Here are all the books I read in 2006, in the order in which I finished them:

Fiction

1. Mujeres Alteradas 1 by Maitena Burundarena (8/10)
   
2. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (10/10)
   
3. The Lost Get-Back Boogie by James Lee Burke (7/10)
   
4. The Absence of Nectar by Kathy Hepinstall (7/10)
   
5. Curvas Peligrosas by Maitena Burundarena (10/10)
   
6. Drama City by George Pelecanos (8/10)
   
7. Middlemarch by George Eliot (9/10)
   
8. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (10/10)
   
9. The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke (8/10)
   
10. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (10/10)
    
11. Candide by Voltaire (9/10)
    
12. The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos (9/10)
    
13. The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (9/10)
    
14. Little Children by Tom Perrotta (7/10)
    
15. Beware of God by Shalom Auslander (8/10)
    
16. Mission to America by Walter Kirn (9/10)
    
17. Sightseeing by Rattawat Lapcharoensap (8/10)
    
18. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (9/10) (a reread)
    
19. The Babes in the Wood by Ruth Rendell (8/10)
    
20. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (8/10)

Nonfiction

1. Travels with Alice by Calvin Trillin (4/10)
   
2. Granta 90: Country Life (9/10)
   
3. Robbing the Bees by Holley Bishop (8/10)
   
4. George Sand: A Biography by Curtis Cate (8/10)
   
5. The Long Goodbye to Pinochet by Ariel Dorfman (7/10)
   
6. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (9/10)
   
7. The Rosetta Bone by Cheryl Smith (8/10)
   
8. The Fat Girl's Guide to Life by Wendy Shanker (5/10)
   
9. How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton (9/10)
   
10. The Hungry Ocean by Linda Greenlaw (7/10)
    
11. Julie & Julia by Julie Powell (7/10)
    
12. Queenan Country by Joe Queenan (8/10)
    
13. Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl (10/10)
    
14. A Dog Year by Jon Katz (8/10)

My favorite book of the year was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Other standouts included:

• Bleak House
  
• Maitena Burundarena's comics
  
• The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos—the best book I've read yet by my favorite mystery writer
  
• Mrs. Dalloway—I've loved this book for years, but I never actually finished it until 2006.
  
• Mission to America by Walter Kirn—when I finished it I wrote: "It's got it all: road-trip action, lifestyles of the rich and famous, blistering insights on male-female relationships and what it means to be American, plus a bonus tip: how to tell from her hairstyle whether she's a top or a bottom!"
  
• George Sand's biography—her novels are mostly forgotten, for good reason. I think her best legacy is her amazing life.
  
• Garlic and Sapphires—I love Ruth Reichl's memoirs, and this is the most interesting of the three installments I've read.

The first book I finished in 2006 was a total stinker, Calvin Trillin's Travels with Alice. I had enjoyed some of his journalistic writing, but in this book he really annoyed me with his bite-by-bite accounts of every single meal he and his family ever ate in France, and the way he kept referring to Alice, his wife, as the Principessa. I didn't really read another bad book until I was housesitting for a friend and I picked up The Fat Girl's Guide to Life from her shelf. I didn't have high expectations, but even those were disappointed by this rambling mess of autobiography and TMI. Other than those two, it was a good reading year. I didn't get the quantity so much, but I tried to keep it quality.

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