Books

Some time in the late '90's, there was a year when I read a book a week. I don't think I set out to do it, but I did it, and it wasn't hard. These were real books, no padding with genre novels or collections of newspaper columns. The next year, I set out to do it again, and I read fewer than twenty-five books.

I got rid of a lot of books when I moved from a house to an apartment, and a whole lot more when I moved from North America to Europe. I mostly rely on e-books borrowed from a public library now.

I had five books listed here for quite a while that mightily impressed me, and still do, but I noticed that all of them were written in the twentieth century, and the oldest one was over a hundred years old. Furthermore, I hadn't reread any of them in full in the last twenty years, at least. So here are five books published in the twenty-first century that I quite enjoyed.

1. The Known World (Edward P. Jones, 2003)
2. 2066 (Roberto Bolano, 2004, English translation by Natasha Winner, 2008)
3. Ice (Jacek Dukaj, 2007, English translation by Ursula Phillips, 2025)
4. The City and The City (China Mieville, 2009)
5. James (Percival Everett, 2024)

Shoutouts to: A.S. Byatt, Hilary Mantel, Jennifer Egan, Ruth Ozeki, Rachel Kushner, Rebecca Makkai, Elena Ferrante.