Well, Let's Try This Again. :O)

It's been a long time since I've posted, but it's a new year and a good time to start again. Despite the fact that I haven't been writing about my reading, I have been keeping up with it busily and happily all year. I achieved my goal of reading 55 books in 2013, and I encountered some fantastic reads along the way. The picture above is a partial stack of about two-thirds of the books I read this year. The remainder not shown were electronic books, library books, or given away to friends. My reading this year tended to cluster in the areas of literary fiction, European history, autobiography and biography, and even a few young adult novels.

The complete list of books, tiered roughly according to how well I liked them, is as follows:

5 Stars (14 books)
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
The Reawakening by Primo Levi
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis
How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakulic
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Travelers' Tales Spain: True Stories by Lucy MacCauley
The Fault In Our Stars by John Green
Every Day by David Levithan

4 Stars (27 books)
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

March by Geraldine Brooks

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Old School by Tobias Wolff
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Liberator: One World War II Soldier's 500-Day Odyssey from the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau by Alex Kershaw
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

Sold by Patricia McCormick

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham
I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

3 Stars (14 books)

Farewell to by Manzanar Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China by James Fallows

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tokien

The Shadow Patrol by Alex Berenson
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Inferno by Dan Brown
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

2 Stars and Below
None! This year, I abandoned every one of the books in imminent danger of scoring this low.