books read 2014 - final

I think this is the complete books-read list from 2014, not including books started but not finished (lookin' at you, Michael Chabon: Telegraph Avenue was unreadable).

1. Postwar, by Tony Judt
2. Stoner, by John Williams
3. The Giant, O'Brien, by Hilary Mantel
4. The Aleph, by Jorge Luis Borges
5. The Maker, by Jorge Luis Borges
6. The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt
7. Devil in the Grove, by Gilbert King
8. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
9. A Delicate Truth, by John Le Carre.
10. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, by bell hooks
11. A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin
12. The Gifts of the State and Other Stories: New Writing from Afghanistan, ed. Adam Klein
13. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Chandler
14. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky (ongoing serial, third time through to date and I skipped and skimmed a bit this time, counting as a full book because it's hundreds of thousands of words long by now)
15. Murphy, by Samuel Beckett
16. The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. LeGuin
17. God Loves, Man Kills, by Chris Claremont
18. Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolf  
19. Claw of the Conciliator, by Gene Wolf
20. I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, ed. Eliza Griswold
21. The Animal Family, by Randall Jarrell
22. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, by Alan Moore
23. The Map that Changed the World, by Simon Winchester (audiobook)
24. Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, trans. Philip Pullman
25. The Blood Telegram, by Gary Bass
26. Sword and Citadel, by Gene Wolf
27. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle
28. A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L'Engle
29. A Swiftly Tilting Planet, by Madeleine L'Engle
30. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, by Susan Sontag (counting the two together as one book)
31. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
32. In the Freud Archives, by Janet Malcolm
33. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin
34. Notes from No Man's Land, by Eula Biss
35. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
36. Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (second time)
37. O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather
38. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt 

o pioneers!

Sent to me by Bill as part of a huge set of books by women authors. Very quick. Stylistically not my cup of tea, but a really rich portrait of a particular time and place and of a strong woman. Feels like a primary document, if that makes sense, like reading someone's journal even though it's written in the third person. Very different in that way from Stoner, which is also an exceptionally rich portrait of an actually rather similar time and place (Great Plains, about a hundred years ago), but which looks at its characters and their surroundings and actions from a remove.

wolf hall (second time through)

Good lord, what a book. What a character Mantel has created with Thomas Cromwell! The supporting cast -- Eustache Chapuys, Thomas More, Wolsey, Anne Boleyn, Henry himself, Walter Cromwell, Thomas Wriothesley, Cromwell's daughters and nieces, the Wyatts father and son, Mary Carey, Cromwell's cook whose name escapes me at the moment, Hans Holbein, and on and on -- is wonderful and rich but they're no match for the man at the center. Mantel just refers to Cromwell with third person pronouns: "he," "his," only bothering to identify him by name when there might be some confusion about the reference, and then it's, "he, Cromwell." What a touch! What a writer!

I'll re-read Bring Up the Bodies next year, before The Mirror and the Light comes out. Now I face the difficult decision about what to spend the rest of the year reading. Bunches of options.