The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller

I wrote yesterday that I would try to finish two more books before the year ends, but I will likely leave it at one. I'm not sure why I thought it was a good idea to select a 369-page book yesterday morning when that was my intention, but I picked The Song of Achilles to be the first of the two books I'd read. I finished it in time for lunch today, and believe me: I am still contemplating trying to finish another book today, but I have plans to go to the movies this afternoon and will likely do something this evening, so I'm also telling myself to just stop here.

My knowledge of Greek history/mythology is so nonexistent that the bulk of The Song of Achilles was new to me. I was supposed to read The Odyssey in 9th grade, but didn't, and I've never read The Iliad, or any other accounts of the Trojan War, so everything I know about it has been picked up from literary or other cultural references. I honestly didn't even know Achilles fought in it or (obviously, since as far as I can tell that's what he's most known for) who he was before reading this. I knew he was fast, but that's about it. But some of the stories from the war did slip through to my consciousness: when the wind wouldn't come for the ships to set sail, I knew that as a thing that had happened. And the names were familiar, though I didn't know anything about who most of them were. Reading The Song of Achilles reminded me a little of reading José Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, though I'm much more familiar with the stories New Testament than with stories of the Trojan War. In any case, this book was wonderful. I'm not sure whether anything would have been gained by my knowing the story already; sometimes I felt lucky not to. I had no idea what was coming, except through the hints and prophesies in the text. Maybe now I'll go read The Iliad.

The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu; Royal Holiday, by Jasmine Guillory

One of my favorite things about the holidays is that I have long stretches of free time when the weather is not great: ideal conditions for sitting on the couch and reading all day. This year, for the first time since 2003, I have the full stretch of time between Christmas and New Year's Day off, so I hoped I would have even more of this kind of time than usual, but the first several days of my time off proved to be quite busy and I didn't get nearly as much reading-on-the-couch time as I had hoped. But on December 27, I took Amtrak upstate to visit my mom and stepdad, so I had 2 hours of reading time on the train up, the same amount on the train home, plus several hours of sitting on their couch with their dog in front of the fire. In these perfect reading conditions, I finished the book I had started just before the holiday break, Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem, I read Jasmine Guillory's Royal Holiday cover to cover, and I read the first three stories from Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. (I will talk about this last when I finish it, which probably won't be until next year because I have in mind devoting today and tomorrow to reading a couple short books.)

The Three-Body Problem was the fourth Chinese book I started for my World Books Project and the first I succeeded in finishing. A few years ago, I tried Mo Yan's The Republic of Wine and gave that up quite quickly. It may just have been I wasn't in the right mood at the time. Last year I started Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong, about an educated youth who is sent to Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution and becomes fascinated with the wolf/human relationship there and the balance that is being lost. I read about 150 pages of it, but I found the blood and violence hard to tolerate, so I set it aside. Earlier this year, I started Han Shaogong's A Dictionary of Maqiao, another book about an educated youth living in a remote part of China during the Cultural Revolution. The "story" unfolds in the form of a dictionary, describing the specific meanings of various words and phrases in the village Maqiao. It's a really lovely book, but very slow. I read about 150 pages then set it aside in June as my travel schedule picked up and I needed a different kind of reading material, and I never went back.

Which brings us to The Three-Body Problem. I didn't really know anything about it before reading it except that it was science fiction and several people I know recommended it. So, I was quite surprised when I started it to find that it, too, began during the Cultural Revolution and one of the central characters is an educated youth sent to Inner Mongolia. Before going into it, I perhaps doubted that genre fiction -- and more specifically sci-fi -- for my world books project would adequately represent the country, but in fact Chinese history is central to the story in The Three-Body Problem. (This is not so true of a couple other instances of genre fiction I've read as representatives from Scandinavian countries; from reading Scandinavian crime fiction you'd think things were much grittier than they actually are there, I think.) I can hardly claim to be a sci-fi expert, but this book struck me as unusual in that it's a sci-fi novel set nearly entirely on contemporary earth, featuring rather regular humans.

I suspected I would finish The Three-Body Problem while upstate so I brought two other books with me for my time there and my return trip home. I had just received Jasmine Guillory's Royal Holiday in the mail and I imagined it would be just the book to read on the train to make the trip fly by. But the train ride is only 2 hours, so I decided I had better start it ahead of time so I could finish it on the train. I picked it up late Saturday afternoon and was 70 pages in when I set it down not long after to have dinner. Sunday morning, I woke up pretty early and had breakfast with my mom and then the couch and the fire and the dog were calling me (that's Royal Holiday in the photo above), so I read some more and about 3 hours later I finished it just in time for brunch. Somewhat ironically, because I love rom-com movies, I never thought romance was a genre I would want to read. I think I imagined the entire genre consisted of self-serious bodice-rippers. But of course there's diversity in the genre, and Guillory's books are modern and funny, and they tackle race in important and unexpected ways. One of the things I really love about her books is how all the central characters are really passionate about what they do -- often this passion itself is part of the conflict: her characters have important jobs that they love and can't give up for another person. The central character of Royal Holiday is a social worker in a hospital who helps families navigate difficult situations, and the fact that this is a background theme in a romance novel is, to me, so unexpected and refreshing. In any case, Royal Holiday wasn't my favorite, but Guillory's books are fun to read and just the perfect type of escapism for me sometimes.

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid

I read Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia back in 2016 as my book for Pakistan, then Exit West came out the following year to so much acclaim and I had this sense of almost regret: I should have waited!

In fact, I quite enjoyed How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, so it's not that I didn't like my pick for Pakistan, it was just that Exit West got so much media attention and was shortlisted for the Man Booker, that it left me feeling I might have chosen better if I had waited. I don't think I wrote about How to Get Filthy Rich, but it's written unlike anything I've read before or since. The entire book is told in an impersonal second person as sort of an instruction, sort of a reportage on moving from rural poverty to urban wealth in an unnamed country. What's incredible is how, even in the absence of characters or story in a traditional sense, the reader gets this strong sense of character and story. It's really something.

Of course, nothing was stopping me from reading both, and so I put Exit West on my PaperbackSwap wish list and sometime earlier this year it arrived. It hadn't really been front-of-mind, but when I was staring at my shelves trying to decide what to read next, I pulled it out on a whim. It was small (I tend to read short books toward the end of the year to really try and pack more in) and I remembered speeding through How to Get Filthy Rich... so it seemed like a good choice.

I'm glad that, despite hearing so much about Exit West when it came out, I actually didn't really know anything about the story. The book opens with spare prose, that was familiar to me from How to Get Filthy Rich..., though Exit West does have named characters, whose inner selves are explored, and a bit more of a straightforward narrative. Saeed and Nadia meet and become involved in an unnamed city in an unnamed country that is entering civil war. Then about halfway in, the book takes a turn that was hinted at in a couple earlier passages in the book but was completely unexpected to me, giving me a real aha moment. Though most reviews do mention it, I'm choosing to leave out what is, in fact, the central plot device of the story because I think not knowing was nice. I will just say that the book addresses the contemporary refugee crisis and the rise in nationalism in a fresh and interesting way. And it's really lovely too.

Winter in Lisbon, by Antonio Muñoz Molina

Some months ago, I was a few cents short of free shipping on Amazon and so I looked at books by some authors I liked for something to add to my order and stumbled across a copy of Winter in Lisbon for $548. (I looked again today, and the book can be yours from Amazon for just $59.99.) Unsurprisingly, the book lodged itself in my mind as something I should seek out at a price I could afford and after I found The View from Downshire Hill for half what Amazon was charging from an international seller on Abe Books, I had the idea to look there for Winter in Lisbon (plus I avoid buying from Amazon just generally). Amazingly, they had a copy available for $6.06 plus $5 shipping and $1 tax and so I got my copy for $12 and change. (Today the cheapest available edition on Abe is $46. Sorry.) It turned out to be a discharged library edition, but was in fine condition and, most importantly, was $12. I have to admit, the cost and scarcity of the book definitely lingered in the back of my mind as I was reading it, especially at the beginning. Sometimes I thought, I am reading this extremely valuable book; I must understand why it's so valuable. And then sometimes I thought, this book was allowed to go out of print in English; obviously there's a reason. Eventually I mostly got over this superficial aspect of reading it and got absorbed in the story. In the end, I really liked it.

Winter in Lisbon uses a narrative device I hadn't thought much about previously, but which I found quite interesting: first person narration by a character who is rather incidental to the main events of the book. I spent some time reflecting on this last night after finishing the book, trying to remember where else I had seen it and two books came to mind - both of which I read upwards of 20 years ago: The Razor's Edge and The Great Gatsby. In Winter in Lisbon, the narrator's story alternates between San Sebastian in the past, when the central characters first encounter one another, and Madrid in (the book's) present, when he is reunited with the person whose story he is really telling. (You'll notice that neither of these locations is the titular Lisbon. Some of the book's key events take place in Lisbon, but the narrator admits he's never been there.) Everything that comes in between is told as a second- or even third-hand report, based on conversations the narrator and central character have in present-day Madrid. Occasionally, the narrator knows more than he could possibly know from having heard the story from another person, but you get lost in his telling and you don't mind.

My Decade in Books

It's too soon for me to write my year in books round-up because I'm still hoping to finish a few more before the year is up, but with just 19 days left in the decade, I think I can go ahead and write that round-up -- even if I do expect to finish a few more books this decade. As of today, I have finished 292 books in the 2010s. I have started and not finished at least another 16 (those are the ones I got so far as to document). As someone who used to average about a book a month, it's pretty self-affirming to see that my ten-year average is so much higher.

I told my friend Nicole that I'd write up the top ten books I read this decade, so he we are. Yesterday I took to Goodreads and figured out what the first book I read in the 2010s was (The Count of Monte Cristo if you're wondering) then scrolled through and jotted down the books I thought might be contenders for the top 10. On the first pass, I came up with 15 individual books, as well as 3 authors who I thought would make the cut but would require some consideration to figure out which specific book to include. (When making these lists, one has to make rules and so I have ruled that only one book per author will be allowed.) Last night in therapy I mentioned this list and went on to talk about how I write up my year in books every year and always declare a favorite and my therapist said, "So you already have the list then?" and I realized that (as usual) she had a point. (Of course, I often can't narrow down my favorite to just one book and I was also surprised to find that I did not make these lists between 2007 and 2012, meaning I'm missing the first two years of this decade. There is also one flaw in her argument which is that it assumes the best book I read in any given year would also beat out most books I read in any other year, but thinking through my first pass list while talking to her, I immediately recognized there was a lot of overlap.)

So, I went back to all my year in books posts and jotted down my declared favorite(s) from each year and came out with 18 books. There are two books from my first pass list that do not appear among my annual favorites, and two books from my annual favorites that did not make the first pass list, so I knocked those 4 off. There's one author who appears twice and one who appears three times in my annual favorites list, so when I narrow those down to one book a piece, that list gets down to 13: we're close!! EXCEPT, there are 2 years missing from that list and one of my 3 authors who I know makes the cut is George Eliot, whose entire oeuvre I read in 2011. My first pass list includes another two books I read before 2012 as well. So, with my 13 books from my favorite books each year list, plus one book by George Eliot, plus the 2 others, I have a list of 16 that I must narrow down to 10 (setting aside the issue of the authors who have multiple books I need to choose between).

It was not easy, but here are the ten best books (in alphabetical order) I read this decade. (Where I have them, I've included links to where I wrote about them either individually or as part of a year-end round-up.)

2666, by Roberto Bolaño (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

A Broken Mirror, by Mercè Rodoreda
(Order it from the University of Nebraska Press!)

Curfew, by José Donoso (Order it from IndieBound!)

Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

The Dream of My Return, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
(Order it from Bookshop.org!)

Explosion in a Cathedral, by Alejo Carpentier (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
(Order it from Bookshop.org!)

Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

Your Face Tomorrow, vol. 1, by Javier Marías (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

I think it's worth noting that only one of these books (the Castellanos Moya) was published this decade. Only three were published this century. It's interesting to me that fully half were written in Spanish (and a 6th in Catalan). If you're wondering, aside from Eliot, the authors for whom I had to struggle to choose which book to include were José Donoso (and I'm still not sure I made the right choice) and Javier Marías (for whom the choice was actually rather easy). Anyway, there you have it, the ten best books I read this decade.

Villa Triste, by Patrick Modiano

I'm terrible about reading when I travel. And yet, I always think I might want to read while I'm traveling, so I never go anywhere without a book. Often, I bring multiple books with me and I don't read even a page. And then I'm also in the habit of buying books when I travel, which only makes the situation worse. I'm just back from a trip to Italy, on which I brought with me 5 books. One of these was a guidebook and three were books about Venice, where I spent 4 days during my trip. The latter were John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and a book I picked up in London called Rilke's Venice, that is part biography of Rilke and part guide to Venice. But even with all this reading material I worried that it wouldn't be the right reading material. I wanted what I thought of as a "normal" book, in case I found myself in the mood to just read (rather than to read with purpose, which seemed the demand of all my other reading material). So, at the last minute, I threw a very water damaged edition of Patrick Modiano's Villa Triste in my bag. I selected this book mainly because of the water damage -- it arrived for me in the mail in July on one of those days when it just poured rain and it was soaked through when I retrieved it from my mailbox. I figured I could just leave it behind somewhere if I finished it; perhaps even if I didn't. But, as it turned out, I started it the day before I left and I carried it all the way back home with me. I read it for nearly the whole two-and-a-half hour train trip from Venice to Milan. I finished it on my flight home from Milan the following day. I considered leaving it on the plane, but didn't want to give the cabin crew another thing to clean up. And so I brought it home, where I have put it in the paper recycling, though I've taken it out twice since doing so. It's not so easy for me to part with even a very water damaged book, apparently. I did leave one book behind in Italy: I donated my Time Out guide to Venice to my wonderful hotel's collection of guidebooks because they didn't have that one yet. But I also picked up two books in Italy, an Italian edition of Italo Calvino's Le Città Invisibili and a large hardback book about amari.

This is the second Modiano book I've read this year and I've loved them both. I had had him on my mental to-read list for quite a while, but only got around to him this year when I found myself with a couple of his books. Like Missing Person, which I read in May, Villa Triste is infused with the most intense feeling of nostalgia. It takes place mostly in the early 60s in an Haute-Savoie summer resort town. The 18-year-old narrator is hiding from something and has invented a name and a glamorous past for himself and he falls in with two locals who have to a greater or lesser extent escaped their provincial roots. They are all playing parts. The present-day of the book is actually 10 years after the main events take place, when the town has completely faded and the resorts all closed. The narrator's faded memory and pieced together recollections are what gives the book its nostalgic, melancholic quality. You also sense there is a greater story behind each of the characters, which you only get to glimpse here and there.

Two side notes:

• Like Missing Person, this book also contained a passing reference to the Place Malesherbes. I saw it and thought, "Again?!" In fact, first I thought, "Didn't I read another book that referenced that street this year?" And then I realized it was the other Modiano book. 
• I read this entire book while listening to Brian Eno's Music for Films on repeat (on noise-cancelling headphones, to drown out background noise on the train and plane), which I feel added some additional unintended (perhaps filmic?) quality to my experience of the text. It seemed to go together, but of course I can't know what the reading experience would have been otherwise. 

In any case, I'm very glad I got around to Modiano this year. I look forward to reading more.