1 January 2002

If I could connect lists like Nick Hornby, this is what I would say about my reading last year:

That I had read about three golden things, a notebook, a spur, and a bowl; that Under the Volcano connected the dots between Under the Net and The Volcano Lover; that Annie Proulx brought news of Katharine Anne Porter's ship of fools; that Henderson the Rain King Must Die along with All His Men; and that the Naked and the Dead ate their Lunch.

But I didn't. Of those twelve books, I read two.

Adult Fiction

1. Beryl Bainbridge, The Bottle Factory Outing
2. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
3. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
4. Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road
5. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
6. James Dickey, Deliverance
7. E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime
8. Margaret Drabble, The Radiant Way
9. William Faulkner, Light in August
10. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
11. Penelope Fitzgerald, At Freddie's
12. John Fowles, The Magus
13. Keri Hulme, The Bone People
14. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
15. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
16. William Kennedy, Ironweed
17. Jack Kerouac, On the Road
18. D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
19. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
20. Mary McCarthy, The Group
21. Carson McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Café
22. Carson McCullers, "Member of the Wedding"
23. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
24. Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
25. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
26. Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief
27. Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
28. Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons
29. Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
30. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
31. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
    and
32. Linda Berdoll, The Bar Sinister
33. Tracey Chevalier, Girl in a Pearl Earring
34. Tracey Chevalier, Falling Angels
35. Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
36. Nick Hornby, Speak to the Angels
37. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
38. Anne Lamott, Crooked Little Heart
39. Gregory Maguire, Lost
40. David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

1. Antonia Fraser, ed., The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England
2. Susanna Kaysen, The Camera My Mother Gave Me
3. Maria Perry, The Sisters of Henry VIII
4. Desmond Seward, The Hundred Years War
5. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation
6. John Sutherland, Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?
7. John Sutherland, Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?
8. Alison Weir, The Wars of the Roses
9. Alison Weir, The Princes in the Tower
10. Jochen Hemmleb, Ghosts of Everest : The Search for Mallory & Irvine
    

Children's Fiction

1. Paula Danziger, This Place Has No Atmosphere
2. James Howe, The Watcher
3. E.L. Konigsburg, Silent to the Bone
4. Robert Lipsyte, One Fat Summer
5. Jean Little, Kate
6. Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue
7. L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Ingleside
8. L.M. Montgomery, Rainbow Valley
9. L.M. Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside
10. Lemony Snickett, A Bad Beginning
11. Lemony Snickett, The Reptile Room
12. Lemony Snickett, The Wide Window
13. Lemony Snickett, The Miserable Mill
14. Jerry Spinelli, The Wringer
15. Mildred D. Taylor, The Land

Audio

1. John Gardner, Grendel
2. Franz Kafka, The Castle
3. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
4. Toni Morrsion, Paradise
5. Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking
6. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons