Books Read in 2017

Surprisingly, I read/listened to 53 books last year! Usually I annotate each one, but in the interests of time, this year I've only commented on a few.

Key:
* Recommended
**Read these first!
' Disappointing

Adult Fiction:
**Bel Canto (Ann Patchett)

**All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr)

The Shell Collector:  Stories (Anthony Doerr)

**The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)

*Water For Elephants (Sara Gruen) (I really enjoyed the audio version. The old man had the BEST gravelly, grumpy, petulant character voice. What a performance!) 

**The End of the Affair (Graham Greene) (Why have I never heard of this extraordinary novel before?? I loved the audio version, read by Colin Firth.)

*The Museum of Extraordinary Things (Alice Hoffman)

The Red Garden (Alice Hoffman)

Turtle Moon (Alice Hoffman)

Faithful (Alice Hoffman)

Longbourn (Jo Baker)  (Interesting parallel story to Pride and Prejudice, told about the serving staff.)

'The Nest (Cynthia Sweeney)

Mysteries:
Partners in Crime (Agatha Christie)
Spider's Web (Agatha Christie)
A Rule Against Murder (Louise Penny)
The Cruelest Month (Louise Penny)
The Brutal Telling (Louise Penny)
Bury Your Dead (Louise Penny)
A Trick of the Light (Louise Penny)
The Beautiful Mystery (Louise Penny)
How the Light Gets In (Louise Penny)
The Nature of the Beast (Louise Penny)
Glass Houses (Louise Penny)
Death and the Dancing Footman (Ngaio Marsh)
'Murder in the Dark (Kerry Greenwood)
*Talking about Detective Fiction (P.D. James) (essays from lectures she's given)

Children's/YA Fiction:

*From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (E.L. Konigsberg)

*My Side of the Mountain (Jean Craighead George)

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (John Boyne)

*Entwined (Heather Dixon)

Theater Shoes (Noel Streatfeild)

Ghost (Jason Reynolds)

Historical/Biographical Nonfiction:
*The Devil in the White City:  Murder, Magic & Madness and the Fair That Changed America (Erik Larson)
*In the Garden of Beasts:  Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin (Erik Larson)
*The Girls of Murder City : Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago (Douglas Perry)
The Churchills:  In Love and War (Mary S. Lovell)
Girl Waits With Gun (Amy Stewart)
The Man He Became:  How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency (James Tobin)
Martin Luther (Eric Metaxes)

Alexander Hamilton:  The Outsider (Jean Fritz)

'The Great Fire (Jim Murphy)

'Traveling With Pomegranates (Sue Monk Kidd)

Nonfiction:
The Meaning of Flowers (Gretchen Scoble)
How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age (based on Dale Carnegie's work)
The Successful Novelist (David Morrell)
Scarcity : Why Having Too Little Means So Much (Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir)

Theatercraft:

*Notes on Directing (Frank Hauser and Russell Reich)

*Audition (Michael Shurtleff)

Conversations with Choreographers (Svetlana McLee Grody and Dorothy Daniels Lister)

Plays:

*A Raisin in the Sun (Lorraine Hansberry) (loved this as a dramatized audiobook)

The Children's Hour (Lillian Hellman)

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Edward Albee)

**William Shakespeare's Star Wars:  Verily, A New Hope (Ian Doescher)

If you'd like to see other year-end book lists, visit the Saturday Review of Books, Special Edition, A List of Book Lists at the blog Semicolon.

Happy reading in 2018!