Alex Little

Seems to be the time of year when everyone puts retrospectives of last year on their blogs, so here’s my contribution… a list of all the books I read last year:

• The Steep Approach to Garbadale – Iain Banks
• The Closed Circle – Jonathan Coe
• Shadow of the Sun – Ryszard Kapuscinski
• Diary – Chuck Palahnuik
• The English – Jeremy Paxman
• A case of 2 cities- Qiu Xiaolong
• The Tesseract – Alex Garland
• The Dwarves of Death – Jonathon Coe
• The Dog Catcher – Alexei Sayle
• Critical Mass – Philip Ball
• Armageddon in Retrospect – Kurt Vonnegut
• Fermats Last Theorem – Simon Singh
• White Tiger – Aravind Adiga
• The Pig that Wants to be Eaten – Julian Baggini
• The Russian Debutantes Handbook – Gary Shteyngart
• A Mad World, My Masters – John Simpson
• Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
• The Emperor – Ryszard Kapuscinski
• The Greatest Show on Earth – Richard Dawkins
• No 1 Ladies Detective Agency – Alexander Mccall Smith
• Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
• Ministry of Fear – Graeme Green
• The Shackled Continent – Robert Guest
• New Rulers of the World – John Pilger
• Doors Open – Ian Rankin
• Freedom for Sale – John Kampfner
• QI Book of the Dead

Out of these there are a few I would certainly recommend:
(non-fiction) Shadow of the Sun, Critical Mass, New Rulers of the World
(fiction) The Dwarves of Death, The Dog Catcher (although Barcelona Plates was better), The Steep Approach to Garbadale

Given that I now have a bit of a commute to work, I’m likely to be reading a fair bit more this year, the last 7 books on the list were all read in the last 6 weeks, see my GoodReads page for what’s going to be on next years list.