2007: the definitive list

It's over. What did we really read in Baroque Mansions?

None of the books we set out to read at the beginning of last year, that's for sure! Lowell's and Larkin's letters (heretofore known as The Three L's) languish unloved in their pink dustwrappers. A list of the books I meant to read but didn't might be more instructive, but it is just random, and I'd hate it to look as if I didn't really want to read that Günter Grass memoir, for example...

So what can I remember (key word there) actually reading? I've been going on about how I read nothing all year, but that can't be right, so here goes. Previous rules apply, to wit: inclusion on this list doesn't mean I read every last sorry word. Exclusion from this list doesn't mean I didn't read it. Note that I did a smaller version of this list, but it turns out I reads (lots) more than I thought I did: I just don't remember it.

The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
Persuasion, Austen
The End of the Poem, Paul Muldoon
Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers, Antonia Quirke
Take Off Your Party Dress, Dina Rabinovitch
Amazonia, James Marcus
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, Emily Kimbrough and Cornelia Otis Skinner
If This is a Man, Primo Levi
God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens
A World of Love, Elizabeth Bowen
Anthony Hecht talking to Philip Hoy, a book-length interview
The Speed of Dark, Ian Duhig
John Ash, Selected Poems
John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Isobel Dixon, A Fold in the Map
Chris Emery, Radio Nostalgia
Ludlow, David Mason
The Best Man That Ever Was, Annie Freud
The Waste Land, fascimile edition, Eliot (I nearly wrote Pound, there - oops)
Letters of James Schuyler and Frank O'Hara
Letters of Fanny Brawne to Fanny Keats (just amazing)
The Bradford Count, Ian Duhig
Thomas Lux, New & Selected Poems
Carolyn Kizer, Cool, Calm & Collected (poems)
WS Merwin, Selected Poems
Frances Presley, Myne
Frederick Seidel, Ooga Booga
Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous
Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
The Simple Truth, Philip Levine
Why I Write, George Orwell
Proust, The Way by Swann's (new trans.)
The Lyric Touch, John Wilkinson
The Lost Luggage Porter, Andrew Martin
Look We Have Coming to Dover!, Daljit Nagra
Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alison Weir
Le Roman de Silence
Anthony Hecht, Collected Later Poems
Cate Marvin, Fragment of the Head of a Queen
Penelope Hughes-Hallett, The Immortal Dinner
The Bookaholic's Guide to Book Blogs, Rebecca Gillieron & Catheryn Kilgarriff
The Curtain, Milan Kundera

There were many more books I thought about, even spent days reminiscing about, but even I realise that's not the same. And maybe that's enough lists for a while. The Christmas decorations (such as they were) are still up, and there's work I should be doing.