What I Read in 2011
* - books I really liked


Previous Years
2010     2009     2008     2007     2006     2005

 
  December
The Complete Short Novels. Anton Chekov
The Man with the Getaway Face. Richard Stark
Snowdrops. Andrew Miller
The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized. Owen Flanagan (abandoned)
The Magus. John Fowles
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Simon Sebag Montefiore (abandoned)

November
The World as I Found It. Bruce Duffy (abandoned)
The Sisters Brothers. Patrick deWitt (abandoned)
The Inner Circle. T.C. Boyle
Decline & Fall. Evelyn Waugh (abandoned)
Reamde. Neal Stephenson

October
Machine Man. Max Barry
Calling Mr. King.  Ronald De Feo (abandoned)
All Quiet on the Western Front. Erich Maria Remarque (abandoned)

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Stephen Greenblatt

September
Rules of Civility. Amor Towles.
Seven Days in Rio. Francis Levy (abandoned)
Julian. Gore Vidal (adandoned)
The Devil All the Time. Donald Ray Pollock
Before I Go to Sleep. S. J. Watson (abandoned)

August
The Family Fang. Kevin Wilson
Cleopatra. Stacy Schiff
Barchester Towers
. Anthony Trollope *

July
George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I. Miranda Carter (abandoned)
Colonel Roosevelt. Edmund Morris
 *
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore. Benjamin Hale (abandoned)
Exploring Happiness. Sissela Bok
Happiness: A History. Darrin McMahon (abandoned)
The Politics of Happiness. Derek Bok (abandoned - a truly awful book)
The Adults. Alison Espach
 
*
Pnin. Vladimir Nabokov (abandoned)
 
June
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children. Sarah Braunstein (abandoned)
My American Unhappiness. Dean Bakopoulos
Oblivion. David Foster Wallace
 
*
Great Expectations. Charles Dickens
The Aleph and Other Stories. Jorge Luis Borges (abandoned)
Long Last Happy. Barry Hannah (abandoned)
Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche. Jim Miller

May
How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Robin Dunbar (abandoned)
A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Iris Murdoch (abandoned)
A Visit from the Goon Squad. Jennifer Egan
The Social Animal. David Brooks (abandoned)
Moonwalking With Einstein. Joshua Foer
 
*

April
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Donald Miller (abandoned)
Brave New World. Aldous Huxley
Nerve: Poise Under Pressure, Serenity Under Stress, and the Brave New Science of Fear and Cool. Taylor Clark (skimmed)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


March
So Long, See You Tomorrow. William Maxwell (abandoned)
Cassandra at the Wedding. Dorothy Baker (abandoned)
Waiting for the Barbarians. J. M. Coetzee
The Road to Wellville. T.C. Boyle (abandoned)
The Warden. Anthony Trollope
 
*

February
So Brave, Young, and Handsome. Leif Enger 
*
The Great Stagnation. Tyler Cowen
Whiter Shades of Pale: The Stuff White People Like. Christian Land


January
A Handful of Dust. Evelyn Waugh 
*
So Much For That. Lionel Shriver
Cat's Cradle. Kurt Vonnegut (abandoned)

All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly