Books Read in 2011 [en]

Last year, I stumbled upon a blog which had a list of a books the blogger had read over the last year. I cannot for the life of me remember who it is. I do remember, though, that I asked him how he did it. He told me he kept a running list in which he added each new book he started, between brackets — and removed the brackets when he’d finished reading the book. Or so I remember, and so I did.

Some books have comments after them, in brackets too. Almost all the “started” books are still “ongoing” — as you can see, I’m somebody who has many many books going at once. It can take me over a year to get through certain books. But I rarely abandon them mid-way forever, though I’m starting to do that now with certain books I find disappointing. This list is somewhat chronological.

• Apprendre à vivre, Luc Ferry [life-changing]
• Illium, Dan Simmons
• Olympos, Dan Simmons
• Elephants on Acid, Alex Boese
• Les Miscellanées du chat (*partial)
• Does Anything Eat Wasps?, ed. Mick O’Hare
• Madhouse, ed. Urmilla Deshpande, Bakul Desai
• Je croyais qu’il suffisait de t’aimer, Jacques Salomé
• Tales From Firozsha Baag, Rohinton Mistry
• Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
• What You Can Change… and What You Can’t, Martin Seligman
• The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom
• Simon’s Cat, Simon Tofield
• Zima Blue, Alastair Reynolds
• [Mediocre But Arrogant, Abhijit Bhadhuri]
• The Dip, Seth Godin [disappointing]
• Eat That Frog!, Brian Tracy [disappointing]
• Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman [life-changing]
• The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch
• [The Power of Slow] [disappointing]
• Indian Take-Away, Hardeep Singh Kohli [funny]
• [The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson]
• [Simon’s Cat beyond the fence, Simon Tofield]
• L’intimité au travail, Stefana Broadbent
• How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer
• [Confessions of a Public Speaker, Scott Berkun]
• [Influence (the psychology of persuasion), Robert B. Cialdini]
• Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
• Three-Legged Friends (and other animals in a vet’s life), Caitlin Barber
• The Wild Life of the Domestic Cat, Roger Tabor
• [The Moral Animal, Robert Wright]
• [La société émergente du XXIe siècle, Michel Cartier & Jon Husband]
• [Facebook, Twitter et les autres…, Christine Balagué & David Fayon] [disappointing, too basic]
• Argleton, Suw Charman
• Simon’s Cat in Kitten Chaos, Simon Tofield
• Rama II, Arthur C. Clarke
• Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts [epic]
• Clicker Training for Cats, Karen Pryor
• Terminal World, Alastair Reynolds
• The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
• [The Long Tail, Chris Anderson]
• Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman
• The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky [even more life-changing]
• Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• [L’Esprit de Solitude, Jacqueline Kelen]
• Coraline, Neil Gaiman
• American Gods, Neil Gaiman

2011 was the year of grieving, for me, and some of my readings reflect this. “Apprendre à vivre”, which was an important stepping-stone in helping me start figuring out how to make sense of life and death, as a person who does not have the consolation or support of believing in any kind of afterlife or higher power.

“Learned Optimism”, and even more importantly, “The How of Happiness”, have prodded me to question some of my beliefs about what to do and not to do to keep oneself happy. The very practical nature of these two books has actually resulted in my doing things quite differently now than I did a year ago, and I believe this is lasting change in the way I approach my life. You’ll find blog posts about this if you search a bit.

I love SF, and as you can see I’m an Alastair Reynolds fan. I pre-order his books now, and I’ve read everything he’s written that I could lay my hands on. Dan Simmons is great too. During the autumn I finally read my first Neil Gaiman book (after years of following him idly on Twitter) and I’m hooked. I have a pile of books with his name on it waiting to be read.

I loved pretty much all the books I read during this year. I usually like the books I read, funny, eh? Maybe by now I’m a pretty good judge of the kind of stuff that interests me.

If you want to ask me anything about any of the books on the list, peruse the comments, I’ll be happy to oblige!

Sorry for the absence of links in this post, the sheer number I could have added managed to discourage me. I might add them later *hope hope* 😉