What is the best book youve read in the past year?
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is absolutely astonishing. It seems so mundane, quiet, pedantic even – but that’s all just a brittle shell for the astonishingly sad, emotional narrative beneath. It’s also a very quick and easy read. (It won the Booker Prize.) Alan Lightman’s Reunion is an elegantly written short novel, about youth, loss, and love with a ballerina. The descriptions are sensual but light, and note-perfect. His Einstein’s Dreams, Good Benito and the devastating The Diagnosis are also excellent. Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot G. Enough has been written already: but it’s terrific. Ian McEwan, Atonement. It’s a heartbreaking novel, written with tremendous clarity, confidence, and focus. It’s about justice, truth, forgiveness and – indeed, atonement. It’s great, and far better than the other sort of novels that share its setting (eg, [gasp] Virginia Woolf). And finally, an absolutely fascinating read is Michael Ondaatje’s The Conversations: Walter Murch. The noted
Although these are not books I have read in the past year, if you haven’t read the Three Kingdoms (attributed to Luo Guanzhong), Outlaws of the Marsh (by Shi Nai’an, Luo Guanzhong and translated by Sidney Shapiro) and The Journey to the West (by Anthony C. Yu), these are all good (and thick) books to fill up large chunks of time.
I’ve been reading some nerdy librarian pop history lately. Notably: The Book on the Book Shelf by Henry Petroski [my review] Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles When I have to think back to my favorite books, the one that always jumps to the head of the list are The Goldbug Variations by Richard Powers [review] and anything by Allen Kurzweil who wrote the Grand Complication and A Case of Curiosities [review]. If you’re into short fiction, pick up Stephen Millhauser [writer of Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer and The King in the Tree] or Angela Carter. My library browsing strategy is generally to go to the new fiction shelf and the new non-fiction shelf and then choose a Dewey number [or LC] and just browse til I find something that piques my interest. Works better in larger libraries.
Second Orhan Pamuk, Richard Powers (Galatea 2.2 is what turned me on to him), and the Ondaatje/Murch book (I’m only dealing with non-obvious books here — I mean, any list of recommendations of Great Twentieth-Century Books is going to have Bulgakov, García Márquez, Grass, et al on it), and I will add two long, riveting reads: Olivia Manning‘s Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy (memorably filmed as Fortunes of War, a BBC series starring the impossibly young and lovable Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh) and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (filmed as The Jewel in the Crown) and its sequel Staying On. That’s ele
