some books from my 2008 reading list

I am looking through the list of books that I read last year; 32 titles in all. Some I have very little recollection of except whether I enjoyed the experience of reading them or not! I read the two Australian 'must-reads' of the year - Tim Winton's Breath and The Spare Room by Helen Garner, but I was more attracted to meaty tomes from the nineteenth century. In May/June Dicken's Bleak House kept me company through many a cold night, closely followed by Middlemarch. Later in the year Vanity Fair was my companion for several weeks. My least favourite book of the year was the Booker winner, The Gathering by Anne Enright. It was particularly disappointing because I had heard the writer interviewed on the ABC radio show The Bookshow and she sounded like a real hoot. Rarely do I not finish a book but I gave up on that one as I found it dreary and didn't like any of the characters and couldn't stand the style of writing. I did however thoroughly enjoy The Forsythe Sago Vol 1 by John Galsworthy - it saw me through a period of back pain nicely! Another book I didn't finish (though almost struggled through it) was As I Lay Dying by Faulkner - his writing was lauded by one of the members on The First Tuesday Book Club so I thought I would fill that particular gap in my reading history, but definitely not to my taste.

And the cream of the crop were: Reflections on a Mountain Lake by TenzinPalmo the English Tibetan Buddhist nun who meditated for many years in a cave in the Himalayas. For anyone wanting a brilliantly written explanation of Buddhist thought and practice this is the book I would recommend most highly - and I've read a few!!

The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm. In this book Janet Malcolm investigates the issue of biography and asks important questions about the practice. She does this while writing her interpretation of events in the life (and afterlife) of the poet Sylvia Plath. She asks whether biography can ever really tell the truth about a life. Unputdownable!

The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright.
Justin Cartwright is one of my favourite authors and this book deserves a whole post to itself! Clever, insightful, full or wisdom, a great story, wonderfully written.