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?