What novels have you read and loved in 2008?

[lobelia321]

My birthday's coming up, and I like to send my family the link to my amazon wish list. So, fun-loving and literature-loving Freinds (sic), what books can you recommend that I might wish to add to this wish list?

Btw, I currently have nine wish lists on amazon, and only one of them is my public one... I use them as a sort of del.ici.ous type deposit box for odds and ends that I used to scribble down on bits and papers. I have a list for 'DVDs and CDs', for 'DVDs for teaching', for 'self-help' (I am addicted to self-help books!), for 'writing', for 'books I want to buy', for 'fantasy' (remember when I once got interested in fantasy round about May?), and oh, I can't remember for what else. :-)

I like literary novels, and genre only if it's practically a crossover to literary (like Ursula LeGuin). And I like stories with a complex plot structure (chronology all shook up, a mystery to be unveiled but it's in the past, not the 'and then', 'and then' structure unless it's Sophie Kinsella), interesting prose but a light touch, can have a hint of artsy-fartsiness but not too much, and it's always a bonus if written by a woman.

Novels I loved and read recently: Phil Hensher, The Northern Clemency, Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, I quite liked Chuck Pahlaniuk's Fight Club and Paul Torday's The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, and I can't remember any others for the moment. :-)

Comments

[22by7.livejournal.com]

i've spent a lot of this year reading various kinds of comic books, something i hadn't done very much of before. novel-reading has suffered. but. i loved beyond measure these two novels: Michael Chabon's 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' and Raymond Chandler's 'Farewell My Lovely'. i have also been surprised by how much i enjoyed George Eliot's 'Middlemarch'. if graphic novels somehow count, 'Night Cries' by Archie Goodwin and Scott Hampton.

i have a genre interest, but it seems to be unusually difficult to find medieval-themed fiction around here.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you! What interesting recs. I read Middlemarch decades ago, and have tried to read Chandler, but I'm afraid he's not me (the genre thing again, I suspect). But I've never heard of Goodwin an Hampton, and will definitely check out Chabon.

[ia-ne.livejournal.com]

Michael Chabon's 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' is great!

I often borrow books instead of buying them, and I often can't remember which books I really liked until I see or hear about them again...

Of the books I do actually have at home I especially liked
- Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the shore (definitely fits your description of complex plot structure)
- everything by Neil Gaiman, especially Good Omes and American Gods
- most books by Paul Auster except for the New York Trilogy. Actually, don't really remember much of the books I've read (Timbuktu, Leviathan, Moon Palace...), it's a blur, but I do remember really enjoying them while I read them :)
- Cormac McCarthy - All the pretty horses

It's really pathetic that I can't remember more.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I like Gaiman a lot although there is something about him that bothers me. I don't know Good Omens... I thought I'd read all his books! (except for the children's one; perhaps this is a children's one? or a graphic novel? I don't like his graphic novels).

I once tried reading Murakami and couldn't get anywhere with it. :-(

Now, Paul Auster has been recced to me by several people over the decades. I want to try him!

Thank you!

[ia-ne.livejournal.com]

Gaiman wrote Good Omens together with Terry Pratchett. It's not a children's novel, it's about the end of the world :) It's hilarious! I never tried reading a graphic novel by anyone, but I would at least try those by Gaiman.

Kafka on the shore was the first Murakami I read, and I was really fascinated by it. The second one, Wild Sheep Chase, I couldn't get into and never finished. Never tried another one.

Do you still read German? You probably know Krabat by Ottfried Preussler, I think it's always worth a reread. Also Homo faber by Max Frisch and Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink.

Have you read Changing Seasons by Stephen King? It includes four stories, among them Shawshank Redempetion, and it's quite different from what Stephen King normaly writes.

This ist just what pops into my head... And none of them written by women! The last book I read by a woman was The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. It's not fiction, she wrote it in the year after her husband died. It's not a typical good read, but it's insightful and moving.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Aha, graphic novel.

Yes! I love Krabat! I read it as a child and loved it, then read it to my son. Creepy, and beautiful language. And I read Homo faber ages ago and loved it and laughed till tears streamed down my face during the airplane crash chapter. And I didn't like Vorleser: too 'politically correct', German style.

I've always wanted to read Stephen King, mainly because I admire him as a person and I love his book on writing. I bought Misery but o goodness, it's gloomy. I didn't know he wrote Shawshank Redemption so this is a really, really good tip! Thank you!

[perverse-idyll.livejournal.com]

Hm. Funny, how hard it can be to remember what I've been reading. I think my brain's disintegrating. But here:

John Banville's The Sea. Gorgeous prose and sharp psychological insight. Banville's narrative voice is almost always cold-hearted but his gifts make up for that.

The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers. U.S. race relations over half a century, musical transcendence (nobody writes about the effect of music better than Powers) and physics. The texture thins out in the last, most contemporary section, but this is an amazing novel, chockful of everything: heart, mind, politics, science, beauty. I love it fiercely.

Helen de Witt's The Last Samurai. Fast read, full of emotion and ideas. I fell in love with this book. There's a broken heart somewhere inside it, and I think it might be the author's.

A re-read: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso. Not fiction - more an extended exploration of myth that braids all the variations into an ongoing meditation on narrative, metaphor, the power we invest in symbols and gods. Beautifully written.

When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of Earth by Fernanda Eberstadt. I found this in a secondhand bookshop; I suspect it's out of print. Very New York, revolving around the art-world scene. The prose is robust, funny, sharp, smart, extremely colorful. The main character is a precocious outsider, and it's primarily his journey to self-knowledge, though not as trite as that sounds. I want to read more of this author.

Umm . . I can't believe I'm blanking on everything else. Oh well. This is enough for a rec, I suppose.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your detailed generous recs! I know none of them, and they all sound intriguing (or at least, you make them so). Great!

[viva-gloria.livejournal.com]

Especially enjoyed:
Darkmans -- Nicola Barker (Booker shortlist: possible time-slippage but possible mad narrators: great sense of place: suspect some authorial self-insertion)
Vacant Possession -- Hilary Mantel (gloomy and spooky and blackly funny: I adore Mantel, she makes me feel sweet-natured and philanthropic.)
The River King -- Alice Hoffman (kind of mythic but very firmly rooted in the real, the contemporary: New England college, mysterious death, secrets and echoes)
Notes from an Exhibition -- Patrick Gale (if I say 'about a depressed artist' that misses all the layers of identity and family and creativity and rage)
Incendiary -- Chris Cleave (poor Mr Cleave published this novel, about a terrorist attack on London, a couple of days before the London bombings July 2005. It sank. Fascinating voice and very evocative.)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I tried to get into Nicola Barker and finally gave up and donated the book to Amnesty. :-(
I've never read any Mantel so this is a good tip, thank you!
Never heard of Alice Hoffman... so: great new tip!
Ditto Patrick Gale. Ditto Cleave. Am taking this list to Borders/Waterstone's with me!