This has been my best year of reading in well over a decade. So many wonderful books.
The two lists here refer to books READ this year, not books PUBLISHED this year (though quite a few are).
Spots in the respective top 10s were hotly contested, and many very fine books did not make the lists at all. Should you choose to seek any out, I hope you find them as enjoyable and rewarding as I did.
Non-Fiction:
1. Nature's Mutiny - Philip Blom 2. The Restless Kings - Nick Barrat 3. Impossible Owls - Brian Phillips 4. The Fall of Language - Alexander Stern 5. Viking Britain - Thomas JT Williams 6. The Map of Knowledge - Violet Moller 7. Ants Among Elephants - Sujatha Gidla 8. The Other World - Azar Nafisi 9. The Weil Conjectures - Karen Olsson 10. The Human Condition - Hannah Arendt 11. The Darkening Age - Catherine Nixey 12. The End of the West - Sean Meighoo 13. To Hell and Back: Europe 1914 - 1949 - Ian Kershaw 14. The Black Prince - Michael Jones 15. Act of God - Selina O'Grady 16. The Diaries of Samuel Pepys (three volume) - Samuel Pepys 17. The Secular Enlightenment - Margaret C. Jacob 18. Matilda: Empress, Queen, Warrior - Catherine Hanley 19. Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition - Patricia S. Churchland 20. The Years - Annie Eraux 21. The Madness of Knowlege - Steven Connor 22. Alexander the Great - Anthony Everett 23. Out of Our Minds - Felipe Fernandez-Armesto 24. Absolute Power - Paul Collins 25. Civilisations - David Ologuso
Fiction:
1. Light Years - James Salter 2. Four Soldiers - Hubert Mingarelli 3. Passage of Love - Alex Miller 4. The Archipelago of Another Life - Andrei Makine 5. Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather 6. Fame is the Spur - Howard Spring 7. Lanny - Max Poter 8. Half of a Yellow Son - Chmamanda Ngozi Adichie 9. Everything Under - Daisy Johnson 10. Aaron's Rod - D.H. Lawrence 11. Velvet Waters - Gerald Murmane 12. Abel Sanchez - Miguel De Umamamo 13. The Green Mansions - W.H. Hudson 14. The Gololevs - M.E. Saltykov-Shcherdin 15. I am A Cat - Soseki Natsume 16. South Wind - Norman Douglas 17. Godsend - John Wray 18. Be Near Me - Andrew O'Hagan 19. At Dusk - Hwang Sok-Yong 20. The Hungry Grass - Richard Power 21. The Death of Murat Idrissi - Tommy Weiringa 22. Tirra-Lirra by the River - Jessica Anderson 23. Stand By Me - Wendell Berry 24. Split Tooth - Tanya Tagaq 25. A Fraction of the Whole - Steve Toltz
Comments