Presented without excess commentary, explanations, or embarrassment, these are all the books I read in their entirety, a few for class but mostly by choice, from this past January through December. There is, of course, significant overlap with my Summer Reading 2011 post, but it made more sense to be redundant and comprehensive than to skip over those books in this list.
How to Make an American Quilt -- Whitney Otto
Rites of Spring (Break) -- Diana Peterfreund
Sense and Sensibility -- Jane Austen
The Virgin Suicides -- Jeffrey Eugenides
Beauty and the Beast -- Jeanne-Marie le Prince de Beaumont
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius -- Dave Eggers
Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America's First Encounter with Radical Islam -- David R. Farber
Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded -- Samuel Richardson
Shamela -- Henry Fielding
Colossus: The Rise and the Fall of the American Empire -- Niall Ferguson
What Now? -- Ann Patchett
How Did You Get This Number -- Sloane Crosley
Nine Stories -- J. D. Salinger
Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
Special Topics in Calamity Physics -- Marisha Pessl
On Chesil Beach -- Ian McEwan
The Russian Debutante's Handbook -- Gary Shteyngart
The Phantom Tollbooth -- Norton Juster
A Widow for One Year -- John Irving
Someone I Loved -- Anna Gavalda
I Am Charlotte Simmons -- Tom Wolfe
Indecision -- Benjamin Kunkel
The Luneberg Variation -- Paolo Maurensig
Selected Stories -- E. M. Forster
Love in the Time of Cholera -- Gabriel García Márquez
The Forgotten Garden -- Kate Morton
The School of Essential Ingredients -- Erica Bauermeister
Old School -- Tobias Wolff
The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation -- Elizabeth Berg
SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance -- Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Still Alice -- Lisa Genova
The Elegance of the Hedgehog -- Muriel Barbery
Picnic, Lightning -- Billy Collins
Interpreter of Maladies -- Jhumpa Lahiri
The Music Lesson -- Katharine Weber
One Day -- David Nicholls
Little Bee -- Chris Cleave
The Classmates: Chaos, Privilege, and the End of an Era -- Geoffrey Douglas
A Moveable Feast -- Ernest Hemingway
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation -- Lynne Truss
The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris -- John Baxter
The Hunger Games -- Suzanne Collins
Never Let Me Go -- Kazuo Ishiguro
Everything Beautiful Began After -- Simon van Booy
Nocturnes -- Kazuo Ishiguro
Middlesex -- Jeffrey Eugenides
Catching Fire -- Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay -- Suzanne Collins
Anna in the Tropics -- Nilo Cruz
The Handmaid and the Carpenter -- Elizabeth Berg
Spring Awakening -- Steven Sater
The Anthologist -- Nicholson Baker
If authors were stocks, I'd say I made some pretty strong investments this year.
