What I read in the Year 2000

In the year 2000 I started my book recording in a small, turquoise notebook. It wasn’t even a new notebook because on the pages at the back are the notes of some meetings I attended at that time, the address of a friend I have now lost touch with, a telephone number for someone I don’t recognise and a number of to-do lists. I suppose that I didn’t expect to be looking at the notebook again nearly 25 years later although what exactly my intentions were at the time remains a mystery.

This first notebook contains records of the 224 books I read in the year – title, author, genre, where I got them from and whether they were new to me (I dropped that last category a few years later). All of them were paper books and I owned most of them, although some were borrowed or from the library. 224 is the lowest number of books I have read in any year after that point so I do wonder if my recording has meant that I have increased the number of books read or whether it is a coincidence.

The very first book in the list is The Thief’s Gamble by Juliet E Mckenna which was the first book in a series and new to me at the time. Since then I have now read the rest of this series and reread it a couple of times – I am currently reading it again and you can find my review of the first book here. I still own this book.

The final book I have recorded for the year is Fear is the Key by Alistair Maclean. I used to love this author’s books and this was one of my favourites. They are mainly standalone thrillers written in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. I owned all of them at one point and read them over and over again. My tastes have moved on since then and I no longer own the novels but they were important to my reading life for years.

There are a lot of crime, thrillers and suspense novels in the list which reflects what I still read today. Sprinkled among them are some history and some fantasy but there isn’t the variety of genres that I read now. I notice some names of authors which you would still see in my reading all these years later – Terry Pratchett, Reginald Hill, Elizabeth Peters, Agatha Christie, Guy Gavriel Kay, Paula Gosling and Margaret Maron. I also note that I read Pride and Prejudice in the year (a regular favourite) and the Harry Potter books (which I borrowed rather than owned).

The books recorded in this year seem like a restricted sub-set of books that I would read today so my reading tastes were well formed at this time – I don’t think there are any which I would be unprepared to read now. What has changed is that I read more widely and perhaps reread less than I used to do.