I’m always interested in what books people like or dislike, so here’s my list of 34 books read in 2017 and a brief verdict. Not so many compared to 2016 as that total came to 46 books. But who’s counting?
(* Indicates it has been read before.)
Five stars
The Human Factor, Graham Greene, 1978
Comanches: The History of a People, T. R. Fehrenbach, 1974
Catiline’s War, The Jugurthine War, Histories, Sallust, 1st cent. BC
The Campaigns of Alexander, Arrian, 2nd cent. AD
A Dead Man in Deptford, Anthony Burgess, 1993
Grendel, John Gardner, 1971
The Rise of the Roman Empire, Polybius, 2nd cent. BC
Alan Partridge: Nomad, Neil Gibbons, Ron Gibbons and Steve Coogan, 2016
Rome and Italy, Livy, c. 30 BC
Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr, 1964
The War with Hannibal, Livy, c. 30 BC
Rome and the Mediterranean, Livy, c. 30 BC
Hamlet, Shakespeare, c. 1599-1602*
Four stars
Valdez is Coming, Elmore Leonard, 1970
Cotton Comes to Harlem, Chester Himes, 1965
The Jewish State, Theodor Herzl, 1896
Hard To Be a God, Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, 1964
The Night Manager, John Le Carré, 1993
Alfred the Great, Asser (et al), 893
Pagan Babies, Elmore Leonard, 2000
Hello America, J. G. Ballard, 1981*
Misery, Stephen King, 1987
Three stars
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolome De Las Casas, 1542
Silas Marner, George Eliot, 1861*
The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley, 1954
Travels With My Aunt, Graham Greene, 1969
Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett, 1929
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rovelli, 2014
Look Back in Anger, John Osborne, 1956
A Maze of Death, Philip K. Dick, 1970
Urban Code, Anne Mikoleit and Moritz Puerckhauer, 2011
The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank, 1947
Two stars
N/A
One star
Swastika Night, Murray Constantine (Katharine Burdekin), 1937
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories, Various, 2016
