Favourite Books 2010

A month to go but how about a stab at this? Anything from discoveries to old things that you've re-read and learned to love again, published in this or any other year.

In no order:

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz - Insatiability. Crazily intense novel from the playwright. Great bots on music, madness, bohemianism, with well drawn out SF sub-plot.

I need my own copy! Discovered lots of Poles this year (Kownwicki, Milosz, etc.)

Gyula Krudy - The Adventures of Sindbad. From Poles to Hungarians. In this bunch of stories Sindbad is a traveler through time, from one love to the next, and from one death to the next. Very witty and needs more than the one read I managed to give it so far.

Life is a Dream was great as well (great writing on food, made me hungry) part of the Central European classics series on Penguin.

Thomas Bernhard - Old Masters. Again on the Penguin series. What does angry stand-up comedy actually look like on the page? For one thing its paragraph-less. But I think he backs this up with strong arguments and convinctions.

Roberto Bolano - By Night in Chile and 2666. Took me a while to notice (even w/the Bolano thread). He pulls little places of the universe together, but he makes it all matter. I'm on 2666 atm and I like the galloping style of narration. Hard to stop (as someone said on the reading thread).

The Arabian Nights - The Husain Haddawy translation, so only 500 pages as he chooses to translate what he thinks are the actual stories. Twists and turns per page count is high but it never tires.

Tarjei Vesaas - The Ice Palace. Uses the landscape to mirror the intensity of the best friendship you will have in your life? That was quite a morning! Rulfo's Pedro Paramo was another intense short one.

Vasily Gossmann/Platonov/Serge/Shalamov - all different facets of Bolshie lit. Grossmann brings the reportage and essayist's eye to various disasters, Serge is very sharp and feels close to events (even if he was on the run all the time), Platonov brings some art and lots of engineering failures and, in Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, tries to document the Gulag universe where you really feel there is no humanity left. Yet you keep turning pages. At one point in their lives, they all believed in it.

Denton Welch - Diaries. Just an awesome style.

Finally Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai - must find more cool books like this to read with everyone on here, next year.

Wow, someone else was reading "Insatiability"? I paid over the score for a battered reading copy. Found it very demanding, as he seems to want to wrestle with every possible contemporary issue at length, but strangely hypnotic, though I can't say I came out of it liking Witkacy much. (If the composer is based on his friend Szymanowski, I'd hate to think how he would portray an enemy.) This and his previous novel have been filmed fairly recently - I'm morbidly curious to see the films. Also read "The Mother", a short collection of his plays, concentrated weirdness and much more accessible.

"Sindbad" is an old favorite, and "Life is a Dream" would have to be on my list for this year. Another discovery was Kadare's "Palace of Dreams".

A few more finds:

Claude Seignolle's "The Accursed" - the Mark Gatiss series on Horror movies tagged "Wicker Man" and "Blood on Satan's Claw" as 'folk horror', which would be a perfect description for this beautifully written novel of witchcraft in rural France.

Hans Heinz Ewer's "Alraune" - a femme-fatale variation on "Frankenstein", very nasty but compelling stuff by a major German Decadent who wound up - much later - as a Nazi apologist.

Phillipe Soupault's "Last Nights of Paris" - oblique and poetic sort-of thriller of the Parisian underworld by a founding Surrealist

John Lanchester? I've liked everything he's written so far, starting with his novels The Debt to Pleasure (reminding me of Nabokov and Ishiguro), Mr Phillips (Virginia Wolff?), Fragrant Harbor, and his memoir A Family Romance. And his non-fiction I.O.U wasn't bad either, about the financial collapse. But the first two are my favorites, very funny, and strange, and the memoir is compelling

'Lie is a Dream' and 'Old Masters' get my vote too. Plus, also from that series, The Elephant by Slawomir Mrozek and How I Came to Know Fish by Ota Pavel

Two other big Autro-Hungarian discoveries for me this year:
'Skylark' and 'Anna Edes' by Dezso Kosztolanyi
Everything by Leo Perutz

Spring essence - the poetry of Ho Xuan Huong: amazing Vietnamese poetess from 1700s - wish i knew Vietnamese, as her poems were written to make sense both read ACROSS and read DOWN (in old Vietnamese characters), with all sorts of hidden sexual puns and stuff

henry Green: 'Back'

The journalism of William Langewiesche, who I'd not read before

Elizabeth Taylor: 'A View of the Harbour' -- the only book by her I hadn't read, and had been saving up

George V Higgins; 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle'
and Dorothy B Hughes: 'In a lonely Place' -- two perfect crime novels

Coetzee: 'Waiting for the Barbarians'

Tove Jansson: Travelling Light

Chloe Hooper: The Tall Man

Jess Walter: The Financial Lives of the Poets -- funniest book I read all year

Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Magician of Lublin

Ted Chiang: The Lifectycle of Software Objects

I'm sure there are more that have slipped my mind, too

Frederik Pohl's Gateway -- wowed by the bleakness, the mysteries, and that ending

Hadawy's Arabian Nights translation -- much different than movies based on its stories (thief of bagdad, disney's aladdin etc.), with a consistent theme of forgiveness

Wow, lots of names I haven't even heard of in these lists, but my tastes often seem a little more pedestrian than a lot of folks on this forum ( and I say that as a compliment to ILB, not as complaint.) Anyways, here's my list ...

Lydia Davis: The End of The Story.
Definitely my favorite read of 2010. Pretty experimental but still hits on a deep, emotional level.

Flaubert: Madame Bovary (new translation by Lydia Davis).
Couldn't put it down, and it left me reeling. Much more alive and modern than I expected it to be.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go.
Liked it even better than Remains of The Day, which I also read this year and really loved.

Don Delillo: The Names.
I read a handful of Delillos this year. All were really good (well ... except for Libra), but The Names is the only one I would consider top-tier.

Thomas Bernhard: The Loser.
My first Bernhard. Definitely will read more when the mood strikes.

Andrew Holleran: Dancer From The Dance.
Grabbed this one because it deals with the 70s NYC disco scene, which I loved reading about, but the characters and voice are what really make it so great.

And a few more ...

Leonard Gardner: Fat City
James Baldwin: Giovanni's Room
Patrik Ourednik: Europeana
William Maxwell: So Long, See You Tomorrow
Bohumi Hrabal: Too Loud a Solitude

I read a lot of short books this year since I made a New Year's Resolution of reading at least 50 and I wanted to make sure I made the mark. Maybe I'll make 2011 the year of the doorstopper to change it up.

I like Hrabal and Lydia Davis I read this year. Wanna pick up Bovary but wonder if her ways are much more successful when tackling something like Proust or Blanchot than Flaubert (and she is brilliant when translating the former).

I'll probably get round to ...Bovary though.

I knew I would forget something amazing, and that was History: A Novel by Elsa Morante.

Could post another 5-10 that felt like a waste of time, but no negativity from me tonight.

Don Delillo: The Names.
I read a handful of Delillos this year. All were really good (well ... except for Libra), but The Names is the only one I would consider top-tier.

!!! plz explain?

Yeah, I hated Libra, but I quit about 100 pages from the end so I probably shouldn't judge it without having finished it. I also had a lot going on when I was reading it, sand kept taking long breaks from it, and it seems like the kind of book that you have to be persistent with.

I feel like I can only offer lame criticisms too: some of the characters blended together in my head, the back-and-forth crosshatch narrative style bugged me, and, first and foremost, I knew where the story was going and just have an aversion to all these probings of the JFK assasination ... it's just yawnsville to me at this point.

I give these criticism with a bit of a cringe though. Not saying the book isn't important or well executed. I just don't think it's for me, even thought I'm a BIG Delillo

Seconded. Was really looking forward to Libra, had enjoyed White Noise, quite the JFK conspiracy nut at the time and knew the background well, but got less than a quarter of the way through it and just gave up. Deadly. Haven't looked at his work since since.

Hasn't been a great year for me as far as more heavyweight fiction goes. The books I remember most positively have been short and often relatively lightweight. They include:

Elizabeth Taylor - A View from the Harbour. Taylor's an old favourite and very few writers have given me such pure pleasure. This was the best of three Taylors I read this year. I've probably read around 10 of her novels and unlike James I'm in the lucky position of being able to look forward to more.

Barbara Trapido - Noah's Ark. My first Trapido but I followed it up quickly with Brother of the More Famous Jack, which I also liked a lot if not quite as much. I expect to be reading more of her in 2011.

Penelope Fitzgerald - Offshore. I'm hoping this is one of those cases where the penny drops with a writer I didn't quite get the hang of before. I read The Blue Flower a few years ago and found it sophisticated and beautifully crafted but dull. I had a much better experience Offshore and hope its given me a taste for her other books.

J M Coetzee - Summertime. This was my second Coetzee. I read Disgrace a few years ago and was hugely impressed, but the brutality of the subject matter made reading it not altogether enjoyable. Summertime may be comparatively minor Coatzee, and the subject matter is still dark, but I found it an easier and more compulsive read.

My other "discovery" this year was Wallace Stevens. I knew his work a bit already but hadn't tried to get grips with it properly. This year I gave him a proper chance and was surprised how much more I liked him than I expected. In fact I re-read more poetry this year than for ages, mainly classics - Yeats; Eliot and Dylan Thomas, who both rose in my estimation, Thomas surprisingly so (I thought he was an adolescent taste); Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, both of whom I found less impressive than I used to.

I've been running a book club for 19th century books this year, so my favourite books are all from that century. In particular, I have loved:

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. This is a truly amazing book - if you have never got round to reading it, get down to it now.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg - bonkers tale of unreliable narrators, demonic possession, Calvinist theology, and personal damnation. Also nice and short, unlike a lot of 19th century novels.

My favourite recent book is probably China Mieville's "The City and the City", the one about the two conjoined cities whose inhabitants spend their time pretending not to see the other city.

It hasn't been a great year for me either. I've felt really uninspired, but had some standouts:

Christos Tsialkos' The Slap was really, really good and kind of devastating. I want to read more by this dude but he's not widely available in Canada.

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker was lovely. I am a big Baker fan and it was pretty beautiful.

Also I read Crime and Punishment this year so that was a memorable one. It was better and more enthralling than I expected. What a character.

frankiemachine, all of Trapido is very good, except for her most recent one (Sex & Stravinsky) which I thought showed a worrying drop in quality

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg --this is such a great book! I really need to read more by him, but there doesn't really seem to be any obvious next place to go. Maybe he only had one (fantastically) great book in him?

the privileges by jonathan dee - the coldest and most thoughtful book dealing with 'the end of late capitalism' that came out this year but also the best written.

a vist from the the goon squad by jennifer egan - presents an even more plausible and heartbreaking vision of the near future than 'super sad love story' w/o the solipsism or anger. one of the most generous books ive read in a long time, really.

memories of the future by sigizmund krzhizhanovsky - not new but newly translated a collection of seven futuristic short stories from a stalin-era writer. filled with these incredible and dense metafictions that produce really arresting images - of a runaway effiel tower, of a cat on the windowsill of highrise - its also p 'original'.

Krzhizhanovsky's book is so fucking awesome!

haha yah it deserves a longer & more considered post to really give the scope & intelligence its due but yknow

it is so fucking awesome

really most of my backwards reading was all nyrb publishing stuff & i couldve just linked that thread

one thing that i wasnt so hot on initially was brad watson's aliens in the prime of their lives but i really came around to it after rereading the title story. hes still often overly precious & false & sloppy but a couple of the stories are really beautiful and hang together really well

also javier marías your face tomorrow trilogy is probably the greatest thing i read all year, although its not very new

I read and finished thirteen books this year. Here they are, ranked:

1. Libra - Don DeLillo
2. The Anatomy of England - Jonathan Wilson
3. Drown - Junot Diaz
4. The Prize - Daniel Yergin
5. Many Years From Now - Paul McCartney
6. Indignation - Philip Roth
7. 2666 - Roberto Bolano
8. Bowie In Berlin - Thomas Seabrook
9. Soccer In A Football World - David Wangerin
10. Cantona - Philippe Auclair
11. The Likes of Us - Michael Collins
12. The Last Samurai - Helen De Witt
13. Why England Lose - Simon Kuper

I've written about them all at length on here, no point in going over old ground. I last checked this thread just before Romeo's and Soukesian's slatings of Libra, so I had a good chuckle when I opened it up to write this post. It was the best thing this year by a mile.

Of the others: 2-3 really excellent, would say outstanding if I hadn't read Libra; 4-6 very good, no flaws; 7 a couple of fabulous sections, but as a whole strangely unsatisfying; 8-9 good but not really working their subjects, if that makes sense; 10-13 all have interesting bits but flawed to varying degrees.

Should I do this? I don't know. I get confused about what I've read. I'll try keeping a list this year. But the washing up needs doing, so I'll give it a go.

(A few minutes later)

The list isn't really working for me - can't really rank, would prefer to mention a few books that really stood out for me, not necessarily on any top ten sort of way, but just because they seem to have resonated with me, or made me feel fuller for having read them:

Walter de la Mare Short Stories Vol 1. - 1895-1926. Haunting. Self-consciously so perhaps, but usually doesn't feel too fey because of a certain psychological cynicism, with a poetic delight in the weight of words and things. Lispet, Lispett and Vaine is the stand out story. (finding the second volume less pleasing, more whimsical, which often lends too much of the hectic flush of flippancy).

A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan. Impressed and disappointed by Wells Tower, Goon Squad felt light years ahead, where fiction should be - dealing effectively with the modern world, neat interlinking tales, great psychological eye, great style (sometimes it feels like every sentence could be the first of a short story), and for all the ease (with character, dialogue, movement), there are paragraphs that have real emotional heft. Probably the only writer I've read who's used music naturally and effectively. Very very impressive, not at all disappointing.

Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses - Ian Hacking. Great book, which uses the phenomenon of fugue state wandering to look at the broader phenomenon of transient mental illness (socially transient that is, rather'n individually). Looks at the case study of a French fellow who'd find himself in Moscow apparently without knowing how he got there from France or what he'd done, uses it to analyse modern illnesses that might potentially fit the description of transient mental illnesses (the ones that can cause controversy when talked about directly - eating disorders, schizophrenia inter alia). Looks at how the umbrella of definition and collections of symptoms change over time, how recategorisation affects perception, and the social contexts of illness.

The Collected poems of Wallace Stevens. Thanks to woof and Lord Sotosyn. Enjoyed probably more than anything this year, + the Necessary Angel essays at the end. Simply fantastic

Oh, and I certainly didn't finish it, but I thoroughly enjoyed poring over WF Smith's translations of Pantagruel and Gargantua. It's not as fun as Urquhart but it's absolutely rammed with scholarly notes and contemporary detail. And because the reading's plainer it feels even stranger than Urquhart in a way.

Also really enjoyed - Vol 1 of Scholastic humanism and the unification of Europe by RW Southern, Thomas More - Peter Ackroyd, The Grotesque in Art and Literature - W Kayser, Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (my favourite of his I think),The Dog at Clambercrown by Jocelyn Brooke, and of course The Myster of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer.

Bum steers - really didn't like The City and the City by China Mieville.

im deeply impressed by ismael focusing so intently on quality over quantity. cld probably stand to read less widely and w/ more discernment this coming year

jeez, don't be - I should be clocking up three times as many, my life is not richer for this

Actually, something odd I've been finding is that the better the book, the less I read because I don't want to find myself at the end of it. Night Soldiers is taking forever and it's utterly engaging - while Among The Believers, which would have been a match for Libra, stands abandoned entirely.

Impressed and disappointed by Wells Tower, Goon Squad felt light years ahead, where fiction should be

yah one of the things that impressed me the most abt egan's novel - & i wrote abt this at some length - is how adriotly she grapples w/ certain modes of thinking, of 'connectivity', that feel prevalent. other than gg kay's last light of the sun its also probably the best recent attempt ive read @ mapping the interplay btw 'history' and the personal connections/decisions that drive & derive from it. like the way the both of 'telescoping' in on key points in ancillary character's lives w/o making too much or too little of those moments

it really is a p great book imo

she grapples w/ certain modes of thinking, of 'connectivity', that feel prevalent

Yeah this exactly. Where did you write about it, Lamp? On ilx? Busy office time has been eating into ilx time and I haven't been keeping up as much as I'd like to.

Two other books I meant to mention -

The Arabian Nightmare - Robert Irwin. A book about journeys through dreams within dreams within dreams, one of the main scenes/locations in it seemed to be lifted into Inception - let's say it was a tribute no one seemed to notice - but once again a sign that books generally get there first and get there better. (tho the idea is hardly new I realise, older even than Zhuangzi's butterfly I'd imagine).

and C by Tom McCarthy, the first third of which absolutely blew me away, but which only sputtered after that.

The list isn't really working for me - can't really rank, would prefer to mention a few books that really stood out for me, not necessarily on any top ten sort of way, but just because they seem to have resonated with me, or made me feel fuller for having

This is what i did, btw - no ranking or top tens, just what really stood out. And I could only remember some of what I read last year because I keep a not too comprehensive reading list of what I want to try to read at the start of the year.

A Visit from the Goon Squad sounds like a candidate for the ILB's next group book!!

Yeah for sure! I've been thinking abt picking it up due to ppl on ilx loving it (and liking something that was in the nyer)

i finished about as many books as ismael did. i guess you could say i focused on quality over quantity but really i was just busy and tired and did a bad job. i think the books i liked most were nabokov's invitation to a beheading and richard wright's black boy.

A Visit from the Goon Squad sounds like a candidate for the ILB's next group book!!

not sure it's out in the uk till March I think.

Most of the novels I read this year disappointed to varying degrees:
- Lethem's Chronic City: a PKDick version of Humboldt's Gift, with Paul Nelson playing the Delmore Schwartz role. Loved bits of this - the snowglobe satire, the war-free version of the Times - but too thick with dopehead digression and let down by flimsy final reveal.
- Catherine O'Flynn's The News Where You Are - covering similar wistful, meandering west-Mids territory to her loveable debut What Was Lost, but with diminishing returns.
- Amis, Pregnant Widow - Borrowed from the library rather bought, so I knew, really, that it wasn't going to be much cop. Staggering how slack his writing has got though. The attempted emulation of Nabokov's "(picnic, lightning)" with "(fast convertible, summer rain)" seemed to encapsulate the decline.
- Lipsyste, The Ask. Generally love the first 50 pages of Lipsyte's books, but even though the satire of scuffling 40something parenthood struck a nerve, and the post-Lishian prosody is reliably spectacular, he still can't escape the limits of his initial rants.
- Franzen, Freedom. Enjoyable, involving, like a solid season of 6 Feet Under or something, but crazily overpraised. The gestures at social context - references to Twitter, NPR alt.rock, Ivy League republicans, suburban zealots - felt a bit embarrassing. But some of the central characters weren't much more convincing: the repeated bouts of parental fuckupery were stronger than the supposedly central relationship of Walter & Patty. And crucial extra-marital characters like Lalitha barely existed.

Continuing this pattern, I've just started Super Sad Love Story, which isn't as good as I was lead to believe. Hoping to see a new Norman Rush novel in 2011.

The best book I read published this year was probably David Harvey's Enigma of Capital - bracing to read detailed Marxist analysis again, even if his cultural schematics are pie-eyed.

Old books I read this year:
- Nicholson Baker's The Everlasting Story of Nory: almost nobody has a good word to say about this slight, twee novella pretty much written from the perspective of Baker's daughter on her year at school in Ely, but I loved it.
- Dylan's Chronicles, which I only got round to reading this year (despite voting for it in ILB books of the 00's poll), and Nicholas Pegg's The Complete David Bowie.
- Reading Edward Mendelsson through his two volumes on Auden, various essays on Pynchon and finally his book The Things That Matter, particularly the chapters on Woolf.

You didn't tell us whether you LIKED Chronicles, man! I mean what is that even supposed to MEAN?

also you didn't mention Baker's The Anthologist - didn't you read that in 2010?

I have been reading Alasdair Gray's A LIFE IN PICTURES (oh did I mention that before?) so that is one book from 2010.

I also read
#9dream and was dazzled and amazed
Take This Waltz, could be touching
Kieron Smith, Boy was long
Chronic City, largely agree with Stevie
A Gate at the Stairs, ditto

Loved Chronicles. Even better than I thought it would be.
Anthologist was probably my favourite novel of 2009.

Had been avoiding the LRB review of FREEDOM until I read the book; turns out it's almost entirely on the money.

Bought Gray's picture buik for the missus so browsed through it over the winterlude. Struck once again by how fundamentally ugly I find his drawing and typography - think it put me off reading him for about 20 years!

I don't think I feel the same way about Gray's visuals - perhaps I have grown used to them or accepted them tout court. Well, I can see that his faces and more realistic portraits are clumsy, and I think it's a bit embarrassing that he constantly paints people naked (how often do you actually see people naked?).

But in other ways I think he is as fine a visual artist as they say - a great sense of design, scale, symmetry (in fact a rather obsessive tendency to make symmetrical frescos, etc), sweep. Even if one doesn't like his pictures of people, couldn't his pictures of places and objects still appeal? As for typography, I think I quite like this, including the Oran Mor Classic or whatever it's called that he announces at the end.

I think I have come round to liking him a lot in general, and the above partly just reflects that.

Ted Chiang: The Lifectycle of Software Objects

Yes yes yes, this is good as always. Quickly becoming my favourite SF author.

A couple of novels read in December would have made my "best of 2010 list" - Penelope Lively's "Moon Tiger" and "The Privileges" by Jonathan Dee. The Lively was far better than most Booker winners, the Dee rather superficial but well-written, intelligent entertainment. Also enjoyed "How Fiction Works" by James Wood: reading "The Broken Estate" now, I realise that what redeems "How Fiction Works" work for me is it's greater focus on technical analysis. The Broken Estate is criticism of a more traditional, academic, explicatory kind and although Wood is pretty good at it I don't think it's a very interesting or accurate way of looking at the world - or even at fiction, particularly.