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My Top Ten books for 2013: A wonderful year of reading

For the first time I kept a list of the books I read during past year and looking back over the months, 2013 was a rich year for literary pleasure.  In total I read 76 books. That averaged out at about six books a month  I only managed three in June yet nine in May (that’s the luxury of holidays). Apart from reading all the books on the Booker Prize shortlist there was no particular rhyme or reason to my selections. Sometimes I would just see a book in a book shop, other times it was the book selected by my book club. Sometimes it was a review or a news item in a newspaper or magazine or because an author was appearing at a literary festival I was attending (Dublin, Hay-on-Wye in England and Byron Bay in Australia).

Despite all that,  I when I read other people’s  end-of-year Best Of book lists I was stunned at the number  I had not even heard of let alone all those wonderful authors whose books are sitting on my bedside table or in my e-reader but which I haven’t got around to reading yet. I did live up to the promise I made myself to read more collections of short stories and was richly rewarded. I read a pathetically small number of non-fiction which I hope to remedy in 2014. There were one or two which, if it were not for the “I’ve started so I’ll finish” rule, would have immediately been relegated to the bottom of the book pile but thus is the delicious serendipity of reading.

So, before the clock ticks over to a new day and new year, here is my top ten for 2013

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

It has been a long time since I read a book in which there is such a splendid array of thoroughly unsympathetic characters. It is hard to find one with whom you would share a coffee and a chat.  Yet Gillian Flynn’s latest book Gone Girl, is a compulsive read. Part psychological thriller, part who-dunnit, it is a racy mix of mystery and knowledge of the terrible event you just know is going to happenbut can’t be avoided.

Amy and Nick are a fairly typical young couple both slightly surprised they have found each other but happy in their idyllic New York brownstone. It is present from her parents paid for with the proceeds of a wildly successful children’s book Amazing Amy, where the protagonist Amy is always right.

Then Nick loses his job and Amy’s parents, once doting benefactors stumble into financial woe and the house is sold. Suddenly Nick and Amy are back on his home turf in a rented house that “screams nouveau riche” in small-town Missouri right alongside the Mississippi. Borrowing from the last of Amy’s savings, Nick opens a slightly seedy bar with his sister Go (perhaps the only really likeable person in the book). They muddle along. Then one day Amy disappears.

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