Reading Lists

100 Notable Books of 2006 Meme

1 Comment / Meme, Reading Lists /

Here’s a link to the NY Times list so you can find authors and brief descriptions if you need them.  Play the normal way – bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you are sure you will never read (I rarely cross any out).  (my italicized books are either already on my reserve list or have been on my reserve list and returned to the library unread – because I ran out of time.) 

FICTION & POETRY

ABSURDISTAN

AFTER THIS

AGAINST THE DAY

ALENTEJO BLUE

ALL AUNT HAGAR’S CHILDREN

APEX HIDES THE HURT.

ARTHUR AND GEORGE

AVERNO

BEASTS OF NO NATION

BLACK SWAN GREEN

BROOKLAND

COLLECTED POEMS, 1947-1997. By Allen Ginsberg

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF AMY HEMPEL

THE DEAD FISH MUSEUM

DIGGING TO AMERICA

THE DISSIDENT

THE DREAM LIFE OF SUKHANOV

EAT THE DOCUMENT

THE ECHO MAKER

THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN

EVERYMAN

FORGETFULNESS

GALLATIN CANYON: Stories. By Thomas McGuane

GATE OF THE SUN

GOLDEN COUNTRY

HALF OF A YELLOW SUN

HIGH LONESOME: New & Selected Stories, 1966-2006. By Joyce Carol Oates

THE INHABITED WORLD

THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS

INTUITION

THE KEEP

LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH

THE LAY OF THE LAND

LISEY’S STORY

NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS, 1964-2006. By Ishmael Reed

OLD FILTH

ONE GOOD TURN

ONLY REVOLUTIONS

THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND

THE ROAD

SKINNER’S DRIFT

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS

THE STORIES OF MARY GORDON

STRONG IS YOUR HOLD

SUITE FRANÇAISE

TERRORIST

THE TRANSLATOR

TWILIGHT OF THE SUPERHEROES.

THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT

A WOMAN IN JERUSALEM

NONFICTION

THE AFTERLIFE

AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy

ANDREW CARNEGIE

AT CANAAN’S EDGE: America in the King Years, 1965-68

AVA GARDNER: "Love Is Nothing."

THE BLIND SIDE: Evolution of a Game

BLOOD AND THUNDER: An Epic of the American West

BLUE ARABESQUE: A Search for the Sublime

CLEMENTE: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero

CONSIDER THE LOBSTER: And Other Essays

THE COURTIER AND THE HERETIC: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World

THE DISCOMFORT ZONE: A Personal History

EAT, PRAY, LOVE: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH: A Memoir

FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

FIELD NOTES FROM A CATASTROPHE: Man, Nature, and Climate Change

FLAUBERT: A Biography

FUN HOME: A Family Tragicomic

THE GHOST MAP: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

THE GREAT DELUGE: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina

HAPPINESS: A History

HEAT: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

IRAN AWAKENING: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope

JAMES TIPTREE, JR.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

JANE GOODALL: The Woman Who Redefined Man

KATE: The Woman Who Was Hepburn

LEE MILLER: A Life

THE LOOMING TOWER: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

THE LOST: A Search for Six of Six Million

MAYFLOWER: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

THE MOST FAMOUS MAN IN AMERICA: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA: A Natural History of Four Meals

ORACLE BONES: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present

THE PLACES IN BETWEEN

PRISONERS: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide

PROGRAMMING THE UNIVERSE: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos

QUEEN OF FASHION: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

READING LIKE A WRITER: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

REDEMPTION: The Last Battle of the Civil War

SELF-MADE MAN: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back Again

STATE OF DENIAL

STRANGE PIECE OF PARADISE

SWEET AND LOW: A Family Story

TEMPTATIONS OF THE WEST: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW: A Memoir

UNCOMMON CARRIERS

THE UNITED STATES OF ARUGULA: How We Became a Gourmet Nation

THE WAR OF THE WORLD: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

THE WORST HARD TIME: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

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The Emperor’s Children

2 Comments / 2006, Books in Bed, Fiction, Reading Lists /

I’ve done it. I’ve finally read all of the books from the Booker Short List. The Emperor’s Children was the last. It was also one that I thought I would like more than most of the others. Now that I’ve finished, I’m finding it difficult to decide just how I felt about it – other than pleased it did not win the Booker. I also find it troubling that this book was on the Booker Short List at all – what got it there? Simply the 9/11 storyline? It feels that way to me, and I don’t like it.

I liked the book, I enjoyed it very much. But it didn’t feel like a Booker nominee to me. It felt like any other nicely written novel I’ve read this year. The characters were incredibly typical, stereotypical even, and predictable. Not a single shocking characteristic, not a single surprise, no unexpected twists. These characters could be dropped into a zillion other books and fit right in.

None of this is bad – it wasn’t a bad book. It was a good book. I liked it. And, I’m glad it didn’t win the Booker. You should read it though, you’ll like it too.

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Another List

2 Comments / Meme, Reading Lists /

Adrienne is blogging again and she blogged another list.  What the heck, I’ll play.


1. Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
2. Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
3. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
4. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
5. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
6. Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
8. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
9. Emma – Jane Austen
10. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
11. Nightmare Abbey – Thomas Love Peacock
12. The Black Sheep – Honore De Balzac
13. The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
14. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
15. Sybil – Benjamin Disraeli
16. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
17. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
18. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
19. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
20. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
22. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
23. The Woman in White -Wilkie Collins
24. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
25. Little Women – Louisa M. Alcott
26. The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope
27. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
28. Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
29. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
31. Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
33. Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
35. The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith
36. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
37. The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
38. The Call of the Wild – Jack London
39. Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
40. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
41. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
42. The Rainbow – D. H. Lawrence
43. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
45. Ulysses – James Joyce
46. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
47. A Passage to India – E. M. Forster
48. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Trial – Franz Kafka
50. Men Without Women – Ernest Hemingway
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis – Ferdinand Celine
52. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
53. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
54. Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
55. USA – John Dos Passos
56. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
57. The Pursuit Of Love – Nancy Mitford
58. The Plague – Albert Camus
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
60. Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
61. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
62. Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
63. Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
65. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
66. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
67. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
68 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
69. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
70. The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
71. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
73. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
74. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
75. Herzog – Saul Bellow
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont – Elizabeth Taylor
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carre
79. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
80. The Bottle Factory Outing – Beryl Bainbridge
81. The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer
82. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino
83. A Bend in the River – V. S. Naipaul
84. Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
85. Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
86. Lanark – Alasdair Gray
87. The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
88. The BFG – Roald Dahl
89. The Periodic Table – Primo Levi
90. Money – Martin Amis
91. An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar And Lucinda – Peter Carey
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories – Salman Rushdie
95. La Confidential – James Ellroy
96. Wise Children Angela Carter
97. Atonement – Ian McEwan (I tried but it made me sleepy so I quit)
98. Northern Lights – Philip Pullman
99. American Pastoral – Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz – W. G. Sebald

OK I’m in at just under 60%.  Hmmmm, interesting list.

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The Inheritance of Loss

2006, Books in Bed, Fiction, Reading Lists /

I finally finished The Inheritance of Loss. It was difficult. Everytime I would start to read, I would start to yawn… my eyes would get so tired I couldn’t keep them open. Great bedtime reading if you need something to help you fall asleep.

It really was well written and it’s obvious why it won the Booker Prize. But it isn’t a book I will ever read again. It isn’t a book I want to own. It isn’t even a book I’m glad to say that I read. It just didn’t DO anything for me – except put me to sleep.

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Carry Me Down

2006, Books in Bed, Fiction, Reading Lists /

Down, down, down and down some more. This book was properly named.

Carry Me Down took close to a week to read and not because I wanted to savor every word. Everytime I picked it up I would hope something good would happen and everytime I put it down I just felt depressed and hopeless.

I am very glad this did not win the Booker. It was well-written. It was interesting. It was depressing in what I’ve begun to think of as the “Irish way”. Angela’s Ashes-like. Aren’t there any uplifting Irish novels?

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The Booker Prize

3 Comments / Favorites, Fiction, Reading Lists /

Well, as suspected, Inheritance of Loss is the 2006 Booker Prize winner. I haven’t read it yet and now that it has won I have some irrational desire NOT to read it. Weird, eh? Ah well, it is on my shelf waiting patiently so I will give it a go… after I finish Carry Me Down. (In the Company of Men is still on my reserve list at the library and I will read that too, eventually.)


I would like to thank the folks who blogged about the short listed books on the Man Booker Prize Blog. I really enjoyed reading their thoughts about each of the books and following their progress through the stacks.

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Reading the Booker Prize Books?

4 Comments / Reading Lists /

I think I’ve only read one book on the Booker Prize short list – Sarah Waters of course. I’ve reserved the rest of them at the library because this year I want to read a bunch of them, not just a couple like in years past. While I wait for them to arrive, I’m really enjoying this Man Booker Prize Blog.


How many books on the short list have you read? How many do you think you might read? You are going to read Night Watch, soon, right?


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