I’ve sorted through the books I’ve read over the last couple years.  When I looked over the list, I saw four main categories, although they overlap a little:  Books That are Part of a Series; Young Adult; Non-Fiction/Memoir; and Everything Else.  Of course, I already covered a separate category in my earlier post, the books I read during graduate school (the ones actually assigned for a class).

So this post is a quick recap of the books I read that were part of a series.

Wicked Prey
Storm Prey
Buried Prey
These are the latest three books in the Lucas Davenport series by John Sandford.  I love these books, without fail.  The most recent, Buried Prey, is perhaps the best of the series and one of the best mysteries I read in the past year.

Rough Country
Bad Blood
Heat Lightning
These are also by John Sandford, but feature the detective Virgil Flowers, with Davenport playing a bit part.  These are also fun, and I’ll continue to read them, but they don’t really compare to the Prey books.

Finger Lickin’ Fifteen
Argh.  Yes.  I read Stephanie Plum novels.  Sometimes.

Girl Who Played With Fire
Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
I reviewed the first book of this trilogy, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, in my archived posts.  This series continues to have buzz as Hollywood recently released the movie.  The trilogy has also been filmed in Sweden, and although I haven’t seen the Hollywood version yet, I really enjoyed the Swedish films.  I love the books.  The buzz is right.  Read them!

61 hours
Worth Dying For
Gone Tomorrow
The Jack Reacher series, by Lee Child, is another of my favorite series and I will always read them as soon as I can get my hands on them.  I’m on the library’s wait list for the most recent, The Affair.

The Reversal (Mickey Haller)
Nine Dragons (Harry Bosch)
These two books are both by Michael Connely, with different lead men.  I prefer the Harry Bosch books, but the Haller books are decent, too.

Even the Wicked
The Matthew Scudder books are by Lawrence Block, an old master of the detective novel.  This series has almost completely dried up, but I’ll continue to read them if Block keeps writing them.

Innocent
This is the long-awaited for sequel to Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow.  This story staggers along for a while, but once it gets going it has the velocity of a freight train.  Quite enjoyable, really.

A World Made by Hand
The Witch of Hebron County
These two books, written by James Howard Kunstler, provided very fun reading this past summer.  If you know me, I’ve probably put this book in your hands or talked to you about it.  The story takes place in the very near future, when the world has been greatly altered by a breakdown in the economy and a loss of foreign oil (sounds eerily possible, doesn’t it?).  Survival depends on an ability to raise food and barter for what you can’t provide for yourself.  These books are very well thought out, and there’s a rocking story to boot.

In The Woods
The Likeness
Faithful Place (didn’t read)
Tana French writes these Ireland-based mysteries.  I enjoyed the first two, but found them a little long-winded, which is why I haven’t read the third of the series.

Friend of the Devil
This book is part of the Inspector Banks series.  I know that because I looked it up.  I don’t actually remember much about this book at all, which is not much of an endorsement.  I certainly didn’t rush out to read other Inspector Banks books . . . If you think this is an error in judgement on my part, please do let me know.

I’ll have the post about the Young Adult books I’ve read over the past couple years ready to go soon.

My blog has had an extended blank period.  Why?  The short and simple answer is that I was working on a graduate degree.  And when one is working on a graduate degree one’s choice in reading is not his or her own, and one’s time is not his or her own, either.

The good news is that I’ve kept track, for the most part, of what I have read for the past two years.

The bad news is that I’m never going to catch up with a blog post for all of those books.  But I think I can recap over the space of a few posts the highs and lows of my reading list from the past couple years.

My last post was on May 11 of 2009, and was about the book Into Thin Air.  Instead of moving chronologically through the books I’ve read since then, I think I can chunk them up into some categories.

First I will discuss the books I read for graduate school.  Not the academic stuff, but the good stuff.  I got my MA in Writing, with an emphasis in composition and rhetoric.  One of the great things about this degree is that it resides in the English Department, and I got to take a few different literature classes as electives.

One of the literature classes I took was a graduate seminar on Modern American Poetry.  It was an incredible class, but I didn’t read any novels. However, the semester after I took a graduate course on children’s literature that paired modern books with books from the golden era of children’s literature.  Here is a list of the books that I read for that course (and yes, I almost always read the books I’m assigned to read.  I’m a nerd that way . . .):

Peter Pan
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Tuck Everlasting
The Hobbit
Devil’s Arithmetic
The Story of the Amulet

My last semester of graduate school I took a single author course on Margaret Atwood.  I’d previously not read anything by her (why? I have no idea).  This was a fabulous class and made me consider, for five minutes or so, the possibility of sticking around in graduate school for another year to add an MA in literature.  Here is a list of the books we read (and again, yes, I read all of them):

Surfacing
Cat’s Eye
The Handmaid’s Tale
Alias Grace
The Blind Assassin
Oryx and Crake
The Year of the Flood

If you’ve never read an Atwood novel, you should.  I liked Cat’s Eye a lot more than Surfacing, and a little more than Handmaid’s Tale.  From there on, I loved all the books and could not possibly rank them as they are all splendidly different.  The last two on the list are the first two of a trilogy, and I’m anxiously awaiting the conclusion.