2016 reading list

I read some great books this year but all up it was a slightly scatty, underwhelming year. For the first time in a long time I found myself finishing books and not knowing what to read next, which lead to starting and stopping many books I would normally enjoy simply because I was not prepared for them.

• The lost dog – Michelle de Kretser
• Boyhood island – Karl Ove Knausguaard

The third and most disappointing of the My Struggle series.

• We need to talk about Kevin – Lionel Shriver

I’ve been meaning to read this for a long time and it didn’t disappoint. There were many lines that struck me, in particular: “To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay.” Controversial, but it struck a chord with me.

• Catcher in the rye – J.D. Salinger
• Snow – Orhan Pamuk
• Adela Pankhurst: the wayward suffragette – Verna Coleman
• An evil cradling – Brian Keenan

Keenan’s experience as a hostage in Lebanon in the eighties. A story that I was too young to know about at the time but which I now find incredible.

• Why I am not a Christian – Bertrand Russell
• Story of the lost child – Elena Ferrante
• Persuasion – Jane Austen

Forever my favourite Austen.

• Climbing the coconut tree – S.C. Karakaltsas
• A spool of blue thread – Anne Tyler
• Divergent – Veronica Roth
• Room – Emma Donoghue

A highlight of the year. So absorbing that my 30 minute train trip just didn’t feel long enough.

• Sparrow migrations – Cari Noga

Another highlight and comforting that it started as a self-published novel. Several stories linked by the Hudson river crash and sparrows.

• The strays – Emily Bitto
• Hideous kinky – Esther Ford

I read this while we were in Morocco, which felt fitting. Told from the point of view of a child whose mother is a wandering hippy on the Moroccan trail in the seventies.

• Great expectations – Charles Dickens
• All the light we cannot see – Anthony Doerr

Every time I read a story about the second world war I think I can’t possibly read another one that sheds more light, and yet I do. There are so many nuanced experiences outside those of the camps and they continue to intrigue me.

• The door – Magda Szabo

I found this on a list of best translated fiction. It’s incredible and Emerence is a character I’ll never forget. See the New Yorker article here.

• Why not me? – Mindy Kaling
• Not that kind of girl – Lena Dunham
• 20 fragments of a ravenous youth – Xiaolu Guo
• Silas Marner – George Eliot

I was only disappointed that this was so short. It is an incredibly succinct story of the interweaving of lives and how we see people.

• The garden of evening mists – Tan Twan Eng

I wanted to love this, and the second world war information about Malaysia was interesting but the actual writing I found over the top.

• First love, last rights – Ian McEwan
• The history of love – Nicole Krauss
• A little life – Hanyu Yanagihara

Everything is just so big in this novel. The violence is nauseating and the characters often frustrating, but it is a must-read.

• Insurgent – Veronica Roth
• Still Alice – Lisa Genova
• The wandering falcon – Jamil Ahmad
• A god in ruins – Kate Atkinson
• Olive Kitteridge – Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout was the best thing about this year! I feel like I’m lowered into her novels in a glass sphere, the characters are so real that it is easy to believe I am simply visiting them for a time.

• Purple hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Anne of Green Gables – Lucy Maud Montgomery
• The Burgess boys – Elizabeth Strout
• The eye of the sheep – Sofie Laguna
• North and south – Elizabeth Gaskell

 

• Farewell to the East End – Jennifer Worth
• Dark places – Gillian Flynn
• In the woods – Tana French
• The girls – Emma Cline

I kept seeing this on lists of books to read in 2016, so I did. It’s a fictionalised account of the Manson murders, and it was engaging until the writing style got a bit much. Still, an amazing debut.

• Emma – Jane Austen
• Notes on a scandal – Zoe Heller

The best unreliable narrator I’ve ever read. Completely fascinating.

• A murder is announced – Agatha Christie
• Dancing in the dark – Karl Ove Knausguaard

Fourth in the series and it made me look forward to the fifth. I’m a fan once again.

• Moments of reprieve – Primo Levi
• Waiting for the barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
• The lonely city – Olivia Laing

The third of Laing’s books, and I loved it. Non-fiction about how loneliness informed the art of artists including Edward Hopper. Heart-breaking and optimistic at the same time.

• My name is Lucy Barton – Elizabeth Strout
• Slammerkin – Emma Donoghue

I’m not usually one for historical fiction but this was great. Three years of a teenage girl’s life as she goes from prostitution in London to servitude in a Welsh country house.

• Amy and Isabelle – Elizabeth Strout
• Reckoning – Magda Szubanski
• A streetcat named Bob – James Bowen
• And all of Harry Potter, of course.

See previous years’ lists here.