Results for “best fiction”

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I didn’t like most of the widely reviewed fiction of this year, but I did have a few favorites, namely:

Domenico Starnone,  Ties.  This is one of the better Italian novels of the last few decades.  It is short, easy to comprehend, utterly compelling, and the basic story line is that of a married couple and their children, to say more would spoil the plot.  The introduction and translation are by Jhumpa Lahiri, also first-rate (by the way, here is my conversation with Jhumpa, toward the end she discusses this project).  This Rachel Donadio NYT review provides very useful background knowledge.

Ge Fei, The Invisibility Cloak.  This short Chinese noir novel, with a dash of Murakami, is one of this year’s “cool books.”  I finished it in one sitting.  Set in Beijing, the protagonist sells audio equipment, and then strange things happen.  Here is a good interview with the author.

Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation, edited and translated by Ken Liu.  A strong collection, with two stories by Cixin Liu.  Here is a new article on Chinese science fiction.

Min Jin Lee, Pachinko. An old-fashioned literary drama, unfolds slowly but is gripping, reminds me of Dickens and also Vikram Seth but set in Korea and Japan as an extended set piece running throughout most of the 20th century.  For me, this was clearly the #1 fiction book of the year, and I didn’t include it in my Bloomberg column only because I read it after the column was in the pipeline.  It’s also rich with history and social science, a real winner.  NYT picked it as one of their top ten of the year.

Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, the new translation and edition by Stuart Warner and Stéphane Douard.

My best fiction reading of the year was Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy, though it wasn’t published in 2017.  It is one of the best science fiction classics, ever.  Just to recap, I like volume one the most, and it is the most complex, but for many readers disorienting.  You don’t find out the real plot until p.272, so perhaps spoilers will help you.  Volumes two and three are more in the style of classic science fiction, a’la Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke.

My best “classic I had never read before” gets two picks, the first being James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer (review at the link).  The second is Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, though come to it with at least a basic understanding of its Anglo-Catholic milieu.  Sooner or later this novel will be completely unintelligible to even highly educated readers, except for a few specialists.

In Spanish I will pick Juan Marsé, Rabos de lagartija, from 2011, don’t bother with the English translation.  In German it was Thomas Bernhard and Siegfried Unseld, Der Briefwechsel, a series of letters exchanged between an author and his publisher, some of them concern money (I haven’t finished it yet but so far it is quite consistent in quality).  As good as a really good Bernhard novel, also from 2011, there is no English-language translation.

I thought it was a stellar year for fiction, even though most of the widely anticipated books by famous authors disappointed me.  These were my favorites, more or less in the order I read them, not in order of preference:

Michel Houellebecq, Soumission/Submission.  The correct reading is always a level deeper than the one you are currently at.

Larry Kramer, The American People.  Epic, reviewed a lot but then oddly overlooked in a crowded year.

The Seventh Day, by Yu Hua.  Perhaps my favorite of all the contemporary Chinese novels I have read: “Lacking the money for a burial plot, he must roam the afterworld aimlessly, without rest.”

Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz, New World, “An innovative story of love, decapitation, cryogenics, and memory by two of our most creative literary minds.”

Vendela Vida, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty.  Fun without being trivial.

Elena Ferrante, volume four, The Story of the Lost Child.  See my various posts about her series here, one of the prime literary achievements of the last twenty years.

The Widower, by Mohamed Latiff Mohamed.  My favorite novel from Singapore.

The Meursault Investigation, by Kamel Daoud.  I’ll teach it this coming year in Law and Literature.

Every year I offer my picks for best books of that year, today we are doing fiction.  I nominate:

1. Karl Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Two: Man in Love.

2. Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs.  Great fun.

3. Amy Sackville, Orkney.  Not every honeymoon works out the way you planned.

4. Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

5. Kathryn Davis, Duplex: A Novel.  Non-linear, not for all.

Since I think the Knausgaard is one of the greatest novels ever written, I suppose it also has to be my fiction book of the year.  (Except, um…it’s not fiction.)  But otherwise I found many books disappointing, perhaps because my own expectations were out of synch with contemporary writing.

Elizabeth Gilbert and Donna Tartt produced decent plane reads, but I wouldn’t call them favorites.  The new Thomas Pynchon I could not stand more than a short sample of.  I sampled many other novels but didn’t like or finish them.  I read or reread a lot of Somerset Maugham, which was uniformly rewarding.  The Painted Veil may not be the best one, but it is a good place to get hooked.  I reread quite a bit of Edith Wharton and it rose further in my eyes.  Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence are my favorites, more intensely focused than the longer fiction.  I loved discovering the Philip Pullman trilogy and vowed to give George Martin another try this coming year.

1. Murakami I now have finished it, don’t think it adds up to anything but it is consistently fun for 900+ pages.  How many other books can claim that?

2. Steve Sem-Samberg, The Emperor of Lies, A Novel.  “I don’t want to read any more about the Holocaust” is not good enough reason to neglect this stunning Swedish novel.  A fictionalized account of the Lodz Ghetto, it looks at the lives of the ghetto rulers and whether they were heroes or collaborators.  I found it tough to read more than one hundred pages of this at a time; by focusing on the suicides rather than the murder victims, it is especially brutal.  Get up the gumption.

3. Audur Ava Olafsdottir, The Greenhouse.  From Iceland, it’s funny and sheer fun to read and short and easy yet deep and moving.

4. Habibi, by Craig Thompson.  I don’t enjoy many graphic novels, but this is my favorite of all those I have read.

Away from fiction proper we have:

5.  The Anatomy of Influence, Harold Bloom.  In part this is a lifetime achievement award, but his best passages are still stunning.

6. Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003, by Roberto Bolano.  Will make you want to read a lot more Latin American fiction.

Soon I’ll cover the best economics books of the year.

In the order I read them, more or less, rather than in the order of preference.  And behind the link usually you will find my earlier review, or occasionally an Amazon link:

Erika Fatland, High: A Journey Across the Himalaya Through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and China.

Adam Kuper, The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions.

Paul Johnson, Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost?

Murray Pittock, Scotland: A Global History.

Reviel Netz, A New History of Greek Mathematics.

Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege.

David Edmonds, Derek Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality.

Peter Lee, Carey Goldberg, and Isaac Kohane, The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond.

Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism.

Sebastian Edwards, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism.

Martyn Rady, The Central Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe.

Norman Lebrecht, Why Beethoven: A Phenomenon in One Hundred Pieces.

Ian Mortimer, Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter.

Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.

Sophia Giovannitti, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex.

Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849.

Fearghal Cochrane, Belfast: The Story of a City and its People.

Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.

Mikhail Zygar, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.

Jeremy Jennings, Travels with Tocqueville: Beyond America.

Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food.

David Brooks, How to Know Others: The Art of Seeing Others and Being Deeply Seen.

Jonny Steinberg, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage.

Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World.

Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

Larry Rohter, Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist.

Frank Trentmann, Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942-2022.

Tyler Cowen, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?

It is hard to pick out 2 or 3 favorites this year, as they are all excellent.  I am partial to David Edmonds on Parfit, but a lot of you already know you should be reading that.  Perhaps my nudge is most valuable for Jonny Steinberg, Winny and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage?  So that is my pick for the year!

As usual, I will issue an addendum at the end of the year, because I will be reading a lot between now and then.  I haven’t even received my 1344-pp. Jonathan Israel biography of Spinoza yet.  Here is my earlier list on the year’s fiction.  And apologies for any of your books I have forgotten to list, there are always some such cases.

Usually I give this list much later in November, but shopping rhythms are off this year.  Furthermore The Strand bookstore in NYC is rather desperately asking for your business, as is Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, and many other independent bookshops.  Nor would it hurt Barnes & Noble if you spent your money there, and I hear Amazon is hiring and boosting the macroeconomy.  I believe bookstores in England will be closing in a few days, so hurry now.  Finally, I hope you will stay home and read these rather than traveling for Thanksgiving!

As usual, these are (roughly) in the order I read them, not ranked by preference or quality.

Anton Howes, Arts & Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation.

Garett Jones, 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust the Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less.

Bruno Macaes, History has Begun: The Birth of a New America.

Thane Gustafson, The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe.

Dietrich Vollrath, Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy is a Sign of Success.

Ronald S. Calinger, Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius of the Enlightenment.

Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit.

Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Richie Poulton, The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life.

Hollis Robbins, Forms of Contention: Influence and the African-American Sonnet Tradition.

Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success.

Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story.

Joe Henrich, The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.

Oliver Craske, Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar.

Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.

Deirdre Mask, The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power.

Daniel Todman, Britain’s War 1942-1947.

Brent Tarter, Virginians and Their History.

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures.

Matt Yglesias, One Billion Americans.

Ed Douglas, Himalaya: A Human History.

Michael Wood, The Story of China: A Portrait of a Civilization and its People.

Kevin Davies, Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing.

Nicholas McDowell, Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art.

This is indeed a fantastic list, really strong, and apologies to those I have forgotten (there are always some).  I will be doing a revised, updated, and last two months filled in list much later in December.

And here are the additions:

Darmon Richter, Chernobyl: A Stalker’s Guide.

In most cases, my review is behind the link, though a few times it leads merely to the Amazon page.  If I wrote only a few words about the book, I have reproduced them directly in this post.  And the books are listed, more or less, in the order I read them.  Apologies if I forgot your book, each year I do neglect a few.  Here goes:

Robert J. Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, my review is here.

Marco Santagana, Dante: The Story of His Life.

Melancholy, by László F. Földényi.

Ji Xianlin, The Cowshed: Memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  The classic account of its kind, in this edition brilliantly translated and presented.

Robin Hanson, The Age of Em.  Unlike any other on this list, this work created a new genre.

Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries.

Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve.  Fun, engaging, and informative, worthy of the “best of the year non-fiction” list.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History.

Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia.

Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Continental Drift: Britain and Europe from the End of Empire to the Rise of Euroscepticism.

Marie Kondo, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying.

Peter Parker, Housman Country: Into the Heart of England.  It’s already out in the UK, which is where I bought my copy.

Lawrence Rosen, Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew: Entangled Lives in Morocco.  Superb descriptive anthropology.

Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet.  Due out in February, the UK edition is already out.  Substantive and delightful on every page.

Kerry Brown, CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping.

Richard van Glahn, The Economic History of China: From Antiquity through the 19th Century.

Christopher Goscha, The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam.  The best general history of Vietnam I know, and it does not obsess over “the Vietnam War.”  Readable and instructive on pretty much every page.

Andrew Scott Cooper, The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran.

William Domnarski, Richard Posner.

Peter Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs.

Daniel Gormally, Insanity, Passion, and Addiction: A Year Inside the Chess World.  A personal favorite, you can read this as a study in labor economics as to why people hang on to crummy jobs.

Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders.  Short descriptions of places you ought to visit, such as ossuaries, micronations, museums of invisible microbes, the floating school of Lagos, the Mistake House of Elsah, Illinois, Bangkok’s Museum of Counterfeit Goods, and the world’s largest Tesla coil in Makarau, controlled by Alan Gibbs of New Zealand.  The selection is conceptual, so I like it.  I will keep this book.

Jean Lucey Pratt, A Notable Woman.

Ben H. Shepherd, Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich.

Sebastian Mallaby, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives.

Julian Gewirtz, Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China.

Marina Abramović, Walk Through Walls.

Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts.

Here is Arnold Kling’s list.  Here is my list of the year’s best fiction.

I would describe this year as thick in wonderful, superb books, though I remain uncertain which of these is truly the year’s winner.  So many plausible contenders!  I can only promise I’ll continue to cover what comes out between now and the end of the year, and apologies if one or two of those above are from late 2015.