Reading done in 2010

I read 43 books this year! This year’s number is a massive improvement over last year’s (20).

Best book: Light in August by William Faulkner

I stand in awe of Faulkner’s florid and powerful prose:

He seemed to himself to be standing just and rocklike and with neither haste nor anger while on all sides the sluttishness of weak human men seethed in a long sigh of terror about the actual representative of the wrathful and retributive Throne

Worst book: Second Degree — One Crazy Year at IIM-A by Prashant John

Badly written. Parts of it are so amateurish one wonders if it was ghost-written by a precocious  schoolboy.

Fiction:

1. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
2. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
3. Harry Potter and the Deathy Hallows by J. K. Rowling
4. Metamorphosis and other stories by Franz Kafka
5. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
6. Wheels by Arthur Hailey
7. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
8. 2 states by Chetan Bhagat
9. Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry
10. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. Airport by Arthut Hailey
12. To Sir, With Love by E. R. Braithwaite
13. Second Degree — One Crazy Year at IIM-A by Prashant John (absolutely mediocre writing – do not buy)
14. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
15. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
16. The Class by Erich Segal
17. Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
18. Atonement by Ian McEwan
19. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larrson
20. The Color of Law by Mark Gimenez
21. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
22. Alibi for a judge by Henry Cecil
23. The Bourne Ultimatum by Robert Ludlum
24. Potrait of a judge by Henry Cecil
25. Big Money by P. G. Wodehouse
26. The Fakir by Sunil Gangopadhyay
27. Light in August by William Faulkner
28. Youth by J. M. Coetzee
29. Bullet Park by John Cheever
30. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
31. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
32. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Biographies/Autobiographies:

1. Shakespeare by Bill Bryson
2. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
3. The story of my life by Hellen Keller
4. Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

Plays:

1. Death of a salesman by Arthur Miller
2. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Graphic novels:

1. WE3 by Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
2. 365 Samurai and a Few Bowls of Rice by J. P. Kalonji
3. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Technical:

1. Microsoft SQL Server 2008: T-SQL Fundamentals by Itzik Ben-Gan

Miscellaneous:

1. How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster

Advertisement