There's a Savers in Manchester near where I live that sells used books, and sells them for cheap. There are six racks that I look through. Almost everything is misfiled: non-fiction in fiction, Faulkner in mysteries, and so on. But these racks are magical. A majority of the books I read this year came from that Savers.
I read 120 books this year; always the target I shoot for. There was a six week slump in the late summer where I read one book. I compensated for that in the autumn with focused reading. Something clicked. I took on authors I would never have thought of before. I generally try to mix it up, and all my lists reflect that.
There are six books of the year. Two are about The Cultural Revolution, one non-fiction and one novel. Wu Ningkun's memoir, A Single Tear, is written in elegant, beautiful prose, which brings home the tragedies he writes about all the more forcefully. Yu Hua's novel To Live is one of the greatest novels ever written; it shook me to the core, and I marvel at this writer's talent. More well-known to the Western reader is the amazing Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. Moonlight is late-period Pinter, and it is well worth your time. It took me 40 years to read The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux, and it was a non-stop entertainment. Finally, Adele King's concise, astute review of Albert Camus's life and work.
The worst of the year was Mutiny On The Bounty by Nordhoff and Hall: poorly written and racist, racist, racist. I do not believe it is in print.
China:
- C. Y. Lee: The Flower Drum Song (B+)
- Ningkun Wu with Yikai Li: A Single Tear (A+)
- Richard Mason: The World Of Suzie Wong (B)
- Yu Hua: To Live (A+)
- Jonathan D. Spence: The Chan's Great Continent (C+)
- Ezra F. Vogel: Deng Xiaoping And The Transformation Of China (B)
- Yu Hua: Brothers (C+)
- Geremie Barmé & John Minford: Seeds Of Fire: Chinese Voices Of Conscience (A)
- Mark Salzman: Iron And Silk (A-)
- Deborah Fallows: Dreaming In Chinese (B-)
- Lao She: Rickshaw Boy (A)
- Su Tong: My Life As Emperor (B)
- Su Tong: Raise The Red Lantern (A-)
- Su Tong: Madwoman On The Bridge (B)
- Can Xue: Five Spice Street (B)
- Laozi (Lao Tzu) (tr. by Philip J. Ivanhoe): The Daodeqing (Tao Te Ching) (A+)
- Bei Dao: Waves (C)
- Madge Huntington: A Traveler's Guide To Chinese Hjstory (B-)
The Nobelists:
- William Golding: Lord Of The Flies (B)
- Harold Pinter: Moonlight (A+)
- William Faulkner: Light In August (A-)
- William Faulkner: Sanctuary (B+)
- J.M.G. Le Clezio: Wandering Star (B-)
- William Golding: The Pyramid (A)
- Adele King: Albert Camus (A+)
Poetry:
- Edgar Lee Masters: Spoon River Anthology (A+)
- Robert Frost: Early Poems (A+)
- Edwin Arlington Robinson: Selected Poems (A)
- Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poetry (B+)
- Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems (A-)
Drama:
- Bertolt Brecht: Mr. Puntila And His Man Matti (A)
- Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee: Inherit The Wind (A+)
- Bernard Pomerance: The Elephant Man (A+)
- Archibald MacLeish: J. B. (B-)
- Karel Čapek: R.U.R. (B+)
- John Ford: Three Plays (C+)
Novelists Of My Youth:
- John Gardner: Nickel Mountain (C+)
- Bernard Malamud: Dubin's Lives (C)
- John O'Hara: The Cape Cod Lighter (A)
- P. G. Wodehouse: Mulliner Nights (A+)
- Peter Benchley: The Deep (C)
- P. G. Wodehouse: The Return Of Jeeves (B)
- Tom Robbins: Still Life With Woodpecker (B)
- Walker Percy: The Second Coming (D+)
- Kurt Vonnegut: Jailbird (A+)
- Richard Condon: The Manchurian Candidate (C-)
- Anthony Burgess: The Pianoplayers (B-)
- Kurt Vonnegut: Welcome To The Monkey House (A+)
- Jack Higgins: The Eagle Has Landed (A)
The 21st Century:
- Garth Risk Hallberg: City On Fire (B)
- Steven Hall: The Raw Shark Texts (C-)
- Jo Nesbø: Headhunters (B)
- Haruki Murakami: Killing Commendatore (C+)
The 20th Century:
- Marguerite Duras: The Lover (A+)
- Raymond Carver: Where I'm Calling From (B-)
- Jaroslav Hašek: The Good Soldier Švejk (B+)
- Abraham Cahan: The Rise Of David Levinsky (C)
- Grace Metalious: Peyton Place (B)
- W. Somerset Maugham: The Painted Veil (A+)
- W. Somerset Maugham: The Magician (B)
- Wallace Stegner: Crossing To Safety (C-)
The 19th Century:
- Feodor Dostoevsky: The Gambler (A-)
- George Eliot: Scenes Of Clerical Life (D+)
- Thomas Hardy: Jude The Obscure (C)
- Ivan Turgenev: Fathers And Sons (A+)
- Victor Hugo: Ninety-Three (B+)
- Nikolai V. Gogol: The Overcoat (And Other Tales Of Good And Evil) (D+)
Science Fiction:
- H. G. Wells: The Invisible Man (B)
- Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (C)
Mem-Wahs, Biographies:
- Lola M. Schaeffer: Martin Luther King, Jr. (A+)
- Doris Kearns Goodwin: Wait Till Next Year (A-)
- James Herriot: Every Living Thing (A-)
- Eric Clapton: Clapton: The Autobiography (D-)
- Paula Fox: Borrowed Finery (C)
- Robert Hilburn: Johnny Cash (A)
- André Maurois: D'Israeli (C-)
- Peter Maas: Serpico (B-)
- Sid Caesar: Where Have I Been? (B-)
Belles-Lettres:
- Alistair Cooke: Letter From America, 1946-2004 (C)
- Kory Stamper: Word By Word (B-)
- Wilton Olmstedd (ed. Edward Anthony): How To Get Rid Of A Woman (A+)
- Rudolf Flesch: The ABC Of Style (A+)
- Norman Mailer: Pieces And Pontifications (B-)
- The Gay Talese Reader (C-)
- Miriam Weinstein: Yiddish (B)
- Paul Theroux: The Old Patagonian Express (A+)
- D. H. Lawrence: Studies In Classic American Literature (A+)
- Edmund Gosse: Father And Son (B+)
- E. M. Forster: Aspects Of The Novel (A-)
- Mark Twain: Letters From The Earth (C)
- William Hazlitt: Selected Writings (C+)
Sports:
- Ron Darling: Game 7, 1986 (B+)
- Gale Sayers: I Am Third (B)
- Bruce Markusen: Tales From The Mets Dugout (A+)
- Michael Tunison: The Football Fan's Manifesto (A)
- Rob Neyer: Big Book Of Baseball Legends (A+)
- Terry Francona & Dan Shaughnessy: Francona (B)
- Robert W. Creamer: Babe: The Legend Comes To Life (A+)
- Jim Bouton: Ball Four (A+)
- Don Zimmer: The Zen Of Zim (B)
- George Plimpton: Paper Lion (A)
- Roger Kahn: The Boys Of Summer (A)
History/Politics:
- Edmund Wilson: To The Finland Station (C-)
- Terry Eagleton: Why Marx Was Right (B+)
- T. Harry Williams: Lincoln And His Generals (B+)
- William F. Buckley, Jr.: Cruising Speed (C+)
- George Orwell: Homage To Catalonia (C+)
- Marc Peyser and Timothy Dwyer: Hissing Cousins (B)
- Paul Collins: The Murder Of The Century (B)
- Rick Beyer: The Greatest Stories Never Told (B+)
- David Grann: Killers Of The Flower Moon (C+)
Junk:
- Henry & Katherine Bellamann: Parris Mitchell Of Kings Row (B-)
- Lawrence Sanders: Private Pleasures (C+)
- Joseph Wambaugh: The Black Marble (D)
- Lawrence Sanders: The First Deadly Sin (B-)
- Robert Wilder: Written On The Wind (C+)
- Lloyd C. Douglas: Magnificent Obsession (C-)
- David Ignatius: A Firing Offense (C+)
- Julian Fellowes: Snobs (C-)
The Worst Book Of The Year:
- Nordhoff and Hall: Mutiny On The Bounty (F)
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