Here is my annual Books-and-Plays-I-Have-Read-Since-Last-April List. I am not counting the fifty play scripts I read for work this summer, not because they weren't worth reading, but because I neglected to write down all their names. Enjoy!

1) The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
2) The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius
3) Life Work by Donald Hall
4) The Annals by Tacitus
5) Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
6) The History Boys by Alan Bennett
7) The Golden Ass by Apuleius
8) Lord John and the Hand of Devils by Diana Gabaldon
9) Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature by David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash
10) On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
11) The Last Novel by David Markson
12) An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge
13) Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
14) More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
15) Further Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
16) Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin
17) The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes by Marcel Theroux
18) On Beauty by Zadie Smith
19) Looking For Class: Days and Nights at Oxford and Cambridge by Bruce Feiler
20) New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
21) Mass Appeal by Bill C. Davis
22) Eclipse by Stepheie Meyer
23) Justine by Lawrence Durrell
24) Babycakes by Armistead Maupin
25) When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
26) Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell
27) Significant Others by Armistead Maupin
28) Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
29) Sure of You by Armistead Maupin
30) Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin
31) The Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
32) The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud
33) The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard
34) If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
35) The Goat by Edward Albee
36) Mauritius by Theresa Rebeck
37) August: Osage County by Tracey Letts
38) How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
39) I am My Own Wife by Doug Wright
40) The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
41) The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi
42) Caprice and Rondo by Dorothy Dunnett
43) Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
44) Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
45) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
46) Am I That Name? by Denise Riley
47) A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
48) Persuasion by Jane Austen
49) Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
50) Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
51) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
52) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
53) Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
54) The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
55) The Boat by Nam Le
56) The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
57) The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler
58) The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
59) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
60) The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
61) The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
62) The Altar of the Dead by Henry James
63) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
64) The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
65) Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
66) The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
67) The Road by Cormac McCarthy
68) Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi
69) Gemini by Dorothy Dunnett
70) My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid
71) Finbar's Hotel by Dermot Bolger, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Hugo Hamilton, Jennifer Johnson, Joseph O'Connor, and Colm Toíbín
72) Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman
73) Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
74) The Alienist by Caleb Carr
75) Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton
76) The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
77) A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
78) Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
79) Mothers & Sons by Colm Toíbín
80) A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
81) Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
82) Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott
83) MW by Osamu Tezuka
84) The Táin by Ciarán Carson
85) Directions to Servants by Jonathan Swift
86) A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
87) Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
88) The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
89) De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
90) Canterbury Tales by Geoffry Chaucer
91) Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid
92) Riders to the Sea by J.M. Synge
93) Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge
94) Playboy of the Western World by Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle
95) Company by Samuel Beckett
96) Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett
97) The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
98) Selected Poems by W.B. Yeats
99) Dubliners by James Joyce
100) The Kid by Dan Savage
101) Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
102) The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh
103) Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
104) Fishing the Sloe-Black River by Colum McCann
105) At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

105. Not bad, not bad. That's up from 75 last year, and is easily explained by double the reading time over the summer, and double the reading-intensive English classes while at Princeton.

Recurrences include SEVEN Armistead Maupins, THREE Jonathan Swifts, TWO Roddy Doyle, TWO Colm Toíbíns, TWO J.M. Synges, TWO Samuel Becketts, FOUR Jamaica Kincaids, TWO Dorothy Dunnetts, TWO Lawrence Durrells, TWO Hanif Kureishis, THREE Oscar Wildes, and (oh the shame) THREE Stephenie Meyers (see immediately below).

Of the 105, FOUR I would never read again, ELEVEN I had read before, and FOUR were truly guilty pleasure reading.

Top Five of the Year:
Tales of the City series by Armistead Maupin
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott
The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh

So there it is. The good, the bad, and the ugly.