So, with the help of my library’s on-line search and my cell phone’s list of downloads I think I’ve managed to collect a list of all the books I’ve read or listened to on the phone during the past fifteen months. In order of author:
| 1 | The Big Sleep – Farewell, My Love… | Chandler, Raymond |
| 2 | The Antagonist | Coady, Lynn |
| 3 | Open City – A Novel | Cole, Teju |
| 4 | The Privileges – A Novel | Dee, Jonathan |
| 5 | The Maytrees – [a Novel] | Dillard, Annie |
| 6 | Billy Bathgate – A Novel | Doctorow, E. L. |
| 7 | Landing | Donoghue, Emma |
| 8 | Room – A Novel | Donoghue, Emma |
| 9 | Touchy Subjects – Stories | Donoghue, Emma |
| 10 | Half-blood Blues | Edugyan, Esi |
| 11 | A Visit from the Goon Squad | Egan, Jennifer |
| 12 | Better Living through Plastic Explosives – Stories | Gartner, Zsuzsi |
| 13 | P Is for Peril | Grafton, Sue |
| 14 | R Is for Ricochet | Grafton, Sue |
| 15 | S Is for Silence | Grafton, Sue |
| 16 | Waiting | Jin, Ha |
| 17 | The Poisonwood Bible – A Novel | Kingsolver, Barbara |
| 18 | Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures – Stories | Lam, Vincent |
| 19 | The Surrendered | Lee, Chang-rae |
| 20 | Darkness, Take My Hand | Lehane, Dennis |
| 21 | Darkly Dreaming Dexter – A Novel | Lindsay, Jeffry P. |
| 22 | Dearly Devoted Dexter – A Novel | Lindsay, Jeffry P. |
| 23 | Dexter in the Dark – A Novel | Lindsay, Jeffry P. |
| 24 | Double Dexter – A Novel | Lindsay, Jeffry P. |
| 25 | I Am Number Four – The Lost Files : … | Lore, Pittacus |
| 26 | The Bishop’s Man – A Novel | MacIntyre, Linden |
| 27 | The Bright Forever – A Novel | Martin, Lee |
| 28 | 1Q84 | Murakami, Haruki |
| 29 | Divisadero | Ondaatje, Michael |
| 30 | A Catskill Eagle – A Spenser Novel | Parker, Robert B. |
| 31 | I Curse the River of Time | Petterson, Per |
| 32 | The Echo Maker | Powers, Richard |
| 33 | Nemesis | Roth, Philip |
| 34 | Swamplandia! | Russell, Karen |
| 35 | Wake | Sawyer, Robert J. |
| 36 | The Lovely Bones | Sebold, Alice |
| 37 | Shakespeare’s Kitchen – Stories | Segal, Lore Groszmann |
| 38 | The Collected Stories | Shields, Carol |
| 39 | The Stone Diaries | Shields, Carol |
| 40 | Unless – A Novel | Shields, Carol |
| 41 | Various Miracles | Shields, Carol |
| 42 | Stargirl | Spinelli, Jerry |
| 43 | Amy and Isabelle – A Novel | Strout, Elizabeth |
| 44 | Olive Kitteridge | Strout, Elizabeth |
| 45 | The Accidental Tourist | Tyler, Anne |
I’m a fan of the TV show Dexter, obviously. The novels and the show exist in two separate realities, so I read the novels to get more Dexter fix. Sue Grafton I’m not a huge fan of; I’ve read others in the series and I picked up a few to remind me of her writing style. And there are a few YA books in the collection when I looked into the genre a bit.
Many of these are novels (it says so right in the title!) and many simply plucked from lists; Pulitzer, Giller and Man Booker nominees. As mentioned in the previous post, I look for reliable suggestions for reading material.
Plus, I have a list of those that I didn’t finish:
| 1 | The Plague of Doves | Erdrich, Louise |
| 2 | The Secret Scripture | Barry, Sebastian |
| 3 | The Writing Circle | Demas, Corinne |
| 4 | Family Matters | Mistry, Rohinton |
| 5 | The Confessions of Nat Turner | Styron, William |
| 6 | Lit – A Memoir | Karr, Mary |
| 7 | Mercy among the Children | Richards, David Adams |
| 8 | Close Range – Wyoming Stories | Proulx, Annie |
Both lists are all ebooks or audiobooks, and doesn’t include books printed on paper (! the stuff referred to as “recycling material” on a podcast today), so on top of those there are a bunch of non-fiction books on writing as well as at least one novel I can think of: “The Hunger Games”, speed-read over a weekend, borrowed from high school student. Oh, plus a little ways into “The Pale King”, David Foster Wallace. Even in paper form that was more than I could work my way through, at least at the time. I plan to give it another shot at some later date.
Still, that’s a decent average speed, I think. The Dexter and Grafton and YA and other light ones I finish in a couple of days of reading, and most of the rest in two weeks or so.
The non-finishers are an interesting group; “Lit” was good reading, but I read it sporadically for the author’s style and ability to put words and sentences and paragraphs together, and less for the memoir story; I wasn’t concerned when it expired. “The Writing Circle” is so mediocre that I couldn’t bring myself to finish it.
The others seem to have in common a sweeping family/race tale covering a number of years, and they all lost my interest. But “The Poisonwood Bible” and “Half-blood Blues” and “The Stone Diaries” might also fall into those categories and I liked those quite a bit. Maybe there’s a dryness to the others that I couldn’t connect to, a dryness in the writing and/or in the characters. “Mercy among the Children” is the only one I really tried to finish, but the reverence the author had for his story and for his character became distasteful after a while; he seemed to think the main character was heroic, tragic, almost Jesus-like. I just found him pathetic and sad.