2009 reading list
I know I’m a bit late with any kind of a “2009 in summary” post, but it just occurred to me to do this. Early in 2009, I decided to start reading my way through a Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century. There are a number of these available on the internet. The one I chose to follow was this one:
Most, but not all, of what I read in 2009 is from this list. Here’s a list of novels I read in 2009 and their ranking on the list, if any.
| Title | Year Published | Author | Rank | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lolita | 1955 | Vladimir Nabokov | 4 | |
| Brave New World | 1932 | Aldous Huxley | 5 | |
| The Sound and the Fury | 1929 | William Faulkner | 6 | |
| Catch-22 | 1961 | Joseph Heller | 7 | |
| Under the Volcano | 1947 | Malcolm Lowry | 11 | I started this in December 2009, but I haven’t finished it yet. |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | 1949 | George Orwell | 13 | |
| An American Tragedy | 1925 | Theodore Dreiser | 16 | |
| Slaughterhouse-Five | 1969 | Kurt Vonnegut | 18 | |
| The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion | 1915 | Ford Madox Ford | 30 | |
| Lord of the Flies | 1954 | William Golding | 41 | |
| The Sun Also Rises | 1926 | Ernest Hemingway | 45 | |
| Portnoy’s Complaint | 1969 | Philip Roth | 52 | |
| The Catcher in the Rye | 1951 | J.D. Salinger | 64 | |
| Of Human Bondage | 1915 | W. Somerset Maugham | 66 | |
| Heart of Darkness | 1902 | Joseph Conrad | 67 | |
| A Farewell to Arms | 1929 | Ernest Hemingway | 74 | |
| Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance | 1974 | Robert Pirsig | – | |
| Stranger in a Strange Land | 1961 | Robert Heinlein | – | |
| The Big Sleep | 1939 | Raymond Chandler | – | |
| The Long Goodbye | 1954 | Raymond Chandler | – |
Fiction wasn’t all that I read though. Here are some other highlights:
| Title | Year Published | Author | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bittersweet: diabetes, insulin, and the transformation of illness | 2003 | John Christopher Feudtner | Personal stories about how diabetes was treated in the days before and after the availability of insulin |
| The Physics of Sailing Explained | 2003 | Byron D. Anderson | I received this for Christmas 2009. |
| Godforsaken Sea: Racing the World’s Most Dangerous Waters | 1998 | Derek Lundy | An account of the harrowing 1996 Vendee Globe round the world single-handed sailing race. |
| Sailing Alone Around the World | 1899 | Joshua Slocum | I started this in later December 2009, but I haven’t finished it yet. It’s an account of Slocum’s single-handed global circumnavigation aboard the sloop Spray. Slocum was the first person to sail around the world alone. |
