I made an offhand reference on twitter to the fact that Facebook memes on books are always cast in terms of one's entire life, a convenient means of allowing the individual to avoid revealing too much of what they have read recently, which in a number of cases would amount to, one suspects, a blank list, or one containing very few entries. It also occurred to me that within the past year I have read two books that are obviously the best: A Heart So White by Javier Marías, and Anthony Powell's Casanova's Chinese Restaurant. Thus, an approximate list:
A Heart So White
Casanova's Chinese Restaurant
Robertson Davies, The Fifth Business and The Manticore
Reynolds Price, Ardent Spirits
Juan Gabriel Vazquez, The Sound of Things Falling
Emile Zola, The Earth
and two titles I was re-reading:
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Javier Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis
(There have been two other Marías novels, five others by Powell, two other Zolas, but I don't want to crowd the list there too much; there have also been a reasonable number of books that I found myself surprisingly indifferent to: I think the time in which I could have read Don Quixote has passed.)
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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