Your 2008 Reading - Looking Back

Looking back, how would you summarize your 2008 reading? Is there anything you had hoped to read more or less of? Was your reading affected by having to read for school or work? Are you satisfied with the amount of reading you did?

A LOT of Anna Kavan for school, some of which required me to fly to London to access the British Library. Can't complain on that front. Otherwise, it was mostly what I could fit in around academic books and articles. :( So sad. Hoping for better next year so that I don't bore you all...

Beyond the 20+ books on New England history and social history, related biographies and other books that I've read for research, the 'pleasure' reading adds up satisfactorily.

It breaks down like this:
General fiction - 36
pre-19th century Fiction - 8
SF - 8 (includes post-apocalyptic & dystopian tales)
Mystery - 8
Short fiction collections - 6
Poetry collections - 8
Rereads - 6
Memoir - 3
Nonfiction/Essays - 3
I read more mystery* and poetry than I thought I did, more rereads than I have ever done in a year (too many new books to read!) and more short fiction. *I tend to read mysteries as a kind of literary palate cleanser or when my brain needs a break.
---------
And looking at where the fiction, memoirs and poetry come from, which is important to me, it breaks down this way:

29% US authors/poets
17% UK authors/poets
17% African authors (roughly half No. African)
9% European authors (all, believe it or not, Nordic countries and all mysteries)
9% Australian/NZ*
8% Asian
7% Canadian
2% Caribbean/Central & South American

It's important to me that the larger percentage of my reading be literature from outside the US. The past two years I have read a large number of African authors. Clearly, I'm low on Canadian authors this year (the majority of the Canadian authors I read this year were Atwood rereads) and our neighbors to the south.

I'm not unhappy about any aspect of my reading this past year, but there are definitely some other areas I'd like to explore when I'm finished with the project. And the year isn't quite over yet!

I don't know if it's that a sig. % of Scando mysteries(relative to the overall literary production) gets translated..but i've read a fair # of Icelandic and Swedish mystery novels the last couple of years - and except for Hoeg's the Quiet Girl not much else from the region that i can recall.

That figure is all Indridason (2), Mankell (2), Fossum (1) Larsson (1) oops, 1 regular novel by Olafsson in there also. Bob, assuming you have read Indridason, have you seen the movie of Jar City? It's probably on Netflix now. I thought it pretty good, and so NOT Hollywood.

This list only includes books I read for the first time this year. Of the 108 books, the breakdown is as follows:

Fiction (78)
Poetry (3)
Science fiction (7)
Fantasy (7)
General nonfiction (3)
Philosophy (5)
Scholarly nonfiction (5)

I read books from 25 different countries this year. The percent breakdown is as follows:
United States (26%)
UK (31%)
Europe (29%)
Asia (4%)
Other Canada, Iceland, South American, Australia, Africa, Saudi Arabia, Israel (10%)

Overall, I am a bit disappointed on several counts. Only 43% of my reading was non-British or non American. Of that 43%, 29% was European, which means that I didn’t graze as far afield as I would have liked. I am over halfway through ~50 books, most of which are further afield than the US, UK, and Europe. I am also disappointed at how little nonfiction I have read this year. Yuck. However, I am pleased that the list includes very little of what I deem junk fiction.

#5 - i've been waiting to see Jar City..i missed it..if it showed up around here..but i really liked the book - passed it on to a local book friend who also liked it.

>6 urania1: well, what kind of nonfiction would you like to read?

>8 avaland: More philosophy. More cultural, post-colonialist studies/histories (particularly from India), more environmental studies. I've read a lot of articles this year, but I've been woefully deficient in reading more sustained presentations. I had also intended to start working on reading knowledge of a language other than French this year. I did not do that. I also read much less than I usually do. In summary, my reading year's intentions paved a long, very long road to. . . .

Looking back at it so far I re-read the following:

Three to Kill--Jean Patrick Manchette--French noir.
Murphy--Samuel Beckett
The prone gunman--Manchette again.
Triomf--Marlene Van Niekerk.
Losing the edge: The rise and fall of the Stanley Cup New York Rangers--Barry Meisel--hey I needed some variety.
Out of danger--poetry collection by James Fenton.
A void--a Georges Perec novel. Perec was a member of Oulipo and this an EAP style mystery written without a single 'e' in the entire text. That absent vowel is continually alluded to though.
Albert Angelo--a novel by B. S. Johnson.

Highlights so far:

Christ versus Arizona--Camilo Jose Cela--spanish nobelist.
Omega Minor--Paul Verhaeghen
No country for old men--Cormac McCarthy
Song of Napalm--Bruce Weigl (poetry)
The echo maker--Richard Powers
Allah is not obliged--Ahmadou Kourouma
Gate of the Sun--Elias Khoury
My battle of Algiers--Ted Morgan
The big money--last of John dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy.
Operation Shylock--Philip Roth
No great mischief--Alistair MacLeod
Yalo--Khoury again.
The lost salt gift of blood--MacLeod again.
Children of the new world--Assia Djebar
Senselessness--Horacio Castellanos Moya
What was lost--Catherine O'Flynn
The atrocity exhibition--J. G. Ballard
The last samurai--Helen Dewitt
The eagle's throne--Carlos Fuentes
Three day road--Joseph Boyden
Speed of light--Javier Cercas
Lush life--Richard Price
Atonement--Ian McEwen

Finally Infinite Jest--David Foster Wallace--which I hope to finish is really something unique.

I have never kept track of my reading throughout a year, so I don't know exactly what I read in 2008! But I can remember some highlights:

Fiction

1) For the book group I'm in (you can see a list of everything we've read and watched over the years, with a few typos, at http://homepages.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~rarnold/bookgroup.html):

Middlemarch
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Northern Lights aka The Golden Compass

2) My own choice:

Slipstream (OK, that's an autobiography) and the four-volume Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Children of the Arbat by Anatoly Rybakov
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia by Viktor Pelevin

Poetry

My Iron Spine by Helen Rickerby
Moonshot by Harvey Molloy
A Long Girl Ago by Johanna Aitchison
More of Me Disappears by John Amen

At the moment, I'm reading The White Road and Other Stories and Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land. When 2009 starts, I will be there with my list!

>12 timjones: and we'll be watching. It's always interesting to see what a writer reads.

i have the same problem Tim has - heretofore i've never really tracked my reading..But a few recent highlights:

Fantasy -
Paul Park - A Princess of Roumania sequence
Catherynne Valente - The Orphan's Tales.
Pelevin A werewolf problem in central russia
the latter 2 are collections of short stories.

SF -
charles stross atrocity archives
Kage Baker Gods and Pawns
Wyndam the day of the triffids..about 45 yrs late...but.

Graphic stories
G. Willow Wilson Cairo
Lappe Shooting war

Gen. Fiction -
Diaz the brief wondrous life of oscar wao
&nbsp The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander

Non-Fiction -
Michael Pollan In defense of food
Noah Adams Piano Lessons

Poetry -
Laura Fargas an animal of the sixth day (reread)
Ruth Stone in the next galaxy

...
These are from the last couple of months as i can't remember further back in my dotage.

#12--Children of the Arbat is a great book. The sequel to it is called Fear. There is another Rybakov book set before and during WWII--Heavy Sands which is excellent as well.

I had a look at my monthly reading logs and while I've read a fair bit in 2008 (84 books), I can tell at a glance that I didn't get nearly the global diversity that others have. And my poetry is nearly ALL Canadian. This may have something to do with the fact that many of my friends are published poets... The breakdown is as follows:

fiction: 27 (14 of which were by Anna Kavan, and one of which was about her)
non-fiction: 27 (7 of which were by or about Kavan or Sylvia Plath)
poetry: 20 (of which only 3 were by non-Canadians!)
comics & graphic novels / memoirs: 4
children's lit: 6

Highlights included:
Ice by Anna Kavan
Eagles' Nest by Anna Kavan
Julia & the Bazooka by Anna Kavan
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Pricksongs & Descants by Robert Coover
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
Black Sun: Depression & Melancholia by Julia Kristeva
At Large and at Small by Anne Fadiman
The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
Illustrated London by Peter Ackroyd
Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
blert by Jordan Scott
un by Dennis Lee
Nerve Squall by Sylvia Legris
Light Duress by Paul Celan
The Sands of Dream by Therese Renaud
Men of Letters & People of Substance by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
City of Glass: A Graphic Mystery by Paul Auster, David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik
The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam by Ann Marie Fleming
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll and illustrated by Stéphane Jorisch

As you can tell from the 20 highlights, there's not much global diversity - though I have read more broadly in past years. I joined the Reading Globally group in the hopes of poaching suggestions for books from around the world. I suspect this group will help me with that too!

>14 bobmcconnaughey: I have that particular Ruth Stone collection in the TBR shelves next to the bed (my side). I've picked through it a little but it's waiting for a thorough going over.

>16 cocoafiend: How was the graphic mystery, City of Glass? As you may know from the Nudgers group, that's also in the TBR pile.

That's two for Pelevin's newest. And to think we don't have that one on the shelves (or the floor, or the table, or the...)

Not much fiction this year, genre or otherwise.

I seem to be back on a big History kick, especially local history. "Local history", though, is a large enough topic to have led me in any number of directions, "history" leading me all the way back to archaeology, and "local" extending as far as from here in upstate Nw York to Holland.

avaland, I love the graphic novel version of City of Glass! This was a re-read for me. In fact, I taught it in a detective fiction class in 2005 (quite a metaphysical, not particularly genre course which included some Cortazar, Borges, Capek, Ishiguro...) The students were very into it! I got some really ambitious papers that semester. Ultimately, it is a deeply disturbing book about the collapse of speech, identity and representation, and the visuals convey this in quite interesting ways. You should definitely give it a read!

I've read over 80 books so far this year. A number of them were rereads for classes I was teaching, including about 10 plays by Shakespeare, a few each by Marlowe and Middleton, about 10 other plays written between 1300 and 1800, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales, The Rape of the Lock, tons of clasic poems (Wyatt, Sidney, Donne, Herbert), A Modest Proposal, and many critical essays on these literary works.

I keep a "Best of 2008" list on my profile page that I'll replicate here. I don't usually note the genre; most are fiction. I've been writing short comments on my 75 Books Challenge thread.

Read My Hearrt by Jane Dunn--biography
Sorry by Gail Jones
The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
The Adventures of Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
The Saffron Kitchen by Yasmin Crowther
Restoration by Rose Tremain
The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle
The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl--nonfiction
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
The Assassin's Accomplice by Karen Clifford Larson--nonfiction
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
Anagrams by Lorrie Moore
Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin
The March by E. L. Doctorow
Astrid and Veronika by Linda Olssen
Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
The Deportees and Other Stories by Roddy Doyle
Lady Susan by Jane Austen
Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert
The Child in Time by Ian McEwan

I started the year with the resolve to read more classics, and it began quite well. Read about 100 books which is down a bit for me, but I had a busy work year.

Classics – 12
Shakespeare – 4

Then I had quite a bout of memoir-mania – 8
Followed by biography -8
History – 6 and Art History - 1
Science – 4
Poetry - 2

The rest were fiction books:
English 18
US – 9
Dutch – 5
Canadian – 5
Africa and Sth Africa – 4
Italian – 3
Indian – 1
French – 1
Australia – 1
Israeli – 1

And 3 graphic novels to expand my horizons.

Don’t ask me to give up my UK reads – I cannot. I do want to continue to read more classics, more non-fiction and more poetry.

I want to learn to stop reading a book that I don’t like and stop wasting time on trying to plow through those reads that everyone else ‘Loved’ and I just could not connect. Vive la difference!!

Some highlights for me:

Classics - Pride and Prejudice, Crime and Punishment, The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Nonfiction - The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, The Vertigo Years by Philipp Blom, The Slave Ships by Marcus Rediker (touchstones not working)

Memoir - The Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray, In the Blood - a Memoir of my Childhood by Andrew Motion

Fiction - The Secret Scripture, Waiting for the Barbarians, The Blue Flower, The Devil's Footprints, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, The Road Home.

Copied from the 75 Book Challenge The Best of Books thread,

I can attempt this, since I think I'll be reading Doctor Faustus for the rest of December, although I may mix in a few lighter, shorter, reads.

It's been a good reading year for me. These lists are not in order, but I've tried to put my top favorites first in each category. I may try to narrow them down later. They are all bests, with one exception at the end, because I don't finish books I don't like.

On reflection, I probably read more fiction and less nonfiction than usual this year, and I read a lot more new fiction than I usually do.

New Fiction

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
Lush Life by Richard Price
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
The Condition by Jennifer Haigh
A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carre
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block
The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

Older Fiction

Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
In Hazard by Richard Hughes
Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah
What's for Dinner? by James Schuyler
The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig

Nonfiction

Blood-Dark Track by Joseph O'Neill
The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists by Gregory Curtis
The Dark Side: How the War on Terror Turned into a War on America's Ideals by Jane Mayer
A Way of Life, Like Any Other by Darcy O'Brien

The total clunker was A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle by Liza Campbell. As I have said elsewhere, the best (and only good) thing about this book is the title.

I was trying to read more slowly in 2008, and take on a few of the chunkier books on my TBR, with mixed results. I have read 77 books to date this year, which is quite a lot down on previous years. Unfortunately, my reading jags for this year didn't work out too well. I decided to read Solzhenitsyn this year (actually finished my pile literally 3 days before his death), but realised that I wasn't a big fan of his style or perspective. 'One Day in the LIfe...' is great, and I really enjoyed 'Cancer Ward' and 'The First Circle', but the Red Wheel novels and the 'Gulag Archipelago' books left me a bit cold. And, with the exception of 'One Day in the Life...' they are very, very big books. All of them.

I also tried to read a few authors from SE Asia, but, with one exception, wasn't blown away. My Bhutanese read was The Circle of Karma by Kunzang Choden, which was absolutely superb. My other reading jags were more successful. I 'visited' a few Arab countries, finding some great literature along the way. Two standouts (for me) were Pillar of Salt (Tunisia) and Saddam City (Iraq). I also read a few Herman Hesse, and he is fast becoming one of my favourite authors. Finally, I fulfilled an ambition I have had for a long time now, and read a few (nine, to be exact) Icelandic sagas and tales. They are not smooth reads to modern eyes, but once I understood the style and purpose of the sagas, I really began to enjoy them. There are many more out there, so it is something I would like to continue with in the future.

My 77 reads break down as:
72 fiction, 5 non-fiction

45 different nationalities, of which:
13 by African writers (17%)
12 Asian (16%)
10 North/Central American (13%)
2 South American (3%)
40 European (52%)

Only 6 of my reads (8%) this year were by authors from the UK and US. As usual, most of my European reads were from Eastern Europe. I have a thing for Russian literature, and added another 12 books by Russian writers. Of the 45 nationalities, 26 were from countries I hadn't visited before, which is down on previous years. This was partly because I read fewer books, but mostly because finding books from new countries has become much trickier.

A few highlights from 2008 were:
The Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier
Young Man Seeks Position: Good References by Loukis Akritas
Under the Sun by Hanne Marie Svendsen
Local Anaesthetic by Gunter Grass
Conversations with Spinoza by Goce Smilevski
Debbie Go Home by Alan Paton
Doctor Glas by Hjamlar Soderberg
Pillar of Salt by Albert Memmi
Northern Lights by Phillip Pulman
Natural Novel by Georgi Gospodinov
Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
The Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Skvorecky
The Circle of Karma by Kungzang Choden

Interesting list, Depressaholic. Nice to see such eclectic choices. I am very interested to read the Pullman Northern Lights (Actually interested in the entire list). I think Pullman is a very underrated author.

>25 kiwidoc:
The Pullman was a bit of a revelation for me. I rarely read books that are described as being for kids or YA, and rarely like them when I do, but 'The Northern Lights' genuinely engaged me. Having written that, I haven't made any attempt to read the others in the series, but maybe one day I'll get the urge.

Depressaholic's point about not being blown away by most of his SE Asia reads reminds me that I went on a bit of contemporary Chinese fiction reading jag this year and wasn't blown away by any of the three books I read (Serve the People! by Yan Lianke, Wolf Totem by Rong Jiang, and Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan,the best of the bunch but too long), although each had its good points.

Depressaholic, Wizard of the Crow made my list for this year, too (and rebeccanyc's list for last year, if I remember correctly).

This year, I was new to African lit, and I read more female authors than usual. It was an outstanding reading year for me, the best so far. Right now I'm working on Proust, which is topping anything I've read before. That project will extend well into the new year, I expect.

This year's list:
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Famished Road by Ben Okri
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
A Room With a View by E.M. Forster
Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte (not sure why this one has stuck with me so much, but it has)

Honorable mentions:
The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola
Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo
Towing Jehovah by James Morrow
The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter

I didn't read much non-fiction this year, outside of my music reading, but that doesn't particularly perturb me. Toward the end of the year here, I've been reading a bit of philosophy-lite, fairytale/folklore stuff, and some lit crit and biography (mostly Proust-centric). I just haven't finished much of anything in these categories, yet.

I don't keep a running count of the books I read to amaze my friends and confound my enemies--and given the lists here, my paltry book-a-week average wouldn't make it anyway.

Five of the most memorable, in one way or another, from this year:

Most "writerly" book: The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville. Somebody could spend a whole semester in a grad seminar talking about this one, and I would like that somebody to be me.

Book I most enjoyed: A Heart-Breaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. Hilarious and laceratingly honest account of 20-something guy trying to raise his orphaned little brother.

Best re-read of the year: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus. Couple embroiled in an ugly divorce against the angst and insanity of 9/11 torture each other a la Albee's George and Martha in a bitter exploration of the malaise of American life. (Sorry that sounds so purple, but this is a wonderfully visceral read if you like that sort of thing.)

Most disappointing book: The Idea of Perfection by A.S. Byatt. Impressive writing hampered by ho-hum plot about two repressed academics who join forces to study a romance between two middling Victorian literati and fall into a lukewarm romance.

Worst book I read this year: Austenland by Shannon Hale. Single career woman obsessed with Mr. Darcy fantasies goes to purge herself of same by going a kind of Austen dude ranch, which is actually a high-class brothel for bored rich women, only Hale is too coy and cute to be frank about it. Pass the insulin.

Medellia, you are right about Wizard of the Crow being on my list last year, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood was on my list this year. Fifth Business was also on my list this year (as part of The Deptford Trilogy, and Cold Comfort Farm was on my list last year. I read Proust (finally) two years ago, and it took me the better part of the year, since I mixed it up with other reading.

Rebeccanyc,

Great list!! I see that we shared quite a few books this year.

Netherland was very notable and a great read, Lush Life was not to my taste despite great narrative but my hubbie cannot stop singing its praises. The Miles book was good, but a bit too neurotic and alcohol bound for a resounding recommend from me. We must be reading the same reviews!!

The book on your list that I really want to read is Tree of Smoke which has been very heavily praised by many.

nohrt4me - I imagine you have already read The Secret River - I really enjoyed that book and must get to The Idea of Perfection as well.

Medallia - what a great selection you managed to read - I just adored The French Lieutenant's Woman for instance.

>26 GlebtheDancer: don't blow off books because they've been labeled as YA by the publisher. Pullman had many good books out before "his dark materials;" we first discovered him through his excellent Sally Lockhart series when adam was 8 or 9...But if you've started in YA via Pullman..others that are of like quality include (in no particular order):

Peter Dickinson - merlin dreams
MT Anderson - feed
Isobelle Comody obernewtyn chronicles
Alan Garner The Stone Quartet
Margaret Mahy the Catalogue of the Universe or Memory
Robin McKinley,
Garth Nix Sabriel - the Abhorsen Trilogy..
Jostein Gaardner Sophie's world

the next few are aimed at younger kids, but well worth checking out too:

Nancy Farmer the ear, the eye and the arm
Jane Yolen the devil's arithmetic
Cynthia Rylant I had seen castles
..
an unusually high % of the very best recent "YA" literature has come from NZ and Australia. No idea why. Alan Garner's probably the best pure writer among the above, but all are very good writers with original POV and intriguing ideas. The best YA rarely has prose that calls attention to itself; the conjunction of story & character without the author (visibly) getting in the way is far more often the case. (i'm obviously a huge fan of YA and children's literature.

One of the great bonuses of having a kid born in 1983 was discovering the HUGE increase in excellent books for kids, compared to what was available in the 50s and 60s..And my mother, to her credit, did an excellent job getting books for us back in the day.

*well, i tried to modify my last 3 months' best of, and ended back down here..But seeing Netherland listed above reminded me of how much i enjoyed it, too.

Re Netherland: it's great to see that so many Americans are reading and enjoying a book about cricket! Definitely a book I'd like to read in 2009.

i'm not sure the cricket was any less mystifying..but i read other books centered incomprehensible topics. The descriptions of the little (to me) known Caribbean/S Asian sub-communities were engrossing and the tale of promise and loss, classic. (Years ago Patty and I were waiting @ RDU for Adam to come home for break; we'd been amusing ourselves w/ Schott's Miscellany and were on the diagram of the cricket field/positions and obviously baffled; a Pakistani grad student heard us attempting to figure out who/what/where and took pity on us and after informing us that it was all very easy, nicely described the pitch, players, game. etc. Of course 30 minutes later all that info turned into mush again)

Looking forward to A most wanted man - might be 08 or 09 depending upon when a copy shows up @ our library; i have it on hold. If it doesn't show up by the holidays i'll probably go ahead and buy a copy.

#34: If your offie can bowl a doosra and the captain has set a silly mid-off and a short leg, then things are looking good. Just watch out for the mow to cow corner.

i LOVE the silly mid-off (whatever he/she/it) might be! i think i know that bowling ~ pitching (albeit w/ the capability/requirement? that the ball bounces off the grass) but that's about it. I'm sure wikipedia can unravel all.

The Indian movie "Lagaan" has some great cricket scenes - a tax dispute between the locals and the English colonists is settled over a game of cricket (very climatic). I don't even pretend to understand the sport.

I promise this will be my last post about cricket! But since I was deliberately obscure in #35:

offie - offspinner, a bowler who usually makes the ball spin from left to right (as the bowler looks at it) after pitching

doosra - ("other one", an Urdu word) - a ball from an offspinner which surprises the batsman (note: this term is used in both men's and women's cricket) by spinning from right to left after pitching

silly mid-off and short leg - fielding positions, both near the batsman, one on the same side of the batsman as he/she holds the bat (the "off" side), the other on the opposite side to the side they hold the bat (the "leg" or "on" side). The "silly" is because it's silly to stand that close to the batsman if they hit the ball hard.

mow to cow corner - an uncontrolled shot in which the batsman swings mightily from off to leg and hits the ball high at about 45 degrees forward of the wicket on the leg side. If it's hit well enough, it will go for 6 runs, which is the equivalent of hitting a home run.

#36: Bowling is ~ pitching. It isn't a requirement that the ball land before reaching the batsman, but it is often helpful to the bowler. There are two ways of making the ball deviate: by causing it to move in the air, and by causing it to deviate from a straight line when it hits the pitch (the grass strip between the stumps). The ideal delivery does both - unless, of course, it's an inswinging yorker, but let's not go there. (Though the greatest exponents of that particular art have been Pakistani, so your grad student friend could have told you all about it.)

(The closer it gets to Christmas, the more I want to post silly messages on LT instead of getting on with my writing - actually, with my slogging through a list of reprint permission requests I have to send out for an anthology I'm co-editing. This. Must. Stop!)

ahh they're just silly mid-posts. no harm no foul.

rebeccanyc, I was kind of interested in Beware of Pity myself - how was it?

depressaholic, I'm planning to read Doctor Glas and The Wizard of the Crow next year, so good to see that they were both highlights for you!

cocoafiend, I read Beware of Pity in the midst of a mini "Central Europe/end of the Austro-Hungarian empire" reading jag. I definitely thought it was excellent, although there were other books I read that I enjoyed more (e.g., Bridge on the Drina, The Radetsky March). And count me in as a big fan of Wizard of the Crow -- it was one of my favorite books last year.

>40 cocoafiend: if the two of you are hoping to read The Wizard of the Crow next year, I may join you. It's been on my TBR pile since before it was published:-)

Of my 2008 reading the books that stand out (as of today) are:

Paula Spencer- Roddy Doyle
The Siege Of Krishnapur- J.G.Farrell
Independent People- Halldor Laxness
Dylan Thomas In America- John Malcolm Brinnin
Lolita- Vladimir Nabokov
Ovid: "Metamorphoses"- Charles Martin (Translator)
The Trouser People- Andrew Marshall
Elephant Bill- J.H.Williams
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors -Roddy Doyle
South Of The Border West Of The Sun- Haruki Murakami

Isaac Bashevis Singer must have made an impact too because after reading meshugah
I went out to the second hand book stores and bought three more by him. They are on my TBR horizon. The other novel that I didn’t list but sit here wondering if I shouldn’t just add it on was Norman Mailer’s 'The Naked and the Dead' which caught me thoroughly by surprise, in fact I double checked the publication date thinking it must have come out in the 1960’s.

I enjoyed my reading this year; I didn’t feel like I was picking up anything I didn’t want too. I became completely immersed in Charles Martin’s translation of Ovid to the point where I was taking it to summer music festivals and friends kept asking if I had a class. It says something about reading Ovid that I found myself over emphasizing how much I was enjoying it, and no I didn’t have to read it, I wanted to read it. The response’s to this bordered on bemused acceptance of obvious eccentricity.

Elephant Bill is on the list because I loved the account of working with elephants in the 20’s and 30’s in Burma and because my Father ordered it at the same time as I borrowed a copy, all quite coincidentally. I was delighted to email him and discover we were reading the same book at the same time.

Roddy Doyle is the best writer in my library. “I love Roddy Doyle” is destined to become a T-shirt. I want to read everything by Roddy Doyle even if it isn’t any good, I don’t care, I’d read the newsprint off the bottom of his boots if he’d let me.

>43 BeesleSR: I have bought Doyle's The Barrytown Trilogy as a gift more times than I can count. (The movies are pretty good, too.)

#43--The Naked and the dead struck me as very realistically drawn. James Jones The thin red line is much the same. Best WWII book IMO though goes to Curzio Malaparte Kaputt which is quite different in style and tone than either of those and was the first real commentary on the holocaust. It is a very brutal read as in nightmarish. Gert Ledig's The Stalin front is almost as awful and saturated in very black humor. Good competition as well from Willi Heinrich The cross of Iron and W. S. Kuniczak's The thousand hour day.

Anyway I'm a big Halldor Laxness fan and if you liked Independent people--World Light and Iceland's bell are just as good and Salka Valka is pretty close.

It was a strange reading year for me, because I was asked to be part of the jury of the Mara-Cassens-Preis, which is the largest (€10,000) prize for a debut novel in the German language (i.e. from Germany, Austria and Switzerland). Great idea, I thought, loads of free books and a big showdown at the end of the year *assuming Henry Fonda's role*.
Well, both proved to be true, but I simply didn't realise how utterly brain-deadeningly tedious it would be to read over 45 (from a total of 50) really really awful novels, to the exclusion of almost everything else. It was a fascinating and enriching experience, but - like your first car battery failure on the summit of Mont Blanc in a snowstorm - NOT something you wish to repeat EVER AGAIN.
Thankfully (and after I drowned an obnoxious co-juror in a vat of the finest claret), my preferred title won: Hundert Tage, by Lukas Bärfuss, a gruesome but worthy and well-written story set in Rwanda in 1994. I'm hoping for an English translation very soon.

As for the rest, I managed to keep apace with the usual Orange and Booker blah blah, pottered around in 17th century Britain and Ireland, as well as reading five different versions of Gilgamesh, but I have no major highlights to report, alas.
Roll on, 2009.

I have never been very good about keeping track of what I read. That may be about to change. I have tried to cast my mind back over 2008, and while no doubt there are books I am not remembering right now, here is the list of memorable books read or reread in 2008:

2008 Memorable Books

The Odyssey: a Norton Critical Edition
The Iliad: the Fitzgerald translation
A Guide to the Iliad – Hogan
Homer’s The Iliad and the Odyssey: a Biography – Manguel
The Curtain – Kundera
Dog Soldiers – Stone
The Tender Bar – Moehringer
Cockroach – Hage
Drown – Diaz
Metamorphosis – Kafka
Cure of Tours – Balzac
Cousin Bette – Balzac
Pere Goriot – Balzac
Droll Stories – Balzac
Balzac – Zweig
Madame Bovary – Flaubert
A Very Long Engagement – Japrisot
Shame – Ernaux
Piano Shop on the Left Bank – Carhart
A Year in the Merde – Clarke
Long Ago in France – Fisher
Never Let Me Go – Ishiguro
The Lay of the Land – Ford
A Thousand Acres – Smiley
Jazz – Morrison
The Road – McCarthy
Anna Karenina – Tolstoy
Howards End – Forster
On Beauty – Smith
An Equal Music – Seth
Ground Beneath Her Feet – Rushdie
Fury – Rushdie
Fine Just the Way It Is – Proulx
Snow Falling on Cedars – Guterson
A Long Way Down – Hornby

Did you like "Fine Just the Way It Is"? I was on a Proulx kick two years ago, and really liked "The Shipping News" and "The Accordion."

I've posted a year end wrap on my blog. Which can be found HERE.

#47, 48

I knew I would remember other books I read in 2008 which qualify as memorable. Three more for now:

Assassin's Song -- Vassanji
Double Hook -- Watson
Transposed Heads -- Mann

As far as Fine Just the Way It Is is concerned, it is a book that made me angry. I consider myself a major Proulx fan. I have reread Shipping News many times, always with delight. I have also enjoyed all of her other work. Until this one. There are perhaps three stories in the collection which are Proulx the way we know and love her. There are three which are silly to the point of anger. Satan and his running of Hell and interference in the world? Puh-leeeze. One story like that, perhaps. But three? Very bad Woody Allen, Woody Allen at the age of thirteen, with no self-control. Why, Annie, why?

NOT a recommended book.

I had a number of reading goals for 2008, and for the most part I reached them all. At the end of the year though, I feel kinda blah about my year of reading. Of the 92 books I read, there weren't any fiction books that I was really excited about. The two highlights were both memoirs, Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and If This is a Man, by Primo Levi. I hope that I can be more passionate about my 2009 reading.

Here were my 2008 goals:

1. Read more books from my TBR pile than I buy: I failed pretty miserably at this one!

2. Read books from the 1001 list (there are about 300 books from the list that I'm interested in): 25

3. Read Canadian: 11 books

4. Read 10 books over 400 pages: done

5. Read plays: Read 6 Shakespeare, 8 ancient Greek and 1 20th-century.

6. Read more global lit: Read 8.

7. Read slowly and closely: How does one measure this? I guess I achieved it, although there is always room for improvement.

8. Read older books from my TBR pile: read the 8 oldest ones, including one I've packed around since 1986.

Not really outstanding results, but I took five university courses in '08 which heavily affected my reading (especially the global and Canadian lit categories).