Best Reads of 2019

Not so different from 2018, 2019 had lots of very long stretches where I was reading books more out of perceived obligation than actual enjoyment.  I finally managed to read all of Homer and Virgil's Aeneid, something that I would have done in my first year of university except I skipped out of the Great Books seminar (I was taking a different honors course, not simply bailing on class...), and as I explained, I ended up reading all three in dueling translations.  At times, this was quite a long slog.  The two volumes of Musil's The Man Without Qualities took up almost all of March and April.  While there were certainly some interesting passages, I can't say that this massive novel really spoke to me that much and I certainly shan't return to it a second time.  That said, I'm glad that I conquered it, mostly so that I can say I've actually read the three most challenging monuments of High Modernism (Ulysses, Remembrance of Lost Time and The Man Without Qualities).  It's sort of interesting that I have to dip into non-fiction in order to get to 10 honorable mentions for the year.

At any rate, the top 3 books from 2019 were:

Russell Hoban Turtle Diary
Anthony Marra The Tsar of Love and Techno
Loren Eiseley The Invisible Pyramid

The best book reread was
Ovid Metamorphoses

Honorable mention:
Homer The Odyssey
Elaine McCluskey The Most Heartless Town in Canada 
Constance Beresford-Howe The Book of Eve (very delayed review here)
Dawn Powell Turn, Magic Wheel
Salman Rushdie* Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
Paul Auster Leviathan
Teju Cole Known and Strange Things
Eiseley The Immense Journey
Thien Do Not Say We Have Nothing (though a ruthless editor would have helped)
Robert Stone A Hall of Mirrors (I liked the middle third quite a bit but not the ending)

Graham Swift's Waterland was a bit of a slow burn, but it got better as more family secrets were revealed until 1) he started going on long digressions including one about the mysteries of eels and their reproductive systems and 2) he introduced an incest subplot, which always icks me out to the point I really don't want to continue reading this book.  It's a shame, as Waterland otherwise would have made honorable mention (given that this has been another somewhat disappointing year).

However, the prize for the most horrible book of the year goes to Eugene Marten's Waste.  A very unpleasant book on so many levels.  I won't be reading any of his other books, none of which seem to be in the Toronto library system anyway.

* I thought up until last night that I would either split this slot with Rushdie's The Golden House or it would supplant Two Years..., but I did not care for the ending at all or rather one aspect of the ending that I found too incredible, as opposed to all the other fairly unbelievable events in the novel.  I was also disenheartened by the running commentary on Trump beating Clinton (here recast as the triumph of the Joker over Bat-Girl), and this surely didn't help either.  Maybe I am being too harsh, as I didn't like the ending of A Hall of Mirrors either, but this is my list, and I don't have to be completely consistent...