What I read in the Year 2004

To record the books I read in 2004 I used a small notebook. It’s 2.4 inches square with good quality plain white paper for the pages. The cover is a stiff card which is covered with a white, silky material and a picture of a plant has been created on its cover with silvery sequins. It’s rather lovely, although it has become a bit stained over the years and some of the sequins are now missing. I can’t remember where it came from but it was obviously chosen because it looked nice which shows that by this point, my fifth year of recording what I read, I am beginning to regard this as an important activity.

I read 306 books in the year which is the first time that the total had gone beyond 300 – it has only dropped below it on one year since. I had a new job in this year and was working near the centre of Sheffield and in easy reach of bookshops – this will definitely have an effect on my reading life in the future although it’s not so marked in 2004.

The first book of the year is Cherry by Mary Karr which is a biography and which my records say that I owned rather than borrowed. I certainly don’t own it now and I have absolutely no memory of this book at all. I looked it up on Amazon to see if that triggered a memory but it didn’t. As I don’t record star ratings in my records and at this time I wasn’t reviewing I have no idea what I thought of this book. This is quite unusual for a non-fiction book where I usually retain a sense of the book and a feeling about it even if I can’t remember details – for fiction novels I don’t find remembering as easy because I read so many and a lot of them are similarly themed.

The final book read in the year was Queen Victoria’s Children by John Van der Kiste. This is one of a series of history books by this author where he details the lives of royalty and their descendants – we tend to know about the more famous children or the ones who inherit the throne but not the others. It’s a short book (I still own it) and not designed to give you a full understanding of the lives of its subjects but it is interesting and where a story catches your attention you can purchase a more in depth biography.

I notice that in this year I began to acquire books from charity shops more – something which is now the main way that I obtain paper books. I was still using the library occasionally and I seemed to be reading my way through their travel section. Biography and history were becoming more important to me as well.

I also see that in this year I read both Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Both of these are modern classics and I always indicate that I have read them when you get those lists of books that you should have read. The truth is, though, that I really don’t remember much about them or my impression of them. The fact that I don’t now own copies of either book indicates that I was happy to part with them at one point so I suspect that they weren’t great loves of mine. But these are modern classics and very well thought of and it is twenty years later – I wonder if I should reread books like this again to see what I think of them now. I would add to that list the following books which I have read at some point but not at all recently and which fall into the same category – Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mocking Bird, On the Road and Brave New World. Maybe there’s the making of a new challenge for me for next year.