Year. Books

I hadn't read a full-length work of adult fiction for around 3 years at the time of my 40th birthday, in August 2018.

I've read 70 in the year since, with an iron and joyless will. Here they all are. Just to spice it up and add value, I've put them in some putative order of how much I think I enjoyed them, though the order is completely arbitrary really, and there were very few (indeed none) I didn't enjoy at all (honestly, the gap between 6 and 66 in how highly I would rate these books is almost nothing - I think I chose pretty well what I read and also had limited wish to impose my critical faculties on the task/pleasure of reading quickly ...)

Here you go. Lots of very good, quite short books ...

1. The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford
2. Normal People – Sally Rooney
3. Autumn - Ali Smith
4. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
5. Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie
6. The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes
7. I Heard the Owl Call My Name - Margaret Craven
8. An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
9. A Month in the Country – JL Carr
10. Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin
11. Swimming Home - Deborah Levy
12. Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
13. Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
14. Ghost Wall – Sarah Moss
15. The Vegetarian - Han Kang
16. Exit West - Mohsin Hamid
17. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor
18. Eileen - Ottessa Moshfegh
19. Conversations with Friends – Sally Rooney
20. Nutshell – Ian McEwan
21. The Gathering – Anne Enright
22. Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner
23. Winter  - Ali Smith
24. Spring - Ali Smith
25. The Beginning of Spring – Penelope Fitzgerald
26. Moon Tiger – Penelope Lively
27. Quartet in Autumn - Barbara Pym
28. 13 Ways of Looking - Colum McCann
29. Train to Pakistan – Khushwant Singh
30. Sula – Toni Morrison
31. The Postman Always Rings Twice - James Cain
32. Regeneration - Pat Barker
33. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
34. Tin Man - Sarah Winman
35. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
36. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
37. Hot Milk – Deborah Levy
38. Train Dreams - Denis Johnson
39. Stay With Me - Ayobami Adebayo
40. The Ghost Road - Pat Barker
41. The End We Start From - Megan Hunter
42. The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
43. The Noise of Time – Julian Barnes
44. Midwinter Break – Bernard MacLaverty
45. The Little Sister – Raymond Chandler
46. Seize the Day - Saul Bellow
47. The Ghost Writer - Philip Roth
48. A Severed Head - Iris Murdoch
49. Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
50. The Forgotten Waltz – Anne Enright
51. From a Calm and Narrow Sea – Donal Ryan
52. Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
53. Heartburn - Nora Ephron
54. In a Free State - VS Naipaul
55. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
56. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
57. Home - Toni Morrison
58. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
59. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
60. Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin
61. Grief is a Thing with Feathers - Max Porter
62. In Our Mad and Furious City - Guy Gunaratne
63. Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward
64. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
65. The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
66. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
67. Oranges are not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson
68. The Fall - Albert Camus
69. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
70. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon