50 Books I Want to Read in 2013

This year has been a busy year for me going back and forth between Paris, Buenos Aires, and Vancouver.  Being a big bookworm, it became a pain for me to drag even 3 books around during my travels (especially if it were in hardback!).  Luckily for me, my friends noticed, and surprised me with an Amazon Kindle for my birthday in August.  :)  Whilst I had been resisting the idea of switching to digital reading for a long time, I must admit that it has made my nomadic life much easier!  And I can still buy the book in hard copy afterwards if I really like it.  With the Kindle, I think I actually read more than my usual average of 70 books per year, simply due to the easy access that it gives me.
 
I'm really excited for 2013 as a reading year because so many wonderful titles came out in 2012, and also because there are still so many classics out there left for me to read!  Every December, I make a list of all of the books I want to read during the following year, to make sure that I am always inspired to open a book and that the limited time that I have for reading will be spent with the best possible books.  So for all of you bookworms out there, here is the list of 50 books I want to read in 2013 (35 fiction + 15 non-fiction).

Fiction & Poetry

1. Blasphemy - Sherman Alexie
2. Ancient Light - John Banville
3. Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch
4. Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey (*)
5. Rayuela - Julio Cortazar (*)
6. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (*)
7. Half Blood Blues - Edi Edugyan
8. A Hologram for the King - Dave Eggers
9. The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng
10. Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner (*)
11. Canada - Richard Ford
12. Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol (*)
13. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway (*)
14. Married Love: And Other Stories - Tessa Hadley
15. The Map and the Territory - Michel Houellebecq
16. Swimming Home - Deborah Levy
17. The Complete Stories - Franz Kafka (*)
18. Pigeon English - Stephen Kelman
19. Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel
20. Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwan
21. The Lighthouse - Alison Moore 
22. The Land of Green Plums ("Herztier") - Herta Müller (*)
23. New Selected Stories - Alice Munro
24. Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain - Lucia Perillo
25. Kiss of the Spider Woman - Manuel Puig (*)
26. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
27. Umbrella - Will Self
28. NW - Zadie Smith
29. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (*)
30. Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil
31. The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems - Tomas Tranströmer
32. The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa (*)
33. Bartleby & Co. - Enrique Vila-Matas
34. Building Stories - Chris Ware 
35. Confusion of Feelings - Stefan Zweig (*) 

Non-Fiction 

1. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty - Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
2. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe (1944-1956) - Anne Applebaum
3. Mythologies - Roland Barthes (*)
4. The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir (*)
5. Behind the Beautiful Forevers - Katherine Boo
6. La Folie Baudelaire - Roberto Calasso 
7. News of a Kidnapping - Gabriel Garcia Márquez 
8. We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Other Families - Philip Gourevitch (*)
9. Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story - Jim Holt
10. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot - Robert Macfarlane
11. Speak, Memory - Vladimir Nabokov (*)
12. Being and Nothingness - Jean-Paul Sartre (*)
13. Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity - Andrew Solomon
14. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - Clay Shirky 
15. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character - Paul Tough

(* classics or books published over a decade ago)

**

As you can see, I focus mainly on English, French, and Spanish books.  But if you have any other reading recommendations for me for 2013 - whether in those 3 languages or otherwise in translation - please let me know in the comments below.  Happy reading, everyone!