My Year In Books, 2017

As i say every year around this time, i am a list freak. I keep lists. Every book i read, every CD i listen to, every CD / DVD i buy, every film i watch.

Herewith, for your dining & dancing pleasure, is the list of every book i read this year, in chronological order. Some were re-acquaintances. Those that were new to me are marked with an asterisk.

Note: before i bought my first PC (it ran Windows 95) i would read one or two books a week; now i read one or two a month, but as someone once said, the Internet is television for people who read.

*Bruce Sterling – The Hacker Crackdown: Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier

*Ian Rankin – Rather Be The Devil

Tom Sharpe – Blott On The Landscape

*Robert Ludlum – The Bourne Supremacy

*Gerry McAvoy w. Peter Chrisp – Riding Shotgun: 35 Years On The Road With Rory Gallagher        And Nine Below Zero

Tom Sharpe – The Throwback

*David Herbert Donald – Lincoln

Tom Sharpe – Vintage Stuff

*John Le Carrė – The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life

Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Starting From San Francisco

*Andy Rathbone – Windows 10 For Dummies

John Le Carrė – A Murder Of Quality

*Robert Ludlum – The Bourne Ultimatum

Tom Sharpe -- Porterhouse Blue

*Allen Drury – Advise And Consent

*Lee Sandlin – Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild

Arthur C. Clarke – Tales From The White Hart

*Christopher Hitchens – Thomas Jefferson: Author Of America

Tom Sharpe – The Wilt Alternative

*Fawn M. Brodie – Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait

*Donald Fagen – Eminent Hipsters

*Loung Ung – First They Killed My Father: A Daughter Of Cambodia Remembers

*Paul Watson – Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt For The Lost Franklin Expedition

Tom Sharpe – Wilt On High

*David Yaffe – Reckless Daughter: A Portrait Of Joni Mitchell

*David Lagercrantz – The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye

And what (i hear you ask) were my favourites? In fiction, there's no question: Allen Drury's "Advise and Consent," published in 1959 (it won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for fiction). (I'd never heard of it until a friend told me about it this summer.) It's a novel of political intrigue. Normally, politics interests me about as much as the secret lives of earthworms, and, indeed, this novel started very slowly, but it picked up and picked up and became unstoppable. Brilliant, although the devastating and tragic ending is something that couldn't happen in 2017.

In non-fiction, it's tied: Joni Mitchell's biography, and Thomas Jefferson's "Intimate Portrait." Wait! (i hear you cry). I thought you said you weren't interested in politics? Right, i'm not, particularly, although the current American political scene has a certain morbid appeal. But Brodie's book was less about Jefferson's politics and more about the man – and a fascinating man he was.

I'll end with a few words about Volume 5 in the Millennium trilogy. The first three volumes in the saga were written by the late Steig Larsson. (He wrote a fourth, but it has never been published – his family has refused permission.) It was the story of Lisbeth Salander ("The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo"), one of the most compelling characters in all literature – a strong, powerful, take-no-bullshit woman with a brilliant mind. David Lagercrantz picked up the ball and ran with it and, while his two additions to the series are worthwhile reads, i have one major problem with them: Salander herself isn't in them very much. There's a lot about her, her background and history and so on, but she herself is rarely "on stage."