What I read in the Year 2006

To record my reading in 2006 I had a lovely notebook, purchased from Oxfam I think, which is a brilliant blue colour with an appliqued elephant on the cover. Again it is a small notebook and it has good quality paper. By this time in my reading journey I obviously valued what I was doing by recording my reading and deliberately chose appealing notebooks.

I read 363 books in 2006 which amazes me now. I am currently retired and that is the sort of number of books read in a year that I would expect these days but in 2006 I had teenagers and a job which was almost full time – I have no idea where I got the time ! In April 2006 I read 45 books which was a very high number given that I usually averaged 25 to 32 per month.

The first book I read in the year was Time to Depart by Lindsey Davis which is part of the series I was reading at the end of 2005 (see my review of that year’s reading here). I have reread that particular volume in the series recently and I review it here.

The last book I read in the year was Vane Pursuit by Charlotte Macleod. This is one of a series of books by that author which are best described as cosy crime. I started reading books by this author when I found them in the library and eventually bought my own copies. Vane Pursuit is about a college professor and his wife who become involved in trying to find the thief who has been removing valuable weather vanes from historic houses in the area. I can remember little more of it but I still have the book and think that I should reread the series.

Two things in my life determined some of the books that I read during the year. The first was that I was pursuing my studies with the Open University where I had taken a course on the history of religion. I was attempting to get a diploma in Religious Studies but I never took enough courses and I don’t think that I would ever go back to it now. The course I was following, however, meant that I read a few factual books about religion during the year.

The second thing that happened during that year was that we started a book club at work. As with all book clubs we began with many members and eventually ended up with just a few but for a couple of years we met once a month and later we started to watch film versions of some of the books we read as a social gathering. I can’t now remember all the books we read but they included Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, South Riding by Winifred Holtby, Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver, Ordeal by Innocence by Edith Wharton and Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. We each chose a few books that we thought that we would all like and then we drew lots for what we would read next. I seem to remember enjoying most of them although it is fair to say that we didn’t try anything very adventurous. On one occasion, however, we asked a colleague who had just returned from Spain to recommend a book that he had read in the original but that we could read in translation and he chose a detective story An Olympic Death by Manuel Vazquez Montalban – I remember little about it except that one of the characters tore a book in half for some reason which outraged one of our members.

It seems to me that 2006 was a year in which I shared my reading more with others. The person who shares my life is not a reader and I didn’t know many other people with whom I could discuss books so both my Open University course and my book club were ways to engage with other readers. The course took only a year and the book club lapsed after one of the members was taken seriously ill so 2006 was unusual in my reading life – I have not taken a course or been part of a book club since.