Books I Have Read in 2009

(in red: I really enjoy it!)

January 2009
1. Travels with a Tangerine – Tim Mackintosh-Smith
2. Pretty Birds – Scott Simon
3. Travels with Charley – John Steinbeck
4. The Yacoubian Building – Ala Aswani
5. The Amber Spyglass – Philip Pullman
6. Hemingway’s Chair – Michael Palin
7. The Flamboya Tree: Memories of a Mother’s Wartime Courage – Clara Olink Kelly
8. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic – Alison Bechdel

Febraury 2009
9. Everything is Illuminated
10. The Progress Paradox
11. The Goose Girl – Shannon Hale
12. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (abridged)
13. Wind Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
14. Scribbling the Cat – Alexandra Fuller
15. The Stupidest Angel – Christopher Moore
16. The Swallows of Kabul – Yasmina Khadra

March 2009
17. Round Ireland with a Fridge – Tony Hawks
18. The Teahouse Fire – Ellis Avey
19. The Street of a Thousand Blossoms – Gail Tsukiyama
20. Secret ingredients: the New Yorker book of food and drink – David Remnick
21. For Tibet, With Love – Isabel Losada
22. One Hundred Girls’ Mother – Lenore Carroll
23. There’s no Toilet Paper… on the Road Less Traveled
24. A Woman’s Europe
25. Rumspringa… To Be or Not to Be Amish – Tom Shachtman
26. Gathering Blue – Lois Lowry
27. There and Back Again – Sean Astin
28. Cooked– Jeff Henderson

April 2009
29. Modoc
30. The Tale of Despereau
31. Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing – Andrew Weil
32. Lili – Annie Wang
33. The Last Apprentice – Joseph Delaney
34. The Lace Reader
35. The Confessions of Max Tivoli – Andrew Sean Greer
36. The Gravity of Sunlight – Rosa Shang
37. No Time for Goodbye – Linwood Barclay
38. Fragrant Rice – Janet De Neefe
39. In Watermelon Sugar
40. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio – Terry Ryan

May 2009
41. Life After Death – Deprak Chopra
42. New Habits – Isabel Losada
43. Lost on Planet China – J. Maarten Troost
44. Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone – Rajiv Chandrasekaran
45. Road Map to Holland: How I Found My Way Through My Son’s First Two Years With Down Syndrome – Jennifer Graf Groneberg
46. The Garden Spell
47. The Big Over Easy – Jasper Fforde
48. The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
49. Persepolis
50. Shakespeare: The World as Stage – Bill Bryson
51. When Fox is A Thousand
52. Slow Food Nation
53. No Place Like Home – Mary Higgins Clark
54. True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart – Thich Nhat Hanh
55. Kickboxing Geisha

June 2009
56. Black Wave – John and Jean Silverwood
57. Heir Apparent – Vivian Vande Velde
58. Krik? Krak!
59. Japanland: A Year in Search of Wa – Karin Muller
60. She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders – Jennifer Finney Boylan
61. Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas – Jamaica Kincard
62. Femme D’Adventure – Jessica Maxwell
63. Ender in Exile – Orson Scott Card
64. The Star Beast – Robert A. Heinlein

July 2009
65. Cork Boat – John Pollack
66. Ellen Foster – Kaye Gibbons
67. Organising from the Inside Out – Julie Morgenstern
68. Better – Atul Gawande
69. Victoria: The Romance of Hats – Victoria
70. Confessions of a Werewolf Supermodel – Ronda Thompson
71. He Died with a Felafel in His Hand – John Birmingham
72. Circling the Tortilla Dragon – Ray Gonzalez
73. The Songcatcher – Sharyn McCrumb
74. Meat: A Love Story
75. I Feel Pain in My Neck – Nora Ephron

August 2009
76. A Long Way Gone – Ismael Beah
77. The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
78. Penelopaid – Margaret Atwood
79. Maus – Art Spigelman
80. Lost and Found – Carolyn Parkhurst
81. It’s Okay to Miss the Bed on the First Jump – John O’Hurly
82. Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
83. The Ties that Bind
84. Gossamer – Luis Lowry
85. My ‘Dam Life – Sean Conroy

September 2009
86. Come Back to Afghanistan
87. Stalin’s Nose – Rory Maclean
88. Not on the Label – Felicity Lawrence
89. The Geography of Bliss – Eric Weiner
90. Tales from Nowhere
91. Shoot the Moon – Billie Letts
92. Confession of a Jane Austen Addict
93. How Starbucks Save My Life – Michael Gates Gill
94. Autumn Bridge – Takashi Matsuoka

October 2009
95. Restaurant at the End of Universe
96. Hitching Rides with Buddha – Will Ferguson
97. Waiter Rant – The Waiter
98. Nickel and Dimed – Barbara Ehrenreich
99. Nest in a Cage
100. Raising a Reader – Jennie Nash
101. Benji – Allison Thomas
102. Cat’s Tales
103. Pobby and Dingan – Ben Rice
104. The Orphan Calf and the Magical Cheetah
105. 3rd Degree – James Patterson
106. Freakonomics
107. Hoot – Carl Hiaasen
108. The Camel Bookmobile – Masha Hamilton
109. Flower – Irene N. Watts
110. Sarah – J. T. LeRoy
111. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – Ian Fleming
112. Mr. Bean’s Diary – Rowan Atkinson
113. The Secret School – Avi
114. Naked Pictures of Famous People – Jon Stewart

November 2009
115. Shadow of the Hegemon – Orson Scott Card
116. Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way – Ruth Reichl
117. My Miserable Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy
118. The Life You Can Save
119. They Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
120. Timbuktu: The Sahara’s Fabled City of Gold – Marq de Villiers, Sheila Hirtle
121. A War of Gifts – Orson Scott Card
122. Out Stealing Horses
123. The Song of Hiawatha – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
124. The Seashell on the Mountaintop
125. March – Geraldine Brook
126. The Anatomist
127. Crescent Moon – Haruko Iida
128. Never Better: Stories from Lake Wobegon – Garrison Keillor

December 2009
129. I, The Divine – Rabih Alameddine
130. Bollywood Beauty
131. The Alchemyst
132. Memories of My Melanchony Whores
133. Thirteen Moon – Charles Fraizer
134. A Dirty Job – Christopher Moore
135. Happy Hour at Casa Dracula – Marta Acosta
136. The Friendly Snowflake – M. Scott Peck
137. Chasing the Sea
138. 6th Target – James Patterson
139. The Persian Requiem – Simin Daneshvar
140. Darwin: A Graphic Biography – Simon Gurr & Eugene Byrne

My Top Ten of 2009

(in no strict order):
Wind Up Bird Chronicle
The Amber Spyglass
Ender in Exile
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone
The Confessions of Max Tivoli
Krik? Krak!
Hitching Rides with Buddha
Persepolis
The Geography of Bliss
Autumn Bridge

Some Useless Statistics:
For year 2009 –
Bookcrossing Books: 114 (81.4%) Non-BC Books: 26
Fiction: 76 Non Fiction: 64 (45.7%)

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