Time for my annual reading list post. A couple more books than last year. Here it goes:
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
- Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
- Persuasion - Jane Austen
- Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
- Totally Pawstruck - Sofie Ryan
- The Last Curtain Call - Juliet Blackwell
- The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
- Howards End - E.M. Forster
The first two books of the year were real disappointments. Many people really love both books, but I was not positively impressed. Neither seemed very believable to me. I found the whole premise of "Crawdads" unrealistic and the end was bothersome.
All three of the Austen novels were re-reads with my husband. I enjoy it when we read things together and discuss them.
The Sofie Ryan novel and Juliet Blackwell novel were parts of the only two series that I'm still keeping up with. They are fun distractions.
The Remains of the Day was definitely my favorite of the new novels I read this year. I thought it was very well written and insightful. I would absolutely recommend it.
The last two novels on the list are part of a little mini-course that I asked my husband to make for me on the modern novel. We have a few more to go in our course before it's done.
There probably would have been an eleventh book on the list, but I decided that I didn't want to finish it. My husband and I started reading Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut, but I had a very strong emotional reaction to a couple of the chapter in the middle of the book, and I decided that it wasn't worth it to keep reading. I had enjoyed it up until that point, but I was just put off after that. I have enjoyed the other Vonnegut novels that I've read, but it was just the wrong time and place on this one, I guess.
