2008 was the second year in a row where I recorded my reading in a small notebook with the London Eye on the cover. This notebook was a spiral bound one and isn’t very large at all. I expect that, like the previous year I had got the notebook from my sister-in-law as a present and had been waiting for an appropriate purpose to use it. I have a tendency to buy and then not use lovely little notebooks because I don’t want to spoil them !
I read 314 books in the year of which the first was In the Woods by Tana French. This is a suspense novel/crime thriller set in Dublin and is one of a connected set of books which are known now as the Dublin Murder Squad with each volume featuring one of the detectives. They are excellently written but quite dark – I have read three out of the six.
The final book of the year was Full Moon Rising by Keri Arthur. This is an urban fantasy novel and the first in a series featuring Riley Jensen who is a vampire/werewolf hybrid. These books are set in Australia in the present day but assume that supernatural creatures are part of this world and that they are policed accordingly. In my enthusiasm for urban fantasy I read all of this author’s books when they came out and also her older series but after a few years I realised that I didn’t enjoy them as much as those of other authors and I gave my collection away and haven’t read them since.
Looking at my reading for the year I note that aside from the usual crime fiction and my more recent enthusiasm for urban fantasy I also read a lot of romantic suspense novels. Romantic suspense fiction is, as can be surmised from its title, a genre which combines romance and crime fiction/thrillers. Usually there will be a crime and two individuals will also fall for each other (maybe one will be falsely accused or one be the investigator who falls for the victim). Characters may be from any area of law enforcement, private investigators, journalists or the military. Depending on the author there may be some sex scenes but you can be pretty sure that they will end up happily. The Americans seem to have cornered the market in this genre, or at least they have written most of the books which I read. It’s a very different feel from that of Tana French. Authors I read in the year included Mariah Stewart (mainly FBI characters), Allison Brennan (also FBI), Dee Davis (secret agents), Joann Ross (military) and Laura Griffin (forensic investigators).
I note that in this year I read little non-fiction despite it having been a growing component of my reading diet over the previous couple of years. I did read a few quite odd books though – Dry Store Room No 1 by Richard Fortey is about the past of the Natural History Museum in London and has some amazing anecdotes about those who studied there. Black Diamonds by Catherine Bailey is the story of the family who lived on the Wentworth estate in South Yorkshire (very close to where I live) and who were once some of the richest aristocrats in Britain because of the coal mined on their property. The Suspicions of Mr Witcher by Kate Summerscale investigates the murders at Road House in 1860 and was first published around 2008 and began a fashion for historical true crime (I have many examples now but this was the first). Shakespeare’s Wife by Germaine Greer is a study of Ann€ Hathaway/Shakespeare and a social history of women in the early seventeenth century and how the wives of famous men are often overlooked or only identified with their husbands (it should be compared with the fictional version of her life included in Maggie O’Farrell’s book Hamnet (reviewed here)– the contrast is very interesting). I still own all of these books.
So, a year mainly of comfort novels with a few gems included – lots of enjoyable reading here.
Anne Is Reading 