Fiction is in red.
118. Just One Damned Thing After Another (The Chronicles of St Mary's, #1), Jodi Taylor
119. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John Le Carre (after we watched the miniseries, then the film -- I don't use the word "masterpiece" lightly, but, damn, this book is one, still fantastic after I don't know how many rereadings -- according to the marginalia I last read it through in 2011)
120. The Magician's Land, Lev Grossman (good, but I had a lot of mixed feelings)
121. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North
122. J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist (Icons series), Thomas Beller
123. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen (first reread in several years, I think)
124. The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr
125. The Lost Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, Denis O. Smith
126. Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl, Stacy Pershall
127. Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality, Merri Lisa Johnson
(now THAT was GOOD) (Stacy's memoir was just....ehh)
128. My Life and Hard Times, James Thurber (comfort reread due to period brain) (can this really be classified as nonfiction? Or, God help us all, "Humorous memoir"?)*
129. Mark Twain's Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years, Laura Skandera Trombley
130. The Last Days of Dorothy Parker, Marion Meade (decidedly meh - it's a shame Meade has anointed herself Parker's champion because her prose style is, as ever, shitty)
131. Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?, Marion Meade (reread) (read this book when it FIRST came out, God, I am old) (it is still shitty)
132. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Nancy Milford
133. Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties, Marion Meade (godawful)
134. Lock In, John Scalzi (not bad, not great)
135. Alpine Giggle Week: How Dorothy Parker Set Out to Write the Great American Novel and Ended Up in a TB Colony Atop an Alpine Peak (A Penguin Classics Special) (why don't we have a collected edition of her letters? Or a new one of Millay's? Or Sylvia Plath's? Or -- )
136. Complete Broadway, 1918-1923, Dorothy Parker
137. Lake of Sorrows, Erin Hart (sickbed reading, don't judge)
138. A Free Man of Color (Benjamin January, Book 1), Barbara Hambly (damn, that was good. Beautifully written too)
*"There are two classes of people whom it is my cross to meet in my small daily round: those who think that Ring Lardner is a humorist, and those who have just discovered that Ring Lardner is something more than a humorist -- the latter group makes me perhaps a shade sicker than the former." -- Dorothy Parker
all 2014 booklist posts
descensus Averno facilis est