What I Read in 2016

Here it is, the complete list! While I will likely never again reach the reading heights of 2015, this was a good year, book-wise. Hope it was the same for you!

Fiction:

Top Ten:

1. The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt (Back Bay Books, 2013)
2. The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene (Penguin Books, 1981)
3. Wenjack – Joseph Boyden (Hamish Hamilton, 2016)
4. The Narrow Road to the Deep North – Richard Flanagan (Vintage International, 2015)
5. The High Mountains of Portugal – (Yann Martel (Knopf Canada, 2016)
6. Commonwealth – Ann Patchett (Harper, 2016)
7. Daydreams of Angels – Heather O’Neill (Harper Collins, 2015)
8. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace (Back Bay Books, 2006)
9. Cutting for Stone – Abraham Verghese (Vintage Canada, 2010)
10. The Secret History – Donna Tartt (Vintage Contemporaries, 1992)

And the rest…(alphabetical by author’s last name)

11. Fifteen Dogs – André Alexis (Coach House Books, 2015)
12. A God in Ruins – Kate Atkinson (Doubleday Canada, 2015)
13. The Heart Goes Last – Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday Canada, 2015)
14. The Bellman – Heidi Barnes (Vireo Rare Bird Books, 2016)
15.The Secret Chord – Geraldine Brooks (Viking, 2015
16. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes (Penguin Books, 2003)
(translated by John Rutherford)
17. The Nest – Cynthia D’Aprix-Sweeney (Harper Avenue, 2016)
18. Waiting for the Cyclone – Leesa Dean (Brindle & Glass, 2016)
19. The Wonder – Emma Donoghue (Harper Collins, 2016)
20. A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan (Anchor Books, 2010)
21. Swimming Lessons – Claire Fuller (House of Anansi Press, 2017)
22. Paper Towns – John Green (Penguin Books, 2008)
23. The Humans – Matt Haig (Harper Collins, 2013)
24. Before I Fall – Noah Hawley (Grand Central Publishing, 2016)
25. His Whole Life –  Elizabeth Hay (Emblem Editions, 2015)
26. The Painted Kiss – Elizabeth Hickey (Atria Books, 2005)
27. A Long Way Down – Nick Hornby (Riverhead Books, 2005)
28. The Vegetarian – Han Kang (Portobello Books, 2015)
(translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith)
29. Trying to Save Piggy Sneed – John Irving (Arcade Publishing, 1996)
30. Flight Behavior – Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial, 2012)
31. A Separate Peace – John Knowles (Bantam Books, 1998)
32. Music for Wartime – Rebecca Makkai (Viking, 2015)
33. A Constellation of Vital Phenomenon – Anthony Marra (Vintage Canada, 2014)
34. Transatlantic – Colum McCann (Harper Perennial, 2013)
35. Thirteen Ways of Looking –Colum McCann (Harper Collins, 2015)
36. The Company She Keeps – Mary McCarthy (Penguin Books, 1966)
37. The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be – Farley Mowat (Pyramid Books, 1968)
38. The Little Red Chairs – Edna O’Brien (Little, Brown and Company, 2016)
39. By Gaslight – Steven Price (McClelland & Stewart, 2016)
40. Monkey Beach – Eden Robinson (Vintage Canada, 2001)
41. Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson (Harper Perennial, 2005)
42. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy (Viking Canada, 1997)
43. Today Will Be Different – Maria Semple (Little Brown, 2016)
44. The Trees – Ali Shaw (Bloomsbury, 2016)
45. I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith (Red Fox, 2001)
46. Missing, Presumed – Susie Steiner (Harper Collins, 2016)
47. Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel (Harper Avenue, 2014)
48. Modern Lovers – Emma Straub (Random House, 2016)
49. On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light – Cordelia Strube (ECW Press, 2016)
50. The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories – Leo Tolstoy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)
(translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)
51. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist – Sunil Yapa (Lee Boudreau Books, 2016)
52. Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates (Vintage Contemporaries, 2008)

Non-Fiction:
(alphabetical by author’s last name)

53. Six Walks in the Fictional Wood – Umberto Eco (Harvard University Press, 1994)
54. A Tale of Three Kings – Gene Edwards (Tyndale House Publishers, 1992)
55. Prayer – Timothy Keller (Dutton, 2014)
56. Furiously Happy – Jenny Lawson (Flatiron Books, 2015)
57. Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer – C.S. Lewis (Mariner Books, 2012)
58. A Grief Observed – C.S. Lewis (Faber & Faber, 2013)
59. But You Did Not Come Back – Marceline Loridan-Ivens (Penguin, 2016) (translated by Sandra Smith)
60. Last Child in the Woods – Richard Louv (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2008)
61. The Dirty Life – Kristin Kimball (Scribner, 2010)
62. The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers – Elizabeth Pantley (McGraw Hill, 2005)
63. The Givenness of Things – Marilynne Robinson (HarperCollins, 2015)
64. An Invisible Thread – Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski (Howard Books, 2011)
65. Half Broke Horses – Jeannette Walls (Scribner, 2009)
66. Rumours of Another World – Philip Yancey (Zondervan, 2004)

Children’s:

67. Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library – Chris Grabenstein (Yearling, 2014)
68. The Adventures of Miss Petitfour – Anne Michaels, illustrated by Emma Block (Tundra Books, 2015)
69. Pax – Sara Pennypacker (illustrated by Jon Klassen) (Balzer + Bray, 2016)
70. At the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness – Andrew Peterson (Water Brook Press, 2008)
71. The Fox at the Manger – P.L. Travers (Virago Modern Classics, 2015)

Re-read:

72. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (An Airmont Classic, 1963)
73. A Tangled Web – L.M. Montgomery (Bantam Books, 1989)
74. The Blue Castle – L.M. Montgomery (McClelland & Stewart, 1989)
75. We Should All Be Feminists – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Anchor Books, 2014)
76. Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut (Vintage, 2000)

The Year in Review:

• As always, my fiction reading far outstrips my non-fiction. Only 18% of my 2016 reads were non-fiction
• Only five of those non-fiction reads were theological/religious in nature. (Maybe six, if you include Marilynne Robinson’s essays.) This was less than previous years but based on my To Read list for 2017, that may look different next year.
• 23% of my reads were from Canadian authors. Most of them were very good. We’re a country of good books.
• My male to female author ratio was pretty even but female authors did win out this year.
• I only read five books translated from other languages. This is something I continue to need to work on.
• I read five books that would best be described as “tomes” (ie: 500+ pages). I’m happy to see that each was worth the time invested, for various reasons.
• I reviewed 80% of my 2016 reads here on the blog. That’s definitely my best percentage since I started sharing book reviews and I hope to maintain and even increase that number in 2017.

What about you? What did 2016 look like for you in books? What was the best book you read this year? Or the worst? What have you read from my list and what are you looking forward to reading in 2017?

Happy New Year!