Books Read This Year of Grace 2011

The Fry Chronicles                                            Stephen Fry

When the Lights Went Out                                  Andy Beckett

Any Souvenirs?*                                               George Mikes

How to Make Friends and Influence People             Dale Carnegie

Origins of the Cold War (1983 ed.)                        Martin McCauley

Precarious Living                                                Dr. Martin Israel

The Crisis of Islam                                              Bernard Lewis
Yezidism in Europe                                    Philip G. Kreyenbroek 

With Friends Like These                                     Larry L. Watts

Ataturk                                                            Andrew Mango

Snow                                                                       Orhan Pamuk

The Balkans*                                                          Mark Mazower

The Yezidis                                                              Eszter Spat

Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece                   Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

Black Mischief*                                              Evelyn Waugh

The Transformation of British Life 1950-2000     Andrew Rosen

The Comedians                                               Graham  Greene

Reflections on the Impact of the French Revolution  Alexandru Zub

The Spy who Came in from the Cold                 John Le Carre

From the Holy Mountain                                        William Dalrymple

The Lady in the Lake*                                      Raymond Chandler

The Catholic Church And Nazi Germany                   Guenter Lewy

Farewell, My Lovely*                                        Raymond Chandler

* =  reread

bold = I loved it

I am proud I read five novels (one recent) instead of the usual one a year. All the books were worth reading except for the Stephen Fry book which interested me  a lot for personal reasons. Two I read on-line. Dale Carnegie and Martin israel are the ones I most recommend but I haven't nearly finished either. I wonder why I only liked From the Holy Mountain a great deal rather than loving it. Larry Watts' magnum opus is very good. Black Mischief is a book to read in your teens or early 20s. At 13 I wept copiously. With The Comedians you can hear the wheels turning. Raymond Chandler never fails to exhilarate even on a fourth reading. Like a great ballet dancer doing pirouettes.Eszter Spat's slim book was the one I liked best, partly because she writes well, partly because of the subject matter, partly as an aide memoire of an afternoon spent in Lalish in March

 I also - an unusual achievement for me - manged to see two films, both dire, both set in Paris: To Catch a Thief and the new Woody Allen.