December 10, 2013
Tuesday

As I noted yesterday, many of my online friends and acquaintances are posting their reading tallies for 2013. Further, they are ranking the titles, reporting on the best book they read. One friend, a fiction writer who works full time as an attorney and who also writes book reviews for a widely distributed newsletter, has read 68 books this year. He’s currently posting links to the reviews he considers to be of the ten best books he’s read this year. We have similar tastes. I’m noting the titles.

The combing of my journals to pluck out the titles of what I read in 2013 taught me (not for the first time) that keeping a running list makes the task a lot easier. Put that on my growing list of Things I Have Always Meant To Do and Will Definitely Do This Year.

I am not going to type out now the titles of all 43 short stories (equivalent to 4 books) that I read. But I will list, in the order in which I read them, the novels and story collections that I managed to complete. Thus:

Still Alice. Lisa Genova
The Might Have Been, Joseph Schuster
If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (story collection), Robin Black
More Than Glamour, Grace Gelvin Kisinger
News from Heaven (story collection), Jennifer Haigh
Faith, Jennifer Haigh
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D., Nicole Bernier
At-Risk (story collection), Amina Gautier
Being Esther, Miriam Karmel
Shout Her Lovely Name (story collection), Natalie Serber
Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell
The Burgess Boys, Elizabeth Strout
Death Is Not an Option (story collection), Suzanne Rivecca

The best one? Eleanor & Park, with The Might Have Been a close second.
The most disappointing one? The Burgess Boys.
The most unusual? More Than Glamour.

And that’s the one I’ll write about tomorrow.