View RSS Feed

Halls of the Dark Muse

What I Read in 2013

Rate this Entry
10 Comments
by
Dark Muse
, 01-02-2014 at 02:49 AM (1873 Views)
It feels like I was not able to read as many books this year as usual. I know I got behind on a lot of my reading, and still have some books backlogged, which I had started last year and thought I would have finished by now but kept getting distracted from. Plus it seems like I had a lot of things come up this year which deterred from my reading. But all in all I still did pretty well.

1. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow ****
2. Snow by Orhan Pamuck ****
3. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf ***
4. Ten Year Later by Alexandre Dumas ****
5. First Love and Other Stories by Turgenev ****
6. Sailors of Stonehenge by Manuel Vega ***
7. Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell ****
8. The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin Jr. ***
9. The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins ****
10. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence ****
11.The Bostonians by Henry James ****
12. The Bone People by Keri Hulme ****
13. Cut by Patricia McCormick ****
14. Birds Without Wings by Louis de Berničres ****
15. Attlia by William Napier ****
16. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell ****
17. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey ****
18. Jester Leaps In by Alan Gordon ****
19. My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad ****
20.The Borgia Bride Jeanne Kalogridis ****
21. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane ***
22. Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell ****
23. All For Love by John Dryden ****
24. The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy ***
25. Poodle Springs by Raymond Chandler ****
26. Prophecy: Clash of Kings by M.K. Hume ***
27. Spirit of Lost Angels by Liza Perrat ***
28. The Master by Colm Tóibín ***
29. Surfacing by Margaret Atwood ***
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway ****
31. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield ****
32. The Rover by Aphra Behn ***
33. The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham ***
34.The Unending Mystery: A Journey Through Labyrinths and Mazes by David Willis McCullough ***
35. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides ****
36. The White Queen by Phillippa Gregory ***
37. Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk ****
38. The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell ****
39. Joyland by Stephen King *****
40. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski ***
41. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck ****
42. The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy ****
43. Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton ***
44. The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen ***
45. The Silent Land by Graham Joyce *****
46. 1919 by John Dos Passos ****
47. The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford *****
48. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman ****
49. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood ****
50. New Grub Street by George R. Gissing ****
51. Ghost Story by Peter Straub ****
52. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman ****
53. The Godfather by Mario Puzo ***
54. The Haunted House by Charles Dickens (and others) ***
55. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells ****
56. The Grey by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers ****
57. Tales of Men and Ghost by Edith Wharton ****
58. The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton ****
59. Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu ****
60. The Seagull by Anton Chekhov ****
61. The Last Olympian by Rick Riodran ****
62. Silas Marner by George Eliot****
63. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See****
64. Limbus Inc. - Various Authors*****
65. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillarad****
66. Hero of Rome by Douglas Jackson***
Categories
Books

Comments

  1. hannah_arendt's Avatar
    Congratulations I wouldn`t never been able to make such a list
  2. TheFifthElement's Avatar
    Interesting list DM. Any particular favourites?
  3. Dark Muse's Avatar
    I would say Snow, Lullaby, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Good Soldier, The Bone People LOL I could list more, but those in particular I did very much like.
  4. kev67's Avatar
    That is an impressive list. Of those I have only read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Winter King and New Grub Street. I have heard The Good Soldier is a very good book. I was surprised to see you gave a Stephen King book five stars, but there is no reason why you should not, just because he is popular, still alive and writes horror stories. I was disappointed you gave The Master only three stars, as I was thinking of giving that a go one day.
  5. Buh4Bee's Avatar
    I read Crasnford years ago and found it to be very charming. Happy reading!
  6. qimissung's Avatar
    I've read Ragtime, The Virgin Suicides, Cannery Row (I like the book, but the movie version of this is one of my favorite movies), Ghost Story (I LOVED this when I read it), Oryx and Crake. As Kev67 said, an impressive list, Dark Muse. I think that list compares fairly well with years past. It's not shabby at any rate. I think the more important questions are, did you enjoy reading these? Did you enjoy the issues they explored? If so, then I'd say it was a very successful year indeed.
  7. Virgil's Avatar
    Not as much as the past? Tsk, tsk. Only kidding. I don't know how you and Fifth can read so much. Out of curiosity, do you know how many pages an hour you typically read?

    Cannery Row was the last book I read this year, completing it within an hour of the ringing of midnight.
  8. Dark Muse's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by kev67
    That is an impressive list. Of those I have only read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Winter King and New Grub Street. I have heard The Good Soldier is a very good book. I was surprised to see you gave a Stephen King book five stars, but there is no reason why you should not, just because he is popular, still alive and writes horror stories. I was disappointed you gave The Master only three stars, as I was thinking of giving that a go one day.
    I do tend to have a very love/hate relationship with Stephen King and well I am a horror fanattic so I cannot deny I do enjoy the King once in a while. Joyland I did think was among some of his better books and needless to say I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

    The Good Soldier I thought was excellent. and defiantly a worthwhile read.

    Personally I just felt that The Master was very slow moving. It was not badly written by any means or a bad book, but I struggled to get through it because it did not capture my interest quite as much as I was hoping, and thought it would. I found it somewhat tedious reading at points.
  9. Dark Muse's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Virgil
    Not as much as the past? Tsk, tsk. Only kidding. I don't know how you and Fifth can read so much. Out of curiosity, do you know how many pages an hour you typically read?
    I really don't know how many pages I read an hour, but I tend to read multiple books at once, so on average I will read around 5-7 in a month give or take a few.
  10. Buh4Bee's Avatar
    That is very impressive! I read about a book a month, more in the summer. But I could never read 5 books a month!