New York Times released their list of the best books of 2008 this week. In keeping with tradition, I read almost none of them. My boss lent me Netherland a few months ago, so I did manage to get to one of them, but that’s the sum total. And, to be honest, I didn’t really think Netherland lived up to all the hype. It was good but not the best I’ve ever read.
Have any of you read any/many of these? I took a look at a similarly-themed post on Anne’s Fiction Writers Review the other day and saw that many people included The Good Thief among their best of the year lists. I haven’t read that one, either, but momentum seems to be with it.
What would you consider your personal best of the year? These don’t have to be books that published this year, just ones that you read in 2008.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
The season of lists is upon us
at 2:29 PM
Labels: Bibliophile
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I haven't read any of those either :(
The best book I read in 2008 was "Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, a writer from the Catalunya region of Spain. I am probably a bit biased since it takes place in Barcelona...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_of_the_Wind
My reading has been paltry and aged, but of high quality. Favorites of this year: Jonathan Lethem's first (I think) novel, "Gun, with Occasional Music" and then (genre addiction alert) Philip K. Dick's "The Simulacra." "Gun..." is a much more masterful piece of writing, in that Lethem is the kind of careful craftsman who doesn't make you feel as if he's overdoing anything or showing off and you don't want to stop reading, ever. PKD is, technically speaking, a sloppy writer but his imagination and his eye for psychology and power and politics are so astute, and he's so funny about it all, that the sloppiness doesn't matter much in the end. Lethem has an imagination not to be made light of, either.
(kk)
I've not read any of them either. Though intersetingly, "The Forever War" is also the title of a modern classic of science fiction written in 1974 by Joe Haldeman, which I did read this year.
I think my favorite things that I read this year were the Bartimaeus trilogy, by Jonathan Stroud, and Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold.
I'm reading The Good Thief right now, and granted it's one of the only actually-released-in-08 books I've read this year, and I haven't finished yet, but it's really good.
Post a Comment