Best Books

Good books I’ve read in the past few years: the 10 that I’d recommend to you with bright eyes and maybe even let you borrow from my shelf.

10 Best Fiction Books I Read in 2012

1. Absalom, Absalom!  William Faulkner
2. The Captive and The Fugitive, Marcel Proust
3. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
4. King Lear, William Shakespeare
5. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
6. Close Range, Annie Proulx
7. Evidence of Things Unseen, Marianne Wiggins
8. May We Be Forgiven, A.M. Homes
9. The Wonders of the Invisible World, David Gates
10. A Mercy, Toni Morrison

10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2012

1. Lit, Mary Karr
2. The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddartha Mukherjee
3. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
4. Apollo’s Angels, Jennifer Homans
5. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Diarmaid MacCulloch
6. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas G. Carr
7. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick
8. The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr
9. Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
10. Flaubert and Madame Bovary, Francis Steegmuller

10 Best Fiction Books I Read in 2011

1. Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
2. Sodom and Gomorrah, Marcel Proust
3. What the Living Do, Marie Howe
4. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
5. Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner
6. Light in August, William Faulkner
7. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
8. The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides
9. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
10. I, Claudius, Robert Graves

10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2011

1. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
2. Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer
3. New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton
4. Dog Years, Mark Doty
5. Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer
6. Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Lives for Animals, Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson
7. How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel, Alain de Botton
8. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Philip Gourevitch
9. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick
10. Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen

10 Best Books I Read in 2010

1. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
2. The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk
3. The Guermantes Way, Marcel Proust
4. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
5. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
6. Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell
7. Ulysses, James Joyce
8. The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
10. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Vladimir Nabokov

10 Best Books I Read in 2009

1. Middlemarch, George Eliot
2. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
4. Cane, Jean Toomer
5. For the Time Being, Annie Dillard
6. The Narrow Road to the Interior, Matsuo Basho
7. Within a Budding Grove, Marcel Proust
8. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
9. Resurrection, Leo Tolstoy
10. Drown, Junot Diaz

10 Best Books I Read in 2008

1. Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson
2. Rashomon and Other Stories, Ryunosuke Akutagawa
3. Sula, Toni Morrison
4. The Duel, Anton Chekhov
5. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
6. Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata
7. The Makioka Sisters, Junichiro Tanizaki
8. What is the What, Dave Eggers
9. Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster
10. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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