Ten Favorite Books of the Year

My favorites of the books I read this year, not necessarily books that came out this year (or anywhere near this year) ...

10. Bonecrack (1971)

All of Francis' books are pretty much the same, just either good or bad. This was very good.

9. The Hunger Games (2008)

I could've put the trilogy here, since I read them all, but the first book, much as I liked the follow-ups, was the real barn-burner of the bunch. Let's hope the movie is half as good.

8. One Across, Two Down (1971)

Sometimes we don't need fuzzy characters or moral uplift. Sometimes it's uplifting to read about a degenerate plotting to kill his mother-in-law and his wife. Sometimes.

7. Full Dark, No Stars (2010)

Not King's best collection of novellas, but certainly his grisliest. It's nice to know that the old fella can still make your skin crawl.

6. Mad World (2010)

A rare non-fiction appearance. This is the fascinating true story of Evelyn Waugh and the family that inspired Brideshead Revisited.

5. A Good Man in Africa (1981)

Boyd's very funny first novel, with a protagonist worthy of Kingsley Amis at his best.

4. An Unsuitable Job For a Woman (1972)

I prefer Cordelia Gray to Dalgliesh somehow. My favorite of James' mysteries.

3. The Last One Left (1966)

MacDonald at his height, telling a multi-character tale of corruption and redemption.

11/22/63 (2011)

Simply a great page-turner, with some nice asides thrown in about history, America, and the passage of time.

1. Any Human Heart (2002)

It's hard to imagine a year in which this wouldn't be my favorite book. Maybe the year I read Lucky Jim, of course, or the year I read Brideshead Revisited. An epic and human tale.

Any Human Heart (2002)

I can't make the claim that this is necessarily one of the great books of modern times, and I won't, but I will say that, having just finished this, it will probably wind up on my own personal top ten books of all time. This was just one of those novels that seemed almost written for me and me alone (is that how everyone feels about their favorite books?); essentially, it hit a lot of my own personal preoccupations. The novel is in the form of a series of diaries, kept by the fictional Logan Mountstuart, a mildly successful writer who careens through the twentieth century. He spends time in Paris in the 1920s, works under Ian Fleming during the war years, runs an art gallery in New York City in the 1950s, and along the way, meets all sorts of famous (plus fictional) characters. It's ultimately a fairly tragic novel about a full life that could have been fuller. It also perfectly expresses my personal philosophy of life: that it boils down to the luck you get, the good luck, and the bad luck. Not a popular philosophy, I know, but us agnostics/atheists have to believe in something.

I read this because I had just caught the televised miniseries on Masterpiece Theater that aired last month. It was well-done, and captured a lot of the book, but somewhat paled compared to the written version. Pictured below, the lovely Matthew MacFayden and the equally lovely Hayley Atwell as Logan and Freya in the filmed version.