What I read in the Year 2002

2002’s reading is recorded in a small, hardbacked blue and yellow notebook which I then turned over and used to record 2003 from the back. Again, it’s not one I bought especially to record my reading but it was unused and it is a bit more robust than the exercise book of 2001.

In 2002 I read 270 books, many of which were from the library. My reading was again mainly crime/suspense/thrillers but I also read more fantasy and I explored some other writers such as Armistead Maupin which I have never owned but always borrowed from the library. The library definitely allowed me to explore other genres and authors but when I particularly enjoyed them I bought my own copies.

The first book I read in the year was a library book – Rodinsky’s Room by Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein. It is a book about a reclusive Jewish scholar who disappeared in the 1960s and the discovery of his room in a London synagogue which had been left untouched for twenty years. The book doesn’t explore the history of Rodinsky but what the room shows us about modern Judaism and what it means to be Jewish – there was even an art installation created as a result of the thinking about this event. I remember being unimpressed by the book and wishing the authors had written an investigative biography instead.

The last book that I read in the year was Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters which is the first of her Amelia Peabody novels set in Victorian London and Egypt. These are books that I first found in the library but loved so much that I had to have my own copies, which I still own. I regularly reread these and you can find out more about them in my post here.

My crime reading continued to dominate, as it still does today, and I note that it was a year in which I read a lot of Reginald Hill (see my post here about his books). Some authors were borrowed from the library only and I haven’t read them again since but I did read a lot of books by Simon Brett, Quintin Jardine and Robert B Parker.

The fantasy reading tended to be books that I owned – maybe the library had fewer fantasies but probably they didn’t have the whole of series that I started so I had to buy them to see what happened. This year I read books by RA MacAvoy, Mercedes Lackey, Terry Pratchett, Orson Scott Card, David Eddings, Barbara Hambly and Guy Gavriel Kay. I still own books by most of these writers. I also note that I reread The Thief’s Gamble by Juliet E McKenna which was the very first book I recorded in 2000 (see here for my blog about that year) which I did, I think, because new books in the series were being released and I wanted to catch up on the story.

The library was obviously a vital resource for me in that it expanded the range of what I read and allowed me to access books that I had never heard of before. Many of those authors and titles are no longer important to me, and many of them never were, but I had a great opportunity to try new material and to take risks with my reading. I tend now to use charity shops in the same way and I buy many books from them that I read quickly and then discard, although I have found some great favourites this way.