This is not a regular garden post; I am indulging my own interest in reading. Much of my fair weather reading takes place in our beautiful garden. And since every media outlet feels free to post best of year end lists of movies, books, songs, foods, electronic gizmos, I'm posting the list of best books I read in 2014, in no particular order.
My Struggle Book Three by Karl Ove Knausgaard
My Struggle Book Three by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Book three
centers on K’s boyhood. While not as compelling to me as Book One, I am still
enthralled by this six-book enterprise. Impatiently waiting for Don Bartlett to
finish the translation of the remaining books. Book Four is due this spring.
Lila by
Marilynne Robinson
The third volume
in Robinson’s gorgeous examination of two families in Gilead, Iowa.
A Month in the
Country by J.L. Carr
A perfect, fleeting
English summer in the life of a World War I veteran, recalled many years later.
Gutenberg’s
Apprentice by Alix Christie
A terrific
literary debut about the invention of printing by moveable type. Comparable to
the kind of thing Hilary Mantel does for Cromwell.
I Hate to Leave
this Beautiful Place by Howard Norman
Norman, always
thoughtful, beautiful, and slyly humorous, memorializes five incidents in his
life.
An Unnecesary
Woman by Rabih Alameddine
Godless, fatherless,
childless, and divorced, aging Aaliya lives a reclusive life in a Beirut
apartment stockpiled with books. Each year she translates another book into
Arabic.
Honorable
Mention.
Before I Burn by
Gaute Heivoll
Fictionalized
account of Norway’s most dramatic arson case. Translated by the great Don
Bartlett.
Adelle Waldman.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P
Weeks after
reading this I looked at every young man with deep suspicion.
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