What I read in the Year 2011

2011 was a transformative year in my reading life because it is the year that I first got a Kindle. My very first one was the Keyboard Kindle with no backlight or touch screen. It wasn’t cheap but suddenly I had all manner of books, new and backlist, available to me and I could access them instantly. There were also lots of free books to download, although that really affected my reading life in subsequent years. I have to say that I don’t recognise the title or author of many of the books that my notebook records that I read this year – many of them were rubbish ! At first I downloaded and read very few books but that soon accelerated and for a while I read almost solely on my Kindle. In more recent years I have acquired a lot of books at charity shops and I am trying to reduce the pile by reading more physical books so my current reading is about 25% on Kindle.

I loved my Kindle and I adore it still, although it has been replaced by a much newer one. Reading is easy on the Kindle, the new ones are backlit so I can read anywhere and they are also now supposed to be waterproof so I can read them in the bath (I have never dropped one in yet so I can’t testify to their recovery after immersion). I also benefit from the fact that the Kindle is light (I have arthritic fingers) and the fact that you can change the font size. Since my first Kindle I have owned the PaperWhite (bought the day it first came out and still functional), The Voyage (they no longer produce this one which is sad as it was my favourite despite its battery giving up and it having to be jettisoned), the Oasis (I don’t really like the shape but I have one) and a much newer PaperWhite.

The first book I read on my Kindle was A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s one of his Sherlock Holmes stories and although I prefer the short stories it’s a good read – it was not new to me but I obviously didn’t own a paper copy.

The first book I read in the year was The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins. It’s a great WW2 thriller assuming that German soldiers land in Britain and try to assassinate Churchill. I have read it a few times – there is an excellent film of the book.

The final book that I read in the year was Nothing Good Can Stay by Dana Stabenow. She writes a crime series set in Alaska. I read the first one free on my Kindle and have eventually bought the rest of them. I have occasionally seen them in shops in more recent years but I have only ever read them on my Kindle. I review one of the series here.

Crime, thriller and suspense novels made up the majority of my reading in 2011 (as they still do) and I note that in this year in which I finished 428 books, I read books by Robert Barnard, Linda Castillo, Tess Gerritson, Chris Mooney, JD Robb, Reginald Hill, Alex Kava, Kathy Reichs, Tony Hillerman, Elizabeth Peters, Chris Carter, Jeffery Deaver and Lisa Gardiner among others. If you are looking for a well written crime or suspense story you can’t go far wrong with any of these authors – if you use the search function on this website you will find out that I have reviewed books by many of them too.