Things were a little thin on the ground in 2025, though they improved in the fall.
Top 5 books:
Zevin Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Peter De Vries Slouching Towards Kalamazoo
Russo Empire Falls
Austen Persuasion
Kaysen Asa, As I Knew Him
Honorable Mention:
Giuseppe Di Lampedusa The Leopard
Joan Didion Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Denis Johnson Angels
Sean Michaels Do You Remember Being Born?
Zhu Wen I Love Dollars: And Other Stories of China (sort of relentlessly one-note, however...)
Dorothy Edwards Winter Sonata
Rosario Castellanos The Book of Lamentations
Downing A Narrow Time
The Epic of Gilgamesh (English version by Mitchell)
Dawn Powell Angels on Toast (mostly about the sordid affairs of businessmen)
I reread quite a few good to great books in 2025, and I am expecting the same in 2026 where I am probably going to reread Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, Narayan's The Financial Expert and Murdoch's Under the Net, all of which are right up my alley (and which I read in my late 40s or early 50s, so my reading tastes won't have shifted as much). And perhaps I shall get around to Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway's Party and maybe the rest of Joyce's Dubliners (I recently reread 'The Dead').
It's really quite hard to choose between Calvino's Invisible Cities, Carr's A Month in the Country and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Calvino is the most interesting thought experiment, but it isn't successful as a cohesive narrative for obvious reasons. Mrs. Dalloway is probably the more important of these books, but I might have enjoyed A Month in the Country just slightly more.
Best book reread:
Carr's A Month in the Country
No comments:
Post a Comment