This has probably been the best year of reading fiction in my life as well as the most books I’ve read in a year since school! While the non fiction was decent, the fiction I read this year was extraordinary. So much so that I wasn’t able to do a top 3 because to leave out books like The Corrections or Sputnik Sweetheart didn’t make sense. So I have a best of the rest in addition to a big list of honourable mentions for a total of 15 fiction books I loved!
Rankings and summary below for both fiction and non-fiction. The next post has reviews of all 55 books.
Fiction Top Books
1) The Mahabharata (Ramesh Menon Verizon). There is no doubt that the two volume version of The Mahabharata that I read is not just the best book I read this year, I really feel that it is the single best story ever written!
2) The Last Picture Show. Larry McMurthy. Leaving aside ancient epics the best book I read this year is The Last Picture Show. This small town American story explores youth, yearning and the repressed hopes, dreams and rage of growing up in a small town like few others.
Best of the rest
- A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway. God writes. I read. I worship.
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino. A jigsaw puzzle of a book that makes you remember that sometimes genius writing doesn’t even need a plot
- Conversation in the Cathedral - Mario Vargas Llosa. No one weaves together the political and the personal quite like Llosa
- The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen. More than Infinite Jest this is THE great American Novel for this century.
- Sputnik Sweetheart - Haruki Murakami. Heartbreaking.
- The Housekeeper and the Professor - Yoko Ogawa. Like when I read Stoner, I feel this is a hidden treasure, a book that deserves a much bigger audience.
- Wonder - R J Palacio. Because in the hardest year of my life, I needed to believe in kindness.
Honourable mentions:
Single Man - Christopher Isherwood, Men Without Women - Haruki Murakami, The Magus - John Fowles, The Ice Storm - Rick Moody, The Fifth Child - Doris Lessing, From Here to Eternity - James Jones
Non fiction Top 3:
1) Out of Africa / Shadows on the Grass - Isak Dinesen. Out of Africa had the aching, melancholy feel of the greatest stories about love and loss, but towards a country, a continent, a feeling. It is quite simply one of the greatest books about a place ever written.
2) The Boys of Summer - Roger Kahn. A book about sport, but a book about being men in youth and in old age, about fathers and sons. Lyrical
3) The Meadow - Adrian Leavy and Cathy Scott-Clark. The absolute horror of the first kidnapping and assassinations of western tourists in Kashmir. I makes you seethe at the tragedy of Kashmir
Honourable mentions:
- The Soul of Basketball : The Epic Showdown Between LeBron, Kobe, Doc and Dirk That Saved the NBA - Ian Thomsen.
- Tell Me No Lies - John Pilger.
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