The Sunday Salon: I Did It! 100 books!!!

Happy Sunday, bloggers and bloggees!

I reached a milestone this week: read my 100th book for 2008! I reached my reading goal with almost 4 weeks to spare. The rest is just frosting on the cake.

I thought I'd do a little 2008 wrap-up today. It's been a great reading year: I've discovered new (to me) authors; read books from countries I hadn't "visited" before; read a couple of classic tomes that I never thought I'd read (War and Peace was a major accomplishment!).

Below is a list of books I read and rated either 4, 4.5 or 5 stars out of 5. All of these are highly recommended. I've linked to my reviews for the ones I have. The asterisk * indicates a new-to-me author; a plus sign + indicates a country new to me in literature.


5 stars:

• Small Island by Andrea Levy*
• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie* +
  
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• The Girls by Lori Lansens*
• The Secret River by Kate Grenville* +
  

4.5 stars:

• The Road by Cormac McCarthy*
• Year of Wonders: a Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks*
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (graphic novel)*
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro*
• The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell*
• When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka*
• Sorry by Gail Jones*
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer*

4 stars:

• Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy by Kraybill, Nolt and Weaver-Zercher
• An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• At Mrs. Lippincote's by Elizabeth Taylor*
• Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
• Blankets by Craig Thompson (graphic memoir)*
• Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
• Chocolat by Joanne Harris
• Come to Me by Amy Bloom (short stories)
• Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire
• Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles*
• Disgrace by JM Coetzee*
• Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn*
• Fifth Business by Robertson Davies*
• Gardens of Water by Alan Drew* +
• Gentleman Jim by Raymond Briggs (graphic novel)
• Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier*
• In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
• In the Wake by Per Petterson
• Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan*
• Light on Snow by Anita Shreve*
• March by Geraldine Brooks
• Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively*
• Mosquito by Roma Tearne* +
  
• Mudbound by Hillary Jordan*
• Music and Silence by Rose Tremain*
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout*
• Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle*
• Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi +
  
• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi*+
• Restoration by Rose Tremain*
• The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff*
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (Group Read)
• The Arrival by Shaun Tan*
• The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery*
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers*
• The History of Love by Nicole Krauss*
• The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville
• The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan (graphic novel)
• The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean*
• The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham (Group read)
• The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell
• The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney*
• The Translator by Daoud Hari*+
• The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton*
• The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve
• Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson*
• Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
• Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xiaolu Guo*
• Unless by Carol Shields
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• We Are All Welcome Here by Elizabeth Berg
• We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (with caveat - difficult emotional read)*
• Wild Life by Molly Gloss

And the clunkers (aka The Poo Pile - courtesy of Irish) - some I slogged through, some I quit on - generally earned 2 or fewer stars. I save the 1/2 star for the worst of the poo - sort of like tipping your bad waitress a penny.

• A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire
• Digging to America by Anne Tyler
• Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen*
• Peony in Love by Lisa See
• The Alchemist by Paul Coelho*
• The English Major by Jim Harrison*

And the number one clunker of 2008, earning the rarely presented One Half Star award:

• Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah* -- I found this one impossible to finish.
  

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I'll be doing a book giveaway in a couple of weeks - Matrimony by Joshua Henkin (signed by the author, no less!). Matrimony was named one of the New York Times 2007 Notable Books. Details coming soon! Read More!

Weekly Geeks #19 AND The Sunday Salon

Our weekly geek task this week: Dewey is asking us to list our favorite books that were published in 2008 (you, dear readers, will have a chance to participate in some future post). By the end of the year the results will be compiled; Dewey thinks "it’ll be interesting ... to see a list of what book bloggers choose as their favorite books rather than what a newspaper decides or what the top sellers were." Great idea!

So here's my list to date (this may change by the end of the year since I have several new books yet to read). This is pretty much in order of my preferences.

Fiction:

• The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
• Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
• Sorry by Gail Jones
• Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
• Gardens of Water by Alan Drew
• Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xiaolu Guo
• Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
• Life Class by Pat Barker
• The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

Nonfiction:

• In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan
• The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur by Daoud Hari
• Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure

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Read More!