What I read in 2003

I just tallied up all the books I read last year, and (counting only the books I completed in their entirety), my grand total was 38 — a pretty healthy year of book reading for me. Here’s a look at the rundown:

Travel narratives and essays

Hold the Enlightenment, by Tim Cahill
Road Fever, by Tim Cahill
Notes from a Big Country, by Bill Bryson
Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need, by Dave Barry
From the Holy Mountain, by William Dalrymple
Playing the Moldavans at Tennis, by Tony Hawks
Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, by Geoff Dyer
Route: 66 A.D. , by Tony Perrottet
Beyond the Last Village, by Alan Rabinowitz
Somebody’s Heart is Burning, by Tanya Shaffer
Facing the Congo, by Jeffrey Tayler
The Old Patagonian Express, by Paul Theroux

Travel scholarship and commentary

America in an Arab Mirror, by Kamal Abdel-Malek
Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex, by Ian Littlewood
The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton
God’s Dust, by Ian Buruma
A Season in Heaven, by David Tomory

Assorted nonfiction

Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson
The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang
Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond
Nickeled and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
For the Time Being, by Annie Dillard
Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell
The World’s Most Dangerous Places, by Robert Young Pelton
Sex and Death to the Age 14, by Spalding Gray

Fiction

My Life in Heavy Metal, by Steve Almond
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
Paris Trance, by Geoff Dyer
The Honorary Consul, by Graham Greene
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
Mr. Foreigner, by Matthew Kneale
Never Mind Nirvana, by Mark Lindquist
Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
Damascus Gate, by Robert Stone
Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare