Brother to Dragons - Charles Sheffield
Speaker for the Dead- Orson Scott Card
Mother of Demons - Eric Flint
Inside Job - Connie Willis
Singularity Sky - Charles Stross
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (also The Kite Runner, and The Mountains Echoed by the same author.)
House of Sand and Fog - Andre Dubus III
The Odds - Stewart O’Nan
The Headhunters - Jo Nesbo
Sunset Park - Paul Auster
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susannah Clarke
The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich
The Terror, Dan Simmons
The Son, Philipp Meyer
…Cinnamon & Gunpowder, by Eli Brown is rising in the Best Books of the Last Five Years firmament, but I’m not quite finished reading it yet, so I can’t say for sure.
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski
Oh, forgot The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. That was indeed amazing, and sad, and triumphant. I’m only a little way into Greg Ile’s Natchez Burning and I am utterly hooked. Apparently it’s the first in a planned trilogy. I went through a phase of reading black authors earlier this year (Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Alex Hailey, Walter Mosely) and this book fits that same theme very well.
Master of Hestviken Sigrid Undset
***Independent People Halldor ***Laxness Gunnar’s Daughter Sigrid Undset Our Mutual Friend Charles Dickens The Dwarf Par Lagerkvist
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (Didn’t see the movie) Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese Children of God by Maria Doria Russell A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell
And I just finished The Golem and the Jinni by Helen Wecker and I absolutely loved it. It’s got some magical realism going on, so if you don’t like that kind of thing, avoid it. But otherwise, very unusual story and characters. I hated for it to end.
The last 5 years? Oy. I need to do two genre lists for this.
Fiction
Nicholson Baker: The Anthologist
Michael Cunningham: Specimen Days
E. L. Doctorow: Homer and Langley
Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
F&SF
Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake
Paolo Bacigalupi: The Windup Girl
Lois McMaster Bujold: The Curse of Chalion
Michael Flynn: Eifelheim
Jeanette Winterson: The Stone Gods