A Year in Books

At the end of each year, I like to look back at the books I read and see which ones stand out particularly. Oddly, I liked almost everything I read this year, but I've put stars(*) next to the, well, starry ones, and double stars (**) next to the very best or most memorable.

Particular highlights were reading and writing about William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! with Peter Stephens; going deeply into the world of Saramago's "Ricardo Reis," exploring New France along with Samuel de Champlain and then taking a trip up the St. Lawrence River with much greater appreciation of the place names and their history; delving deeper into both the literature of both India and Africa; discovering the writing of Javier Marias and Haruki Murakami -- definitely to be continued in 2011 -- and sharing Orhan Pamuk's appreciation of his great Istanbul literary predecessor, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar.

But the greatest pleasure and excitement(!) came from reading two books by friends. Open City, by Teju Cole, which will be published by Random House in February 2011, is a tour de force debut novel by a man I feel will become known as one of the best writers of his generation, familiar to many of you from his own blog and from these pages.I will be writing much more about it in a few weeks.

The Blind Contessa's New Machine, by Carey Wallace, is an entirely different sort of book - a fantasy based on a true story that reads as both fairy tale and love story. It caught me up and carried me into its beautifully-constructed magical world, and I enjoyed it tremendously. I met both of these writers and friends through blogging, and I am so proud of them.

And then there were the wonderful manuscripts I've been privileged to read for Phoenicia Publishing projects, which I haven't included here, nor have I included the poetry chapbooks for the qarrtsiluni chapbook contest last summer (we got 60 submissions; I read the top 10) or the ongoing panoply of great writing we publish nearly every day online at qarrtsiluni. Riches.

2011 begins auspiciously, too: I've started reading two terrific books, Lords of the Sea, an account of the Athenian navy, and Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. In fact, I can't wait to get back to them this evening!

 

2010 Book List (latest first)

Helen, Euripides

"You have your sorrows, I know it well. But it were best
  to bear your life's constraints as lightly as you may."

Mary's Wedding, Stephen Massicotte (play)

The Shadow of the Sun, Rysard Kapuscinski

*The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk

*All Souls', Javier Marias

!*The Blind Contessa's New Machine, Carey Wallace

Ivon Hitchens (his art and life), Peter Khoroche

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

*Light in August, William Faulkner

A Writer's Diary, Virginia Woolf 

**The year of the death of Ricardo Reis, José Saramago

Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner 

The bastard of Istanbul, Elif Shafak

South of the Border, West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami

The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad

**Champlain's Dream (a biography of Samuel de Champlain) David Hackett Fischer

Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres

**A Mind at Peace, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

!**Open City (advance copy), Teju Cole

Birds Without Wings, Louis de Bernieres

Non-Adhesive Binding, Books Without Paste or Glue, Volume I, Keith A. Smith

*English, August: An Indian Story, Upamanyu Chatterjee

Brücke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905-1913

*The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe

Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Henry V, William Shakespeare

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga

*The Gargoyle, Andrew Davidson

Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh

Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America, Jonathan Gould

Find earlier years' lists here.

Comments

[Hannah Stephenson]

Happy new year, Beth! This is a wonderful list.

[Beth]

Thanks, Hannah! Best wishes for 2011 to you too, may it bring wonderful words!

[Aleppo]

Hi Beth,

Glad to see your 2010 list. I was given Romantic Moderns for Christmas and will be interested to see how Ivon Hitchens features. There's a lovely article on Mfanwy Piper here which mentions Hitchens.

The recommendations from my list would be The Leopard, A Room of One's Own and The Wild Places. Most amusing were the similarities between Eat, Pray, Love and The Razor's Edge. Most disappointing was Surface Detail, but I'm still a sucker for SF.

2010 Book list

The Leopard, Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Things I Didn't Know, Robert Hughes
Reflections on a Marine Venus, Lawrence Durrell
Going Buddhist, Peter Conradi
Home Truths, David Lodge
Letters & Diaries 1939-45, Iris Murdoch
Murder on the Leviathan, Boris Akunin
A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, Elizabeth David
The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton
The Razor's Edge, Somerset Maugham
Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup, J.L.Carr
The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton
A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
The Wild Places, Robert MacFarlane
Thus Was Adonis Murdered, Sarah Caudwell
Is Good Still an Englishman?, Cole Moreton
What Was Lost, Catherine O'Flynn
Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, Stephen Batchelor
The Quiet American, Graham Greene
Surface Detail, Iain M Banks
Greene on Capri, Shirley Hazzard
The Shortest Way to Hades, Sarah Caudwell
The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin
Tea for Two . . . with no Cups, Polly Benge
The Christmas Mystery, Jostein Gaarder

And Happy New Year!

[Beth]

Thanks, Aleppo, for this terrific list! Happy New Year to you, too!

[dale]

Happy New Year, Beth! I'm so looking forward to Open City.

[Marja-Leena]

Wonderful list, and of course Open City is at the top of my wish list. Wishing you and J a Happy, healthy and Creative New Year!

[Hattie]

Funny how idiosycratic book lists are. There is just so much to read these days. My favorite read always is what I'm reading right now, which is *Secularism Confronts Islam* by Olivier Roy.

[john]

i get a lot of books at Christmas and i like it best when the titles are a little quirky.One gift was 'What i talk about when i talk about running A Memoir' by a writer i hadn't heard of Haruki Murakami whom you mentioned.I like browsing books before actually reading them and already one can see Murakami writes with generosity.The book ends with "I dedicate this book to all the runners i've passed,and those who've passed me.Without all of you,i never would have kept on running" But the book i would recommend to you would one i just finished,Pat Conroy's 'My reading life' Some of his books were made into movies ..The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, among them.The concluding chapter is entitled "The City" ..."I have built a city from the books i have read" He writes of himself as an abused boy."I believe that the reading of great books saved his life".I love this book

[marly youmans]

Oh, Carey Wallace from our "qarrtsiluni" issue! I'll have to tell Ivy.