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Browsing Tags fiction

Recommended Books in 2013

Because I have had so little time to write here about books I have read in 2013, but have still (fortunately) had time to read some, I thought I would make a list of some of the most memorable, without necessarily adding much commentary.

In the following; books given 5 Stars are enthusiastically recommended, and are on a part with the other books on my “Recommended books” page. But I will mention some others with lower ratings that are nevertheless interesting.

Some of these books were published in 2013 but not all. Books are in alphabetical order of author, five stars first then four stars.

I start with a few I can remember and will add more between now and Christmas, and hope to add a short commentary to each title before then.

* * * * *

Craig Childs: The Secret Knowledge of Water: “There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning”. A strange and touching memoir of one man’s quest to find hidden water in the deserts of the South-Western United States.

Paul Collier: Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World

Sebastian Faulks: Jeeves and the Wedding Bells

Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

Michel Houellebecq: La Carte et le Territoire

P.D. James: Death Comes to Pemberley

Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible

Jon Krakauer: Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

Dany Laferiere: Comment Faire l’Amour à Un Nègre Sans Se Fatiguer

Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies: Magnificent first and second books in a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, chief counselor to King Henry 8th. Fascinating from many points of view, including for a subtle portrait of the corrupting effects of power. At the beginning Cromwell is apparently quite upset to hear about the effects of torture on heretics, while by the end of the first book he is sending political opponents to the stake or the executioner’s block, not exactly without a qualm but with a matter-of-fact acceptance that this follows from the policies to which he has become committed. Shows that the best way to make someone do something morally troubling is not to give them good arguments but simply to insinuate to them that it is the logical consequence of something else they have already decided to do. The second book sees this deadly logic applied to the destruction of Anne Boleyn.

Jan Morris: Conundrum

Siddhartha Mukherjee: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Chris Stringer: Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth

Alison Wolf: The XX Factor: How Working Women are Creating a New Society

 

* * * *

 

Alison Booth: Stillwater Creek

Jeffrey Eugenides: The Marriage Plot

Richard Powers: Gain

Bhisham Sahni: Tamas

Sheryl Sandberg: Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead

Richard Trivers: The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

 

* * *

Richard Rhodes: Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

A Perfect Spy

A Perfect Spy, by John Le Carré. Published by Knopf in 1986, now available in a Penguin reprint.

I read this book when it first came out and thought it a masterpiece. I re-read it recently with some trepidation, fearing I would be embarrassed by my earlier enthusiasm. I needn’t have worried: it remains a brilliant novel by any standards, and the character of Rick Pym, the protagonist’s father, is unforgettable.

Buy here.

Le Club des Incorrigibles Optimistes

Le Club des Incorrigibles Optimistes, by Jean-Michel Guenassia. Published August 2009 by Albin Michel.

Wonderful account of an adolescence in early 1960s Paris, by a boy who comes across a chess club frequented by Jean-Paul Sartre, Joseph Kessel and a cast of East European émigrés who all have shadows they would prefer to escape. The book is sad, evocative and sometimes side-splittingly funny. I particularly loved the description of a supercilious Air France employee refusing to help a Russian pilot who has been diverted to Orly because of fog (I could just see that single raised eyebrow the Air France staff have been trained to deploy so deftly). The hero, a 12-year old boy who walks around the streets of Paris reading, insists he is in no danger of running into a car or another pedestrian because he can rely on everyone else’s interest in avoiding him. Until the day when he crashes into a teenage girl who is also holding a book in front of her nose. It turns out to be a great way to meet girls who share his literary passions.

Tags: Fiction, Français

Buy here.

 

A Pleur-Joie

A Pleur-Joie

By Elvire de Brissac. Published 1969 by Grasset.

The other other woman writes acutely and movingly about being mistress to a man with not only a wife but an established mistress as well. Funny, sad, sharp as a razor.

Tags: Fiction, Français

Buy here.

 

 

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