Progressive Geographies

I mentioned back in January my informal New Year’s Resolution was to read more novels. Not nearly as many as Rob Kitchin – who has read and reviewed 52 – but so far in 2011, half way through the year, I’ve read…

• Wu Ming, Manituana
• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
• Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,
• Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire
• Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest [I really didn’t expect to like these, but had the first two for Christmas and thought they were very good]
• Robert Tressell, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
• Jules Verne, The Journey to the Centre of the Earth
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World and Other Stories
• Vladimir Obruchev, Sannikov Land
• Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Land that Time Forgot
• James de Mille,The Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder [the ‘lost world’ reading that fed into the ‘Fossils’ paper]
• Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent [okay, this isn’t a novel]
• Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
• Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
• John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• Jan Potocki, The Manuscript found in Saragossa
• Alan Bennett, A Life Like Other People’s [autobiographical, rather than a novel]
• H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
• Pat Barker, Regeneration
• Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
• Daniel Kehlmann, Measuring the World
• Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish
• Robert Harris, Lustrum
• Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
• Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist [reflections on his fiction, rather than fiction itself]
• Salman Rushdie, Luka and the Fire of Life

In the ‘to read’ pile: Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories; W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz; Thaisa Frank, Heidegger’s Glasses… and eagerly awaiting Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery.