It's been a great year, with 50 books read, thanks to the shitty weather, especially during the holiday season. The choice is hard, especially in the non-fiction area.
In the non-fiction space, I loved the two major books by neuroscientists about whether or not we have free will. The challenge came from Robert Sapolsky, the reply by Kevin J. Mitchell. An equally important and excellent book is Sarah Bakewell overview of the history of humanistic thought.
In fiction, many of the great writers, such as Murakami, the posthumous Garcia Marquez, or Han Kang, did not meet my high expectations. The winner in my opinion is again Olga Tokarczuk, now stylistically totally different, reminiscent of the Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, published a century ago. We see again great literature from Mexico and Cuba, Spain and France, the UK and Australia. As a total coincidence, four books describe a strange form of paradisiac themes: Paul Harding's "The Other Eden", Murakami's "The City And Its Uncertain Walls", Jim Crace's "Eden" and Abbott Kahler's "Eden Undone".
I also felt quite happy to have (re)read Douglas Hofstadter's unparallelled "Gödel, Escher & Bach", and to have read Martin Amis's "Einstein's Monsters", which makes him feature on my list of authors of whom I've read every novel (further featuring Roberto Bolaño, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Milan Kundera, Haruki Murakami, Michael Chabon, Thomas Pynchon and the translated works of Olga Tokarczuk).
It is also remarkable that in my top-5 of novels, four were published by the excellent publishing house Fitzcarraldo.
Fiction- Olga Tokarczuk - The Empusium *****
- Fernanda Melchor - Hurricane Season ****½
- Carlos Manuel Álvarez - The Tribe ****½
- Paul Harding - This Other Eden ****½
- Munir Hachemi - Living Things ****
- Sorj Chalandon - L'Enragé ****
- Jim Crace - Eden ****
- John Banville - The Singularities ****
- Teju Cole - Tremor ****
- Tim Winton - Juice ****
- Kevin J. Mitchell - Free Agents - How Evolution Gave Us Free Will *****
- Sarah Bakewell - Humanly Possible *****
- Irene Vallejo - Papyrus ****½
- Michael Taylor - Impossible Monsters ****½
- Robert Sapolsky - Determined - Life Without Free Will ****½
- Anne Applebaum - Autocracy, Inc. ****
- Bart D. Ehrman - Armageddon - What the Bible Really Says About the End ****
- Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein - Noise - A Flaw in Human Judgment ****
- Giorgio Parisi - In A Flight Of Starlings ****
- Bart Van Loo - De Bourgondiërs ****
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