Tis the season to brag about books we've read. Why? Because no man is an island. Because woman is a political animal. Because happiness is a warm story. (Or biting analysis.) And because the view from the top of a peak is nice, but so are bragging rights.
So here's my list, at least what I remember:
Frederick Douglas, Life. It is really a powerful piece, wonderfully written, despite Douglas' modesty.
Middlemarch. One of the great novels, Enlightenment-classic in styling and structure, with sentences like rich meals I avoided Eliot, perhaps thinking that someone who would translate David Strauss must be silly. Foolish in some ways, as are we all, but wise in so many others.
The Wolf Totem. (As also below, I translate the Chinese title, without checking the English.) A young man from Beijing learns to herd in Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, and becomes fascinated with wolves and what Mongolians have learned from them. Not finished, but immensely fascinating so far.
Living. An account of an old man in a Chinese village, all of whose loved ones die in one trajedy after the next, until he is left talking (not without humor) with his water buffalo, whom he names after a deceased son. A great intro to modern Chinese history on the ground level.
The Frog. Takes place near my old stomping grounds in Qingdao. See my review a couple weeks ago.
Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen Meyer. Like a slowly-gathering storm of an idea. Incomplete and in a sense narrow, as such an ambitious book must be.
Testaments, Margaret Atwood. An excellent sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. Lydia proves a fascinating and sympathetic central character.
Struggles of Life and Death, Mo Yan. My second book by this Nobel-Prize winning author from Shandong. A rich peasant with three wives is killed by revolutionaries in his town, and returns first as a donkey owned by one of his wives and her husband, a waif he had once taken in. I am laughing out loud.
Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Days, Salman Rushdie. A weird book about Jinn coming into this world and trying to take it over. R-rated, but hilarious, rather like (8.). Rushde clearly does not understand the concept of a "miracle." He thinks they are arbitrary acts that follow no rules. That's the same mistake Chesterton ascribed to Yeats.
Honorable mention: Gore Vidal, Lincoln, and Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Both constitute excellent Civil War reading, but not on a par with Douglas, #1 above. Also Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through it and Other Stories.
I've probably forgot some other great books. My apologies to their authors. And I haven't included much academic or classic stuff.
Oh, yes, and half of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Quite a story, though he frequently gets his facts wrong.
Now (Lord willing) for another happy year of exploring (and maybe even writing) great books.