Tsundoku (Japanese): The act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piling it up together with other such unread books.
Last year I came up with a reading list of 47 books for 2012, but got through only 23, so I’ve scaled it back this year to a couple of dozen. I’ve sourced it from the _Listener_ and _Slate_ best-books-of-2012 lists, recommendations of D and friends, and even a suggestion from a random Twitter follower, but overall my cunning strategy this year is to be, well, late.
Last year the New Zealand media went into a full-scale literary feeding frenzy because _The Forrests_ was tipped for the Man Booker Prize by an anonymous comment on the Hay Festival website. Anonymous British praise? Let’s all get in a fizz! Most Kiwis had never heard of the Hay Festival, of course, and for all the media knew it could have been any of the Festival staff; perhaps a caterer. “Look you, that Emily Perkins, she’d be a dead cert for Booker. You want chips with that, love?” _The Forrests_ was the _Listener_ book club pick only a few days after it had been officially published, and copies still damp from the presses were flying off bookstore shelves.
I decided it might be nicer to read it in 2013.
* Alain-Fournier | *Le Grand Meaulnes*
* Alain Badiou | *In Praise of Love*
* Nicholson Baker | *The Way the World Works*
* Julian Barnes | *Through the Window*
* Quinn Berentson | *Moa*
* Laurent Binet | *HHhH*
* Katherine Boo | *Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity*
* Oliver Burkeman | *The Antidote*
* Paul Callaghan | *Wool to Weta*
* Bernardo Carvalho | *Nine Nights*
* Richard Ford | *Canada*
* Richard Fortey | *Dry Storeroom No. 1*
* Nick Harkaway | *The Gone-Away World*
* Ian Kershaw | *Hitler: Profiles in Power*
* Elizabeth Jenkins | *Harriet*
* Denis Johnson | *Train Dreams*
* Ben Lerner | *Leaving the Atocha Station*
* Mark Lynas | *The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans*
* Robert Macfarlane | *The Old Ways*
* Hilary Mantel | *Bring Up the Bodies*
* Joe Meno | *The Boy Detective Fails*
* Lydia Millet | *How the Dead Dream*
* Nancy Mitford | *Wigs on the Green*
* Alison Moore | *The Lighthouse*
* Lawrence Norfolk | *John Saturnall’s Feast*
* Lawrence Patchett | *I Got His Blood On Me*
* Emily Perkins | *The Forrests*
* Rebecca Priestley | *Mad on Radium*
* David Quammen | *Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic*
* Keith Ridgway | *Hawthorn and Child*
* Marilynne Robinson | *When I Was A Child I Read Books*
* Kim Stanley Robinson | *2312*
* Nina Simon | *The Participatory Museum*
* David Thomson | *The Big Screen*
* Claire Tomalin | *Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self*
* Rose Tremain | *Restoration*
* Chris Ware | *Building Stories*
* Ashleigh Young | *Can You Tolerate This?*