It felt like I spent a lot of time reading in 2004, yet my list of books read isn’t any longer than last year’s list. On the other hand, this does not include countless magazines and unfinished dabbles into various anthologies and journals.
And as with most things, it’s the quality that counts, not the quantity.
As such, here is the list (alphabetically, by title) of books I read and finished in 2004:
• Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, by A.J. Liebling
• Burning Ground, by Pearl Luke
• Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck
• Daisy Miller, by Henry James
• East is East, by T.C. Boyle
• In Search of Stupidity, by Merrill R. Chapman
• In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman
• Mordecai & Me, by Joel Yanofsky
• Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood
• Prague, by Arthur Phillips
• Seventeen Tomatoes, by Jaspreet Singh
• Someday, Even Trevi Will Crumble, by Neal McDevitt
• The Child in Time, by Ian McEwan
• The Daydreamer, by Ian McEwan
• The End of Elsewhere, by Taras Grescoe
• The Fixer, by Joe Sacco
• The Great Game, by Frederick P. Hitz
• The New Yorker Stories, by Morley Callaghan
• The Sky Unwashed, by Irene Zabytko
• The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell
• This Year in Jerusalem, by Mordecai Richler
• Traveler’s Tales Spain: True Stories, ed. by Lucy McCauley
• War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges
• While I Was Gone, by Sue Miller
• Youth, by J.M. Coetzee