2012 Reads
Something that's been true my entire life is that I start the same things and then abandon them over and over again. At the beginning of this year I started keeping a physical reading journal. This is not the first time I've done this, though I was fairly sure before this morning that this is the longest I've ever actually kept it up.
Earlier today I was in my loft looking for something when I found a box filled with old notebooks. One of them contained my reading journal from 2012 (plus the very end of 2011 and the beginning of 2013) and it turns out that back when I was a Waterstones bookseller I did, in fact, manage to maintain a journal for at least a year.
Since this blog is in large part a place for me to log all of my reading away from StoryGraph/Goodreads I figured I'd transpose that list here. So here it is.
It's interesting looking back on this, because it's a real time capsule of where I was in my life. A big chunk of my time as a bookseller was working in the children's section, so I read a ton of YA at the time when YA was hitting a peak in the wake of The Hunger Games and that wave of dystopian fiction. It's also interesting to see me doing what was at the time my annual re-read of Harry Potter, in the days before the author outed herself as being a horrible person. It seems I broke up that read-through by rereading some Neil Gaiman, too, who at the time was my favourite author. Who could have predicted what would have become of the reputations of those two authors a decade later?
There's a lot here that I still consider among my favourite books, and a lot that I have no memory of ever hearing about let alone reading. It's interesting to see which books managed to stick around and which ones disappeared.
As with the main Books I've read page, struck-out text are DNFs, italics are re-reads, and bold are highly recommended.
2012 Books Read
Mansfield Park - Jane Austen- The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
- Sexing The Cherry - Jeanette Winterson
- Maze Runner - James Dashner
- Waterland - Graham Swift
- The Sense of An Ending - Julian Barnes
- The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebould
- Dark Matter - Michelle Paver
- Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
- The Associate - John Grisham
- A Confusion Of Princes - Garth Nix
- Ender's Shadow - Orson Scott Card
- Speaker For The Dead - Orson Scott Card
- Shadow Of The Hegemon - Orson Scott Card
- Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
- The Gunslinger - Stephen King
- The Drawing Of The These - Stephen King
- The Waste Lands - Stephen King
- Wizard and Glass - Stephen King
- The Wind Through The Keyhole - Stephen King
- Wolves Of The Calla - Stephen King
- Song Of Susannah - Stephen King
- The Dark Tower - Stephen King
- You Against Me - Jenny Downham
- 'Salem's Lot - Stephen King
- Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor
- Alif The Unseen - G. Willow Wilson
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - JK Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - JK Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - JK Rowling
- Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - JK Rowling
- The Litigators - John Grisham
- The Terrible Thing that Happened to Barnaby Brocket - John Boyne
- Memoirs of An Imaginary Friend - Matthew Green
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - JK Rowling
- Days of Blood and Starlight - Laini Taylor
- Angel Dust - Sarah Mussi
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - JK Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling
- Uglies - Scott Westerfeld
- Red Country - Joe Abercrombie
- Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
- The Long Walk - Stephen King
- Jet Smoke and Dragon Fire - Charles Ashton
- Empire In Black and Gold - Adrian Tchaikovsky
- I Am The Messenger - Marcus Zusak
- Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
- Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
- Game Girls - Judy Waite
- To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
- The Gods and Their Machines - Oisín McGann
- Zom-B - Darren Shan
- Closure, Limited - Max Brooks
- Carrie - Stephen King