Books of 2025

Alright, it's that time of the year again! It actually feels like winter around here, with frost in the night and a little sliver of ice on the ponds. Also, I finished reading a book last night and will not be finishing another, this year, so I am all set to muse on the books I read this year.
This year's total is even higher than last year's; 46 books in total. That cold December weather I just mentioned has been a big help in achieving that number, although I have (yet again) done a lot of rereading in the autumn and winter. But there were many exciting new reads as well!

The full list is:

1 Intentioneel leven

2 Orbital

3 Komt een land bij de dokter

4 The Professional Scrum Product Owner

5 Everything I know about love

6 So late in the day

7 Mania

8 The viscount who loved me

9 Het is oorlog maar niemand die het ziet

10 Intermezzo

11 Under cover aan het werk

12 Franny & Zooey

13 Maar ik wil helemaal geen moderne man zijn

14 Brooklyn

15 The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

16 Refuse to Choose

17 Dinner for Six

18 Whale Fall

19 Sweetness in the Skin

20 Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

21 The Anthropocene Reviewed

22 Dear Dolly

23 Clear

24 The end we start from

25 Ik ga toch iets zeggen

26 You are here

27 An offer from a gentleman

28 Everything is tuberculosis

29 The Bee Sting

30 The Glass Hotel

31 Romancing Mr Bridgerton

32 Op een andere planeet kunnen ze me redden

33 The Help

34 Onder Vrienden

35 Prophet Song

36 The dictionary of lost words

37 The Wedding People

38 Slade House

39 Schokbestendig

40 The Light Years

41 The Thursday Murder Club

42 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

43 The Proof of my Innocence

44 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

45 12 ways to kill your family at Christmas

46 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Like I said, lots of rereads in the autumn; one Emily St John Mandel, one David Mitchell, one Elizabeth Jane Howard and the three by J.K.Rowling. I've tried to get into a rhythmn of reading at least one new book in between rereads, so as not to get stuck in the whole Cazalet series or all the Harry Potter books. And other than that, there were still 40 new books to break down into lists.

Best English novel

1 Clear

2 The Help

3 Intermezzo

This is a difficult category to order this year. I read too many good books. Added to that, I awarded some books with 5 stars on Storygraph, which I in hindsight don't think are the best books I read this year, since they haven't stuck in my mind the way some others have done. So this is, at best, a tentative step towards the best books.

The first one, Clear by Carys Davies, nearly broke my heart. It is about Ivar, the last inhabitant of a small and remote Scottish Island, who is visited by a church minister. Ivar does not know this man has come to throw him off the island to turn it into grazing land for sheep, so he takes him into his home. I felt so dearly for Ivar, who loves his solitary life with the few animals that are left to him, but gradually also comes to understand that being alone all the time is no way to live. It is only 150 pages long, but it feels like three entire lives are contained in those pages.

I've written about both The Help and Intermezzo before, but I think what makes these books so great is that they, like Clear, are about real people that you get to know, can relate to and maybe even start to love a little bit. A real good book, for me, makes the characters come alive and makes me both sad and happy when their story ends. These are books that I will read again some time in the future, not because of the plot, but because of who lives in them.

Honorable mentions go to Whale Fall, Sweetness in the Skin and The Bee Sting for also being great reads.

Best Dutch novel

Once again, no Dutch novels on the list, even though 20% of all books I read were in Dutch. I read one work of fiction in Dutch (Onder Vrienden), but that is a translation of a Danish author. And I would not put that in any 'best' list.

Best classic

Storygraph let's you compare when you've read a book with when it was published, which gives me a nice scatterplot that is sloping slightly upwards as I read newly published books shortly after they've hit the local library or bookshop. In 2025, there is one book distinctly below the 1990 line; Franny & Zooey. I think we can call this a classic, although not everyone is in agreement on whether it is a novel (or a short story and a novella in one). One could argue that the Harry Potter books are classics in their own right, but since those are rereads, we'll leave only J.D.Sallinger on this list.

Best non-fiction

1 The Anthropocene Reviewed

2 Undercover aan het werk

3 Ik ga toch iets zeggen

30% of all books I read this year were non-fiction, however, many of those fall into the autobiographical category (see below). And some fall somewhat in between, so I've made the distiction as best I can.

When I was a student, or thereabouts, one of the new-fangled 'blogs' I used to read was De Recensiekoning, which translates to The Reviewking. This was written by semi-famous youngsters, who'd gotten the idea that if they wrote reviews about stuff (in a funny but thoughtful way), companies would send them free things or let them have free experiences, just so they could write reviews about them. This did not work out for them, although they did publish a book about it, which was a standard part of my student housing toilet's reading materials. (Years later, of course, influencers thought up the same thing with videos and social media and actually did get rich. And those Recensiekoning people ended up creating some of the most famous Dutch late night tv programmes, so everything turned out alright for them). All this is a longwinded way of saying: I like reading reviews about random things that are not generally reviewed. And that is exactly what John Green (of YA fame) does in his covid-time non-fiction work The Anthropocene Reviewed: he reviews the state of humankind, its history and the impact it's had on the rest of the planet. It is a wonderful, diverse, funny and sometimes depressing read.

The same goes for Undercover aan het werk by Jeroen van Bergeijk. He is a Dutch journalist famous for taking on low-paying jobs to show the working conditions of (mostly) immigrants who are extorted by (usually) big companies, but also the effects we as consumers/buyers have on those conditions. He goes undercover to write his stories, and this book is a compilation of recent years.

The final book on the list is by another journalist, Aaf Brandt Corstius, who followed the debates in Dutch parliament for a year and half, incidentally a period in which the cabinet fell, new elections were held and a new parliament was instated. She wrote not so much about the content, the ideas, of the debate, but about the social norms, the way people do things or don't do things. Even though she only wrote about public debates which she viewed from the public gallery, it reads like a 'behind the scenes' of the Dutch political debate. Very insightful.

Best autobiograhical

1 Op een andere planeet kunnen ze me redden

2 Maar ik wil helemaal geen moderne man zijn

3 Everything I know about Love

Many contenders for this category this year, which as I said slightly overlaps with the general non-fiction one. The first, by Lieke Marsman, is a haunting tale of life, death and her struggles with cancer. She used to be the Dutch Poet Laureate, but is better known to the wider public for her decision to amputate her arm to stop the cancer from spreading. Sadly, this did not work. In Op een andere planeet kunnen ze me redden, she discusses how her illness has brought her back to parts of the faith she had lost, going even further into believing that there must be alien life somewhere that could save her (all the while knowing she will die). It is a beautiful book about beliefs, quantum mechanics and the human will to live.

The second book is by Julian Althuisius, who writes a column in my favourite newspaper. This book is about his refusal to be 'a modern man', with all the social expectations and norms that come with that. It is a story of family life, expectations and breaking free of those. I think Lieke and Julian are both great Dutch writers with difficulties, but of a slightly different order of magnitude.

The last is by Dolly Alderton, whom I discovered last year. She has written two non-fiction works about love and relationships, one collection of her newspaper columns (Dear Dolly) and Everything I know about Love. The second feels more meta, as she also describes how she felt like a fraud, giving advice to readers when her own love life or relationships were in shambles. But it is that honesty that makes both books such great reads, even if I wouldn't follow every word of advice she has.

Best short story collection

No short story collections at all this year (unless you count Franny & Zooey, which would then still only be one short story). Must (as always) try to read some more next year.

Best scifi/fantasy

1 Orbital

2 Prophet Song

3 The end we start from

Alright, I'm taking some liberties with the definition of this category, as I only read one 'real' scifi or fantasy novel (apart from rereads), but I did read some hauntingly good dystopian novels. Which is sort of the same thing?

Anyway, I read Orbital in the beginning of the year and enjoyed it a lot, although it does have its faults. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is another Booker Prize winner and a very differnt cup of tea. It is set in a future Ireland that is slowing slipping into a totalitarian regime. This book kept me awake at night, partly because I was so annoyed at the main character for not acting, partly because I realised I would probably respond in the same way she did. Let's hope this remains a work of fiction, although some elements of the story are already becoming reality. Finally, I read The end we start from by Megan Hunter after watching the film, which isn't always the best way around. But the book is more suggestive of events than it is descriptive, so it was kind of nice to already have some idea of the plot. As the south of England is submerged by floods, a couple and their baby flee north in search of a safe haven. Both society and the characters show their ugliest sides, in yet another story warning us of what may be to come.

Okay, so maybe scifi and dystopian are not the same thing, since the former seems to focus on the nice things of scientific and social advances, on how we would like things to develop, while the latter feels more like a warning sign. But they both show possible stories yet to come, whether we like them or not.

Best romance

1 You are here

2 Romancing mister Bridgerton

3 An offer from a gentleman

A new category! I hesitated about putting one last year, but with all the extra Bridgerton novels passing through, I thought it would be nice to keep track of them. And the new David Nicholls also clearly falls into the 'romance' category and was actually a very nice read (after the huge disappointment of 2020). He could show Julia Quinn how it's done, but then again, nobody reads the Bridgerton books for their depth of character or literary flourish.

Best 'new' author

It is impossible to chose just 3 of the new authors I enjoyed reading this year, as there were so many. So here comes the full list; I would love to read more from Samantha Harvey, Colm Toibin, Elizabeth O'Connor, Ishi Robinson, Carys Davies, Kathryn Stockett, Paul Lynch, Pip Williams, Alison Espach, Richard Osman and Jonathan Coe. Most of these authors have written at least a couple of books already, so I will be spoiled for choice.

Most disappointing novel

1 Everything is Tuberculosis

2 Mania

3 12 ways to kill your family at Christmas

The first one isn't really a novel, it is yet another non-fiction book by John Green. But in sharp contrast to The Anthropocene Reviewed, I did not like this one. It feels too contrived, with the history of tuberculosis interspersed with a personal human interest story that feels fake or at least exaggerated... It was the most disappointing because I liked his other book so much. 

Mania is a book by Lionel Shriver, who've I've been ambivalent about for some time, but this one was the worst yet. I wrote about why I disliked it earlier. 

The final book on the list is one in a series of 'cosy crime' I've been reading (which I've been wanting to write a post about, but which hasn't happened yet). I thoroughly enjoyed books like The Thursday Murder Club or Proof of my Innocence, but 12 ways to kill your family at Christmas was not cosy, it was filled with horrible characters and a murderer reveal that was so unrealistic and not in line with the rest of the book that after finishing it, I immediately put it on the pile of books for the second-hand bookshop.

Authors I read more than once:

- Julia Quinn (3)

- J.K. Rowling (3)

- Dolly Alderton (2)

- John Green (2)

Some usual suspects on the multiple reads list, but also many new authors I enjoyed reading. This year was a very varied bag, even though I didn't read any Dutch fiction or short story collections. I'm sure 2026 will bring loads more new books, as I continue to reread some old favourites.

Books of 2020

So this was a funny year. Enough has been said about that in many other places, but compiling the list of books I've read this year brought the message home again; the virus and the following lockdown had their effect on the books I've read this year too. Funny how you don't notice that when you're in the middle of things.
I read 29 books this year, which is slightly higher than my average of the past years. Some of these were pretty lengthy, but to compensate I read some really short ones too, so the overall page number should be comparable. The amount of rereads is much higher than it was in other years, and I think there you can see the corona effect; most of the year it was impossible to just wander into a bookshop and browse, so I had to make do with what was already on my bookshelves. 

Anyway, before I dive into the analysis, let's first look at the complete list:

1 Sweet Sorrow

2 Levels of Life

3 Koning van Katoren

4 Northanger Abbey

5 Girl, Woman, Other

6 Het wonder van Frieswijk

7 One Day

8 The Count of Monte Christo

9 Spring

10 Dune

11 The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying up

12 Leah on the Off Beat

13 How to be both

14 Pleidooi tegen enthousiasme

15 Het water komt

16 Piep

17 Wild

18 Eat pray love

19 The Accidental

20 Grote Verwachtingen

21 The Bone Clocks

22 The Testaments

23 Stoorzender

24 The Underground Railroad

25 Het recht van de snelste

26 Just like you

27 Pride & Prejudice and Misletoe

28 Me & Mr Darcy

29 The Rosie Project

Wow, I did not end on a high note, that's for sure. The stream of reread romantic novels stems from the illness I had in the beginning of December, which drove me to reading quick and easy novels. Not that one should make excuses for reading something light every now and then, but seeing three of them grouped together looks a bit sorry.

Anyway, more rereads than ever, as I said; Koning van Katoren, Northanger Abbey, One Day, Eat pray love, The Bone Clocks, and the final 3 romantic novels make 8 rereads in total. Only one 'classic' novel, The Count of Monte Christo, which in page number probably equals all the rereads. Unless you want to count Dune amongst the classics too, of course. Lots of Ali Smith (Spring, How to be both and The Accidental), which is probably no surprise since I put her as my best 'new' author of 2019. I was planning on ready more from Anna Burns too, but I didn't get her first novel until Christmas, so she will have to wait until 2021.

Best English novel

1 Spring

2 How to be both

3 Girl, Woman, Other

This category was pretty hard this year, mainly because I read so many rereads, non-fiction works and plainly bad books. But there were some great ones in there too. 

Spring is of course by the lovely Ali Smith, the third instalment of her seasonal novels. I am very much looking forward to the final novel (which is already out but not in the edition I need to complete my quartet), as I read an interview with her in which she states all the connections between the novels should become clear then (apart from some references to Shakespeare, classical musicians and contemporary artists that she already pointed out in the article and which I've missed so far anyway). How to be both is also by Ali Smith, making it the first time two novels from the same author find their way into my top 3. But Spring is definitely the better of the two. I read Girl, Woman, Other first of all these novels, which puts it in danger of slipping away in the mind, which it sort of did. It was one of the Man Booker prize winners of 2019 (look for the other one down below) so maybe it should have stuck with me more than it did. Anyway, it was still a great novel, a female view on contemporary Britain.

Honourable mention goes out to Just Like You by Nick Hornby, who just didn't make the cut.

I've just had a quick look back, and this is the first year that all novels in my top 3 were written by a woman. This may be a reflection of my changes in reading preferences, or it may be a reflection of me not buying books that have come out by male authors I usually love to read, such as Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell, The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes or State of the Union by Nick Hornby.

Best Dutch novel

The only Dutch novel I read that could go in this category is Koning van Katoren, which is a reread (Het Wonder van Frieswijk is also a Dutch children's book but it is so thin it is more a novella). All the other Dutch books I read this year were non-fiction.

Best classic

1 The Count of Monte Christo

If you only read one classic novel, the outcome is easily predicted. But I really liked this novel, as I've written before; despite the huge number of pages I flew through. Must really read more by Dumas in next year.

Best non-fiction

1 Grote Verwachtingen

2 Piep

3 Stoorzender

So these are all Dutch and wildly differing in their topic and size; Grote Verwachtingen is a pretty sizeable book on the years 2000-2019, which I started somewhere in 2019 and just finished this year. It is a nice read, a good follow-up to In Europa 1900-2000, but it took me a while to get through. Piep on the other hand is a really small collection of stories by biologist Midas Dekkers, in which he combines biology and (Dutch) literature; two of my favourite things. Stoorzender is an autobiography of one my favourite comedians (to name just one of the categories you can put him in) Arjen Lubach. Funnily enough, when the theatres were open, I heard several bits of this book spoken aloud by him without even knowing there was a book coming up. The bits he read out were the best bits of the book, it must be said. 

I have been reading three non-fiction books in English for the last couple of weeks, I put them down because of the illness but will probably finish them sometime early 2021, so next year this list will probably include more English titles.

Best short-story collection

I read no short story collections at all this year, something I just realised when putting in this category. I have several ready to read now, so this will be amended next year, but it is a sad realisation.

Best scifi/fantasy

1 Dune

Again, if you only read one... But this novel too was better than expected; really one of the classics in terms of character/society/plot building.

Best 'new' author

1 Bernardine Evaristo

Again, this was not a good year for finding new novels or authors. But I really liked Girl, Woman, Other from Bernardine Evaristo and have bought several of her older novels. So she is still a good new addition to my literary perspective.

Most disappointing novel

1 The Testaments

2 Sweet Sorrow

3 The Underground Railroad

So this was a toss up between the first two. I've written about my disappointment with The Testaments and Sweet Sorrow before, so I won't repeat myself except to say that Atwood gets first place because I expected so much more from her novel. I've read not-so-great novels by David Nicholls before, but never a novel by Atwood that was this bad. It makes me sad, putting two authors I generally like in the disappointing pile, but I've done the same in 2018 and 2019, so maybe their writing styles and my tastes are starting to grow apart somewhat. The Underground Railroad makes third place not because it was so bad, but because it could have been so much better. Again, it is all to do with the expectations you have; The Nickel Boys was my favourite novel of 2019 and Whitehead was in my list of best 'new' authors.

Honourable mention goes out to Levels of Life by Julian Barnes, which I haven't written about, had actually forgotten I'd read until I started to compile this list and then had to look up for what it was about. This is not a good sign, for a novel and a novelist that I've enjoyed so much before.

Authors I read more than once

Ali Smith (3x)

David Nicholls (2x)

One Day - again

So I first read One Day in October 2015 as part of my 52 book challenge that year. I loved it. I can still remember bits from the novel almost 5 years on, not just the plot but the actual words in order. I can also still remember the text I got from my mother (I gave her the novel translated in Dutch for her birthday) when she'd finished it and was heart-broken in the same way I'd been. So with all this stay-at-home mayhem going on, I decided it was time for some rereading, and I picked One Day up again.
I still loved it. Even knowing what was going to happen, how everything was going to turn out, I loved the story, I loved the characters. Reading it again, I was struck by how cleverly the story turns in on itself, ending just where it began, a writer's trick I missed the first time around. Since finishing it, I've felt slightly sad, like the main characters are people I've come to know and spend part of my life with, and now they've somehow gone and all I have a memories. Bits of the story keep coming back to me, almost visually, as if I really was there and really did see it happen. Jonathan Coe says on the blurb: "You really do put the book down with the hallucinatory feeling that they've become as well known to you as your closest friends" and I couldn't agree more.
I also thought back of my own life 5 years ago and now, comparing the 29 year-old with the 34 year-old, wondering whether I identified more with the characters in the earlier part of the novel than in the second, as I did now. David Nicholls really knows how to write people, to put a person of a certain age and disposition on the page.
Plus, he is very very funny.
So if you haven't already, do read this novel. Ignore Sweet Sorrow, ignore Us, just read One Day.

Sweet Sorrow

For the last couple of years, the first book I've read in a year was the Man Booker winner of the previous year. But since the Man Booker people decided to break with tradition by awarding the award to two novelists, I figured I can break my own little tradition too. Not that I don't want to read both novels, they just haven't found their way into my home yet.

So my first read for this year is, and this is in keeping with tradition, the book I was trying to finish last year but that took me longer than expected. In this case, three whole weeks longer. That is probably not a good omen. In 2015, when I was doing my 52 book challenge, I read three David Nicholls books in one year. I remember loving Starter for 10, crying my eyes out over One Day, and feeling slightly disappointed with Us. But overall, I loved his novels. So when Sweet Sorrow came out, a novel about one summer in which love turns everything around, revolving around Romeo & Juliet no less, I was very eager to read it.
I enjoyed the first chapters very much. The main character, Charlie Lewis, brought to mind the protagonist of Starter for 10; clumsy, disorganised, dishonest, but lovable in his own chaotic ways. Charlie isn't doing all that well in school, is maybe hanging out with the wrong crowd a bit, but is cute in his awkwardness. He stumbles upon a group of fellow teenagers rehearsing Romeo & Juliet and finds himself eager to join because of one girl participating; Fran Fisher. She is the most magical creature in the whole world and he finds himself inexplicably drawn to her. In this first part, there are some great reflective and descriptive pieces of writing. There is one about 'love at first sight', which goes on for a whole page but includes bits like "It's true that I thought she was lovely, but I thought this about someone five to ten times on any given day and even alone, I thought it while watching TV. It's true that during our first encounter a clear, insistent voice in my head had told me concentrate, this will matter, concentrate, and true, too, that part of this was probably just sex, the noise of which underscored almost any conversation that I had with a girl at that time, like a car alarm that no one can turn off."
But as the story progressed, I found myself liking the main character less and less. Sure, he'd had a shitty childhood, and shitty friends, but he is finding a lot of excuses not to be a better person. Not to work at being a better person. He is mostly ashamed of himself, ashamed of his father, ashamed of his theatre friends to his 'real' friends and the other way around; somehow this character is ashamed of his own existence. Without changing anything about it. And all the witty, wry commentary on life and love and teenage drama goes out the window.
Even worse, I found nothing whatsoever appealing about Fran Fisher. Literally nothing. I cannot see how she can be the great love of his life; she is constantly telling him to change himself, to man up, to put in work, she is letting him dance on a string for her by insisting he joins the theatre company before she will even go out for coffee with him. And if he were able to look back on this (the story is told from the perspective of a forty-year-old Charlie) with some detachment or perspective on the whole this would be okay, but he appears to be the exact same character, despite some of his theatre friends pulling out of his rough situation and trying to make something of him. He's never seen doing anything for himself. Neither is Fran, who is preoccupied only with herself. This is why I put the novel down for several days on end: I really couldn't be bothered to find out what would happen to them. On the back of my copy of the novel is a recommendation by Graham Norton, saying "Capturing perfectly a moment in time we've all experienced". I sincerely hope that not everybody has run into this kind of first love, as it will set you up for a life of broken hearts.
Okay, back to the good parts. For there are some. The novel takes place in 1997, with the characters being 16; I was 12 that year and recognise many of the cultural references and ways 'things are done' around that time. The language, as displayed above, is beautiful as ever, the plot lightly follows Romeo & Juliet's story without being too obvious. It is less arduous than Us, but a long way away from the light wit of Starter for 10 and the deep, emotional love of One Day.
With David Nicholl's writing speed, I'm afraid it'll be another four years before he produces another novel. I sincerely hope his next novel is more like his earlier writings.

52 Books Challenge - The lists

Now I'm not normally a person for lists or ratings or 'highlights of the past year' or something, but given that I have 41 books which I can group into a couple of meaningful categories, I'm going to give it a go in this instance. These are the things that popped into my head while looking over the books I'd read this year.

Best English novel
1 The Children Act
2 Black Swan Green
3 One Day
Pretty typical, in a year where I'm reading only new novels, that my favourite novels still come from that group of male British authors that I've loved over the years. Must be my style. Also, the only Ian McEwan novel I read all year (and the first novel I read this year) is still a firm number 1. New to this list is of course Dave Nicholls, who I hadn't read before this year, but am now a really big fan of.

Best Dutch novel
1 Tongkat
2 Kom hier dat ik u kus
3 De Aanslag
This was a pretty hard choice between Tongkat and Kom hier dat ik u kus, because they are both beautiful, wonderful novels in their own way. But Tongkat is just so special, I cannot really get my head around it (I will reread it in the near future).

Best non-fiction (whichever language)
1 Dit kan niet waar zijn
2 My Brief History
3 Gratis geld voor iedereen
Three widely divergent books, but all three good in their own way, and all three containing lots of personal notes/touches/stories of the author.

Best short story collection
1 Speaking with the angel
2 The Beautifull Cassandra
3 The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
I didn't read that many short story collections, and none of them were really brilliant, but still, a top 3. Also, my only Jane Austen reading of this year is in there.

Best WWI/II novel
1 The Narrow Road to the Deep North
2 All Quiet on the Western Front
3 Slaughterhouse 5
As always, I read a lot of War novels this year, and some stand out. The Narrow Road... won the Man Booker for a reason; it is a beautifully written, deeply haunting novel about WWII in Asia. Nr 2 and 3 are classics in the genre, and for a good reason. I've said it before, and I will say it again; if everybody would read these horribly fantastic novels, no one would ever start a war again.

Best comic novel
1 Shades of Grey
2 Funny Girl
3 Starter for Ten
I don't often read funny novels, but when I do, they're usually by Nick Hornby or Jasper Fforde, who find themselves high on this list. And then there's another Dave Nicholls, of course.

Classics (whichever language)
1 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
2 Brideshead Revisited
3 De Aanslag
Brideshead Revisited and De Aanslag are technically both also WWII novels, but when looking at them as classics, they somehow rank higher than some of the other WW novels. And the John le Carre novel just blew me away - I will definitely read more by him in 2016.

Most disappointing novels
1 The Rosie Effect
2 All the Light we cannot See
3 The Book of Lost Things
Not everything was good. I was really looking forward to The Rosie Effect, because I loved The Rosie Project, but this was one of the most disappointing sequels I've ever read. All the Light we cannot See won the Pullizer, but really, it's such a hyped-up American WWII novel, I couldn't care for it in any way. And The Book of Lost Things is one of the worst fairy tale retellings I've ever read. If you want to read a good one, go for The Sleeper and The Spindle (my only Neil Gaiman novel, which I couldn't fit anywhere else).

And to complete the list craze, not a top 3 but another neat list:

Authors I read more than once
- David Mitchell (3x)
- Dave Nicholls (3x)
- Rutger Bregman (2x)
- John le Carre (2x)
- Harry Mulisch (2x)
- Nick Hornby (2x)
Again, some of my all time favourites are also recurring reads. I could do you a top 3 of Mitchell novels (Black Swan Green, The Bone Clocks, Number9dream) and Dave Nicholls (One Day, A Starter for Ten, Us), but that would be stretching things.

52 Book Challenge - October

So this month was the worst so far, what with moving house and all the other things (mainly work and emotions) that kept me busy. Here's what I'm at now:

35 The Book of Lost Things - John Connolly
36 One Day - David Nicholls

So the first one was in the Recommended by Staff section of the Waterstone's in Amsterdam. A former fellow student of English has been lucky enough to find work there, and she recommended the novel, so I simply had to read it. It's about a small boy in WWII London who finds a way into another world, one where fairytales are real - even if with somewhat different endings and morals than the real ones. I loved the premise (I've actually written quite a lot of stories that follow a similar vein, but then again, haven't we all?), and most of the first part when he was still in our world, but once he 'fell through' it all became a bit too obvious and flat. What with his unfailing abilities to see through things no one else can understand, presumed-dead characters turning up in the nick of time to save the day, and the 'face your fears' moral drawn out a bit too long, it became quite unoriginal and frankly boring. With so many variants of this idea roaming around on the Internet, it's almost a shame that this is the one that got published
Now One Day, my third David Nicholls novel, was something of a surprise in that I didn't see the 'Signed by the author' sticker when I bought it in London (also at Waterstone's) last July. So it was nice to see the hasty scribble on the title page; it is one of only a few signed books I own. The book itself is great; I'd say it's Nicholls's best, better than the much-acclaimed (or hyped) Us or Starter for Ten, which I loved but which lacks the depth of One Day. Again, the premise is straightforward: two people are followed on the same day for 20 years, starting on the 15th of July 1988 and ending in 2007. In that period, they go from being 22 to being 42, and the biggest and most important part of their lives take place. As with Us, the ending is not what you'd expect; I won't spoil, but the 500 Days of Summer warning "This is not a love story" should be heeded. The writing is beautiful; very funny but also very meaningful, with well-developed characters, scenes and feelings set out in just a few words. You really get to know the two protagonists; who they are, how they differ, why they do what they do, and also why their lives keep revolving around one another. David Nicholls is starting to become one of those authors who I want to read every single novel of, and I'm already quite some way along. If you're in for something new, try him. Stay away from Us, and read this one instead.
Looking at the bigger picture; I'm 36 books down and it's already week 44. That means I'm 8 books behind, with the craziness of NaNoWriMo looming. I'd be very very surprised if I manage to read 52 new books this year, but who knows what will happen, maybe a literary miracle!

52 book challenge - July

So I'm back from London, the City that... has a lot of rain? It doesn't really have a snappy nickname, like The Big Apple or The City of Lights. Apparently, the most-used nickname is "The Big Smoke", which may or may not be very apt, as I couldn't really see any smoke through all the rain.

Anyway, we spent a lot of time in museums, and not a lot of time reading, so my book list didn't really grow that much during this particular holiday. I'll have to make that up during our camping trip to France in the coming weeks.
The standings are as follows:
24 The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
25 Starter for Ten - David Nicholls
26 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John le Carre
27 De Aanslag (The Assault) - Harry Mulisch

I am nearly finished with Speaking with the Angel, a short story collection by Nick Hornby, but I don't think I'll finish that this month. But, still, I'm more than halfway! And today's week number is 31, so I'm still just four books behind, which I can easily catch up on.
Some varied reading this month. The Talented Mr Ripley should probably be seen as a classic, as it is from 1955 and hasn't really been out of print since. I hadn't read any Ripley novels before and fell asleep during the film, but the story gripped me. I'm not really into crime novels, but this one had a nice psychological edge to it that made it interesting. Also, part of it takes place in Venice, which seems to be a favourite place for lots of literary characters these days (the protagonists of Us and The Discovery of Heaven also find themselves in Venice at some point).
Starter for Ten is something completely different, but one of my favourite books of those I've read so far this year. I'm a big fan of University Challenge and had already seen the film (with James McAvoy! And Benedict Cumberbatch! And they're so young!), so I was familiar with the plot, but Nicholls writing style is just the best. It is a very comical story, but has a very serious class-conscious undertone that comes out better in the novel.
Another novel I'd already seen the film of was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, my second John le Carre novel. Now I didn't really understand or follow the film properly, so I was counting on le Carre's beautiful writing style (as discovered in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold), and it was another gem. The first few chapters leave you utterly confused, as he starts in the middle of everything and doesn't explain who people are or where they are or what they are doing or why, but slowly you get to discover all the pieces and put them together. It's written like the puzzle George Smiley has to construct: who is the mole hiding in the British secret service? Somehow you do figure it out just slightly ahead of Smiley, so you can feel a bit smug about yourself even while you are wondering how you ever got there.
And finally I read one of the great Dutch classics, The Assault, by Harry Mulisch. I couldn't really get through his The Discovery of Heaven, but The Assault is much thinner and much better written. I won't give away too much, but it's about the Second World War and it's kind of another puzzle, only this time, the protagonist doesn't really want to solve it, he just sort of gets pulled in. Most of my classmates read this book in secondary school, but I was trying to be anti-snob by not reading any novels by Mulisch or his famous contemporaries. Which leaves me in the happy position of being able to discover and read them, and probably appreciate them better, now.

So, just one more week, and then we're off to the south of France to do some camping, and a looot of catch-up reading!

52 books challenge - June

Wow, is this year going faster than other years, or what? I feel like May has just begun (I've just come back from China), and suddenly it's almost July already! We're bracing ourselves for some of the hottest days to come this year (30+ temperatures, the whole country is in an uproar) and in the meantime I even managed to read some books!
19 De vegetarier (The Vegetarian) - Han Kang
20 The assassination of Margaret Thatcher - Hilary Mantel
21 Us - David Nicholls
22 Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
23 Gooseberries - Anton Chekov

I alllmost managed to finish The Talented Mr Ripley as well, but then sleep overtook me, so that will have to go in next month's list.
But considering that the last full week of June was last week (week 26), and I'm now at 23 books, I seem to have actually caught up by one book! I am now only 3 books behind!
So I read some wildly differing books this month. The Vegetarian is by a South Korean writer who I'd never heard of, and it is a very beautiful but also slightly disturbing book about a woman who decides to stop eating meat, and the events that unravel because of that choice. It makes you wonder whether anyone is actually in their right mind at any time. I feel that Us is this years The Rosie Project: the book about a scientifically minded man (first-person narrator) who falls in love with this artsy girl but can't quite get the affection across because of his slightly autistic nature. Only in Us, the couple are actually married (much to the surprise of the protagonist) and their marriage is falling apart. Also, Us has a wonderful sense of humour, which makes me want to read more books by Nicholls. Then there was Gooseberries, short stories by Chekov, to complement the short stories by Hilary Mantel. And finally Black Swan Green, of which I've written a lot already.
Hopefully the approaching summer weather will mean lots of lazy afternoons filled with reading and eating home-grown strawberries...