Books read, 2013

It’s the time of year for making lists—best this, top that, insert number of whatever we’re counting down. And I am nothing if not a type-A sucker for lists. I write them on scraps of paper, in my phone, I have notebooks full of them.

But one thing I’ve never listed—not completely, anyway—are all the books I’ve read in a given year. I tried Goodreads, but that petered out, and I tried to just remember, but that obviously didn’t work. So this year, I started keep track and I’m so glad I did. Thanks to my daily commute, I have a little less than 2 hours every day to read—and I actually took advantage of it this year. (This list doesn’t include all the magazines I read, which, as you can imagine, was a lot, and it does includes a couple of books that I didn’t completely finish because, well, getting at least halfway counts, right?)

Here, in the order in which I read them, are the 27 books I read in 2013:

1.     Apron anxiety by Alyssa Shelasky

2.     This is how you lose her by Junot Diaz

3.     I loved, I lost, I made spaghetti by Giulia Melucci  

4.     Rules of civility by Amor Towles

5.     A tree grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

6.     Is everyone hanging out without me? by Mindy Kaling

7.     The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg

8.     Girls in white dresses by Jennifer Close

9.     I married you for happiness by Lily Tuck  

10. The beautiful and damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Got ¾ of the way through)

11. It starts with food by Melissa Hartwig and Dallas Hartwig

12. Z: A novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler 

13. Beautiful ruins by Jess Walter

14. Everything is illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

15. Paris in love by Eloisa James

16. What the dog saw by Malcolm Gladwell (I skipped a couple stories)

17. Maineby J. Courtney Sullivan

18. Wallflower at the orgy by Nora Ephron

19. Lean in by Sheryl Sandberg

20. Attachmentsby Rainbow Rowell

21. Where’d you go Bernadette by Maria Semple

22. Major Pettigrew’s last stand by Helen Simonson

23. Seating arrangements by Maggie Shipstead

24. Sweetness in the belly by Camilla Gibb

25. The interestings by Meg Wolitzer   

26. The best American nonrequired reading edited by Dave Eggers (Still a few more stories to go here)

27.  Gone girl by Gillian Flynn (I’m reading this one now)

It’s not a particularly highbrow list. There are lots of bestsellers on there, and a few Kindle versions that I downloaded from the library because that’s all there was. I threw in a couple classics—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, namely—because I should have read them already. (And I should say, for the record, that that was my favorite of the year. For the first 300 pages or so I couldn’t get into it, but then something just clicked, it got really good, and I one hundred percent understand why it’s on school reading lists.)

I really don’t know what was with with food/romance memoirs but I read three of them. (I am also a sucker for this genre, apparently.) And collections of short stories are obviously not for me, since I tend to skip around. Plus, it’s funny to see the particular points of the year when I was reading what—it was Fitzgerald around the time when “The Great Gatsby” movie came out and It Starts with Food was research before we did our Whole 30 back in May.

Overall, the books were all pretty entertaining and I’m looking forward to actually making it to 30 in 2014.