It's All Right, I'm Not Famous: Books of 2008

[callmemadam]

I see I’ve read 131 books this year. A lot of crime and a sorry want of non fiction; some excellent new novels and some old favourites. Robert Goddard, Hazel Holt and Katie Fforde are all well established authors whom I’ve discovered for the first time. I really like Hazel Holt’s Sheila Malory, with her love of Siamese cats and Charlotte M Yonge. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Alexander McCall Smith. Scotland Street is perhaps my favourite series so the prize would go to The Unbearable Lightness of Scones. Top crime series would be Kate Atkinson’s trilogy about Jackson Brodie, which starts with Case Histories.

Amongst older books read for the first time, Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns astonished me and I also liked Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. Special mentions also for A Very Long Engagement, Sebastien Japrisot; Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Paul Torday; The Unfortunates, Laurie Graham; Digging to America, Anne Tyler; The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer; Sputnik Caledonia, Andrew Crumey; The Clothes on their Backs, Linda Grant; Summertime, Raffaella Barker; What Was Lost, Catherine O’Flynn.

In 2009, I shall be carrying books around in this cool bag, a present from huskyteer.



Thanks to my photo, it's hard to see where the quote is from; it's Erasmus.