What I Read in 2012
* - books I really liked


Previous Years
2011     2010     2009     2008     2007     2006     2005

 
  December
Fortune's Favourites. Colleen McCullough
The Grass Crown. Colleen McCullough


November
The First Man in Rome. Colleen McCullough *
Back to Blood. Tom Wolfe (abandoned)
The Twelve. Justin Cronin. (abandoned)
Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato. Goodman and Soni (abandoned)


October
Capital: A Novel. John Lanchester
Dialogues and Essays. Seneca (abandoned)
Girl with Curious Hair. David Foster Wallace
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. D. T. Max


September
Spurious. Lars Iyer (abandoned)
The Small House at Allington. Anthony Trollope
 *
We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons. Tim Kreider
The Orphan Master's Son. Adam Johnson


August
A Dance to the Music of Time. Anthony Powell (abandoned)
Cicero on the Emotions. Margaret Graver, translator
Mr. g: A Novel About the Creation. Alan Lightman (abandoned)
Skios. Michael Frayn
Confessions of Felix Krull. Confidence Man: The Early Years. Thomas Mann (abandoned)
The Sense of an Ending. Julian Barnes
 *
Framley Parsonage. Anthony Trollope
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. Daniel Pool
Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life. A. A. Long
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Dai Sijie (abandoned)
A Hologram for the King. Dave Eggers

July
The Adventures of Augie March. Saul Bellow (abandoned)
Redshirts. John Scalzi
Bring Up The Bodies. Hilary Mantel

A Brief History of Thought. Luc Ferry
Doctor Thorne. Anthony Trollope *
War and Peace. Leo Tolstoy (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, translators) *
The Marriage Plot. Jeffrey Eugenides

June
Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
Honeymoon With My Brother. Franz Wisner (abandoned - an awful book)
Just My Type: A Book About Fonts. Simon Garfield
The Passage of Power. Robert Caro


May
The Tortilla Curtain. T.C. Boyle


April
The Delivery Man. Joe McGinniss  (abandoned)
Strange Flesh.  Michael Olson (abandoned)
Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry
 *
Samuel Johnson: The Struggle. Jeffrey Meyers (abandoned)
Some Hope. Edward St. Aubyn (abandoned)
Bad News. Edward St. Aubyn
Never Mind. Edward St. Aubyn

March,
Blueprints of the Afterlife. Ryan Boudinot
Something for Nothing. Michael Klein (abandoned)
Zone One. Colson Whitehead (abandoned)
Hellenistic Philosophy. A. A. Long
Ready Player One. Ernest Cline
The Life of Cicero. Anthony Trollope

February
The Therapy of Desire. Martha Nussbaum
 *
The Loved One. Evelyn Waugh (abandoned)
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Vladimir Nabokov (abandoned)
  • I've tried, and tried and tried. But even though Lolita is one of my favorite books of all time, I just can't get into anything else by Nabokov. This feels like some sort of odd personal failure on my part, which I realize sounds irrational.
Wild Thing. Josh Bazell
The Way We Live Now. Anthony Trollope
 *
Epicureanism. Tim O'Keefe
Stoicism. John Sellars

January
In the Garden of Beasts. Erik Larson (abandoned)
Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. R. W. Sharples
Butcher's Crossing. John Williams
 *
The Art of Fielding. Chad Harbach *
Rome. Robert Hughes (abandoned).