What I Read in the Year 2018

In 2018 I recorded my reading in a small notebook covered with fabric in shades of lilac, pink and blue. As usual, I am not sure where I acquired the book from but I do note that I could probably have used it to record another year’s reading – there are a lot of blank pages at the ends of many of my notebooks.

I read 362 books in the year which is what I now consider to be normal – I currently read between 320 and 370 books in each year. The days of short novels downloaded free from Kindle are now gone and the books I am reading are more substantial. I have a breakdown of the reading for the year which shows that I read exactly the same number of books on my Kindle as I did in physical form and that I read 32 books on audio. In 2018 I was still working in Sheffield and commuting by car which is why there were so many audio books.

I was aware that we were intending to move house in the next couple of years. The intention was to downsize considerably. This presented a bit of an issue because at this time I had sixteen full length bookcases distributed around the house in various room – wherever we moved to I knew that I was not going to have the same amount of space so I started to consider the books I owned and look at how to rationalise them. I had got into the habit of reading books and then keeping them, even though I might not have enjoyed them, because we had room so this meant that some books could be easily culled. The decisions about the rest of my collection took some time as I had to work out why I was keeping the books and if that reason was still valid. I am a book reader rather than a collector so, with a very few exceptions, I need to be sure that I would reread the books I was keeping otherwise there was no point in having them. This process was difficult as no reader wants to dispose of books and then find out later that they want to read them again. In fact, it took two years to reduce my book collections by about half and I still rethink the decisions regularly.

The first book I read in the year was Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese which is a literary fiction novel set in Ethiopia during the twentieth century following the lives of twins who become estranged. It’s a novel which is highly thought of but I found it unengaging – there were too many side stories and too much detailed description of medical procedures.

The last book I read in the year was North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell which is the story of a man and his daughter who come to live in the industrial north of England during the last part of the nineteenth century. It was written to highlight the contrast in the lives of people in both areas but there is a good story and I enjoyed it a lot.

Ther are a few books that I read during the year that stand out as exceptional – Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguru which is a beautifully told story about identity and choice; Morality Play by Barry Unsworth which is an historical novel set in the fourteenth century and featuring a murder and a troupe of travelling players; The Nuremburg Trials by John and Ann Tulsa which is informative and very easy to read and taught me a lot I didn’t know about the aftermath of war; Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell which is set in the Cairo Peace Conference in 1921; The Foreman by Joe Hill which is a creepy dystopian novel where people develop a disease which makes them ignite; The Dry by Jane Harper which is a brilliant crime novel set in Australia; and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas which I had never read before and which was a gripping story of revenge.

If you are looking for a good read then you may enjoy any of these.