Best of British?

After the New Yorker's list of twenty American fiction writers under the age of 40 to watch out for last week, Lorna Bradbury in The Telegraph sets herself the challenge of identifying the British equivalents, based on merit and potential :

The List

1 Chris Cleave (b 1973) His first novel, Incendiary, was about a terrorist attack on London and was published on July 7, 2005. The Other Hand (2008), a cross-national thriller set in England and Nigeria, became a word-of-mouth hit.

2 Rana Dasgupta (b 1971) Born in Canterbury, but now lives in Delhi. His first collection of stories was set in a Tokyo airport; his first novel, Solo (2009), was about a 99-year-old Bulgarian chemist.

3 Adam Foulds (b 1974) After writing his verse novel The Broken Word about the Mau Mau rebellion, he wrote his Man Booker-shortlisted study of John Clare, The Quickening Maze (2009).

4 Sarah Hall (b 1974) The author of four novels, the first two of which were set in the early 20th century in her native Cumbria. Her most acclaimed work is The Carhullan Army (2007), about a band of women rebels surviving in a Britain hit by environmental disaster.

5 Steven Hall (b 1975) His debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts (2007) – about a man who loses his memory and tries to create a new identity for himself – unusually lived up to his publisher’s hype.

6 Mohsin Hamid (b 1971) The Reluctant Fundamentalist – a literary thriller about a Pakistani man who may, or may not, be a terrorist – came within a whisker of winning the Man Booker in 2007.

7 Anjali Joseph (b 1978) Her debut novel, Saraswati Park, is published next month. Sharp yet lyrical, the novel, which is set in Bombay, shows the influence of Amit Chaudhuri.

8 Joanna Kavenna (b 1974) Wrote seven unpublished novels before her eighth, Inglorious, was published by Faber and won the Orange new writers prize. Described as “Dostoevsky meets Bridget Jones”.

9 Benjamin Markovits (b 1973) Part way through a trilogy of novels about Byron and his circle, this assured writer has also just published an autobiographical novel, Playing Days, about a professional basketball player in Germany.

10 China Miéville (b 1972) Inspired by horror writers such as HP Lovecraft and Michael Moorcock, his science fiction and fantasy books – including Un Lun Dun for young adults – have legions of fans.

11 Paul Murray (b 1975) His second book, Skippy Dies, a comic novel set in a private boys school in Ireland, was recently described in the Telegraph as “gigantic, marvellous, witty…heartbreaking”.

12 Patrick Neate (b 1970) Won the Whitbread (now Costa) novel prize in 2001 for Twelve Bar Blues, a picaresque novel about New Orleans jazz artists. His most recent work, Jerusalem, deals, like his first novel, Musungu Jim, with European encounters with Africa.

13 Ross Raisin (b 1979) This Yorkshire-born novelist’s first book, God’s Own Country (2008), followed the dark story of a teenage farmer’s son living on the Moors.

14 Dan Rhodes (b 1972) After his second book, Rhodes declared he wanted to give up writing. Luckily for us he carried on with Gold (2007), about a Welsh-Japanese woman living in a coastal cottage, and his most recent book, Little Hands Clapping.

15 Kamila Shamsie (b1973) The author of five novels, mainly set in the Pakistan of her birth. Her most successful work is her latest: Burnt Shadows (1999) follows two families from the Second World War in Japan to the aftermath of 9/11.

16 Zadie Smith (b 1975) Wrote the wildly successful White Teeth while still at Cambridge. Her writing has matured since then, most notably in On Beauty (2005).

17 David Szalay (b1974) Winner of a Betty Trask Prize, Szalay’s The Innocent is told from the perspective of a KGB agent in late Forties Russia.

18 Adam Thirlwell (b 1978) Clever All Souls fellow who published Politics at the age of 25 and since then the Milan Kundera-inspired The Escape (2009).

19 Scarlett Thomas (b1972) The End of Mr Y (2007) was a surprise bestseller about a student who discovers a long-lost Victorian novel.

20 Evie Wyld (1980) After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (2009) was a haunting first novel set on the Australian East coat.

And of course, lively discussion is invited and anticipated.

Best Asian Books of the Decade?

After my blog post about The Times list of best books of the decade, I got chatting to Adrienne Loftus-Parkins* about how there should be more Asian books on the list. I said that we should have a list of Asian best books, and Adrienne took up the challenge, writing to me later :

Hi Sharon,

Okay here is a first pass, nothing is in any particular order (yet) and its absolutely not ready for publication. I'm sending to get your input - particularly re the ones I haven't read (but am sure you have) and any others I don't know about. Please add whatever you'd like to, and mark the ones you completely disagree with. Then I'll take another pass at it.

Thanks, have fun with it.

Adrienne

PS You'll see that I've included a couple of British Asian books - occupational hazard of living in London!

The Best Asian Books of the Decade :

Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

Temptations of the West – How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond by Pankaj Mishra

Silk Road by Colin Thubron

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta

Beijing Coma – Ma Jian

The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

The Temple-Goers by Aatish Taseer

Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw

The Last Song of Dusk by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

Inspector Chen Series by Qiu Xiaolong

The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra ( but a touch too long)

Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry ( not as good as A Fine Balance – isn’t it time he wrote another book?)

Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

The Golden Age by Tahmima Anam

Butcher and Bolt by David Loyn – excellent primer on Afghanistan

Greetings from Bury Park: Race Religion and Rock and Roll by Sarfraz Mansoor

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Snow by Orhan Pamuk (although I feel My Name is Red is better, this one is more relevant to contemporary Turkey)

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

The White Moghuls by William Dalrymple

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts but could have been abou t30% shorter

White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

China Road by Rob Gifford

Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century by Will Hutton

God’s Terrorists by Charles Allen (fascinating although the author felt he could have done better)

Holy Warriors: A Journey into the Heart of Indian Fundamentalism by Edna Fernandes

Khandahar Cockney by James Fergusson – eye opening book about the life of an asylum seeker from Afghanistan

I might not have suggest these but people suggested them ( ie I don’t think they are as great as other people do!):

Brick Lane by Monica Ali – not so sure about this one, but a number of people suggested it.

Persepolis: The Story of an Iranian Childhood by Marjane Satrapi

The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini

The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

Ones I haven’t read but I understand are noteworthy.

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

The Boat by Nam Le

Madwoman on the Bridge by Su Tong

Evening is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan

Once on the Shore by Paul Yoon

The Calligrapher’s Daughter by Eugenia Kim

The Assassin’s Song by MG Vassanji

Imperial Life in The Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

So now I kick the list over to you - which books do you think should have been included on the list? Which titles would you vote for and why?

Postscript :

Let me also slip in this link to Asian Literary Review editor Chris Woods' list of best books of 2009 [via] which has some excellent Asian titles on it.

*A correction needed here. Adrienne's company is The Asian Word and the Lit fest is only one of Adrienne's products. She curates other Asian literature events at other venues in London (current projects are at the National Portrait Gallery and at Kings Place) as well as the first Asian women's literature festival which will take place in London in October / November and will be produced in partnership with the Pan Asian Women's Association (PAWA). More about these projects later.

A Short Post On Short Stories

Bookfox has an excellent list of best collections of short stories of the decade, and links to another list on the AV Club blog. The two titles both lists have in common are Pastoralia by George Saunders and Runaway by Alice Munroe.

Perhaps there are others you could add yourselves? I am surprised not to see Yiyun Li on the list ...

Lately ... the short story seems poised to get its due. This fall, a handful of collections from writers such as Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ha Jin have put a dent in the dominant view of short stories as an inferior cousin to the Great American Novel. And changing technology and reading habits have provided a boost for short fiction as more readers discover literature through online literary journals and Web sites, or download short fiction onto mobile devices

says Alexandra Alter in The Wall Street Journal. And indeed, The Atlantic Monthly is going to be the first magazine to sell short stories for the Kindle. The e-book format looks like it is going to give a real boost to the genre, and also to the novella.

One important bit of short story news I forgot to post - the BBC National Short Story Award was won by poet Kate Clancy for her story The Not-Dead and the Saved is apparently only the third piece of short fiction she has ever completed! Prospect Magazine has very kindly put the story up for us online to enjoy.

Best Books of 2009

This is the time of year when the newspapers are putting out their best books of the year lists.

The New York Times Lists its 100 Notable Books of the Year, list is then whittled down to a top ten. Litlists does a great job of linking each fiction title to websites, extracts and "page 69 tests". (This is altogether a fabulous blog for those who love lists of books ... as I do.)

I haven't mentioned the Page 69 test on this blog before, but it is an intriguing way to test out whether you are going to like a book or not. The idea was first suggested by Marshall McLuhan, the guru of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) who recommends that the browser turn to page 69 of any book and read it. Here's a whole list of Page 69's for you to try it out on ... and for homework see if it works for the books on your shelves!

Another excellent list of books of the year is this one from The Guardian where authors including A.S. Byatt and William Boyd choose 2009's beast reads.

Postscript :

It's all very well having lists of best books, says Sam Jordison, but a rollcall of worst books would give us a truer picture of the decade. Jordison plays devil's advocate beautifully!

Postpostscript (13/12) :

Jordison's list, now pages long, gets more exciting by the day, and not a literary great remains unscathed.

Lorna Bradbury in The Telegraph has an excellent list of bests of 2009 - plenty of worthwhile reading suggestions here. It was a very good year, for fiction, she says.

Best reading from an antipodean point of view - Aussie authors, including Alexis Wright and kate Grenville, talk about their personal favourites of 2009 in The Age.

Best Books of the Decade?

The Times featured its The 100 Best Books of the Decade, including both fiction and non-fiction titles.* I guess the titles are arranged in reverse order of wonderfulness - and these are the final five :

5 Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (2006) Its astonishing rediscovery more than 40 years after Nemirovsky’s death in Auschwitz should not overshadow that the two novellas here are miniature masterpieces. In the first the veneer of civilisation is stripped from a group of Parisians fleeing the advancing Germans, while the second is a moving tale of forbidden love across the divide of war.

4 Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers trans Robert Bringhurst (2002) One hundred years ago Ghandl and Skaay, two great native poets of the northwest coast of Canada, spoke their stories aloud; Bringhurst’s translations and analysis bring a lost world brilliantly to life.

3 Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (2004) The book that revealed Barack Obama as not just an ambitious politician, but also as an eloquent writer and deep thinker. The fascinating story of his early life, first published in 1995, was reissued in 2004 and became a worldwide bestseller as momentum for the presidency built.

2 Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2003) With its feisty, irresistible heroine and shapely, naive style, Satrapi’s comic-book account of her childhood during the Islamic Revolution in Iran is hugely enjoyable — and an essential, humanising eye-opener on a little-understood country. From an interview with Oprah Winfrey, 2007

1 The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006) Cormac McCarthy’s gripping, shattering novel walks in a long line of tradition. Mary Shelley tried her hand at the literature of post-apocalypse with The Last Man, published in 1826; Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel, Riddley Walker, sets the aftermath of doom in Canterbury. The Road’s wilderness — coming to the cinema in January — is an American one: blasted, ruined, destroyed by an unnamed calamity that has scorched the Earth with biblical fury and lit McCarthy’s prose with holy fire. In this awful landscape walk a father and his young son, treading towards a future where it would seem there could be none.

McCarthy has always been a poet of extremity; his earlier novels stripped romance from the myth of the frontier. The Road is stripped back even farther, its father and son the near-sole survivors of what might be called humanity; the book’s narrative is simply that of their survival. There are respites from their suffering —- a cache or two of unspoilted tinned food —- but more often there is horror; this is existence pared to the bone. For this reason, it is McCarthy’s language that must carry the book, and so it does, triumphantly, its Hemingway-like concision shot through with cadences that sometimes recall the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The Road is our book of the decade; but it will outlast that judgment, too. It is a work of force and dark brilliance, a perfect expression of the early 21st-century’s terrors —- and of the hope we must all have that we shall not destroy ourselves, nor yet be destroyed.

Like all lists it is an Aunt Sally, I suppose, put up to be knocked down, and there is indeed some interesting dissent in the readers' comments. The paper also features a five worst list which makes me sad because I actually really enjoyed Vernon God Little. Is The Road the book of the decade? For me, I think it could be. I've never been so haunted or disturbed by a work of fiction as I've said before. Sarah Crowne on The Guardian blog is also in search of readers' choices for the books of the decade, beginning with 2000 (which - help - feels just like yesterday.) Good Reads has a best of the decade list for fiction based on reader votes. And no doubt there will be more, and if so, I will update this post later. But anyway, the important thing is, what do YOU think? *(Hint - spread over 17 pages this is a tiresome online read, so click the PRINT button and read it from the print preview.)

YOUR Favourite Books of 2008

While I rev up my engine to get the next installment about my favourite books of 2008 written, I am giving you this space so you can tell each other which books really hit the right spot for you in 2008!

The Best of the Best

The New York Times' critics whittled down its list of 100 Best Books of 2008 to just 10 and here they are.

Fiction :

Steven Millhauser - Thirteen Stories
Toni Morrison - A Mercy
Joseph O’Neill - Netherland
Roberto Bolaño -2666
Jhumpa Lahiri - Unaccustomed Earth

Non-fiction :

Jane Mayer - The Dark Side : The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals
Dexter Filkins - The Forever War
Julian Barnes - Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Drew Gilpin Faust - This Republic of Suffering : Death and the American Civil War
Patrick French - The World is What it Is : The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul

It's a pretty exciting list and all the books are described on the website, and there are links in each case to first chapters - so go explore!

Our Authors Sparkle on the Christmas Tree

I have decided to completely rewrite this post to foreground the happy news that came in since my first attempt at it!

You know that Christmas is near when the Best of Year lists start to appear, and a selection of writers and politicians recommend the best reads of the year at the Guardian here, here and here.

Preeta Samarasan's Evening is the Whole Day is nominated as one of the best books of the year in the Guardian list by novelist Ann Tyler! Then on the Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year List, no other than Ali Smith chooses it, saying of the novel :

Preeta Samarasan’s debut novel, Evening Is the Whole Day (Fourth Estate), was largely ignored this year both by the press and the longlist/shortlist makers. I found it a good, strong, spirit-spiked story about caste and unfairness, as furious, controlled, cool and urgent as Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, and an introduction to a writer whose talent with narrative structure combines elegance and potency.

Another end of year list of best books of 2008, this time from Bookmarks Magazine via Amazon's Kindle site, and there is Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain!!!

Congrats to both!!

75 of the Best ... And Then Another 75

When Esquire magazine put up a list of 75 Books Every Man Must Read (which you can find here in the form of a rather lovely slideshow) Jezebel.com found the list "extremly myopic" relying as it does on the "old white dude cannon" with the token great Russian thrown in and only one female author (Flannery O'Connor). So they invited readers to help them compile a list 75 Books Every Woman Should Read.

And here 'tis. Enjoy!

[Found via Conversational Reading]

Great British

The Times has listed what it reckons to be the 50 greatest British authors since 1945, and Erica Wagner invites your comments. (Click on each name to read about them and find out which titles are particularly recommended.)

1. Philip Larkin

2. George Orwell

3. William Golding

4. Ted Hughes

5. Doris Lessing

6. J. R. R. Tolkien

7. V. S. Naipaul

8. Muriel Spark

9. Kingsley Amis

10. Angela Carter

11. C. S. Lewis

12. Iris Murdoch

13. Salman Rusdie

14. Ian Fleming

15. Jan Morris

16. Roald Dahl

17. Anthony Burgess

18. Mervyn Peake

19. Martin Amis

20. Anthony Powell

21. Alan Sillitoe

22. John Le Carré

23. Penelope Fitzgerald

24. Philippa Pearce

25. Barbara Pym

26. Beryl Bainbridge

27. J. G. Ballard

28. Alan Garner

29. Alasdair Gray

30. John Fowles

31. Derek Walcott

32. Kazuo Ishiguro

33. Anita Brookner

34. A. S. Byatt

35. Ian McEwan

36. Geoffrey Hill

37. Hanif Kureshi

38. Iain Banks

39. George Mackay Brown

40. A. J. P. Taylor

41. Isaiah Berlin

42. J. K. Rowling

43. Philip Pullman

44. Julian Barnes

45. Colin Thubron

46. Bruce Chatwin

47. Alice Oswald

48. Benjamin Zephaniah

49. Rosemary Sutcliff

50. Michael Moorcock

I am surprised by Philip Larkin appearing in first place, but it makes me want to run back to his poetry. Would personally have placed Rushdie much higher, and also Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. And I think Burgess should have made the top 10 (sorry, personal prejudice!). It's nice to see Alan Garner (a favourite of my teen years) make the list. Benjamin Zephaniah too.

But then, how on earth can you weigh up authors as if they were vegetables on a market scale? In the end there can be no absolute measure. As Wagner says, it's all about kick starting a conversation. And that's always a good thing.

(I've read books - and in some cases more than one - by 38 of them.)

2007 in Reading

Trying to assign bestness to great books is really very hard when they give you such different experiences.

But drumrolls please, for it's time for the Bibs awards for 2007. In a year of solidly reading good stuff, which books made the biggest impression on me?

Okay, first the nominees (with links to my reviews or previous posts):

Am so glad I made it through the Booker shortlist, even if not entirely the longlist. Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, Anne Enright's The Gathering, Nicola Barker's Darkmans, Indra Sinha's Animal's People and Lloyd Jones Mr. Pip I thought were all very worthy contenders. Enright, yes, deserved her win.

I interviewed Canadian author Camilla Gibb when she came to the KL Literary festival in March which meant reading all her novels in rapid succession. (Not an arduous task at all!) Sweetness in the Belly, was for me is one of the most powerful and moving books of the year.

I wimped out a bit on the TBR challenge I blithely undertook at the beginning of the year and managed only 3 of the 12 books on my list. (I am finding that between me and the books I really want to read, there are a whole lot of books I have to read for reviews and articles and because a friend has written them.) But the three books I did read, Pascali's Island by Barry Unsworth, Money by Martin Amis and William Boyd's Brazzaville Beach were all excellent.

(These are of course books I should have tackled before, but I isolated myself in Nigeria and small town Malaysia in the 1980's and have big gaps in my reading. But I'm kicking myself - how could I have not read any William Boyd before?)

In 2007 Malaysian writing in English proved itself world class once again, with Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain - a book I both loved and felt extremely proud of on the Booker longlist.

At home Kam Raslan with his Confessions of an Old Boy showed us all that not only can local fiction be of an excellent standard, but that it can also hit best seller lists. (I feel like cheering very very loudly at this point, but will restrain myself and just say more please, Kam!)

The other publication of local fiction I want to cheer for is Silverfish New Writing 6, in which the standard of the stories, many of them by first time writers, was very high indeed thanks to editor Dipika Mukherjee who made excellent choices.

My favourite non-fiction read by far was Alan Weisman's The World Without Us which imagines what would happen to planet Earth if all the human beings were just spirited off elsewhere. It was a real page-turner. I also really enjoyed Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness which, like all good popular science books was authoritative and extremely readable even for a non-scientist like me.

The local non-fiction I enjoyed most was Awang Goneng's gentle memoir Growing Up in Trengganu, followed by Dina Zaman's I Am Muslim and Antares' Tanah Tujuh.

My favourite coffee-table book was Malaysians by Steven V. Lee and Haliza Hashim-Doyle. (There are probably others I would love just as much but haven't managed to buy yet!)

Another drumroll please as I open the envelope:

And the 2007 Golden Bibs award goes to ...... The Road!

I can't get Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic (and post-apostrophic?) novel out of my head. The vision of the last remaining love and tenderness in a destroyed world still haunts me, and it should be compulsory reading for every world leader.

So what books knocked your socks off in 2007, and which would you give your award to?

Incidentally, I very much enjoyed reading this best of 2007 books post on Eyeris' blog.

Still More Best Of Lists

The best of the best lists keep coming. I featured a few a couple of weeks back and here are some more. I don't know about you, but I just love them for their useful recommendations ... inadequate though they make me feel when I think of how few of them I've managed to read so far!

Alex Clark in today's Observer lists his personal top ten of 2007 while in the Scotsman, Allan Massie lists the books that didn't make the Booker longlist, but which were none the less, excellent., and other critics also list their favourites.

Scott Pack in the Bookseller says that one of his highlights of the year was:

Seeing Myrmidon make the Man Booker longlist with The Gift Of Rain by Tan Twan Eng. With the eventual winner failing to ignite any real excitement, it is a shame this one didn’t go further.

A whole lot of authors (including Colm Toibin and Geraldine Brooks) list their books of the year in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald critics also pick the best of the literary crop, throwing in some interesting Australian titles.

(Illustration stolen from the Sydney Morning Herald.)

This Year's Best Fiction

In case you need any help choosing books for Christmas presents or for your own reading pleasure in the coming months, here are links to best of 2007 lists on both sides of the Atlantic, and I've skimmed off some of the best of fiction titles.

The New York Times has whittled down its 100 notable books of the year to just 10. The five top novels are:

Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer’s life.

Per Petterson - Out Stealing Horses

In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude.

(You may remember that this won the IMPAC prize earlier this year, and the Independent Foreign Fiction Award in 2006.)

Robert Bolaño - The Savage Detectives

A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.

(Wow! What on earth is a literary guerrilla? Do they throw books as if they were hand-grenades? Where can I sign up?)

Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

Layoff notices fly in Ferris’s acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle.

(A finalist for the National Book Award the other week, of course.)

Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

... a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War.

(Winner of aforementioned National Book Award for Fiction.)

In the UK, the Independent lets its critics decide which of the year's books are the most important and enjoyable, and Boyd Tonkin puts together a very useful fiction list.

The Telegraph features lists of recommended reads. Booker judge Ruth Scurr chooses the fiction, including some of the Booker shortlisted titles and those she thought should have made it, as well as other reads she enjoyed during the year.

Times reviewer Peter Kemp reveals the reads that had him hooked this year.

But things are done much more scientifically on the Guardian blog where Joh Freeman reports on the National Book Critics Circle's attempt to boil down more than 800 year-end recommendations into one consensual chart.

Let's cut to the chase. These are titles that turn up on more than one list:

Ian McEwans - On Chesil Beach
Irène Némirovsky - Fire in the Blood
Anne Enright - The Gathering
Michael Ondaatje - Divisadero
AL Kennedy - Day
Marina Lewycka - Two Caravans
Nikita Lalwani - Gifted
Per Petterson - Out Stealing Horses
Michael Chabon - The Yiddish Policeman's Union
Philip Roth's - Exit Ghost
Nicola Barker - Darkmans

and thus might just do you as a starting point!

I will post up any more links to "best of 2007" lists as I (or you?) find them.

100 Notable Books of 2007

Yes, you know when Christmas is on its way when newspapers announce their best of the best lists.

The New York Times has just released its list of 100 notable books of the year with links to reviews. The best 10 books of 2007 will be announced November 28th.

Books of the Times

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has been voted 'definitive book of 20th century' by Guardian readers in an online pol. Sarah Crown describes the book as:

George Orwell's dystopic vision of a totalitarian future in which the population is constantly monitored and manipulated ...

and says that although the book was published in 1948, the midpoint of the century:

... its ongoing relevance is demonstrated by the extent to which its concepts and terminology - Big Brother, Newspeak, Double Think - have seeped into our language. Even the name of its author has been appropriated as an adjective, Orwellian, which is regularly used today in debates over privacy and state intervention.

The 10 books which the public felt best defined the 20th century, in order of publication, were:

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding

This is one list where I can say I've read every book (although I cheat a bit with Bridget Jones Diary as I read it as a newspaper column). The original list of books voters chose from is here and is a pretty useful reading list of books which capture the spirit of their decade. (I scored 27 with several more dropped halfway).

Malaysia's Top Ten

The people have spoken! These are Malaysia's Top Ten Books according to a survey carried out by ReadsMonthly in Starmag:

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

2. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

5. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

6. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

7. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

8. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

9. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

9. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

218 readers contributed lists, most of them, not surprisingly from the Klang valley, although there also appear to be enthusiastic readers in Kuching, Sarawak.

As Daphne Lee says in her article, fantasy is clearly a favourite genre. What also strikes me is that so many of the books are the kinds of classics typically read by young readers, four of them are children's books (Harry Potter, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, The Chronicles of Narnia). (I use the term children's books advisedly, before legions of Potter fans accost me, because I know that older readers enjoy them too!)

The Catcher in the Rye and The Lord of the Rings trilogy typically find their most enthusiastic readership among teenagers, while To Kill a Mockingbird is a typical college choice. (I've taught it to matric students.)

Now this could represent the demographic of the survey (most readers were under 35, but I wonder how many were under 20?) ... or it could represent the fact that older readers hold on to their childhood friends ... for comfort or nostalgia or simply because a busy life has meant that they haven't had time to read since. Or, more worryingly, (and here my neck is stuck right out!) it could mean that a Malaysian readership is not really maturing? Mind you, there are some interesting similarities with the list produced by British readers, where To Kill a Mockingbird, Pride and Prejudice, Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter books also hold sway.

Of course, plenty of other books were nominated - most receiving just a single vote.

My own list of favourites looks a bit stuffy and dead-white-male-ish though:

1. Crime and Punishment- Fyodor Dostoevsky
2. A Hero of our Time – Lermentov
3. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
4. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
5. The Shipping News – Annie Proulx
6. 1984 - George Orwell
7. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
8. The Malayan Trilogy – Anthony Burgess
9. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
10. True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey

My criteria? These are books that constantly live in my head, and I keep needing to reread, whole and in part. (I'm not a reader who rereads very much, so these books have to be special.)

Only one woman on it (and a woman who writes like a man, at that!). But I got conniptions of the heart yesterday when I realised that I hadn't included Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea which I've read three times.

And should I have had An Equal Music instead of A Suitable Boy? I truly love both.

And shouldn't Atwood have been there?

Dilemmas!

Besides the result of this survey, ReadsMonthly has some very good reviews, including a couple by guest reviewers. Lim Chee Seng reviews Raise the Red Lantern by Su Tong (and there's a 25% off voucher from Kinokuniya) and Gerry Liston (Acting British Council Regional Director) writes about The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace. There are also another couple of reviews I plan to link to later ...

The Best Of Best of Lists

You know when year's end is just round the corner because the newspapers begin to feature their "best of" book lists.

The New York Times of course features its Notable Books of the Year which it then wittles down to 10 Best Books of the Year.

Canada's Globe and Mail features it's recommendations for the 100 Best Books of the Year and features both Canadian and international authors.

Across the Atlantic, Erica Wagner comes up with some Christmas suggestions in the Times, while writers and critics are called upon to recommend their favourites of the year in the Guardian and in the Observer.

Closer to home, Eric Forbes is getting in on the act with his top 30 books of the year. (I don't even dare ask him how many books he's read in total!)

Feel you're drowing with all these recommendations? Some fiction titles crop up time and again on the lists, and I've listed them below (in no particular order):

So Many Ways to Begin - Jon McGregor
Suite Francaise - Irene Nerimovsky
The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai
The Emperor's Children - Claire Messud
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
Be Near Me - Andrew O'Hagan
The Night Watch - Sarah Walters
Everyman - Philip Roth
Carry Me Down - MJ Hyland

No doubt this weekend will bring a new crop of "best of" lists in the run up to the Christmas period. I'll post links to them here.

More Best Holiday Reads

See, this is the time of year the Brits go on holiday to do some serious reading on a beach somewhere.

So the Telegraph has a list of best books to pack and if that's not enough for you, the Sunday Times features its 100 best holiday books, with 50 works of fiction, and 50 of non-fiction.

A few books make both lists including Digging to America by Anne Tyler, Everyman by Philip Roth, and Theft; A Love Story by Peter Carey

Life's too short. Purse's too empty. Oh dear.

Related Post

Life's a Beach (21/6/06)

The State of the Novel

Robert McCrum in yesterday's Observer asks if the British novel has lost its way as money and celebrity and awards are thrown at it:

Out of a swamp of greed, ambition and creative writing crawled a new Gollum, the 'Booker novel', trailing the slime of self-promotion. This, typically, was a scarcely readable work of the imagination, devoid of narrative, character, plausible landscape or moral purpose, whose sole motivation was the desire to get on to that fabled shortlist. There was a boom in second-rate literary fiction, most of it now recycled into wallpaper and toilet tissue. Each year publishers began to bet ever more absurd sums on 'Booker novels' in the hopes of hitting the jackpot.

There's plenty of food for thought here, and McCrum gives an excellent history of the changing fortunes of the novel in Britain over time.

Now maybe I just haven't read enough beyond award lists recently (and even trying to keep up with the longlists and shortlists is a nightmare for this not terribly fast reader) ... but I've thoroughly enjoyed the contemporary fiction I've picked up recently and it's seemed to me that the novel is in pretty good shape.

I wonder which novels McCrum is thinking of when he talks of "scarcely readable works". His list of 20 all-time great Booker winners is very telling - John Banville's The Sea is so pointedly absent, as is Yann Martell's The Life of Pi ...

On the other side of the Atlantic, debate about the best American novel of the last 25 years (see my previous post on this) hots up with an online discussion between prominent authors and critics on the New York Times website about the books that made the list and about the state of US fiction in general.

There's quite a few more titles here for Animah's list too!

(Illustration nicked from the British Council's website)

Related Post

The Novel is Dead, Long Live the Novel (18/9/05)

More Best Books

Can you bear more best books lists? Here's one from literary editor Boyd Tonkin in the Independent. Enough suggestions to bankrupt you before 2006 begins!

In the Times a delightful piece by Jeannette Winterson talking about the joys of books. (Hmmm ... did we need persuading?)