For my ten best list each year, I try to go for a split between fiction and nonfiction and that's how it fell out this year, without tweaking. Non-fiction is represented by history, biography and memoir, a nice mix, but I'm afraid that my fiction titles with one exception fall into the classic rubric, with one popular title. I need to be aware of including more current literary fiction next year.
Non-fiction
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, by Carlos Eire, is the best memoir I've read in years. Beautifully written, effortlessly shifting time, following random associations and bringing them back to topic, incorporating the attitudes of both the boy and the man, this is both a personal story and an account of the last days of an ancien regime and the change to a new.
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert A. Caro, is nearly as good as it's cracked up to be, which is very good indeed. A must read for anyone interested in New York, the sociology of power, or urban planning and development.
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, by Luc Sante, is an account of the social and criminal life of New York's down and out around the turn of the last century. It wasn't all robber barons or even the noble poor. This is what life really was like, for those who had to negotiate those mean streets.
The Taste Of War: World War Two And The Battle For Food, by Lizzie Collingham, tells of the political and economic issues driving the production and distribution of food to populations both civil and military. Food as a weapon. Enlightening and disturbing.
An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, by Nick Bunter. The Brits' eye view of how and why the American Revolution happened. Not only does it give the other side, it's a tale wonderfully told, reading like a novel.
Fiction
The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton, set in New York's age of robber barons, is the story of the heartbreak underlying every life and mistakes that are irrevocable. A MR book club selection and one of two rereads on my list; it was even better than I remembered.
Villette, by Charlotte Brontė, is another tale of a young girl forced to make her own way, but with characters much more subtle and nuanced than those in Jane Eyre and
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway, my other reread. The best of Hem, I think; he doesn't hesitate to show the evil on both sides while saying that a choice must be made.
Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene, another book club read. This is both flatly hilarious and penetrating in its account of spies and a society in its death throes.
The Surgeon's Mate, by Patrick O'Brian, the seventh of his Aubrey/Maturin series set in the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars,is my "popular fiction" choice. This is a wonderful series and this was the best of the bunch so far for me, with action ranging from Halifax to the Baltic to Paris and significant character development.
In looking over my list, I see that two are set during Battista's last days, three are set in New York (two non-fiction) and four are about war (again, two non-fiction). New York was a theme for me this past year and war is a recurring theme, but picking two books set in Cuba during the same time period was entirely coincidental.
Villette is the odd book out.