For some reason, I’m in the habit of listing the books I read each year, ranking them according to pleasure they brought me. Here are the lists from previous years: 2005 & 2006.
Here, for 2007, ordered from least to most-liked:
16. White Ghost Girls, Alice Greenway.
15. Animal Farm, George Orwell.*
14. Alice, I Think, Susan Juby.
13. The Memory-Keeper’s Daughter, Kim Edwards.
12. A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright.
11. Why Gender Matters, Leonard Sax.
10. The Chrysalids, John Wyndham.*
9. The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton.*
8. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides.
7. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling.
6. Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld.
5. a tie, The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje &
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling.
3. Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver.
2. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert.
1. The Way the Crow Flies, Ann-Marie MacDonald.
Despite the ranking, I believe these are all good books and would recommend them all to anyone. I had such trouble ranking the magnificent The English Patient behind any Harry Potter book which are bloody good reads — so I settled on a tie. Probably if it had been my first time reading The English Patient, I would have ranked it higher. Those with stars were read, re-read actually, for school.
Please, please, please – if you have not read any of the top 3 I urge you to do so immediately. These are some of my all-time favourites.
Currently I am in the middle of three books which is madness. I only ever read one book at a time but here is what has happened:
While I was waiting for a book to come in from the library, a friend lent me Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai which I had gotten about halfway into when In Cold Blood by Truman Capote arrived at the library. Seeing that I had a time limit on that one, I began it, hoping to finish it before Christmas. I didn’t and so renewed it and brought it along with me to Vancouver. Meanwhile I knew I had to start the next book for my book club but put that off for a couple of weeks, thinking, “I’ll read that over the Christmas break…” On Boxing Day Ryan and I decided to take a stroll through Chapters and I came across my book club book, The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, which is a fucking pillar itself! It’s bloody 970-odd pages! I only have until January 13th to read that so have interrupted Capote’s book to do so. Meanwhile, Ryan got me Lynn Truss’ Talk to the Hand for my birthday and a friend gave me The Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz which I’d like to get to sometime too.
Well, there are worse things that could happen, I suppose.
Happy Reading and Happy New Year!
[...] Here are a few of my previous, lengthier, book lists: 2009 2008 2007 [...]