My reading for 2014 is recorded in a beautiful notebook which I bought in a sale at the National Gallery of Scotland when we visited there – I had had it for some years by this date and had been waiting for exactly the right thing to use it for (I always have some notebooks on hand, just in case I need them). The picture on the front of the spiral bound notebook is a painting of Gertrude Lady Agnew of Lochnaw by John Singer Sargent and the colours of the portrait are reflected in the pastel shades of the pages.
2014 was a very difficult year for me in my work life and I had little emotional energy to spare. I read 483 books in the year and they were mostly novels and often very light weight stories. The majority of them were read on my Kindle which I think I resorted to reading when things got very difficult. I am surprised that I read so many books when I look back on the complexity of my work life at the time.
The first book I read during the year was The Magistrates of Hell by Barbara Hambly. This is a fantasy novel and one of a series set in Victorian London and featuring vampires. It’s a great series and Barbara Hambly writes very good novels of all types (see here and here for some reviews of previous books I have read by her).
The final book that I read in the year was The Accident by CL Taylor. This is a psychological thriller about a woman trying to work out why her daughter stepped deliberately in front of a bus. I can’t remember a huge amount of detail ten years later but I do remember that I enjoyed it a lot.
2014 was the year in which I read my one and only book on my phone. The book I chose was Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and it was free to download. I think I thought that it might be convenient to read on my phone but the truth is that I hated it. The screen was too small and I had to turn the page too often and the device didn’t sit easily in my hand for reading for long periods. It is not an experiment that I have repeated.
I was still reading a lot of books from NetGalley in the year (see my post here for more details about how that worked) and almost certainly downloading more than I could read. Authors that NetGalley introduced me to and which I would still read include Louise Penny, Pierre Lemaitre, James Oswald, Dan Mayland, Chris Pavone, Mason Cross, Chris Ewan and Julia Keller. I’m still glad I left the site though !
I read very few non-fiction books during the year and that was mainly biography. It seems like this was a year when I needed to escape from events and I did it through reading fiction – it’s a strategy that I have employed more than once.
Anne Is Reading 