Rounding up 2008

I've just counted the number of books read for 2008: 156. This is exactly the same number of books read for 2007. If we divide 156 by 12, that's about 13 books per month. Not too bad, but probably a bit inaccurate, since longer books obviously take longer to read than the shorter ones. Anything I made note of here or in my book journal I finished; I don't count books I tried to get into and just couldn't.

More of the roundup: my favorite books of 2008 were (in order of reading them):

1. The Book of the Heathen, by Robert Edric
2. Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson
3. The Somnambulist, by Jonathan Barnes
4. The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur
5. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
6. Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black
7. The Guards, by Ken Bruen
8. The Silver Swan, by Benjamin Black
9. The Killing of The Tinkers, by Ken Bruen
10. Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob, by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill
11. Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer
12. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
13. Atonement, by Ian McEwan
14. The Magdalen Martyrs, by Ken Bruen
15. The Dramatist, by Ken Bruen
16. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of the Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan
17. God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre, by Richard Grant
18. Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith
19. The Yellow Room Conspiracy, by Peter Dickinson
20. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, by Kate Summerscale
21. The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry
22. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill
23. The Lost Dog, by Michelle de Kretser
24. A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz
25. Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh
26. A Case of Exploding Mangoes
27. Forty Words for Sorrow, by Giles Blunt
28. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsesson in the Amazon, by David Grann
29. The Miernik Dossier, by Charles McCarry
30. The Tears of Autumn, by Charles McCarry
31. A Perfect Spy, by John LeCarre

32. The Human Factor, by Graham Greene

It's hard to pare the list down to pull out a single favorite for the year, because I enjoyed these books for different reasons.

Overall, a great reading year. I read mostly fiction; of those, mostly mystery; of those, mostly mysteries from the UK. This year I got really into Scandinavian mystery novels, and had to ask myself why more American mystery writers do not produce stuff like Scandinavian authors. Probably because there isn't enough audience for more edgy reading here. Oh well.

Time to move on...I still have a lot to read from my tbr pile.