Else Roesdahl, The Vikings, Graeme Macrae Burnet, His Bloody Project, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund, Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game, Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, Fraser MacAlpine, Stuff Brits Like, Johan Cruyff, My Turn, Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

Ahh, a nice simple standard history of the Viking age to ease myself into the new year, and then a work of fiction based in the Highlands that has been shortlisted for the Booker.

Halfway through this clot of books, I received a scratch-off wall chart of '100 Essential Novels'. It came from New York, so has a very American bent, so I'd only read 24 of the books and there were about a third I'd never heard of - Pale Fire? Under The Volcano? Wittgenstein's Mistress? There's a list to complete though, so I'm on it. God of Small Things read (didn’t really understand it, kept getting it confused with Midnight's Children as I'm not very bright), and To The Lighthouse and The Handmaid's Tale on order from Woking Library.