2016 wasn’t a great year for reading.  Having said back in January that I would follow my nose when it came to choosing books, it turned out my nose wasn’t always reliable.  Looking back on the reviews written for this blog, I find I simply chose too many books that proved to be disappointing and mediocre.  Ho hum.  I hope for more discernment next year.

Just as I expected, fiction dominated, accounting for 80% of everything I read.  Several good novels are on the list – Addlands by Tom Bullough and Helen Dunmore’s Exposure, for example – and one very good one (Mothering Sunday), but many were fodder, entirely forgettable.  Biography was more rewarding in 2016 with outstanding accounts of the lives of Ted Hughes and Kenneth Clark among my favorites of the year.

A truly great book changes you forever, altering your perspective and outlook or moving you intensely. I was privileged to read one of those in 2016, Night by Elie Wiesel.  That, without question, was my book of the year.

Now it’s time for some reading resolutions for 2017.  Braver choices.  More unknown and young writers, voices from other worlds. Maybe it’s the year for some of the great authors of the past whom I’ve wholly or largely neglected: Thomas Mann, Evelyn Waugh, Tolstoy, Katherine Mansfield, or Virginia Woolf?  Isn’t it finally time to read Proust?  Less fiction, and especially contemporary fiction, more biography, history, and poetry.  Watch this space!