Here’s the list of books I read in 2019 (most recent at top)
- The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
- Small Memories - Jose Saramago (A memoir)
- Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith
- Literary Occasions by VS Naipaul (Essays)
- Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (Memoir)
- Work Suspended and other stories - Evelyn Waugh (SS)
- The First Person and other stories - Ali Smith (SS)
- Nobody's Looking At You by Janet Malcolm (NF/Essays)
- Victory - An Island Tale by Joseph Conrad
- Such Fine Boys by Patrick Modiano (translation)
- My Antonia by Willa Cather
- Public Library and other stories by Ali Smith (SS)
- A Manual For Cleaning Women - Lucia Berlin (SS)
- Welcome Home - Lucia Berlin's Memoir (NF)
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (SF)
- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
- The Muse's Tragedy and Other Stories by Edith Wharton (SS)
- Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (translated by Edward G. Seidensticker)
- The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe (translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan)
A shorter list compared to the other two recent years. Not many. However, for a while, I did write about the books I read. Glad about that. For the most recently read ones (the 5 or 6 not-linked bullets), my notes are still in draft-form. Not a lot, but hopefully I’ll get around to cleaning the drafts – and then perhaps I might still have a para for each of those not-linked bullets, if not a post.
2019 also marked the decade for this blog. I started this when I got my first kindle, when they launched global shipping, in 2009. I was still in my 20s and A was still a baby/ toddler then, almost. We were still in Mumbai then. I’ve still got that first kindle somewhere – a bit dislodged from its original book-flap cover, although it never seems to go beyond the frozen screensaver image. There’s a blacker, newer kindle now which too gathers dust since I gravitate towards books in their physical form.
Compared to all the other blogs I have launched and closed meanwhile, this one has been here for a while, so cheers to that and to the decade of ‘the kindled and the unkindled’.
Not that these markers matter much but new years, new months, new weeks, they all bring a fleeting lift – a re-imagining of self, a refresh of resolutions, a renewed sense of possibilities.
Here's to 2020, and to reading.