What I Read – 2017

My Favourite Reads of 2017:

Do Not Say We Have Nothing – Madeleine Thien

The Break – Katherine Vermette

The Lonely Hearts Hotel –  Heather O’Neill

Silence – Shusaku Endo

All We Leave Behind – Carol Off

The Golden House – Salman Rushdie

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me – Sherman Alexie

The Good People – Hannah Kent

Bellevue Square – Michael Redhill

Barrelling Forward – Eva Crocker

Wonder – R.J. Palacio

The Snow Child – Eowyn Ivey

Thoughts and Observations:

• My total number for the year is 72. Which comes in slightly below last year’s 76 so I’m pretty pleased.
• Last year included 5 re-reads and I didn’t have any this year, despite intending to re-read a couple of classics
• Speaking of classics, I read very few this year. That’s a goal I’ve set for 2018. Including (maybe) Ulysses…
• Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of my reading is Fiction (61 fiction versus 11 non)
• More surprisingly to me, I read very few theological type books this year. My non-fiction tended to be memoirs in 2017.
• Female authors won out again this year with the women pulling ahead by a larger majority. (I counted 41 women and 28 men. So I obviously missed a few but I’m not going to go back and re-count.)
• It surprises me to see that the U.S. is so highly represented with 31 authors. Canada, which usually wins this round, comes in next with 21 authors.
• Also represented are: England, Ireland, Japan, Nigeria, India, Scotland, Russia, New Zealand, Chile, Spain, and Australia.
• That said, only three books this year were translated from other languages. This is a category I know I always need to work on.
• Other numbers:
  • 3 books were mysteries
  • 3 books had more than 500 pages.
  • 10 books were short story collections
  • 1 book was on parenting (Expect this number to increase in future!)
  • 7 were young adult or middle grade books
• I abandoned 5 books without finishing them. (I don’t count these in my overall total.) This is actually a fairly high number for me but I am becoming more selective as I get older/my reading time becomes more limited.
• I reviewed all but 6 of my 2017 reads, a number I’m pretty proud of. I had a 100% success rate until mid-November. I’m going to blame Rose for the drop off but I am hoping to catch up in 2018.

The Complete List:

1. The Sellout – Paul Beatty (Picador, 2015)

2. Reflections on the Psalms – C.S. Lewis (Harvest Book, 1958)

3. I Carried You Home – Alan Gibney (Patrick Crean Editions, 2016)

4. Beauty Plus Pity – Kevin Chong (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011)

5. The Snow Child – Eowyn Ivey (Regan Arthur/Back Bay, 2012)

6. When She Was Electric – Andrea MacPherson (Polestar, 2003)

7. Perfect Little World – Kevin Wilson (Harper Collins, 2017)

8. Such is My Beloved – Morley Callaghan (McClelland & Stewart, 1994)

9. Fates and Furies  – Lauren Groff (Riverhead Books, 2015)

10. The Conjoined – Jen Sookfong Lee (ECW Press, 2016)

11. Here I Am – Jonathan Safran Foer

12. Barrelling Forward – Eva Crocker (House of Anansi, 2017)

13. The Best Kind of People – Zoe Whittall (Anansi, 2016)

14. What is not Yours is not Yours – Helen Oyeyemi (Hamish Hamilton, 2016)

15. Eileen – Otessa Moshfegh (Penguin, 2015)

16. The Dark and Other Love Stories – Deborah Willis (Hamish Hamilton, 2017)

17. How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen – Joanna Faber & Julie King (Scribner, 2017)

18. The Break – Katherena Vermette (Anansi, 2016)

19. Garden of Eden – Ernest Hemingway (Scribners, 1986)

20. A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara (Doubleday, 2015)

21. The Dinner Party and Other Stories – Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown, 2017)

22. Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf Canada, 2017)

23. The Unwomanly Face of War – Svetlana Alexievich (Random House, 2017)

24. Do Not Say We Have Nothing – Madeleine Thien (Knopf Canada, 2016)

25. The Hate U Give – Angie Thomas (Balzer + Bray, 2017)

26. A Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin (Farrar, STrauss and Giroux, 2015)

27. The Five Love Languages – Gary Chapman (Northfield Publishing, 1995)

28. Silence – Shusaku Endo (Picador Classic, 2015)

29. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine – Gail Honeyman (Viking, 2017)

30. The Collected Stories – Grace Paley (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007)

31. Holding Still For As Long as Possible – Zoe Whittall (Anansi, 2009)

32. Spoonbenders – Daryl Gregory (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017)

33. Trust No One – Paul Cleave (Upstart Press, 2015)

34. Everything was Good-Bye – Gurjinder Basran (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2010)

35. Harmless Like You – Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (Sceptre, 2016)

36. The Red Pony – John Steinbeck (Penguin Classics, 2009)

37. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me – Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown and Company, 2017)

38. The Tennis Partner – Abraham Verghese (Harper Collins, 1998)

39. The Japanese Lover – Isabel Allende (Atria Paperback, 2015)

40. And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie (Cardinal Editions, 1960)

41. Autobiography – G.K. Chesterton (Hamish Hamilton, 1986)

42. The Lonely Hearts Hotel – Heather O’Neill (Harper Collins, 2017)

43. Stay With Me – Ayobami Adebayo (Knopf, 2017)

44. Meddling Kids – Edgar Cantero (Blumhouse Books, 2017)

45. Himself – Jess Kidd (Atria Books, 2017)

46. The Heart’s Invisible Furies – John Boyne (Hogarth, 2017)

47. The Bear and the Nightingale – Katherine Arden (Del Rey, 2017)

48. Teardown – Clea Young (Free Hand Books, 2017)

49. Fall Down 7 Times, Get Up 8 – Naoki Higashida

50. The Golden House – Salman Rushdie (Random House, 2017)

51. The Unintentional Adventures of the Bland Sisters: The Jolly Regina – Kara LaReau (Amulet Books, 2017)

52. The Good People – Hannah Kent (Little, Brown, 2017)

53. The Wind is not a River – Brian Payton (Ecco, 2014)

54. How to Breathe Underwater – Julie Orringer (Vintage, 2003)

55. All We Leave Behind – Carol Off (Random House Canada, 2017)

56. Lost in September – Kathleen Winter (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2017)

57. Bellevue Square – Michael Redhill (Doubleday Canada, 2017)

58. A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles (Viking, 2016)

59. The End We Start From – Megan Hunter (Hamish Hamilton, 2017)

60. Ghost Warning – Kara Stanley (Caitlin Press, 2017)

61. Winter’s Tale – Mark Helprin (A Harvest Book, 1983)

62. A Boys’ Treasury of Sea Stories (Paul Hamlyn, 1968)

63. The Lifters – Dave Eggers (Alfred A Knopf, 2018)

64. Wonder – R.J. Palacio (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)

65. Beloved – Toni Morrison (Plume, 1998)

66. My Cousin Rachel – Daphne du Maurier (International Collectors Library, 1952)

67. Next Year For Sure – Zoey Leigh Peterson (Doubleday Canada, 2017)

68. See What Can Be Done – Lorrie Moore (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018)

69. Letters from Father Christmas – J.R.R. Tolkien (Harper Collins, 2015)

70. The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novellas – Henry James (Signet Classic, 1962)

71. Late Nights on Air – Elizabeth Hay (Emblem, 2007)

72. The Whiz Mob and the Grenadine Kid – Colin Meloy (Balzer + Bray, 2017)

Books I Didn’t Finish:

The Travelers – Chris Pavone

Green Mansions – W.H. Hudson

Gork, the Teenage Dragon – Gabe Hudson

The Wonderling – Mira Bartok

The Beauty Myth – Naomi Wolf