2012 reading list
In recent years I have been worrying that I don’t read enough. Certainly I don’t read as much as I did in university when I managed to pack away more than a hundred books a year for seven years straight and I was reading upwards of a thousand pages a week. But I worry how much I have slowed down over the years, what with work and money, family, etc. So in 2012 I decided to keep a list of the books I read. Several are books that I re-read. You can tell a lot about a person by the books he reads. You can tell some by the books he displays. But you can tell more by the books he re-reads. The books I re-read are marked in red below. Some of them I have read several times, others only once or twice. It’s a good thing, too, that I decided to re-read some books, some of which I haven’t read since junior high school because, while reading them I think to myself, “Holy crap! I don’t remember any of this!” That’s exactly what I thought when I re-read The Great Gatsby, The Odyssey, and The Picture of Dorian Gray last year, and others besides.
1. The Good News Bible
2. I Think, Therefore I Am by Lesley Levene (Michael O’Mara, 2010)
3. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (Penguin, 1994)
4. Starter for Ten by David Nicholls (Hodder, 2003)
5. My Journey: An Immigrant’s Story of Survival by Patti Pascal (Pascal, 2011)
6. Book Love by James Charlton and Bill Henderson (Pushcart, 2011)
7. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe (Sterling, 2011)
8. The Papal Decree by Luís Miguel Rocha (Michael Joseph/Penguin, 2010)
9. The Last Pope by Luís Miguel Rocha (Jove, 2006)
10. The Holy Bullet by Luís Miguel Rocha (Jove, 2007)
11. Relic by Tom Egeland (John Murray, 2001)
12. The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, 2007)
13. god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens (12, 2007)
14. The Siege of Heaven by Tom Harper (Arrow, 2006)
15. The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger (Little, Brown and Co., 1999)
16. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, translated by William Scott Wilson (Kodansha International, 2010)
17. The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss (Sterling, 2006)
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (Folio, 1999)
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (Folio, 1999)
21. To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway (Folio, 1999)
22. For Whom the BellTolls by Ernest Hemingway (Folio, 1999)
23. The Old Man and the ea by Ernest Hemingway (Folio, 1999)
24. The Dead Sea Scrolls by Geza Vermes (Folio, 2000)
25. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (Everyman, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)
26. Tess of the D’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy (Penguin, 2008)
27. Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart D. Ehrman (Harper One, 2012)
28. History of the English Bible by John Brown (Cambridge, 1912)
29. The Case for God by Karen Armstrong (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)
30. Living a Sane Sex Life by William S. Sadler (Wilcox and Follett, 1944)
31. Through the Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong (Book-of-the-Month, 1995)
32. The Lost Art of Reading by David L. Ulin (Sasquatch, 2010)
33. The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood (Sphere, 2012)
34. The Universal History of the Destruction of Books by Fernando Báez, translated by Alfred MacAdam (Atlas, 2008)
35. The Aeneid by Virgil (Everyman’s Library, 1981)
36. The Lost Library by A. M. Dean (Pan Books, 2012)
37. The Library Book (Profile, 2012)
38. Calendar: Humanity’s Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year by David Ewing Duncan (Avon, 1998)
39. Bone by Bone by Carol O’Connell (Berkley, 2008)
40. Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet, translated by James Salter (Overlook Press, 2012)
41. Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James (Arrow, 2011)
42. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (Bulfinch, 1958)
43. A Less Boring History of the Worldby Dave Rear (Square Peg, 2012)
44. A Winter Dream by Richard Paul Evans (Simon & Schuster, 2012)
45. The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling (Little, Brown, 2012)
46. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Charles Santore (Charles Santore, 2009)