Favourite book of 2013?

[kev67]

By my reckoning, I have read twenty-seven books of all kinds, fiction and non-fiction, literary and non-literary in 2013. I think my favourite was Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee, followed closely by A Clergyman's Daughter by George Orwell.

What were yours?

My 2013 list:
The Double Helix - James D. Watson
The God Species - Mark Lynas
Christian Beginnings - Geza Vermes
What's Wrong with Climate Politics and How to Fix it - Paul G. Harris
Periodic Tales - Hugh Aldersley-Williams
Father Brown Selected Stories - G.K. Chesterton
The Energy Dimension, a practical guide to energy in rural development programmes - Christopher Hunt and Andrew Barnett
Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee
Ginger You're Barmy - David Lodge
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemmingway
The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
The Woodlanders - Thomas Hardy
A Clergyman's Daughter - George Orwell
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Brave New War - John Robb
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - Alan Sillitoe
The Black Death, the intimate story of a village in crisis - John Hatcher
Rubicon - Tom Holland
Essays - George Orwell
Hard Times - Charles Darwin
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell
How Not to be a Professional Footballer - Paul Merson
The Diary of a Nobody - George and Weedon Grossmith
The Penguin History of Economics - Roger E. Backhouse

[Paulclem]

Difficult to pick one. I read The Norman Conquest by Marc Morris whose claim on the blurb - that everything I thought I knew about the Norman conquest was wrong - was correct.

A Man Without Breath by Philip Kerr was excellent. This is about a Berlin detective sent to co-ordinate the Katyn Wood revelations for the Nazis.

I also liked No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, and Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, which is an epic novel not unlike War and Peace in it's scope. I've liked all the books I've read this year.

[genermcmillan]

It is really a difficult job to pick one , but i don't read these all one. So i can choose one from that i read and like one...:)
The God Species - Mark Lynas

[Poetaster]

My 2013 list is about 40 books, it's hard to choose. I suppose mine would be The Three Thebian Plays of Sophocles, The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche, Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux, and The Iliad and The Odyssey both translated by Robert Fagles.

[ladderandbucket]

Favourite novel this year was The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Favourite non-fiction was Borges' Total Library. Also read a lot of Borges' short stories this year which were some of my reading high points.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Cider with Rosie is a great book.

I think my favourite books of this year have been the James Herriot novels.

[Pierre Menard]

The standouts for me this year were:

Don Quixote (trans. Grossman) - Bawdy, humorous and poignant, with two of the finest characters (and friends) ever penned.

The Theban Plays (trans. Fagles) - Powerful. The whole cycle tore at my heart; it really is incredible how vivid the ancient playwrights still are in regards to mood and character.

Collected Poetry of Seamus Heaney - A master of technique and form. A constantly consistent delight to read.

Poetry of Geoffrey Hill 1952-1992 - Probably my favourite poetry book of the year. Dense, moving and constantly dragging you deeper into it's intricacies.

Lord Jim from Joseph Conrad - My equal favourite novel that I read, along with Don Quixote. A great character piece on the eponymous protagonist, probing his overly-romantic notions of the world, and the trouble it causes him, contrasted with the stoic, wise and weary Marlowe. Beautifully written and interestingly structured with shifts in perspective and timelines.

Henry IV Part 1 - Falstaff is just the greatest. Really great play, can't wait to read part 2.

Other notable books I thought stood out:

Richard the II
The Sound and the Fury
The Poetry of Frost
And my dabblings into Montaigne and Emerson.

[kev67]

It is really a difficult job to pick one , but i don't read these all one. So i can choose one from that i read and like one...:)
The God Species - Mark Lynas

That was a good book. Lynas came to similar conclusions as Stewart Brand in his book, Whole Earth Discipline, which I thought was a slightly better book. Incidentally, someone I know was mentioned in The God Species on page 120. I know him from my running club. He is also a Thomas Hardy fan.

[Paulclem]

What are you hoping to read in 2014? Or is that a new thread?

[Poetaster]

The Theban Plays (trans. Fagles) - Powerful. The whole cycle tore at my heart; it really is incredible how vivid the ancient playwrights still are in regards to mood and character.

Collected Poetry of Seamus Heaney - A master of technique and form. A constantly consistent delight to read.

I read those same books this year! You clearly have fine taste. :)

[Drkshadow03]

Books Read in 2013:

1) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2) Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
3) Dramatic Lyrics by Robert Browning
4) Dramatic Romances and Lyrics by Robert Browning
5) On the Blue Comet by Rosemary Wells
6) The Sonnets of William Shakespeare
7) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
8 ) Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
9) Born to Fly by Michael Ferrari
10) Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
11) Selected Poems by W. H. Auden and edited by Edward Mendelson
12) Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai
13) Emma by Jane Austen
14) Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
15) Meditations on First Philosophy by Descartes
16) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
17) Evolution: A Beginner’s Guide by Burton S. Guttman
18) My Antonia by Willa Cather
19) Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
20) Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda
21) The Song of Roland by Anonymous
22) Poem of the Cid
23) Erec and Enide by Chrétien de Troyes
24) Yvain the Knight with the Lion by Chrétien de Troyes
25) Lancelot by Chrétien de Troyes
26) The Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius
27) The Romance of the Rose by Guilaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun

I pretty much enjoyed everything that I read this year. Well, I suppose I didn't enjoy John Locke's book as an entertaining read in its own right, but its philosophical arguments were interesting. This year I made an attempt to read more philosophy: Marcus Aurelius, Boethius, Rene Descartes, John Locke.

The only true nonfiction book that I read was Evolution: A Beginner's Guide by Burton S. Guttman, which gave a wonderful overview of all the major concepts involved with Evolution and I encountered many news idea that I had never heard before in any biology class or textbook, all while still being designed for the beginner.

Shakespeare's sonnets was the best poetry I read this year, although some Browning's work was surprisingly good. Pablo Neruda's poems at first proved difficult and off-putting, but discussion of Residence on Earth in the poetry book club and reading from a volume that included copious selections from all his other collections helped me come to really appreciate his diversity of styles and come to enjoy his work.

I read a bunch of great novels this year with Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy being my favorite, which I preferred over War and Peace (also read this year). Les Miserables by Victor Hugo was probably my second favorite. Even the young adult novels, such as On the Blue Comet by Rosemary Wells, a depression-era time traveling story involving toy trains, and Inside Out & Back Again by Thanha Lai about a Vietnamese girl who moves to Alabama and struggles to fit in after fleeing her home in Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War were also surprisingly good. I ended the year with a bunch of medieval literature.

I would love to get back to the 50 books per a year range in quantity. However, last year I only made it to 28 books as well, suggesting this is my new range.

[Buckthorn]

I read about 73 books this year, but I think the one that really impressed me was the first one - The Night Circus by Erin Morgernstern. Followed by The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider

[PaulineGE]

I read probably around fifty or so books in 2013. My favorite was Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber.

[qimissung]

Anna Karenina, Wild, This Book Will Save Your Life, A Tale for the Time Being, and The Fault in Our Stars.

[Vota]

I think my favorite read last year was The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. That is an intense book imo.

I also thoroughly enjoyed The Iliad and The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles.

Of the short stories that I read, The Diamond As Big As the Ritz by F. Scott Fitzgerald was fantastic. I read several of Raymond Carver's short stories which I initially disliked, but then they grew on me.

[chrisvia]

I managed to read 81 books in 2013, which books range from pulp schlock horror to the plays of August Strindberg to theology; to a textbook I used to teach an English class; to mathematics. If you're interested in the list, here's the link to my 2013 Goodreads shelf:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5976824-chris-via?shelf=2013

The books that stood out were:

The Mystery of the Aleph
Play It As It Lays
The Breast
The Mezzanine
The Fifty-Year Sword
Ficciones (second time)
Gravity's Rainbow (second time)

But my favourite book of 2013 has to be Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco! I savored every reading session spent with this book, often with a duo espresso in hand!

[Chris 73]

The ones that impressed me the most were-

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold- John Le Carre
Wolf Hall-Hilary Mantel
The Maids Version-Daniel Woodrell
Tomato Red-DW
The Death Of Sweet Mister-DW
Dandelion Wine-Ray Bradbury
Swamplandia-Karen Russell
Wide Sargasso Sea-Jean Rhys
The Day Of The Triffids- John Wyndham
The Player Of Games -Iain M Banks
Under The Skin-Michael Faber