The Nature of Things

I have had a fabulous year of reading. Most of the books that I've read this year have been recent publications and, honestly, I find the quality and diversity of fiction being produced currently to be quite amazing. I do primarily read fiction, although I also manage to work in a few nonfiction books throughout the year. Trying to come up with a list of my favorite reads of the year was a bit daunting because most of what I have read has been quite good. There have been no real stinkers in the mix. I've had a couple of two-star reads, no one-stars, but most have been three-stars or more. I had thirty-seven five-star reads this year and I limited my selection process to those, even though I was strongly tempted by some of the four-stars. From that five-star group, I tried picking my favorite book from each month. In the end, I was able to identify a baker's dozen of books that were my absolute favorites of the year and here they are in the order that I read them with links ...

Oh, my, that was hard! In 2018, I read 95 books, which was 11 more than my goal of 84, or seven per month. But that wasn't the hard part.  What was really, really hard was coming up with a list of the best from that group, because, in fact, most of the books I read this year were good. There were very few stinkers. So, I had to set parameters to narrow the field. I had several rereads, or in some cases first reads, of classics; books like The Great Gatsby , 1984 , Oryx and Crake , As I Lay Dying , and Heart of Darkness , and soon-to-be classics like Jesmyn Ward's  Salvage the Bones . I enjoyed them all but immediately eliminated them from consideration, deciding to include only recent publications of this or the last year. The next cut was really a no-brainer: I would include only those books that I had rated at five-stars. That should narrow things down, right?  Well... Actually, that left me with 24 books to be considered, an unwieldy number. Surely I could shrink that ...

In 2017, I read 88 books. Of that total, I rated 24 (27.3%) of them as "5 star" reads. Yes, I read a lot of very good books in 2017. In looking at the list of my favorites, I was interested to see that 17 of them (slightly more than 70%) were written by women. I'm not sure what, if anything, that says about me as a reader. Moreover, thirteen of the books were set wholly or partly in another country. A five star rating from me does not necessarily mean, of course, that the book is great literature, although some of these certainly are. It just means that the book really connected with me and that I found it exceptional.  If you look at my list, you'll see that there are three titles there from Tana French, because I was reading her "Dublin Murder Squad" series last year and I really, really liked those books! Also, you'll see titles there from old favorites Sara Paretsky and Michael Connelly. Of all Connelly's Harry Bosch books, The Crossing may just...