My favourites of the year were (simply in chronological order from the list in my profile):

- John Milton, Paradise Lost (review)
Some parts of it were hard to get through, but others were fantastic, and as a whole I can definitely see why it's such a big name.

- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (review)
Possibly the most violent book I've ever read, and one of the most unsettling. Certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but the writing is marvelous.

- William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (review)
An often very cynical but at times almost sentimental book - it's an odd combination, but it works better than you'd think. Not all of the characters are that interesting, and I was somewhat disappointed in the anti-heroine Becky Sharpe, whom I'd heard promising things about, but not in the novel as a whole.

- Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (review)
McCullers always writes about loners and freaks, in this case the protagonist is a mute who moves to a small city in the South of the US in the 1930s. He himself is something of a mystery, and most of the novel is actually about the four very different people who each develop a close but rather one-sided bond with him. The novel is at its best in the storyline about race relations, but the rest is great as well.

- Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin (review)
Another competitor for most unsettling book I've read. The essence of the premise - the mother of a mass murderer looking back at his childhood and the massacre itself - becomes clear rapidly enough, and is more than disturbing enough. But then near the end there's a few additional developments that pack quite a punch.

- Tony Judt, Postwar (review)
I haven't read much non-fiction this year, but this was easily the best of them, a great history of Europe since WW2. Not everything is at the same level, but considering the scope of its ambition, I found this book a very impressive achievement.

- Alfred (Lord) Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.
Not really a book so much as a poem, or rather a compendium of well over a hundred poems concerning Tennyson's mourning over his best friend Arthur Hallam. Amazing stuff, with tons of great passages, though obviously a collection this long will also have poems or passages that aren't as appealing (or weren't to me, anyway). This and my reread of Ulysses established Tennyson as possibly my favourite poet, or among my favourites anyway.

- D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (review)
An essentially autobiographical story about a boy growing up in a mining village in northern England in the early 20th century, and about how his overly close relationship with his mother hampers his efforts to establish romantic relationships with women. Very well written and insightful.

- George Eliot, Middlemarch (review)
My favourite Victorian novel to date, with some of the most memorable characters and a great deal of interesting commentary on the early Victorian period - the evolution in medicine, the British politics, the religious situation, relations between men and women, and so on.


Not really, the closest I came was probably Bret Easton Ellis' book Glamorama. And the reason I mention it is that I rather liked the first half or so - it's basically a satire on the lives of celebrities and supermodels, starring the impressively vapid model Victor Ward. In the later parts of the book, the plot becomes very confusing, as it turns out that Ward is just an actor and the story so far is just a movie he's playing in - or maybe not. Throw in some terrorism with unclear motives, snuff movies and conspiracy theories involving Ward's father, a US senator, and the result becomes one big mess. Quite possibly this is supposed to indicate the consequences of Ward's drug addiction, but if so I didn't quite get it. And as I've said several times before here, I'm not generally a huge fan of plots that go meta when they leave me feeling that I just don't get it (those who have read Jostein Gaarder's famous YA novel Sophie's World will know what I'm talking about, I dare say).