2024
Fiction
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida - Shehan Karunatilaka
The Bee Sting - Paul Murray
Cutting For Stone - Abraham Verghese
The Maid - Nita Prose
Nonfiction
The Battle for New York - Barnet Schecter
Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
2023
Fiction
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf (2nd time in 2+ years; it's worth it!)
Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver
Trust - Hernan Diaz
Annihilation - Jeff Vandermeer
Parrot and Olivier in America - Peter Casey
Bewilderment - Richard Powers
A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Connor
The Hummingbird - Sandro Veronesi
Spaceman of Bohemia - Jaroslav Kalfar
The Singularities - John Banville
Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell
The Great Believers - Rebecca Makkai
Birnam Wood - Eleanor Catton
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - Anthony Marra
When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamin Labatut*
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Manhattan Transfer - John Dos Passos
Sea of Tranquility - Emily St. John Mandel
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
O Caledonia - Elspeth Barker
The Trees - Percival Everett
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Swing Time - Zadie Smith
Olive, Again - Elizabeth Strout
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
Mercury Pictures Presents - Anthony Marra
Double Blind - Edward St. Aubin
Properties of Thirst - Marianne Wiggins
The Girl With All The Gifts - M.R. Carey
Storm Front - Jim Butcher (! :/)
The Zone of Interest - Martin Amis
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store - James McBride
An Island - Karen Jennings
Nonfiction
Ten African-American Presidents - Faith & Martin Sternstein
Fermat's Enigma - Simon Singh
Winning Fixes Everything - Evan Drellich
The Guarded Gate - Daniel Okrent
Will in the World - Stephen Greenblatt
When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamin Labatut*
Just Send Me Word - Orlando Figes
The Crimean War - Orlando Figes
Tournament of Shadows - Karl E. Meyer & Shareen Blair Brysac
Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War - Harry S. Stout
Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews - James Carroll
Why We Love Baseball - Joe Posnanski
Galileo's Error - Philip Goff
*listed as both fiction and nonfiction; one must read it to understand.
2022
Fiction
The Lincoln Highway - Amor Towles (I quit after 200 pages)
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
A Student of Weather - Elizabeth Hay
Desperate Characters - Paula Fox
The Promise - Damon Galgut
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk
Half A Life - V. S. Naipaul
Flights - Olga Tokarczuk
The Every - Dave Eggers
The Map of Love - Ahdaf Soueif
The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead
The Lost Apothecary - Sarah Penner
Pierre, or The Ambiguities - Herman Melville
Three O'Clock in the Morning - Gianrico Carofiglio
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
Deacon King Kong - James McBride
Chicago - Brian Doyle
Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri
The Books of Jacob - Olga Tokarczuk
Dark Matter - Blake Crouch
Recursion - Blake Crouch
The Magician - Colm Toibin*
Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver
*Some would call this non-fiction (biography), I suppose; but dramatic situations, invented dialogue, and personal intimacy so pervade the narrative that I would not classify it as such.
Nonfiction
The Baseball 100 - Joe Posnanski
The Exodus - Richard Eliot Friedman
The Ground Breaking - Scott Ellsworth
Chicago: City on the Make - Nelson Algren
Ill Fares the Land - Tony Judt
After the Apocalypse - Andrew Bacevich
The Bullpen Gospels - Dirk Hayhurst
Bigger Than The Game - Dirk Hayhurst
Home Waters - John N. Maclean
The Verge - Patrick Wyman
The Consolations of Philosophy - Alain de Botton
Exteriors - Annie Ernaux
A Man's Place - Annie Ernaux
Are Numbers Real? - Brian Clegg
This Republic of Suffering - Drew Gilpin Faust
2021
Fiction
The Night Manager - Louise Erdrich
Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro
Jeremiah, Ohio - Adam Sol
Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri
Anil's Ghost - Michael Ondaatje
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Almost - Elizabeth Benedict
The Book of Intimate Grammar - David Grossman
The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman
The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon
Dubliners - James Joyce
Ulysses - James Joyce
Passing - Nella Larsen
The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter
Cloud Cuckoo Land - Anthony Doerr
True History of the Kelly Gang - Peter Carey
The Arrest - Jonathan Lethem
The Anomaly - Herve Le Tellier
The Lost Shtetl - Max Gross
The Invention of Truth - Marta Morazzoni
Nonfiction
How To Watch Basketball Like A Genius - Nick Greene
Entitled - Kate Manne
Metropolis - Ben Wilson
Last Best Hope - George Packer
The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber & David Wengrow
2020
Fiction
Nicholas Nickelby - Charles Dickens
2019
Fiction
Lake Success - Gary Shteyngart
Pachinko - Min Jin Lee
Sing, Unburied, Sing - Jesmyn Ward
Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday
Fragile Things - Neil Gaiman
Nonfiction
How Democracies Die - Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt
1947: Where Now Begins - Elisabeth Asbrink
The MVP Machine - Ben Lindbergh & Travis Sawchik
A Grand Illusion? - Tony Judt
2018
Fiction
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
The Widow - Fiona Barton
Fates and Furies - Lauren Groff
The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu
The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu
Death's End - Cixin Liu
The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen
4321 - Paul Auster
Beatrice and Virgil - Yann Martel
Prisoner's Dilemma - Richard Powers
The Final Solution - Michael Chabon
Little, Big - John Crowley
Nonfiction
Leonardo da Vinci - Walter Isaacson
The Lost City of the Monkey God - Douglas Preston
Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
These Truths - Jill LePore
Boomtown - Sam Anderson
The Fifth Risk - Michael Lewis
2017
Fiction
The Intuitionist - Colson Whitehead
Here I Am - Jonathan Safran Foer
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson
The Nix - Nathan Hill
The Girl Who Played with Fire - Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - Stieg Larsson
Moonglow - Michael Chabon
The Other Log of Phileas Fogg - Philip Jose Farmer
Iza's Ballad - Magda Szabo
Arcadia - Iain Pears
Signs Preceding the End of the World - Yuri Herrera
Life and Adventures of Jack Engle - Walt Whitman
The Quickening - Michelle Hoover
Exit West - Mohsin Hamid
Ghostwritten - David Mitchell
The Lost Painting - Jonathan Harr
Pumpkin Flowers - Matti Friedman
The City of Falling Angels - John Berendt
The One Percent Doctrine - Ron Susskind
The Harm in Hate Speech - Jeremy Waldron
Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
The Undoing Project - Michael Lewis
A Grand Illusion? - Tony Judt
The Congress of Vienna - Harold Nicolson
Priestdaddy - Patricia Lockwood
2016
(OK, so I sorta let this go for close to 2 years. I was busy!!)
Fiction
The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead
The Tsar of Love and Techno - Anthony Marra
Zero K - Don Delillo
The Chemistry of Tears - Peter Carey
The Cunning Man - Robertson Davies
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Northern Clemency - Philip Hensher
All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
Stoner - John Williams
Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Dr. Faustus - Thomas Mann
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
The Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein
Nonfiction
Black Hole Blues - Janna Levin
The Undoing Project - Michael Lewis
David and Goliath - Malcolm Gladwell
The Coming Anarchy - Robert D. Kaplan
The Forever War - Dexter Filkins
1939: Countdown to War - Richard Overy
Why Marx Was Right - Terry Eagleton (a re-reading)
SPQR - Mary Beard
The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America - Colin G. Calloway
2014
Ill Fares the Land - Tony Judt
Minotaur - Benjamin Tammuz
The Calligrapher's Night - Yasmine Ghata
The Predator State - James K. Galbraith
Dismantling the Empire - Chalmers Johnson
Winter's Tale - Mark Helprin
2013
Bring Up The Bodies - Hilary Mantel
A Wicked War - Amy Greenberg
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
2012
Thunderstruck - Erik Larson
On Beauty - Zadie Smith
Galore - Michael Crummey
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
11/22/63 - Stephen King
The Island of the Colorblind - Oliver Sacks
Metropolis: A Novel - Elizabeth Gaffney
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe - Charles Yu
1491 - Charles C. Mann
Pure - Andrew Miller
Lost Memory of Skin - Russel Banks
The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes
Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
Zone One - Colson Whitehead
The Emperor of All Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee
Why Marx Was Right - Terry Eagleton
Just Kids - Patti Smith
Lamb - Christopher Moore
October 2011
Reamde - Neal Stephenson
Well, it is certainly not up to the standard of the Baroque Cycle. This novel is more like a well-done Clive Cussler (yes, I read one of those trashlets, once). Although it started out with, and from time to time reverted to, some moderately interesting stuff on virtual reality and some of the actually rather interesting aspects of how that technology is developing into a culture, in the end this was just another adventure novel of the cliff-hanger variety. Particularly irritating was the way various good guys repeatedly got the evil genius right in their sights, and just as they pulled the trigger a leaf blew in, or someone farted (not really, but just as trivial) and the shot was destroyed. And the coincidences required to get everyone into the same corner of lower B.C.-northern Idaho at the same time, from China, Iowa, Manila, and so forth required a lot more suspension of disbelief than the book was able to support. Finally, the happy-ever-after pairing up of some of the most unlikely boy-girl duos possible was just too saccharine.
But: the reason I stuck with this doggy had to do with the medium: it was the first real book I have read on my Kindle, a recent gift from my wife. And I must say, I think I am a convert. Nothing beats a weighty tome in my lap when I'm in my study; but on the L, on the bus, nothing is easier. A completely one-handed experience, comfortable, extremely portable, easy to read, easy to keep one's place. I expect to use the Kindle a lot more.
September 2011
The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History - Jill LePore
I really enjoyed this modest but careful little book. LePore does a nice job of providing illustration via anecdotes, which I personally find to be an excellent way of bringing immediacy to a history (as well as just enjoying the pleasure of seeing the obscure retrieved from oblivion). And she paces very well the back-and-forth between the events of the Revolutionary period and those of today's politics. The most important contribution of this book, though, is to insist on the reality that the American Revolution was not something that happened one season: it was a process that developed over most of a generation, and that had complexity in its elements as well as in the motivations and interests and beliefs of its protagonists. LePore is an opponent of the over-simplification that accompanies using our history as a tool to justify a narrow political stance today; and she does a great job of making it harder for those who would do so.
The Instructions - Adam Levin
This is a huge book, physically as well as in its headlong pace that takes its story wherever it seems to want to go. The protagonist is a sort of Holden Caufield, ramped up and going two directions at once: on one hand, into the world of Talmudic reasoning and orthodox (if not Orthodox) Judaism, and on the other, into the new millennium -in terms of institutional anomie, cultural war, alienation, and even violence. This novel is a tour de force, and its last 200 pages have a sense of growing exhaustion even as they drive towards a sort of unbelievable but inevitable climax. But it's an irresistible, fun book to read.
You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik
Another novel about young people, sort of. I say "sort of" because, even though most of the characters (other than the protagonist) are high school students, they are made out to be hugely sophisticated; and Maksik gets away with it. Partly I think it's Paris, where the novel takes place; part of it is the fact that these are the children of an elite: students at an international English-language school for the sons and daughters of diplomats, and the powerful of business and similar worlds. The kids don't live like we think of high-school kids, but everything is believable. Engaging, terrible in a way. It was hard to put this book down.
August 2011
A World on Fire - Amanda Foreman
Americans tend to think they know a lot about the Civil War because, well, we had it in high school, didn't we? There was Fort Sumter. And Lee Surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, and then they shot Lincoln, and then we had Reconstruction and the Ku Klux Klan, right? But do we know that the U.S. Ambassador (not the title they used in those days) to England was the son and grandson of presidents? That the Brits were themselves very divided over whether to support the South or the North, or that the USA threatened twice to declare war on England during the Civil War? Do we know that General Grant ordered the arrest and removal of all Jews in the federally-controlled areas of Mississippi and Tennessee (Lincoln overruled him on that one)?
It goes on and on; and this book is a hugely interesting story of our war as viewed by foreigners --and provides plenty of details on intrigue here in this country, as well. Wonderful to read; I was sorry when it was over.
February, 2011
The Predator State - James K. Galbraith
How did I miss this one when it was first published, a few years ago? Busts a basic conservative myth wide open.
January, 2011
The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson
I found this novel sort of off-putting for the first couple dozen pages, but it has an oddly compelling momentum (I guess I'd call it): nothing seems to happen, and yet a story unfolds, gradually, in which I became very interested.
Washington Rules - Andrew Bacevich
This book clearly and relentlessly shows how our current foreign policy narrative has developed since World War II, and how every president has had a hand in nurturing accepted myths and avoiding an examination of their basis in reality.
Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris
This biography made me want to read more books like it. It's particularly interesting to see how the political culture has evolved since the turn of the last century --how much more grounded it used to be in speaking frankly in comparison to the "Big Lie" approach that we have grown used to. Also, the contrast between the major political parties then and now is fascinating. Finally, TR himself is shown as hugely popular; I wonder how he would look on today's political scene: as he would combine some of the core elements of today's Republican and Democratic party beliefs, it would be fascinating to see what the political culture would make of such an enormously popular politician.
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