Typically, I jiggered my ten-best list a bit to divide it into half fiction/half nonfiction. It’s fair enough since as always there are some easy calls but achieving an exact ten requires judgments at the margin.
Nonfiction:
- Ten Restaurants that Changed America by Paul Freedman
- Walking with Ghosts by Gabriel Byrne (© 2021)
- Doomed Romance: Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century America by Christine Leigh Heyrman (© 2021)
- Pilgrim by David Whyte (poetry)
- Thomas Merton and the Noonday Demon: The Camaldoli Correspondence by Donald Grayston
Fiction
- The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
- Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift
- Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse
- A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O’Nan
- Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andreï Makine
Honorable Mention:
- The Claverings by Anthony Trollope
- Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene
- The Coronation by Boris Akunin
- An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews
- The Letters of Shirley Jackson by Shirley Jackson (© 2021)
I was surprised to see that three books published this past year made my lists; 20% of both the top ten and honorable mentions. That seems high for me.
Common themes include Russia, religion and food. Religion recurs with me, Russia and food not so much. Of some interest to me is that it’s overwhelmingly post-1900. Only one and a fraction of the books in the top ten and two of the honorable mentions are set before 1900, and those are all nineteenth century.
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Dazrin: I always enjoy this thread as it forces me to take stock. Thanks!