I’ve been publishing a recap, every January, of every book mentioned in posts during the past year. (Except—whoops—I missed January this year. But maybe you did too? Man, that month went by fast!) Mind you, this is not a list of books I read last year (although there are some of those on this list); it is a list of books I talked about last year, here on the blog. Each title is linked to the post in which it appeared (sometimes it appeared in more than one; they’re all linked).
So here it is, for your reference and enjoyment:
Absalom, Absalom (William Faulkner)
Accidental Tourist, The (Anne Tyler)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Mark Twain)
After Visiting Friends (Michael Hainey)
Albion’s Seed (David Hackett Fischer)
Alias Grace (Margaret Atwood)
All of These People (Fergal Keane)
All the King’s Men (Robert Penn Warren)
Almost French (Sarah Turnbull)
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Michael Chabon)
And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie)
Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
Anil’s Ghost (Michael Ondaatje)
Are You Somebody? (Nuala O’Faolain)
A Separate Peace (John Knowles)
As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)
Assault, The (Harry Mulisch)
Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
Atonement (Ian McEwan)
At Swim Two Birds (Flann O’Brien)
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The (Ernest Gaines)
Bagombo Snuff Box (Kurt Vonnegut)
Baron in the Trees, The (Italo Calvino)
Basketball Diaries, The (Jim Carroll)
Beet Queen, The (Louise Erdrich)
Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Katherine Boo)
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
Best of Youth, The (Michael Dahlie)
Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Steven Pinker)
Blackwater Lightship, The (Colm Tóibín)
Blind Assassin, The (Margaret Atwood)
Blood, Bones, and Butter (Gabrielle Hamilton)
Book Thief, The (Markus Zusak)
Borkman’s Point (Håkan Nesser)
Bourne Identity, The (Robert Ludlum)
Breakfast of Champions (Kurt Vonnegut)
Breakfast on Pluto (Patrick McCabe)
Breaking Apart (Wendy Swallow)
Bring Up the Bodies (Hilary Mantel)
Butcher Boy, The (Patrick McCabe)
Cancer Ward (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Louis de Bernières)
Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken, The (Tarquin Hall)
Casual Vacancy, The (J. K. Rowling)
Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
Catcher in the Rye, The (J. D. Salinger)
Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut)
Cat’s Eye (Margaret Atwood)
Changing (Liv Ullman)
Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, The (Thomas Keneally)
Chaos Walking trilogy (Patrick Ness)
Chocolat (Joanne Harris)
Christmas Carol, A (Charles Dickens)
Chronicles of Harris Burdick (Chris Van Allsburg)
Ciao America (Beppe Severgnini)
Clay’s Quilt (Silas House)
Clockwork Orange, A (Anthony Burgess)
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
Coal Tattoo, The (Silas House)
Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier)
Color Purple, The (Alice Walker)
Confederacy of Dunces, A (John Kennedy Toole)
Confederates (Thomas Keneally)
Confessions of Nat Turner, The (William Styron)
Constellation of Vital Phenomena, A (Anthony Marra)
Corrections, The (Jonathan Franzen)
Count of Monte Cristo, The (Alexandre Dumas)
Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
Crisis Economics (Nouriel Roubini & Stephen Mihm)
Cry, the Beloved Country (Alan Paton)
Cuckoo’s Calling, The (Robert Galbraith)
Curtain of Green, A (Eudora Welty)
Daniel Martin (John Fowles)
Dave Robicheaux series (James Lee Burke)
David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
Dear and Glorious Physician (Taylor Caldwell)
Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
Death in the Family, A (James Agee)
Deliverance (James Dickey)
Devil’s Dream, The (Lee Smith)
Dictionary of American Regional English
Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The (Jean-Dominique Bauby)
Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)
Down in the Garden (Anne Geddes)
Dune (Frank Herbert)
Eat Pray Love (Elizabeth Gilbert)
Edisto (Padgett Powell)
Einstein: His Life and Universe (Walter Isaacson)
Elegance of the Hedgehog, The (Muriel Barbery)
Ellen Foster (Kaye Gibbons)
Emperor of All Maladies, The (Siddhartha Mukherjee)
Empire Falls (Richard Russo)
Enchantment (Guy Kawasaki)
Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
English Patient, The (Michael Ondaatje)
Eragon (Christopher Paolini)
Every Day (David Levithan)
Every Day by the Sun (Dean Faulkner Wells)
Everything Is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer)
Fair and Tender Ladies (Lee Smith)
Farewell to Arms, A (Ernest Hemingway)
Fatherland (Robert Harris)
Father Melancholy’s Daughter (Gail Godwin)
Fever Pitch (Nick Hornby)
Feynman Lectures on Physics (Richard Feynman)
Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk)
Film Club, The (David Gilmour)
Finnegans Wake (James Joyce)
First Circle, The (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy (Rumer Godden)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)
Foucault’s Pendulum (Umberto Eco)
Fountainhead, The (Ayn Rand)
French Lieutenant’s Woman, The (John Fowles)
Fresh Off the Boat (Eddie Huang)
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (Fannie Flagg)
Gathering, The (Anne Enright)
Gathering of Old Men, A (Ernest Gaines)
Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living, A (Michael Dahlie)
Gilead (Marilynne Robinson)
Girl Named Zippy, A (Haven Kimmel)
Girl With a Pearl Earring (Tracy Chevalier)
Glass Castle, The (Jeannette Walls)
Glue (Irvine Welsh)
Go Down, Moses (William Faulkner)
Goldfinch, The (Donna Tartt)
Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn)
Good Lord Bird, The (James McBride)
Good Man Is Hard to Find, A (Flannery O’Connor)
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
Great Gatsby, The (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Great Santini, The (Pat Contory)
Grey King, The (Susan Cooper)
Group, The (Mary McCarthy)
Group Portrait with Lady (Heinrich Böll)
Gulag Archipelago, The (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
Hair of the Dog and Other Scientific Surprises, The (Karl Sabbagh)
Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
Hamlet, The (William Faulkner)
Handmaid’s Tale, The (Margaret Atwood)
Harry Potter and … (J. K. Rowling)
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, A (Dave Eggers)
Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The (Carson McCullers)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
Heaven Lake (John Dalton)
Help, The (Kathryn Stockett)
Here on Earth (Alice Hoffman)
Her Fearful Symmetry (Audrey Niffenegger)
High Fidelity (Nick Hornby)
High Shelves & Long Counters (Heike Thiele, Winifred McNulty
Hobbit, The (J. R. R. Tolkien)
Hooked (Les Edgerton)
Hound of the Baskervilles, The (Arthur Conan-Doyle)
House of Mirth, The (Edith Wharton)
House of Sand and Fog (Andrew Dubus III)
House of the Spirits, The (Isabel Allende)
How Starbucks Saved My Life (Michael Gates Gill)
How the Light Gets In (Louise Penny)
Hunger Games, The (Suzanne Collins)
I Am Forbidden (Anouk Markovits)
I Couldn’t Love You More (Jill Medoff)
If Beale Street Could Talk (James Baldwin)
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino)
I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place (Howard Norman)
I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down (William Gay)
In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction (Lee Gutkind)
Interestings, The (Meg Wolitzer)
Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
In the Garden of Beasts (Erik Larson)
Irish Way, The (Robert Emmett Ginna)
It’s a Long Way from Penny Apples (Bill Cullen)
It Takes a Worried Man (Brendan Halpin)
Jailbird (Kurt Vonnegut)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
Jitterbug Perfume (Tom Robbins)
July’s People (Nadine Gordimer)
Jumanji (Chris Van Allsburg)
Jurassic Park (Michael Crichton)
Kate Vaiden (Reynolds Price)
King James Bible
Kiss of the Spider Woman (Manuel Puig)
Kitchen Confidential (Anthony Bourdain)
Kite Runner, The (Khaled Hosseini)
Lace Reader, The (Brunonia Barry)
Land of Decoration, The (Grace McCleen)
Language and Thought in Action (S. I. Hayakawa)
Leaving the Saints (Martha Beck)
Letters Home (Fergal Keane)
Levels of Life (Julian Barnes)
Liar’s Club, The (Mary Karr)
Lie Down in Darkness (William Styron)
Life After Life (Kate Atkinson)
Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
Light in August (William Faulkner)
Like Water for Chocolate (Laura Esquivel)
Little Friend, The (Donna Tartt)
Little Wolves (Thomas Maltman)
Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
Long and Happy Life, A (Reynolds Price)
Long, Long Way, A (Sebastian Barry)
Long Time, No See (Dermot Healy)
Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
Lord of the Rings trilogy, The (J. R. R. Tolkien)
Love Comes Softly (Jeannette Oke)
Lovely Bones, The (Alice Sebold)
Love Medicine (Louise Erdrich)
Lowland, The (Jhumpa Lahiri)
Loyalties (Carl Bernstein)
Lucky (Alice Sebold)
Luncheon of the Boating Party (Susan Vreeland)
Magus, The (John Fowles)
Maid’s Version, The (Daniel Woodrell)
Marcovaldo (Italo Calvino)
McCarthy’s Bar (Pete McCarthy)
Member of the Wedding, The (Carson McCullers)
Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition
Metamorphosis, The (Franz Kafka)
Mezzanine, The (Nicholson Baker)
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs)
Molecules at an Exhibition (John Emsley)
Monster Calls, A (Patrick Ness)
Monsters of Templeton, The (Lauren Groff)
Moon-Spinners, The (Mary Stewart)
Moon Tiger (Penelope Lively)
Movement of Stars, The (Amy Brill)
Moviegoer, The (Percy Walker)
Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
My Losing Season (Pat Conroy)
My Sister’s Keeper (Jodi Picoult)
Mysteries of Harris Burdick, The (Chris Van Allsburg)
Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs)
Natural, The (Bernard Malamud)
New and Selected Poems (Mary Oliver)
New and Selected Poems, Volume Two (Mary Oliver)
New Science of Strong Materials, The (J. E. Gordon)
Night Circus, The (Erin Morgenstern)
Nightmares & Dreamscapes (Stephen King)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, The (Alexander McCall Smith)
Now & Then (Jacqueline Sheehan)
Ocean at the End of the Lane, The (Neil Gaiman)
Old Editor Says, The (John E. McIntyre)
Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens)
On Beauty (Zadie Smith)
Once and Future King, The (T. H. White)
On Chesil Beach (Ian McEwan)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Márquez)
One Minute to Midnight (Michael Dobbs)
Open (Andre Agassi)
Optimist’s Daughter, The (Eudora Welty)
Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)
Other Boleyn Girl, The (Philippa Gregory)
Other Voices, Other Rooms (Truman Capote)
Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell)
Out of Africa (Isak Dinesen)
Oxford English Dictionary
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Roddy Doyle)
Paris to the Moon (Adam Gopnik)
Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, The (Aimee Bender)
Patriarch, The (David Nasaw)
Peace Like a River (Leif Enger)
Pelican Brief, The (John Grisham)
Perfume (Patrick Süsskind)
Philanthro-Capitalism (Matthew Bishop & Michael Green)
Physics for Dummies
Piano Lessons (Noah Adams)
Picnic (Emily Arnold McCully)
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard)
Pillow Book, The (Sei Shōnagon)
Play It as It Lays (Joan Didion)
Plot Against America, The (Philip Roth)
Poisonwood Bible, The (Barbara Kingsolver)
Polar Express, The (Chris Van Allsburg)
Possession (A. S. Byatt)
Post-American World, The (Fareed Zakaria)
Power and the Glory, The (Graham Greene)
Practical Magic (Alice Hoffman)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Prince of Tides, The (Pat Conroy)
Quiet Vendetta, A (R. J. Ellory)
Raney (Clyde Edgerton)
Reader, The (Bernard Schlink)
Reading Lolita in Tehran (Azar Nafisi)
Reading the World (Ann Morgan)
Reivers, The (William Faulkner)
Reluctant Fundamentalist, The (Mohsin Hamid)
Remains of the Day, The (Kazuo Ishiguro)
Requiem for a Dream (Hugh Selby Jr.)
Ring of Bright Water (Gavin Maxwell)
Room (Emma Donoghue)
Rotter’s Club, The (Jonathon Coe)
Round House, The (Louise Erdrich)
Running With Scissors (Augusten Burroughs)
Sanctuary (William Faulkner)
Schindler’s Ark (Thomas Keneally)
Scorpio Races, The (Maggie Stiefvater)
Sea, The (John Banville)
Secret Garden, The (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
Secret History, The (Donna Tartt)
Secret Life of Bees, The (Sue Monk Kidd)
Seven Types of Ambiguity (Elliot Perlman)
Shadow of the Wind, The (Carlos Ruiz Zafón)
Shining, The (Stephen King)
Shogun (James Clavell)
Shutter Island (Dennis Lehane)
Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
Soldiers of Salamis (Javier Cercas)
Someone (Alice McDermott)
Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison)
Sophie’s Choice (William Styron)
Soul on Ice (Eldridge Cleaver)
Sound and the Fury, The (William Faulkner)
Sputnik Sweetheart (Haruki Murakami)
Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The (John le Carré)
Stand, The (Stephen King)
Steve and Me (Terri Irwin)
Story of Lucy Gault, The (William Trevor)
Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein)
Strawberry Statement, The (James Simon Kunen)
Summons to Memphis, A (Peter Taylor)
Sun Also Rises, The (Ernest Hemingway)
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard Feynman)
Suttree (Cormac McCarthy)
Swimming the Channel (Sally Friedman)
Tell No One (Harlan Coben)
Telling Room, The (Michael Paterniti)
Testament of Mary, The (Colm Tóibín)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
Thousand Splendid Suns, A (Khaled Hosseini)
Time Traveler’s Wife, The (Audrey Niffenegger)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain)
To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (Phillip Lopate)
Trainspotting (Irvine Welsh)
TransAtlantic (Colum McCann)
Tribes (Seth Godin)
Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne)
Twenty Years A-Growing (Maurice O’Sullivan)
Ulysses (James Joyce)
Uncommon Appeal of Clouds, The (Alexander McCall Smith)
Under the Tuscan Sun (Frances Mayes)
Unlocking the Gates (Taylor Walsh)
Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Karen Russell)
Vernon God Little (DBC Pierre)
Victory Over Japan (Ellen Gilchrist)
Virtuous Woman, A (Kaye Gibbons)
Walking Across Egypt (Clyde Edgerton)
Walter Benjamin & Bertolt Brecht: … a Friendship (Erdmut Wizisla)
Water Is Wide, The (Pat Conroy)
Waterland (Graham Swift)
Watership Down (Richard Adams)
We Are Still Married (Garrison Keillor)
Well-Wishers, The (Edward Eager)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lionel Shriver)
What’s Bred in the Bone (Robertson Davies)
Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak)
Whole New Life, A (Reynolds Price)
Widow’s Walk, A (Marian Fontana)
Wild (Cheryl Strayed)
Wild Swans (Jung Chang)
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The (Haruki Murakami)
Winter’s Tale (Mark Helprin)
Wise Blood (Flannery O’Connor)
Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel)
Woman Warrior, The (Maxine Hong Kingston)
Wonder Boys (Michael Chabon)
Word Freak (Stefan Fatsis)
World Is Flat, The (Thomas L. Friedman)
World Without End (Ken Follett)
Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)
11/22/63 (Stephen King)
Tweet: All the books mentioned in the blog in 2013! With links!
Tweet: Books you might like: my annual list of titles mentioned in the blog.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”