I started keeping a word document of all of the books I read during the calendar year back in 2007, bolding the ones that I liked the most. I usually tried to keep the year’s best to ten and later, five–not forcing it, especially in years when I read more books or loved more of them, but it was nice to have a constraint. Here are (were?) my favorites from the past eight years…
2007:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July
Disturbances in the Field, Lynne Sharon Shwartz
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
The Joke, Milan Kundera
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The World Doesn’t End, Charles Simic
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
2008:
What is the What, Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
The Mineral Palace, Heidi Julavits
Anticancer: A New Way of Life, David Servan-Schreiber
Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, Susan Jane Gilman
The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
There are a few in these lists that actually surprise me–really? That was one of my favorites of the year?–and a couple of others that I KNOW were included only so I could have a list of ten (making it, really, nine winners and the next closest thing)…but I’ll try not to revise history.
2009:
A Leg to Stand On, Oliver Sacks
All That I Have, Castle Freeman
The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll be Dead, David Shields
Twilight of the Superheroes, Deborah Eisenberg
The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
The People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, Vendela Vida
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
Even as I do this I’m tempted to further differentiate by bolding, here, the ones that I want to shout about the most. I’m mostly only not doing it because for some reason whenever I use the bold font it doesn’t show up bold, so it would just be a waste.
2010:
Whore’s Asylum, Katy Darby
The Man in the Wooden Hat, Jane Gardam
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
Lay the Favorite, Beth Raymer
The Photograph, Penelope Lively
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters
Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
As a side note: I’ve taken SO many Europa books out of the library solely because I love their jacket design so much.
