Books Read in 2006

This post follows on from Books Read in 2005, which I posted at the end of May.

And for 2006 I read exactly one hundred books, down eight from 2005’s total. In terms of new discoveries, no writers leap out. A lot of my reading was done for review, but aside from that there was a month focused on vampire novels, a month of American thriller/crime books, and a month of horror (mostly Leisure paperbacks), and the last two months of the year had more than their fair share of poetry collections.

On this day in 2006 I was reading “Living Dead in Dallas” which, along with April’s “Dead Until Dark” was my introduction to Charlaine Harris, Sookie Stackhouse, and the town of Bon Temps, the source material for TV show True Blood. And on the day I turned 52 I dipped a toe in charity volume “One City”, with long stories by Alexander McCall Smith, Irvine Welsh, and Ian Rankin, all set in the city of Edinburgh.

One book that I can’t recall the author of, or learn from Google, Amazon, or my own record keeping efforts – “Demons in the Dark”, which weighed in at 173 pages. If anyone recognises the title and can tell me the author, please reply in the comments.

Okay, here’s the list:-

Wild Things – Charles Coleman Finlay

Bernie Hermann’s Manic Sextet – Edited by Gary Fry

Twisted Souls – Shaun Hutson

Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: City of Night – Dean Koontz & Ed Gorman

Nemesis – Vincent Cobb

Nightmare on Elm Street: Protege – Tim Waggoner

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror Eighteenth Annual Collection – Edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant

The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Edited by Richard Lancelyn Green

The English Soil Society – Tim Nickels

Mean Mode Median – Aliya Whiteley

King of the Birds – Alison L. R. Davies

Dusk – Tim Lebbon

An Occupation of Angels – Lavie Tidhar

Brainchild – Diverse Hands

Glass Soup – Jonathan Carroll

Milo’s Run – Danny King

Dark Corners – Steve Volk

King of the Road – Charlie Williams

Strange Itineraries – Tim Powers

Some of Your Blood – Theodore Sturgeon

I Am Legend – Richard Matheson

Lilith’s Dream – Whitley Strieber

Carmilla – Sheridan Le Fanu

The Hand of Dracula – Robert Lory

The Vampire Tapestry – Suzy McKee Charnas

Dead Until Dark – Charlaine Harris

The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula – Roderick Anscombe

The Skin Gods – Richard Montanari

The Ephemera – Neil Williamson

Cinema Macabre – Edited Mark Morris

The Face of Twilight – Mark Samuels

Fine Cuts – Dennis Etchison

Nietzsche’s Kisses – Lance Olsen

Sexy Dreams – Diverse Hands

Comes the Dark – David Taub

Pig Island – Mo Hayder

Practical Demonkeeping – Christopher Moore

Monster Island – David Wellington

Dead Horsemeat – Dominique Manotti

Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk

The Pocket Essential Hammer Films – John McCarty

Rumble Tumble – Joe R. Lansdale

Living Dead in Dallas – Charlaine Harris

Three Things About Me – Aliya Whiteley

Demons in the Dark

The Bloodstone Papers – Glen Duncan

A Cold Heart – Jonathan Kellerman

Want to Play? – P. J. Tracy

Trace – Patricia Cornwell

Metro Girl – Janet Evanovich

Blood of Angels – Michael Marshall

Entombed – Linda Fairstein

Night Fall – Nelson De Mille

Off Season – Jack Ketchum

Caliban and Other Tales – Robert Deveraux

Shelter – L. H. Maynard & M. P. N. Sims

Family Inheritance – Deborah LeBlanc

Naomi – Jonathan Aycliffe

The Conqueror Worms – Brian Keene

Monstrosity – Edward Lee

World of Hurt – Brian Hodge

The Face of Twilight – Mark Samuels

The Culled – Simon Spurrier

Sorcery in Shad – Brian Lumley

Death Hulk – Matthew Sprange

Stray Dog – Gareth O’Callaghan

Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates

Fear and Trembling – Amelie Nothomb

Memories of My Melancholy Whores – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Scent of Your Breath – Melissa P.

Harold’s End – J. T. Leroy

When Graveyards Yawn – Edited Sean Wright

Paranoid Landscapes – David Mathew

A Fine Dark Line – Joe R. Lansdale

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis – Wendy Cope

High Windows – Philip Larkin

Tell Me the Truth About Love – W. H. Auden

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats – T. S. Eliot

Death of a Naturalist – Seamus Heaney

How Much of Us There Was – Michael Kimball

Cuts – Malcolm Bradbury

Travels in the Scriptorium – Paul Auster

The Waste Land and other Poems – T. S. Eliot

One City – Alexander McCall Smith/Ian Rankin/Irvine Welch

A Spy in the House of Love – Anais Nin

Telling Lies – Sophie Marceau

The Dream Room – Marcel Moring

All You Who Sleep Tonight – Vikram Seth

Spanking the Maid – Robert Coover

Roland Penrose – Edited by Joanna Drew

The Betrayed – David Hosp

Perdido – Chase Twichel

The Ruins – Scott Smith

Cycle of the Werewolf – Stephen King

The Colorado Kid – Stephen King

Paradoxia: A Predator’s Story – Lydia Lunch

Secret Story – Ramsey Campbell

The Ray Bradbury Chronicles 2 – Diverse Hands

The Gods of Winter – Dana Gioia

The Order of the Day – Andrew Greig

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