This past year, I read 56 books. (Half fiction, half non-fiction.) Since I'm always looking for a good book, I decided to pick my favorites with the thought that you might want to look through the list in case any appeal to you.
Fiction:
1. Gerbrand Bakker, The Twin (Beautifully written award-winning novel by a Dutch writer about a farmer who carries on with the quotidian duties of his life but who only feels half of himself as he redefines his relationship with his father and twin brother. Very descriptive, poetic.)
2. Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (A married couple and their friend--calling themselves travelers, not tourists--delve deeper and deeper into the Algerian Sahara as, psychologically, they delve deeper and deeper into escape, isolation, illness, release. Edgy, engrossing.)
3. Harriet Scott Chessman, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper (A fictionalized but historically accurate account of Mary Cassatt's sister who, though terminally ill, sometimes posed for her. A good sense of the times.)
4. Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard (The classic based on the life of the last prince in Sicily when Garibaldi unified Italy thus ending the aristocracy. Includes a beautifully written death scene.)
5. Virginia Ironside, No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a 60th Year (Pure fun and whimsy. What's the matter with getting old, the protagonist asks, finding it's a great relief to decide you don't have to want to bicycle across Mongolia or attend Open University.)
6. Anne Lamott, Imperfect Birds (Seems an excellent description of what it's like to have a substance-abuse teen and to come up with excuses for why she isn't.)
7. Penelope Lively, Consequences (Wonderful novel set in Somerset, blitz London, and then post-war England as seemingly incidental events impact the lives of three generations.)
8. Paula McLain, The Paris Wife (Fictionalized but historically accurate rendering of Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley's, marriage and life in Paris. Splendid.)
9. Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (A bizarre, time-warp, vision-quest puzzle about a 15-year-old who thinks he may have killed his father and made love to his mother. Alice in Wonderland meets Close Encounters, Avatar meets Henry Miller, Ghostbusters meets Brigadoon.)
Non-fiction:
1. Susan Cheever, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau - Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (The geniuses who lived in Concord, Massachusetts, in the early-middle 19th century. See my November 26th blog.)
2. Firoozeh Dumas, Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America (The sub-title says it all. It had me chuckling the whole time.)
3. Jeanne DuPrau, The Earth House: Two Women Set Out to Remake Their Lives by Building From Without and Within (A California Sierras Zen memoir. Very accessible.)
4. Alexandra Fuller, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (The companion book to Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight--this, a fabulous memoir filled with humor and poignant descriptions detailing her parents' life before, during, and after Rhodesia's upheaval. A particular favorite.)
5. Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (Actually, events from October 1860 to July 1861 focusing on some of the lesser-known participants from East Coast to West. Well written.)
6. Conor Grennan, Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal (The American son of Eamon Grennan, the Irish poet, goes to Nepal only to discover that many of the "orphans" he's working with were children trafficked during the Maoist uprising. So he returns to help locate their families and establish his non-profit, NGN, Next Generation Nepal.)
7. Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself (A gripping factual account of a North Carolina slave who manages to escape after spending seven years in hiding in a space so small she cannot even stand up.)
8. Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love (A young couple turn 500 acres in upstate New York into a CSA farm--Community Supported Agriculture--where they produce meat, milk, vegetables, and grain to sell using only draft horses. A hard life, engagingly written.)
9. Lillian Schlissel, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (Her summary of some 90 diaries. See my May 14th blog.)
An aside by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Readers may be divided into four classes:
1. Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied.
2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time.
3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.
4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.
Great list (I love lists) and thanks for your descriptions! 56 books is a LOT, you should have a great sense of accomplishment I hope. (I just counted--I read 11, and four were for work.)
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