Books 2010

My year in books takes a quite similar path to my movie-watching: a dearth of reading after 12th June. However, here’s the list for the year:

The Lost Symbol – Dan Brown
My Shit Life So Far – Frankie Boyle
The Greatest Show On Earth – Richard Dawkins
An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain – John O’Farrell
It’s Only A Movie – Mark Kermode
Making History – Stephen Fry
Generation A – Douglas Coupland
Stephen Fry In America – Stephen Fry
Why Does E=MC2? – Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Played with Fire – Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – Stieg Larsson
The Seashell on the Mountaintop – Alan Cutler
The Fry Chronicles – Stephen Fry
Hitch-22: A Memoir – Christopher Hitchens

Of those 15 books, 11 were read in the first half of the year, prior to the boy being born. Both the last Larsson book and the Hitchens autobiog took me 2 months – the former due to immediate child-rearing duties, the latter due to its immense wordiness.

The list appears to be split evenly between fiction and non-fiction. Of the fiction books, the Millenium trilogy stood out, despite a quirky style (see Nora Ephron’s parody here). I’m now officially bored of Douglas Coupland. Dan Brown novels are still entertaining reads, despite all their flaws.

Of the non-fictions, the pop-sci books by Dawkins and Cox/Forshaw were excellent, and Hitchens’ memoir was also stand-out. Avoid Frankie Boyle, however.