I don't seem to have read quite as many books this year as I normally do, averaging about one a month, although some of them were quite lengthy I suppose.
Between the Woods and the Water/The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor
I started the year where I had finished the last, on a bridge across the Danube between Slovakia and Hungary, following a young Patrick Leigh Fermor on his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople through interwar Central Europe, and then onto Greece and the monasteries of Mount Athos.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
I first saw the film of this years ago, and finally got round to reading the novel it's based on.
The West Pier/Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse/Unknown Assailant by Patrick Hamilton
The final novels by one of my favourite writers, published in the early to mid fifties before his decline and death from alcoholism, about a psychopathic conman moving around southern England between the wars.
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
Another TV adaptation I watched years ago where I finally got round to reading the novel it's based on. I especially enjoyed the description of the countryside around the Malvern Hills where it's set.
Oliver Twist/A Tale of Two Cities/Barnaby Rudge/Nicholas Nickleby/The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
Or How I Completed My Reading of the Works of Mister Charles Dickens, Including His Final, and Unfinished, Novel.
A Shabby Genteel Story by William Makepeace Thackeray
Another unfinished novel, about the characters inhabiting a run down boarding house in the seaside resort of Margate one winter in the 1830s.
You've made good use of 2021, Matthew !
ReplyDeleteWhat did you make of Edwin Drood ?
Very atmospheric in its descriptions of the Medway towns and North Kent coast, and semiautobiographical in relation to Dickens walking across that landscape.
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