| 184. Reader | Noam Chomski |
| 185. Magic seeds | V S Naipal |
| 186. Notes from a small island | Bill Bryson |
| 187. Tortilla flat | John Steinbeck |
| 188. The heart goes first | Margaret Atwood |
| 189. Finding Son House | Richard Shade Gardner |
| 190. The big over easy | Jasper Fforde |
| 191. Lost in a good book | Jasper Fforde |
| 192. The Eyre affair (again) | Jasper Fforde |
| 193. The Fourth Bear | Jasper Fforde |
| 194. Sunstorm | Arthur C Clarke |
| 195. Bazaar of Bad Dreams | Stephen King |
| 196. Wind/Pinball | Haruki Murakami |
| 197. The Girl in the Spider’s Web | David Lagercrantz |
| 198. The strange library | Haruki Murakami |
| 199. The Potato Factory | Bryce Courtenay |
| 200. Bodily Harm | Margaret Atwood |
| 201. Justine | Lawrence Durrell |
| 202. Armageddon in retrospect (again) | Kurt Vonnegut Jnr |
| 203. The Tree | John Fowles |
| 204. Moon Palace | Paul Auster |
| 205. Homo Deus | Yuval Noah Harari |
| 206. My White Bicycle | Joe Boyd |
| 207. Sapiens | Yuval Noah Harari |
| 208. Animal Farm | George Orwell |
| 209. Petrified Ants | Kurt Vonnegut |
| 210. Now Wait For Last Year | Philip K Dick |
| 211. Grimus | Salman Rushdie |
| 212. Feel the Rush | Jeff Parsons |
| 213. The Wizard of Wands | Dewin Nefol |
| 214. The Ghost | Robert Harris |
| 215. Sabbath’s Theatre | Philip Roth |
| 216. Staring at the Sun | Julian Barnes |
| 217. Talking it Over | Julian Barnes |
| 218. Hag-Seed | Margaret Atwood |
| 219. Trout Fishing in America | Richard Brautigan |
| 220. Healers from another world | C Coulson Pounder |
| 221. On the Road – original scroll | Jack Kerouac |
A refined list of books! Many of those authors I have heard of, yet unfamiliar with. Props for the Vonnegut books! I love his work, and am excitedly looking forward to, “Armageddon in Retrospect”…I think I will be sharing an article with a list of books I’ve read this year as well. I’ve been all over the place, reading Eastern philosophy, then Western, then current science, politics, classic literature pieces, French authors, bohemian authors, etc., etc.
Hi Tylor – it’s a bit of a mixed bag. I like a mixture of light and heavier reads. Vonnegut is one of my favourites – such a lightness of touch and humour with depth. I enjoyed Armageddon in Retrospect. Not his best but interesting. It is always sad when you come to the end of a favourite writer and know that there is going to be no more. I look forward to your list. All the best.
What’s in a name, she said. Sillitoe? Not many authors there I’m familiar with, Opher. I was wondering what kind of an experience reading Russell Brandt is – is it as surreal and esoteric as the man?
I’ve been reading a very mixed and eclectic bag of fiction, mainly because I was given a huge bagful of discards by a friend. It’s been an interesting dip into books I would not normally bother with.
Raili – Allan Sillitoe was one of those English writers from the late 50s, early sixties, called the Angry Young Men, who wrote gritty books of social realism based in the North of England. His two famous ones were Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. There were some great books came out of that period – the L-Shaped Room, This Sporting Life, Lucky Jim, Room at the Top.
I don’t like Russel Brandt but I was interested in his take on the social unrest and division in society. Revolution was an interesting read. Not like his usual stupidity.
Jasper Fforde is one of my recent finds – a very zany writer.
That would be fun to read a bunch of things that you haven’t selected.
It was – I still have a few left. Some were great, others not so.
But it would take you outside your normal parameters. Interesting.
By the way Raili – I would thoroughly recommend Yuval Noah Harari’s books – Sapiens and Homo Deus. They are certainly thought provoking!
Thanks – I’ll add them to my list of ‘to be read’
Cheers Raili.