2012: My Year in 100 Books

Well, that sounds pretentious. But my first title was "What I read in 2012," which I still like better, only it sounds like a grade school assignment. Anyway, you get the idea! It's time for my yearly list of What I Read.  Because I wanted a nice round number (and because I haven't kept track of everything) this just includes books I've read completely, and it doesn't include the history books I've read aloud to the kids for school. It does include evening read-alouds and also quite a few books which I've listened to as audio books, rather than actually read. So, starting last January....

January
God and Stephen Hawking, by John Lennox
Henrietta's War: News from the Home Front 1939-1942, by Joyce Dennys
The Wednesday Wars, by Gary D. Schmidt
We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals, by Gillian Gill
Auntie Robbo, by Ann Scott-Moncrieff
The Cheshire Cheese Cat: A Dickens of A Tale, by Carmen Agra Deedy
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, by Joan Aiken

February
Daniel Deronda, by George  Eliot
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
The Kingdom New Testament: A Contemporary Translation, trans. by N.T. Wright
Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes
Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
Freddy Goes to the North Pole, by Walter R. Brooks

March
Jesus, Paul, and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N.T. Wright
Nightingale Wood: A Novel, by Stella Gibbons
How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer
Simply Jesus, by N.T. Wright
The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, by John H. Walton
Mr. and Mrs. Bunny -- Detectives Extraordinaire!, by Polly Horvath
Searching for Dragons, by Patricia C. Wrede
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin

April
A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War, by Amanda Foreman
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Freddy the Detective, by Walter R. Brooks
Tales from Moominvalley, by Tove Jansson

May
Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat, by James Morris
Life, the Universe, and Everything: An Aristotelian Philosophy for a Scientific Age, by Ric Machuga
The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde
Freddy the Politician, by Walter R. Brooks
The True Meaning of Smekday, by Adam Rex

June
An Altar in the World, by Barbara Brown Taylor
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
God's Politics, by Jim Wallis
How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, by N.T. Wright
How to Lie with Statistics, by Darrell Huff
Jacob Have I Loved, by Katherine Paterson
Mornings  on Horseback, by David McCullough
Okay for Now, by Gary D. Schmidt
Our Town, by Thornton Wilder
Out of the Silent Planet, by C. S. Lewis
Calling on Dragons, by Patricia Wrede
Freddy and the Men from Mars, by Walter R. Brooks

July
A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
The Chosen, by Chaim Potok
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, by David McCullough
The New Annotated Dracula, by Bram Stoker
The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1918, by Barbara W. Tuchman
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, by Margaret Sidney
Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

August
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, by Sam Kean
To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, by Adam Hochschild
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Tolkien: Man and Myth, by Joseph Pearce
Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt
Mairelon the Magician, by Patricia Wrede
Puck of Pook's Hill, by Rudyard Kipling

September
Henrietta Sees It Through: More News from the Home Front, 1942-1945, by Joyce Dennys
No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, (abridged) by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Silas Marner, by George Eliot
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
The Great Silence, by Juliet Nicolson
The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte
When All the World Was Young, by Barbara Holland
The House of Arden, by E. Nesbit
Harding's Luck, by E. Nesbit
Uncle, by J.P. Martin

October
Churchill, by Paul Johnson
Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just, by Timothy Keller
How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill
Shakespeare, by Bill Bryson
The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson
The Meaning of Marriage, by Timothy Keller
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt
Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck
When I Was A Child I Read Books, by Marilynne Robinson
Swallows and Amazons, by Arthur Ransome

November
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas
The Story of England, by Michael Wood
Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD, by Peter Brown
Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England, by Thomas Penn
Homeschooling, by Martine Millman
The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander

December
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
Hallucinations, by Oliver Sacks
Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? by Michael Sandel
Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian
Polio: An American Story, by David Oshinsky
The Iliad, by Homer (Stephen Mitchell translation)
To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility, by Jonathan Sacks
Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, by Oliver Sacks
A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw, by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Father Christmas Letters, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson
The Black Cauldron , by Lloyd Alexander
The Castle of Llyr, by Lloyd Alexander
North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell


There! I think there might be a few more than one hundred, but that is about it, anyway! And almost all of them were good! Or at least interesting! There were a couple, like Henrietta Lacks, God's Politics, and Hallucinations, that I wasn't wild about, but most of them were really excellent! Master and Commander, North and South, and The Chosen were among of my favorites, but so many of them were wonderful that I'd be hard put to say which ones I loved most!

Having just finished North and South, I'm trying to decide whether to listen to The Odyssey (read by Ian McKellen -- Gandalf!) or Middlemarch (read by the same excellent reader who did North and South -- Juliet Stevenson). Or maybe David Copperfield (which I just caught on sale for .49!)? Such fun choices! And last night we started Liesel and Po as a read-aloud, which seems very promising! And I'm reading Song of the Vikings, by Nancy Brown, which is quite interesting! So it has been a wonderful year for reading, and I'm looking forward to a happy winter (and spring, summer, and fall!) enjoying all the lovely new books I got for my birthday and Christmas!