As usual at this time of year I’ve put together a list of the best books I’ve read over the past twelve months. These are not books that were necessarily published over the past year, just those I read and particularly enjoyed. I’ve listed them in alphabetical order by author.
Fiction
Muriel Barbery – The Elegance of the Hedgehog
This delightful and touching book was recommended to me by a friend who I managed to get back in touch with after ten years. I couldn’t thank her more. The book has been a huge success, especially in the author’s native France. The two main characters, a fifty-four year old concierge and a twelve year old girl who live in an upper-class apartment block in Paris, are beautifully drawn and provide witty and incisive observations on what passes for modern society. Their contemplations and observations on life, love, happiness, language, social class and, above all, beauty and art, are wonderful. A highly moving book.
John Berger – To the Wedding
Over the past couple of years I’ve been reading almost everything written by the great intellectual, writer and artist John Berger – his art criticism, political and cultural essays, and novels. Earlier this year I wrote a piece about Berger here on my blog. To the Wedding was published in 2009 and tells an almost unbearable story of love, hope and sadness. There can be few more humane writers than Berger. His ability to get to the core of ordinary peoples’ lives in a prose so poetic and sensitive is simply beautiful.
Stieg Larsson – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson – The Girl Who Played with Fire
Stieg Larsson – The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
Like millions of others across the world I found the Stieg Larsson trilogy utterly captivating. All three books are quite long, but the fluidity of the prose whisks you along breathlessly. Lisbeth Salander must be one of the great characters of modern literature. Together with Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson has put Sweden very much on the world map. Mixing social commentary and detective fiction, this is narrative at its very best.
Orhan Pamuk – The Museum of Innocence
This is the first book I’ve read by the Turkish Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk. Even though the self-centred, upper-class characters are fairly unattractive, the tale of deeply obsessive and largely unrequited love in 1970s’ Istanbul has a strange and unexpected appeal. There were times when I thought I wasn’t enjoying the book, but because it’s so exquisitively written in the end I found it utterly enticing.
José Luis Sampedro – La sonrisa etrusca
Maruja Torres – Mientras vivimos
These are two novels that I read in Spanish, neither of which are available in English as far as I know.
José Luis Sampedro is unusually a noted radical economist and social commentator, as well as being a superb novelist. The tenderness of his writing in La sonrisa etrusca (The Etruscan Smile), seen from the viewpoint of an old and dying campesino in Milan, is, like Berger’s, deeply humane, showing how love can be so central to our lives at any age.
Maruja Torres is a well known journalist and novelist in Spain and in Mientras vivimos (While We Live), she contemplates, among other themes, the consequences of obsessive admiration for someone and how the past can impact so deeply on the present. This is pursued through the development of a sensitive but ever changing relationship between a successful but ageing novelist and her young assistant.
Non-fiction
Laurie Lee – Cider With Rosie
Laurie Lee – As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
Laurie Lee – A Moment of War
Laurie Lee – A Rose for Winter
In many respects some of Laurie Lee’s work, especially Cider With Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, has suffered from being on the school curriculum (at least when I was at school in Scotland and England) and therefore read by many children merely to pass exams. Rereading these books almost forty years later, these memoirs of his early life had a completely unexpected vibrancy. Living in Andalusia no doubt heightened my appreciation, but Lee’s elegant and seamless descriptive prose of a past way of life in rural Spain is rich with poetic detail. How much and how little Andalusian life has changed.
Paul Theroux – Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’
In 1975 Paul Theroux published The Great Railway Bazaar, his account of travelling across Asia by train. I must have read it around that same time and it soon became regarded by many as a classic of travel writing. Some thirty years later Theroux retraced his journey (at least as much as he could given political changes) and wrote his account in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. The changing world, people and places he sees, now written by a very much changed writer in very much changed personal circumstances, are a delight. Few contemporary writers have such an acute sense of observation.
Fiction
Muriel Barbery – The Elegance of the Hedgehog
This delightful and touching book was recommended to me by a friend who I managed to get back in touch with after ten years. I couldn’t thank her more. The book has been a huge success, especially in the author’s native France. The two main characters, a fifty-four year old concierge and a twelve year old girl who live in an upper-class apartment block in Paris, are beautifully drawn and provide witty and incisive observations on what passes for modern society. Their contemplations and observations on life, love, happiness, language, social class and, above all, beauty and art, are wonderful. A highly moving book.
John Berger – To the Wedding
Over the past couple of years I’ve been reading almost everything written by the great intellectual, writer and artist John Berger – his art criticism, political and cultural essays, and novels. Earlier this year I wrote a piece about Berger here on my blog. To the Wedding was published in 2009 and tells an almost unbearable story of love, hope and sadness. There can be few more humane writers than Berger. His ability to get to the core of ordinary peoples’ lives in a prose so poetic and sensitive is simply beautiful.
Stieg Larsson – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson – The Girl Who Played with Fire
Stieg Larsson – The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
Like millions of others across the world I found the Stieg Larsson trilogy utterly captivating. All three books are quite long, but the fluidity of the prose whisks you along breathlessly. Lisbeth Salander must be one of the great characters of modern literature. Together with Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson has put Sweden very much on the world map. Mixing social commentary and detective fiction, this is narrative at its very best.
Orhan Pamuk – The Museum of Innocence
This is the first book I’ve read by the Turkish Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk. Even though the self-centred, upper-class characters are fairly unattractive, the tale of deeply obsessive and largely unrequited love in 1970s’ Istanbul has a strange and unexpected appeal. There were times when I thought I wasn’t enjoying the book, but because it’s so exquisitively written in the end I found it utterly enticing.
José Luis Sampedro – La sonrisa etrusca
Maruja Torres – Mientras vivimos
These are two novels that I read in Spanish, neither of which are available in English as far as I know.
José Luis Sampedro is unusually a noted radical economist and social commentator, as well as being a superb novelist. The tenderness of his writing in La sonrisa etrusca (The Etruscan Smile), seen from the viewpoint of an old and dying campesino in Milan, is, like Berger’s, deeply humane, showing how love can be so central to our lives at any age.
Maruja Torres is a well known journalist and novelist in Spain and in Mientras vivimos (While We Live), she contemplates, among other themes, the consequences of obsessive admiration for someone and how the past can impact so deeply on the present. This is pursued through the development of a sensitive but ever changing relationship between a successful but ageing novelist and her young assistant.
Non-fiction
Laurie Lee – Cider With Rosie
Laurie Lee – As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
Laurie Lee – A Moment of War
Laurie Lee – A Rose for Winter
In many respects some of Laurie Lee’s work, especially Cider With Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, has suffered from being on the school curriculum (at least when I was at school in Scotland and England) and therefore read by many children merely to pass exams. Rereading these books almost forty years later, these memoirs of his early life had a completely unexpected vibrancy. Living in Andalusia no doubt heightened my appreciation, but Lee’s elegant and seamless descriptive prose of a past way of life in rural Spain is rich with poetic detail. How much and how little Andalusian life has changed.
Paul Theroux – Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’
In 1975 Paul Theroux published The Great Railway Bazaar, his account of travelling across Asia by train. I must have read it around that same time and it soon became regarded by many as a classic of travel writing. Some thirty years later Theroux retraced his journey (at least as much as he could given political changes) and wrote his account in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. The changing world, people and places he sees, now written by a very much changed writer in very much changed personal circumstances, are a delight. Few contemporary writers have such an acute sense of observation.
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