update December 2009

Happy Christmas to you all (and a merry new year!)

You will see below that I did indeed complete the 50 book challenge. Hoorah! But a few targets for next year:

1) Read more French books. Given that I've been living in France for the entirety of 2009, for only 8% of the final count to be in French is frankly an embarrassment.

2) Be better at reviewing books more immediately. Terrible of me, since the whole point of this blog is to review books, to have 10 books that I read in 2009 still (at the time of writing) needing to be reviewed.

3) Aim for 100 in 2010!

# of books read in December: 3

Final total: 60

1. You Are Here (Bremner, Bird and Fortune)
2. Le Dossier: How To Survive The English (Sarah Long)
3. Du phonographe au MP3 (Ludovic Tournès)
4. Where Angels Fear To Tread (E. M. Forster)
5. Born on a Blue Day (Daniel Tammet)
6. The Tale of Genji (Lady Murasaki; tr. Arthur Waley)
7. The Comedy of Errors (William Shakespeare)
8. The Golden Gate (Vikram Seth)
9. Al Capone Does My Shirts (Gennifer Choldenko)
10. A History of Modern Britain (Andrew Marr)
11. The Power and the Glory (Graham Greene)
12. Le CV de Dieu (Jean-Louis Fournier)
13. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer)
14. The Music of Silence (Andrea Bocelli)
15. Love (Toni Morrison)
16. Class: The Secret Diary of a Teacher in Turmoil (Jane Beaton)
17. The Wives of Bath (Susan Swan)
18. The Penelopiad (Margaret Atwood)
19. The Queen and I (Sue Townsend)
20. Molly Fox's Birthday (Deirdre Madden)
21. Daisy Miller (Henry James)
22. The Rules of Attraction (Bret Easton Ellis)
23. Gods Behaving Badly (Marie Phillips)
24. Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons)
25. The Crucible (Arthur Miller)
26. The British Museum is Falling Down (David Lodge)
27. them (Joyce Carol Oates)
28. Flaubert's Parrot (Julian Barnes)
29. Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (Sue Townsend)
30. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
31. Tears of Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath (Michael and Elizabeth Norman)
32. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Tennessee Williams)
33. Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)
34. Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
35. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
36. The Nigger of the Narcissus (Joseph Conrad)
37. The Past is Myself (Christabel Bielenberg)
38. The Road Ahead (Christabel Bielenberg)
39. The Other Hand (Chris Cleave)
40. Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons)
41. The Rules of Engagement (Anita Brookner)
42. Cat's Eye (Margaret Atwood)
43. Three Men In A Boat (Jerome K Jerome)
44. La grammaire est une chanson douce (Erik Orsenna)
45. The Kabul Beauty School (Deborah Rodriguez)
46. Bonfire of the Brands (Neil Boorman)
47. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey)
48. Hotel du Lac (Anita Brookner)
49. Girl Meets Boy (Ali Smith)
50. Exercices de style (Raymond Queneau)
51. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Marina Lewycka)
52. Weight (Jeanette Winterson)
53. Long Way Down (Nick Hornby)
54. The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
55. Choir Boy (Charlie Anders)
56. The Rain Before It Falls (Jonathan Coe)
57. Deaf Sentence (David Lodge)
58. 31 Songs (Nick Hornby)
59. The Thief Lord (Cornelia Funke)
60. Dear Fatty (Dawn French)

Average number of books per month: 5

% by male authors: 64%
% by female authors: 36%