bukes of the year
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
- Offshore
- Laugh out loud mordant.
- Mary Olivier: A Life
- I can’t imagine why this perceptive, penetrating novel isn’t considered a modern classic.
- Of Human Bondage
- This is, of course, and God knows why it took me so long to read it. It’s wonderful. I am looking forward to everything else by Maugham.
- The Aquariums of Pyongyang
- Included not so much for its writing as for its astonishing and chilling survivor testimony from the North Korean gulag.
- The Halfway House
- A despairing, beautiful, haunting account of Cuban refugees in Miami.
- Lilith’s Brood
- Octavia Butler was the single most important find of the year, and this may be her masterpiece.
- The File
- The ideal book to read on the 20th anniversary of the fall of East Germany.
- The American Painter Emma Dial
- As vivid and sad as a drowned bird in a swimming pool.
- The Story of a Marriage
- Set in my San Francisco in the forties, and containing a couple of twists that I did. not. see. coming.
- The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
- Gossipy and absorbing; good background for the appointment of Sotomayor, and terrifying in its portrayal of the ultra right wing Roberts court.
- Tales from Outer Suburbia
- An artifact from the world of my childhood, which never existed.
- Ice Bound
- The memoir of the doctor who, while wintering over at the South Pole, found a lump in her breast. A love song to the ice.
- China Mountain Zhang
- I didn’t know science fiction could do that.
- Shelter
- Or that.
- Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living
- (sings) “C! S! I! RO!”
- Seed to Harvest
- Saint Octavia hear my cry.
- Kamikaze Girls
- Entirely responsible for my newfound love of Lolita culture.
- Brother, I’m Dying
- Immigration is murder.
- The Girls Who Went Away
- Essential companion reading and a corrective to Juno.
- Fledgling
- Not my first Butler but the first to sink its fangs into my throat, to my great delight.
- Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe
- Doreen Baingana c’est moi, if I had grown up in Uganda and become a wonderful writer.
- Tales of Nevèryön
- Reformatted my brain and opened a new eye.
- The Arrival
- As predicted, the best book of the year.
- An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
- Smashed my heart into tiny shards.
Books by women: 14/24
Books by writers of colour: 11/24 – I owe this entirely to the fantastic 50books_poc community.
Books from the San Francisco Public Library: 18/24. I LOVE YOU SFPL.
