2019 in Books

I always wait until the new year to write up my prior year in books because it's sort of a tradition of mine to finish a book on New Year's Eve so I can start each new year with a new book. Last year I messed this up by starting a very long book on December 29, but this year I got back on track. I also slacked off on writing about the books I read last year, but this year I wrote about every single one, which I'm pretty happy about. Here is the list:

Thus Bad Begins, by Javier Marías
Life and Times of Michael K, by J.M. Coetzee
Augustus, by John Williams
To Each His Own, by Leonardo Sciascia
By a Slow River, by Philippe Claudel
The Proposal, by Jasmine Guillory
Pig Earth, by John Berger
Trick, by Domenico Starnone
The Accident, by Ismail Kadare
A Heart So White, by Javier Marías
Tristana, by Benito Pérez Galdós
The Time of the Doves, by Mercè Rodoreda
The Rules of Magic, by Alice Hoffman
The Fifth Child, by Doris Lessing
Fludd, by Hilary Mantel
Probability Moon, by Nancy Kress
The White, by Deborah Larson
Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi
Beauty Is a Wound, by Eka Kurniawan
Missing Person, by Patrick Modiano
Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño
The She-Devil in the Mirror, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Postcards from the Edge, by Carrie Fisher
I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith
State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett
Glory, by Vladimir Nabokov
Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb
The Shape of Water, by Andrea Camilleri
The King of a Rainy Country, by Brigid Brophy
By the Ionian Sea, by George Gissing
The Invention of Truth, by Marta Morazzoni
The Wedding Party, by Jasmine Guillory
Zama, by Antonio di Benedetto
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
Old Filth, by Jane Gardam
Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz
The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
Reef, by Romesh Gunesekera
Normal People, by Sally Rooney
84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff
The View from Downshire Hill, by Elizabeth Jenkins
Transcription, by Kate Atkinson
Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg
Villa Triste, by Patrick Modiano
Winter in Lisbon, by Antonio Muñoz Molina
Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid
The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
Royal Holiday, by Jasmine Guillory
The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller

So, some stats: I read books from 18 countries this year (if we allow Homegoing for Ghana, which I still haven't decided whether I will allow myself in my world books project), plus Catalonia (I always feel I must distinguish Mercè Rodoreda from Spain since she wrote in Catalan). I read 22 books in translation, which seems a little low: usually it's closer to half the books I read, but I read a few international titles this year that were written in English (the Coetzee, Hamid, and Gunesekera, at a glance), which maybe accounts for the difference. I read 23 books by women, plus several more that were translated by women (something I started to think about earlier this year). This is maybe a little better than usual. I read three (or debatably four, if you include the Natalia Ginzburg) books of non-fiction - all memoirs - this year, which is very unusual for me. And I actually loved them all (the others are the Elizabeth Jenkins, the Helene Hanff, and the George Gissing, if you're wondering). Maybe I should read more in this vein. EDITED because I forgot one important stat: countries I haven't read before. I didn't do so great in this respect this year, but I got to Albania, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and China, plus Ghana with the caveat mentioned earlier.

My favorite book of the year is easy: Journey By Moonlight by Antal Szerb. Careful readers will have known this was coming, as I put it on my list of the ten best books I read in the last decade. Other highlights from the year include both the Modiano books (I went out and bought 2 more books of his just before the holidays - I can't wait to read more!); Normal People by Sally Rooney - I could not believe how good this was, even though I had heard so many good things about it!; Thus Bad Begins - I tweeted something to the effect that I was riding in a cab and suddenly remembered the twist in this book and gasped aloud; it was true; The King of a Rainy Country - I knew nothing about this book or its author and it turned out to be so good!; Augustus and The Song of Achilles, which I will pair as fictionalizations from ancient times; The Good Soldier, Homegoing, Trick ... okay, I'm stopping now. I read a lot of really good books this year!

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.

Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg

As I've mentioned before, I have found lots of good books at the thrift shop by my office, but there have been a handful that are particularly unexpected and which I can't help but think must have been donated by the same person who shares some particular interests with me. Among these is Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg and an Italian edition of La notte dell'oblio, by the Italian Jewish writer Lia Levi. (I also found an Italian edition of Leonardo Sciacia's A ciascuno il suo there, which I was thrilled to find because I have the English language edition and so I can do a side-by-side reading, and a couple other Italian books -- I wonder whose they were?) In any case, I wasn't familiar with Natalia Ginzburg, but it was a New York Review of Books edition and sounded like something I'd enjoy, so I picked it up. Family Lexicon is something of a memoir of Ginzburg's family life from her early childhood in the 19-teens and 20s through about the 1950s. It's organized more anecdotally or by characters than chronologically, but it beautifully recounts Jewish life and anti-fascism in Italy during the 20s, 30s, and 40s. One of the odd things about this book is that, while it is telling true stories about real people (as is amply demonstrated in the notes section of the book, which provides little bios of nearly all the characters in Ginzburg's life and circle, many of whom are well-known figures), it is almost not at all about Ginzburg herself, which is why I called it "something of" a memoir. The reader learns all about her family members and people in her social circle, who are described in lovely, humorous detail. Toward the end we learn a little more about Ginzburg herself, who was exiled to a village in the south of Italy by Mussolini's government, fled the village for Rome with her 3 small children after the German occupation in a German truck with a faked identity and story of lost papers, and lived through so much more, and yet it's all touched on very lightly in the book. Family Lexicon was wonderful, but I'd love to read a memoir of more of Ginzburg's own experiences.

Transcription, by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson's foray into the spy genre, Transcription, is another book I picked up in London, leaving me with just two London books to go. It covers some of the same ground that was covered in Life After Life and, especially, A God in Ruins, but with new characters and none of the supernaturalities found in those books. The story jumps back and forth between 1940, when the 18-year-old lead character worked for MI5 as a transcriber and occasional spy, and 1950 when her spying days come back to haunt her. As is often the case in spy novels, you're not always sure who is spying on whom (or if everyone is spying on everyone: at times it seems like the whole cast of characters are employed by MI5 to spy one another). Transcription captures very well the madness and self-doubt that must result from these conditions -- especially when the person experiencing the conditions is young and naive. This wasn't my favorite Kate Atkinson book, but that would be a high bar to hurdle. I did thoroughly enjoy it.

The View from Downshire Hill, by Elizabeth Jenkins

I went down a little Elizabeth Jenkins rabbit hole after seeing a copy of her The Tortoise and the Hare in the background of a photo of her cat Miette that the writer Patricia Lockwood posted on Twitter. I read that book in 2006 and adored it, and the picture made me think I ought to look out other books by Elizabeth Jenkins. As it turns out, very little of her fiction is in print. She was also the author of several biographies and it seems like those are more widely available. In any case, I saw that she had written a memoir, which intrigued me. It was available on Amazon for upwards of $50, but I was able to order it from Abe Books for a little over $20, plus $6 to have it shipped from London, which is still a bit expensive, but not unreasonable. And so I read a second consecutive book shipped to me from London. (The two books - this and 24 Charing Cross Road have quite a bit in common also. They cover some of the same time period and several authors and places and publications pop up in both. The one that struck me most notably was St. Paul's in Covent Square, the Actor's Church, which I now really wish I had visited when I was in London.)

As the foreword, written by her nephew Sir Michael Jenkins, points out, Elizabeth Jenkins lived what was in many ways an unremarkable life, but she lived through a remarkable period (her life spanned nearly the entire 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st), was in contact with many notable figures, and is gifted with the ability to tell the episodes of her life beautifully. From 1939 until about 1995, Jenkins lived at 8 Downshire Hill in Hampstead. I looked the address up and discovered it's just around the corner from the Keats House, which I visited in London and I walked right past Jenkins' former home on my way from the Keats House to the Freud House. In fact, I remember the street well. My father and I were charmed by the Hampstead neighborhood generally. The first house we passed on leaving Hampstead Heath bore a plaque indicating that George Orwell had lived there (this was on Parliament Hill) and from there onward as we walked through the neighborhood, we paid close attention to the homes. When we came out from Keats Grove and made the left onto Downshire Hill, I remember there was a Bentley parked on the corner and I said, "That's not something you see every day." My father said that maybe it was, in London.

In any case, Jenkins' stories of her life in London from the 1920s on through the 1970s gave a wonderful picture of the times she lived through. It was also very interesting to see into her life as a reasonably successful, but not wildly famous, writer.