Year End Chatter or The 2010 Reading List

December is when the whole world is doing best of lists. Each day a list or many catch my attention. But I don't read that many lists because the pleasure of a list is in making one for yourself. My must read list in 2009 helped me not miss some very good books. It provided me with the impetus to get the books I'd listed and read them because I'd put the list out in the ether and hey if you are like me that makes you really accountable to the nameless in ether.

So I made a 2010 must read list. These are works I'd like to spend time with over the year and in a way I think these books worked their way into this list without me looking for them in any determined manner. Each of these titles surfaced several times in my various reading material in the past year or so.

The 2010 Reading List:

1. Serendipities: Language and Lunacy - Umberto Eco
2. The Infinities - John Banville
3. Edward Burne-Jones: A Biography - Penelope Fitzgerald
4. The Bookshop - Penelope Fitzgerald
5. About Looking - John Berger
6. Samuel Johnson's essays in The Rambler - recommended eloquently by Andrew O'Hagan in NYRB
7. A Sentimental Education - Gustave Flaubert
8. Speak, Memory - Vladimir Nabokov
9. Brooklyn - Colm Toibin
10. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
11. We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
12. Out f Sheer Rage - Wrestling with D.H.Lawrence - Geoff Dyer

At the moment I am quite excited by this list. Come January and I'd choose the first of them. Rather I'd read number 1. Because who says you need to wait till January to choose.