One Every Two Weeks: A 2016 Reading List

Tis the season to be jolly. Or at least it's the season to compile lists of one sort or another. Just lately the papers here in Hogtown have selected what they call the top 100 books of the year. Last Sunday I read through the New York Times's list of the most highly regarded 100. No doubt many of the books on those and other lists are worth your time and money. Some, it's equally certain, are a waste of both. Of course, that grave, infallible judge - time - will determine if the books thought to have merit today will still be considered worthy ten or twenty or fifty years from now.

I have no idea what history will do to these books, but here's a list of those I read or reread in 2016. Some I raced through and didn't want to put down; some I put down almost as soon as I picked them up. Which is which doesn't matter because our responses to books, like music or art or film or architecture and the rest are so personal, so wholly subjective that asserting Book A is better than Book B is fatuous.  

Here they are, in no particular order, listed by title and author:

The Scheme for Full Employment, Magnus Mills; Guided Tours of Hell, Francine Prose; Henry & June, Anaïs Nin; The Chalk Circle Man, Fred Vargas; The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process, Meredith Anne Skura; Stranglehold, Robert Rotenberg; Mount Pleasant, Don Gillmor; Davy the Punk, Bob Bossin; Shoot the Dog, Brad Smith; A Moment on the Edge 100 Years of Crime Stories by Women, Elizabeth George, editor; Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad; To Have and Have Another A Hemingway Cocktail Companion, Philip Greene; The White Hotel, D. M. Thomas; Terminal, Rosemary Aubert; Golden Earrings, Yolanda Foldes; The Massey Murder, Charlotte Gray; To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee; Strange Loyalties, William McIlvanney; The Secret History of MI6, Keith Jeffery; This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin; Kinky Friedman, Road Kill; Murder in Memoriam, Didier Daeninckx; Seeking Whom He May Devour, Fred Vargas; The High Window, Raymond Chandler; The Vanished Landscape A 1930s Childhood in the Potteries, Paul Johnson; Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster.

That's 26 listed - those that I remember, of course -- or a book every other week, on average. Not bad considering I also spent time reading the novel-length manuscripts of some Hogtown writer friends. Let's see how 2017 turns out.