Progressive Geographies

At the end of June I posted a list of the novels I’d read so far in 2012. Here are those I read between July and today the end of the year- not all are novels, as there are a few books about cycling too, though given events this year some of these surely count as fiction… I have a few that I expect I’ll read over the holidays too.

It was a year when I rediscovered Sebastian Faulks and Ian McEwan; discovered a host of new (for me) writers including several from Africa, Kamila Shamsie and Roberto Bolaño; and grudgingly realised that Umberto Eco just isn’t going to write anything as good as Foucault’s Pendulum or The Name of the Rose again.

1. David Millar, Racing through the Dark (true story)
2. E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops (short story)
3. Gustave Flaubert, Salammbo
4. Teju Cole, Open City
5. Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love
6. Rob Kitchin, The White Gallows
7. H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
8. H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
9. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
10. Amos Oz, To Know a Woman
11. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
12. Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
13. Herman Melville, Moby Dick  – for perhaps the fourth time
14. Sebastian Faulks, The Fool’s Alphabet
15. Roberto Bolaño, Amulet
16. Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
17. Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
18. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
19. Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (non-fiction)
20. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
21. Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
22. Iain Sinclair, Lights out for the Territory: 9 Excursions into the Secret History of London (non-fiction)
23. Daniel Coyle, Lance Armstrong: Tour de Force (also known as Lance Armstrong’s War)
24. Lance Armstrong, It’s Not About the Bike 
25. Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
26. Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
27. Philip Roth, The Human Stain
28. Jed Rubenfeld, The Interpretation of Murder
29. Michael Cunningham, The Hours
30. Graham Swift, Last Orders
31. Thomas Meyer, Beowulf – open access from Punctum books
32. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
33. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis
34. Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland – I was surprised how different the film was from this, as large parts of the story were completely changed.
35. Ian McEwan, Solar
36. Imre Kertész, Faultless
37. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
38. Matt Rendell, The Death of Marco Pantani
39. Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
40. John Fowles, A Maggot
41. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
42. Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies
43. Nanni Balestrini, Sandokan
44. Joshua Ferris, Then we Came to the End
45. Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach
46. W.G. Sebald, Vertigo
47. Max Apple, The Oranging of America
48. Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
49. Lars Iyer, Spurious
50. Ian McEwan, Enduring Love
51. Sebastian Faulks, On Green Dolphin Street
52. Michael McCormick, Across the Pond
53. Kate Walbert, The Gardens of Kyoto
54. Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus
55. Saul Bellow,  Seize the Day
56. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men