Some Books Chris Read

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

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