JUST LISTS - Part 2

I hope no one minds that I went ahead and created a part 2 to the JUST LISTS thread as it had surpassed the 300 posts mark.
Please continue to post your wonderful lists below!

I'm toying with the idea of reading ten or so novels published or awarded something in 1969

Here is what I'm thinking about. Any thoughts?

Prizes
Something to Answer For by P. H. Newby - Booker Prize winner
Figures in a Landscape by Barry England - Booker Prize shortlist
Impossible Object by Nicholas Mosley - Booker Prize shortlist
The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch - Booker Prize shortlist
The Public Image by Muriel Spark - Booker Prize shortlist
From Scenes Like These by Gordon Williams - Booker Prize shortlist
Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen = James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin - Nebula award
House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday = Pulitzer Prize

Others
The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles (which I own)
Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa
Tent of Miracles by Jorge Amado
The Green Man by Kingsley Amis
Ubik by Philp K. Dick
Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene
Local Anaesthetic by Gunter Grass
The Four-Gated City by Doris Lessing (part of an autobiographical quintet, The Children of Violence, begun in 1952)
Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian
The Godfather by Mario Puzo

----------------------

This is what I have read before
Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
Ada by Vladimir Nabokov
The Promise by Chaim Potok
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

>1 lilisin: thanks!

>2 dchaikin:
Quite a year! Master and Commander the start of perhaps my favourite series of books ever (at least as an adult) - effectively a 20-volume novel. Just go with the flow with the technical language, which some comment on (there's a great companion volume if you get hooked) It's a good start, but gets better (and can be read on its own)!

>2 dchaikin: What nothing by Beckett? (Nobel for literature in 1969)

I loved The Nice and the Good and Eva Trout hit me just right. The French Lieutenant's Woman is solidly good. Pretty sure the movie is better than the book for The Godfather. The book does move along quite nicely, but there's some weird 1960s attitudes that may not have been explicitly translated into the movie.

More possibilities:
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (okay, not a novel....)
A Void (written, and translated!, without the letter "e")
them (can be read as a stand-alone)
Pricksongs and Descants (the strangest fairy tales)
Katalin Street (not my favorite by her, but very good nonetheless)

>4 Willoyd: cool. Bragan read through some or all of the series a couple years ago and left me a interested. This is encouraging

>5 ELiz_M: well now the Bowen and Murdoch appeal even more! I do feel i’m overdue to read Murdoch. I have read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I need a find a source that includes memoirs. I think i was looking at a fiction list (on Wikipedia). I don’t know anything about these other four.

>2 dchaikin: why 1969?

>7 dianeham: well, my rationalization or true reason?

I’m Booker obsessed and 1969 is the 1st year of the Booker Prize. But it was Commonwealth only for the 1st 45 or so years and there is no longlist, just miscellaneous length shortlists. So i thought i would pad it out to ten or maybe 13 by looking at Pulitzer’s and other awards. But that doesn’t cover translations….

My rationalization is 1969 is a very interesting cultural-redirecting year. 🙂

The Miles Franklin Literary Award winner is Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright. https://www.perpetual.com.au/insights/two-time-winner-alexis-wright-joins-esteem...

I saw a fairly detailed review in the Guardian yesterday https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/aug/03/praiseworthy-alexis-wright...

(The Miles Franklin Literary Award is a literary prize granted for novels concerning Australian life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Franklin_Award).

Here's the 2024 shortlist:

Hossein Asgari, Only Sound Remains (Puncher & Wattmann)
Jen Craig, Wall (Puncher & Wattmann)
Andre Dao, Anam (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House)
Gregory Day, The Bell of the World (Transit Lounge)
Sanya Rushdi, Hospital (Giramondo Publishing)
Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy (Giramondo Publishing)

I have to admit, I've read none of these, or indeed anything by these authors, but I will check out the Wright, atleast.

One more list. I always keep an eye on the Cundill History Prize, which is awarded for nonfiction writing on history. There's usually atleast 3-4 titles I want to read from each shortlist. This year's is especially rich. The top three were already on my reading list, and Revolusi is sitting on my desk, ready to read, as I type this.

1) Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J. Bass (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
2) They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence by Lauren Benton (Princeton University Press)
3) Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century by Joya Chatterji (The Bodley Head, VINTAGE / Yale University Press
4) Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal (Penguin Random House)
5) Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh (John Murray, Hachette)
6) Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism by Catherine Hall (Cambridge University Press)
7) France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain by Julian Jackson (Belknap Press)
8) Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World by Patrick Joyce (Scribner)
9) Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan by Ruby Lal (Yale University Press)
10) Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America by Andrew C. McKevitt (University of North Carolina Press)
11) Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights by Dylan C. Penningroth (Liveright Publishing)
12) The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid (Alfred A. Knopf)
13) Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by David Van Reybrouck, translated by David Colmer and David McKay
(The Bodley Head, VINTAGE / W. W. Norton)

https://www.cundillprize.com/news/2024longlist

>10 rv1988:
I wonder if this is the Pond working again, or if I've just missed these, but I'm assuming the Cundill prize is American? Aside from the Petain and the Peasants books, I've not registered any of these iin or from any of my usual sources (TBH, aside from a small collection, my history library is very European focused).

>9 rv1988: and >10 rv1988: cool stuff. I’ve heard of Praiseworthy. Nothing else on either list.

I always forget the August is women in translation month. These are the WiT books I have read so far this year:

Amanat : Women's Writing from Kazakhstan
Fu Ping by Anyi Wang
Chinatown by Thuận
The Laws by Connie Palmen
Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
Boulder by Eva Baltasar
Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong
Bluebeard's First Wife by Seong-nan Ha
Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur
Ice for Martians: Hielo para marcianos by Claudia Ulloa-Donoso

>13 ELiz_M: Any favorites? I'm always looking for women in translation options.

>10 rv1988: How interesting that Ghosh has written a nonfiction piece on the opium trade after all the research he did on his Ibis Trilogy.

>13 ELiz_M: I'll jump onto this with my list of WIT for 2024 so far:

The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers, translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo
Minor Detail by Shibli Adania, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette
Mãn by Kim Thúy, translated from the French by Sheila Fischman
A Faraway Island and two sequels by Annika Thor, translated from the Swedish by Linda Schenck
Eastbound by Maylis De Kerangal, translated from the French by Jessica Moore
Bitter Herbs by Marga Minco, translated from the Dutch by Jeannette K. Ringold
The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain
The Door by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix

My WIT so far:

The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers
After Midnight by Irmgard Keun
A Modern Family by Helga Flatland
The Easy Life in Kamusari by Shion Miura
The Pastor by Hanne Ørstavik

Currently reading:
Quake by Auður Jónsdóttir

>13 ELiz_M:, >15 labfs39: , >16 japaul22: cool. I wasn’t aware of WiT month. I’ll have to check my lists.

>11 Willoyd: I'm not rv, but Wikipedia tells me that the Cundill History Prize is Canadian, awarded to "the best history writing in English" since 2008. The article includes a list of the winner and two finalists for each year, so you might find that interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cundill_History_Prize

>18 KeithChaffee:
That's an interesting list - thank you. I've come across a few, and have read some of those, which have been consistently excellent. I'm still surprised as to how few titles I even recognise (especially when compared with the Wolfson Prize, where I recognise most), which I still think is probably partly a function of my being European and the list being North American. 2022 Winner Tiya Miles's All That She Carried was shortlisted for this year's inaugural Women's Prize for Non-Fiction here, and I have a copy ready to read. Other than that, the only title I recognise from the past 5 years is the Dalrymple from 2020. Prior to that, Lisa Jardine's Going Dutch was outstanding (as I think all her work was!), MacCulloch's Christianity was just too big and academic for me, but was superb for dipping into, Christopher Clark The Sleepwalkers excellent (as ever!), and Andrea Wulf The Invention of Nature my personal book of the year in 2022. Otherwise, some titles that look worth exploring further!

>19 Willoyd: As Keith said, it's a Canadian prize, but they generally are better about doing a broad sweep instead of focusing on North America. The 2024 list, for example, has one book about the history of Indonesia (Revolusi), one on Japan ( Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia), three on South Asia (the ones by Ghosh, Lal, and Chatterji), one about the Congo, one on Jamaica and one focused on Native/First Nations people. I think that's a good range!

Here's my Women in Translation list for 2024 so far:

1) Eileen Chang - The Rouge of the North (Chinese)
2) Cristina Campo - The Unforgivable, and other Writings (Italian)
3) Tiitu Takalo - Me, Mikko and Anikki (Minä, Mikko ja Annikki) (Finnish)
4) Elisa Shua Dusapin - Vladivostok Circus (French)
5) Yulia Yakovleva - Death of the Red Rider (Russian)
6) Lyudmila Petrushevskaya - The New Adventures of Helen (Russian)
7) Marina Tsvetaeva - Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922 (Russian)
8) Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Japanese)
9) Elena Ferrante - Frantumaglia (Italian)
10) Magda Szabo - The Door (Hungarian)
11) Ana María Matute - The Island (Italian)
12) Donatella di Pietrantonio - A Girl Returned (Italian)
13) Mari Ahokoivu - Oksi (Finnish)
14) Lee Geum-yi - Can't I Go Instead? (Korean)

>20 rv1988:
You miss out a few too - there's one World history (Benton - European imperialism), 2 European (Joyce and Jackson), and 2 USA (McKevitt, Penningroth), although whether The Lumumba Story is genuinely 'African' or rather just an extension of USA history (CIA plot) could be discussed!

I hasten to add though that I wasn't questioning the range or the quality of the Cundill Prize. In fact, rather the opposite: more that what I was seeing as a European reader was a rather narrower range, and that this list was covering material I'd not really seen before (and that the North American market might be a mite more wide-ranging?). That of course may just be me and my interests: looking on the shelves of Waterstones in Leeds (our biggest bookseller in one of our biggest cities), a few more of these were actually present than I'd appreciated, but still not all or even a majority. Equally, few of those books on the Cundill list appear to feature in more British based prize lists (eg Wolfson, Bailie-Gifford etc) - hence my question. I do think I need to explore the Cundill backlist of long and shortlists in rather more depth!

On those prize lists, the Chatterji was on the 2024 Women's Prize for Non-fiction longlist - so that's 2 Cundill nominees there (including one winner).
The Wolfson is focused on books from the UK (I'm not sure what their criteria are - British historians, publishers or what, the website doesn't make clear - although there doesn't seem to be a huge overlap between the two awards when it comes to the Brits, with several making Cundill and not Wolfson (and, of course, vice-versa). In the past few years, it seems that the only two common titles have been Rebecca Clifford's Survivors and Judith Herrin's Ravenna. The range of the Wolfson is thus inevitably rather narrower. Bailie-Gifford being more general non-fiction will obviously have a restricted overlap anyway, but a few Cundills have appeared recently, including Red Memory and Aftermath (both B-G shortlist) and All That She Carried again (just longlist).

All in all, and to cut what looks like an increasingly long story on my part short - the Cundill list will be one I keep a closer eye on from now on, with plenty of titles that don't tend to appear on prizelists over here! Thank you!

>14 japaul22: unfortunately not really. None have stuck with me a few weeks/months later. Perhaps because so many are short story collections and while enjoyable, there just isn't enough plot/characterization/depth to hold onto?

Amanat and Lake Like a Mirror did the best job of conveying the culture/society in which the stories are set. Women Without Men had some beautiful imagery. Boulder was well-written, but written in Catalan and set on fishing ships & in Iceland, so no real sense of place.

>13 ELiz_M: >23 ELiz_M: Amanat did catch my eye as it's an area of the world that I am interested in but have not read any women authors from there.

>23 ELiz_M: Thanks for that. Women Without Men was the one that grabbed my interest, so I will probably give it a try at some point.

>18 KeithChaffee: That is a great list, and a very interesting selection of jurors over the years.

-------

I suspect part of the difference in the range of topics might be a reflection of what is of interest in Canada, versus what you might see on a similarly themed list elsewhere. Traditionally, Canada has viewed itself as a "cultural mosaic", a place where you can integrate while still retaining your cultural identity, versus say the American idea of a "melting pot" where the emphasis is on becoming "American", whatever that may be. This idea is an older one, going back to the mid 1960s, but it is one that is still encouraged, and so it makes sense that authors from around the world are represented.

WiT read this year

Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante (1957)
The Details by Ia Genberg (2022, 2024 International Booker shortlist)
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (2021, 2024 International Booker winner)
Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo (2022, 2024 International Booker longlist)
Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener (2021, 2024 International Booker longlist)
The Years by Annie Ernaux (2008, 2017 International Booker shortlist)
Not a River by Selva Almada (2020, 2024 International Booker shortlist)
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk (2014, 2022 International Booker shortlist)

>26 SassyLassy: Traditionally, Canada has viewed itself as a "cultural mosaic", a place where you can integrate while still retaining your cultural identity, versus say the American idea of a "melting pot" where the emphasis is on becoming "American", whatever that may be.
That’s interesting. I didn’t know that about Canada. Last century Australia’s immigrants were meant to fully assimilate, and the term “New Australians” was used for immigrants. Most people would not dare to use this word today. It reminds us of the official White Australian Policy” - those dark post-war years of banned books and discrimination.

Now the Australian approach is meant to be more like that of Canada, though old attitudes remain. Australia is still nowhere near as racially and ethnically diverse as America.

I like it in America where I can say I am an Australian American. Sadly in Australia this retaining of one’s nationality in self-identification is looked down upon.

>23 ELiz_M:
Boulder was well-written, but written in Catalan and set on fishing ships & in Iceland, so no real sense of place.
Apologies if already well known, but if not hope of interest: Boulder is the second of a trilogy, the others being Permafrost and Mamut (Mammoth). the last being published in English, at least here in the UK, just yesterday (Aug 6th). I've only read the first so far, which I found a powerful (and absorbing) read, and am looking forward to the next two. FWIW, it was shortlisted for the International Booker. They're all from non-profit making indie, And Other Stories, whose catalogue looks really interesting (I've just received their edition of Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy which I can't believe hasn't been picked up by a 'mainstream' publisher).

>13 ELiz_M:
I always forget that August is women in translation month.
I hadn't realised that. My WIT list is rather short so far this year, but includes 5 very strong reads:

Not A River by Selva Almada (Argentina - Spanish transl by Annie McDermott)
The Years by Annie Ernaux (France - French transl by Alison L Strayer)
The Details by Ia Genberg (Sweden - Swedish transl by Kira Josefsson)
Permafrost by Eva Baltasar (Spain - Catalan transl by Julia Sanchez)
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Poland - Polish transl by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

currently enjoying the last. Will aim to increase that list this month!

A list of Booker Prize listed books that I own and haven't read

A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr (1980 shortlist)
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981 winner)
Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark (1981 shortlist)
Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner (1984 winner)
The Bone People by Keri Hulme (1985 winner)
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood (1989 shortlist)
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (1992 cowinner)
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (1996 shortlist)
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996 shortlist)
Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge (1998 shortlist)
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee Parker (1999 winner)
Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai (1999 shortlist)
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003 shortlist)
The Sea by John Banville (2005 winner)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005 shortlist)
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (2006 longlist)
The Gathering by Anne Enright (2007 winner)
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (2007 shortlist)
Animal's People by Indra Sinha (2007 shortlist)
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (2014 winner)
War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans (2013, 2017 IB longlist)

>30 dchaikin:
Some great reads there, but the first on your list tops the lot for me: my favourite book!
(Interesting list, BTW - think I might look at the same!).

>30 dchaikin: As >31 Willoyd: says, definitely some good reading there and Midnight's Children is an all time favourite

>30 dchaikin: so many good books on that list! I can highly recommend A Month in the Country, Hotel du Lac, A Fine Balance (I finally read it this year and loved it), Alias Grace, and Never Let Me Go. There are others on that list that I've read and enjoyed, but those are all favorites.

>30 dchaikin: Interesting list. I'll put a word in for Bone People and Mister Pip, Oryx and Crake was not a favorite.

Yikes, I have a lot of unread Booker books...

Winners
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
The inheritance of loss by Kiran Desai
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
The Famished Road by Ben Okri
Possession by A. S. Byatt

Shortlist
An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien
The Long Song by Andrea Levy
The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt
The Secret River by Kate Grenville
Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
Number9Dream by David Mitchell
England, England by Julian Barnes
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
The Riders by Tim Winton
Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe
The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan
God on the Rocks by Jane Gardam

Longlist
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
The Schooldays of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
TransAtlantic by Colum McCann
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
Spies by Michael Frayn

Edited to remove duplicate

>35 labfs39: i’ve read seven of those. I’d like to read the rest.

>30 dchaikin: The only books I’ve read on your list were the Atwoods! Well, except for The English Patient (meh). Cat’s Eye was my favorite by far from the list, and possibly my favorite of hers (not that I’ve read all her books).

>30 dchaikin: A Fine Balance and Disgrace are must-reads.

>34 labfs39: >35 labfs39:
So agree about The Bone People (and Midnight's Children) - on my favourites list.

Standouts for me on your to read list have to be The Luminaries and Possession (yet to read A Fine Balance though!).

The majority of my unread Booker listers are from the past 6 years, since 2019 (I'm really surprised, not a single longlister from before 2020, although have obviously read a few!). But then, going through the lists, I realise there's not a lot I positively want to read (there are some exceptions, some standout!). I've added International Booker listers as well - given that this has only been going since 2016, it represents a rather larger proportion of my TBR shelf (and an increasingly large proportion of books read recently too!).

Winners
Rites of Passage by William Golding (1980)
Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel (2012)
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sharun Karunatilaka (2022)

Shortlist
Goshawk Squadron by Derek Robinson (1971)
Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd (1987)
Oxygen by Andrew Miller (2001)
The Quickening Maze by Andrew Foulds (2009)
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (2019)
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (2021)
This Other Eden by Paul Harding (2023)
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (2023)

Longlist
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel (2020)
Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford (2021)
Booth By Karen Joy Fowler (2022)
Pearl by Sian Hughes (2023)
James by Perceval Everett (2024)
Orbital by Samantha Harvey (2024)
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry (2024)
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (2024)

International Booker Prize (since 2016)
White Hunger by Aki Ollikainen (Longlist 2016)
Compass by Mathias Enard (Shortlist 2017)
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (Winner 2018)
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi (Winner 2019)
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (Shortlist 2020)
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (Shortlist 2021)
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (Longlist 2021)
Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree (Winner 2022)
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk (Shortlist 2022)
Boulder by Eva Baltasar (Shortlist 2023) – bought this last week!
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (Winner 2024)
What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma (Shortlist 2024)

>40 Willoyd: I loved both Bring Up the Bodies, my favorite of the trilogy, and This Other Eden.

>40 Willoyd:
Yes, I'm really not sure why I've never got around to reading beyond Wolf Hall, which I adored (perhaps top 10 ever). This whole process might stimulate that!

>40 Willoyd: I really love Mantel. BUtB isn’t a tough book. My recommendation is read Pearl. It’s a life’s work, her only novel, rewritten over and over since she was a kid. I adored it. Maali has a tough beginning but comes around.

>43 dchaikin: Dan, you book title acronyms remind me of solving Wordle 😉

>44 kjuliff: ha! I’m just too lazy to type the whole title

>45 dchaikin: I realize that. I am sometimes too lazy to decipher it. I have to jump to the person to whom you replying. In most cases this is a kindly soul who has not only typed out the whole titled, but has touchstoned it. BSiLIs.

>46 kjuliff: You win this argument. 🙂 No clue what BSiLIs is.

>47 dchaikin: It meant something at the time of writing, but I have a mind like a sieve. It may come to me later, but recently I have fallen in love with the mind of Isaac B Singer. What a man! I’m currently halfway through his Enemies, a Love Story, or in DanSpeak E,aLS. 🙂

>48 kjuliff: He's an author I need to return to and spend time with. I appreciate the acronym, E,aLS

I belong to 2 book groups, one of which reaches its 5th anniversary this autumn (the other is a bit younger), and thus, as we meet monthly, our 60th book. So, I thought it might be of interest to list the 60 books we've read (of course it might not, in which case my apologies). Books are chosen in a slightly unusual way (for historical reasons) - we have a co-ordinator, and every few months they ask for ideas on our WhatsApp group. Anybody who wants to suggest something puts their idea(s) forward, they're commented on by the rest of the group (have already read etc) and then the co-ordinator pulls all those together and produces a suggested list for the next few months, which people can then suggest modifications to if needs be (but, given our co-ordinator's sensitivity, that rarely happens!). With very few exceptions, we are focused on fiction. Inevitably it leads to biases and holes, but I've found it has also led me to some interesting reading and leads to other books. The obvious holes to me, looking at the list, are the lack of South American writers, and the equal almost complete lack of Irish given our location (Maggie O'Farrell is Northern Irish, Laurence Sterne Anglo-Irish). We've had a rush of 18C/19C books this autumn as one hole we identified at our last meeting was here (only George Eliot amongst English language authors) Anyway, the list (in the order read) is below - any suggestions, comments etc obviously more than welcome! (asterisks mark 2nd books for that author).

Case Histories - Kate Atkinson
A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Streets of Darkness - AA Dhand
Silas Marner - George Eliot
Chocolate House Treason - David Fairer
The Man Who Wasn’t There - Pat Barker
The Beginning of Spring - Penelope Fitzgerald
Travels With My Aunt - Graham Greene
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler
Hamnet - Maggie O’Farrell
The Outrun - Amy Liptrot
A Month in the Country - JL Carr
Mr Loverman -Bernardine Evaristo
Stoner - John Williams
Ghost Stories - Edith Wharton
Man at the Helm - Nina Stibbe
The Motion of a Body through Space -Lionel Shriver
The Mermaid of Black Conch - Monique Roffe
The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver
Pere Goriot - Honore de Balzac
What’s Left of Me Is Yours - Stephanie Scott
A General Theory of Oblivion - Jose Eduardo Agualusa
The Overstory - Richard Powers
To Be Continued - James Robertson
Afterlives - Abdulrazak Gurnah
Thin Air - Michelle Pavey
Death of an Avid Reader - Frances Brody
Golden Hill - Francis Spufford
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula Le Guin
The Abbess of Crewe - Muriel Spark
The Leopard - Giovanni di Lampedusa
Measuring the World - Daniel Kehlmann
The Instant - Amy Liptrot *
Death and the Penguin - Andrei Kurkov
A Grain of Wheat - Ngugi wa Thiong’o
The Night Tiger - Yangtse Choo
Treacle Walker - Alan Garner
The Crowded Street - Winifred Holtby
The Garden Party & Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield
Potiki - Patricia Grace
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
Time Shelter - Georgi Gospodinov
The Romantic - William Boyd
Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver *
Less - Andrew Sean Greer
Lessons in Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus
Joy in the Morning - PG Wodehouse
A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail Lermontov
Daniel Deronda - George Eliot *
The Years - Annie Ernaux
The Virgin in the Garden - AS Byatt
Family Roundabout - Richmal Crompton
The Collini Case - Ferdinand von Schirach
A Heart So White - Javier Marias
The Blue Flower - Penelope Fitzgerald *
Oxygen - Andrew Miller
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
The Red Notebook - Antoine Laurain
Dr Wortle’s School - Anthony Trollope
No Name - Wilkie Collins

That’s an interesting book club list! Much different than the usual fare I see. I like it!

>50 Willoyd: I think I would like your book club, so much more international in scope than mine, which relies on local Maine libraries to be able to supply all needed copies. The first five books I suggested couldn't be filled in this way, and so I had to default to US authors. Since the group has been together for 16 years (I've only been with them two), that would be a lot of books to purchase, but still it's very limiting.

>50 Willoyd: that’s an amazing list for a book club.

>51 japaul22: >52 labfs39: >53 dchaikin:
I have to say that it's a group I really, really enjoy. A lovely bunch of people, with a huge range of backgrounds, including some very knowledgeable individuals (all of whom wear that knowledge very lightly!). We have some amazing discussions, and I learn tons. We meet in an 18th century library!

“We meet in an 18th century library” - wow. Everything about your group sounds special.

>55 dchaikin:
I should have explained from the start perhaps, I'm a member of The Leeds Library: inevitably often confused with the public library (of which I'm also a member), it's the oldest subscription library in the UK - founded in 1768. Actually I should have said 19thC, as it moved to the current building in 1808. I hesitated about the expense (cheaper than most gyms though etc), but joined on a try out about six years ago when I retired and was hooked. It has a very different profile of books to the public library (especially strong on non-fiction), so they complement each other well. Actually, it has proved quite cost effective, as my book buying and magazine subs have actually gone down by at least the price of membership. My only regret is that I didn't join sooner!

Here's a good list: early announcement of 2025 Japanese books coming out in translation!
Source: The translator Morgan Giles's Twitter.

Japanese Literature Titles releases in 2025
1. The Vanishing World - Sayaka Murata (Granta Books/ 24 April)
2. Sisters in Yellow - Mieko Kawakami (tr David Boyd, Picador)
3. Dreams of Love, Etc - Mieko Kawakami (expected 2026, Picador)
4. Recovery Hippo - Michiko Aoyama (Doubleday/14 August)
5. Wildcat Dome - Yuko Tsushima (tr Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, Farrar, Straus and Giroux/ 1.8 March)
6. Strange Pictures - Uketsu (tr Jim Rion, HarperVia/14 January.)
7. Hunchback - Saou Ichikawa (tr Polly Barton, Hogarth/18 March)
8. Murder in the House of Omari (tr Taku Ashibe, Pushkin Press/8 May)
9. Voices of the Fallen Heroes and other stories - Yukio Mishima (Penguin Classics/16 January)
10. May you have delicious meals - Junko 1/2 Takase (tr Morgan Giles, Hutchinson Heinemann/20 February)
11. No One Knows: Stories - Osamu Dazai (tr Ralph McCarthy, New Directions/4 February)

Lots of exciting titles. First of all, two books that won the Akutagawa Prize are on the list: Hunchback, and May you have delicious meals. That means I finally need to finish reading Hunchback in Japanese. Not having even finished the book I knew it had to get published in English. It's just publishing industry clickbait: Japanese, female author, prize winner, features disability, own voices as the author herself is disabled. Just a goldmine of checkmarks on the must publish list.

As for May you have delicious meals we will have to ignore the hideous cover. Also, Morgan Giles states herself that she had no say on the title so don't come after her.

Another exciting title because I JUST finished reading the book in Japanese (although I have yet to do a writeup about) is Vanishing World. This book was exciting and I knew it had to be translated. I'm super curious how the American audience will handle the ending.

Also, we're getting a new Yuko Tsushima, one of my favorites! She always gives an amazing portrayal of single mothers in Japan in all their reality and I'm curious to see this new book. So much to get excited about from this list!

>57 lilisin: that’s so interesting!

The Sunday Times have just publshed their 'Top 100 Bestsellers of the past 50 years' list (it was discussed briefly on Radio 4 this morning). This is based on the number of weeks a book appeared in their Top Tens list during that period. As it was listed in reverse order, that's the way I've listed them below! It was compiled by Nielsen Bookscan, who run the Sunday Times bestsellers list, and is obviously very UK-centric. It does NOT distinguish between fiction and non-fiction, which leads to some interesting combinations/conclusions. There is much one can discuss on this list (most of which I'll save till later if anybody else is shows interest), but what I think is perhaps most interesting is its reflection, of book buying and, perhaps, reading in Britain over the last quarter century of the last century, and the first of this. Some books are very much of their time! Also, there is very little fiction (, even JK Rowling only featuring once), especially for adults. I'd also be interested in how many people actually finished the #1 book - I certainly didn't as I realised I understood each individual word, but couldn't understand the meaning!

100. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
99. The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman
98. The Book You Wish Your Parents Had by Philippa Perry
97. And Away by Bob Mortimer
96. The Power of Geography by Tim Marshall
95. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
94. Rosemary Conley's Inch Loss Plan by Rosemary Conley
93. Schott's Original Miscellany by Ben Schott
92. The Secret Barrister by The Secret Barrister
91. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
90. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
89. Chronicles of the 20th Century edited by Derrick Mercer
88. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
87. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
86. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
85. First Man In by Ant Middleton
84. Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
82= McCarthy's Bar by Pete McCarthy
82= High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
81. Down Under by Bill Bryson
80. The Dukan Diet by Pierre Dukan
79. A Man Named Dave by Dave Pelzer
77= Bridget Jones, the Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding
77= Life on Earth by David Attenborough
76. 12 Rules of Life by Jordan B Peterson
75. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
74. Pinch of Nom: Everyday Light by Kate Allinson & Kay Featherstone
73. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
72. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
71. The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans
70. The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson
69. Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
68. Writing Home by Alan Bennett
67. The Complete Yes Minister by Jonathan Lynn & Antony Jay
66. Rosemary Conley's Hip and Thigh Diet by Rosemary Conley
65. The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend
64. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
63. Some Other Rainbows by John McCarthy & Jill Morrell
62. The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson
61. Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton
60. Captain Corelli's Mandarin by Louis de Bernieres
59. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
58. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
57. Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson
56. Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
55. An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan
54. Watership Down by Richard Adams
53. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
52. The Lost Boy by Dave Pelzer
51. Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson
50. Let Sleeping Vets Lie by James Herriot
49. Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? by Julie Smith
48. Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby
47. James Herriot's Yorkshire by James Herriot & Derry Brabbs
46. Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding
44= Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith
44= Homo Deus by Yurval Noah Harari
43. The Driving Manual
42. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
41. Food Combining for Health by Doris Grant
40. The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
39. Stupid White Men by Michael Moore
38. Toujours Provence by Peter Mayle
37. The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
36. Alistair Cooke's America by Alistaire Cooke
35. A Street Cat Named Bob by James Bowen
34. It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover
33. Seasons of My Life by Hannah Hauxwell
32. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
31. Around the World in 80 Days by Michael Palin
30. RHS Gardeners' Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers by Christopher Brickell
29. Complete Theory Test for Cars and Motorcycles
28. The Little Book of Calm by Paul Wilson
27. Longitude by Dava Sobel
26. The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski
25. Brave Two Zero by Andy McNab
24. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
23. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by JK Rowling
22. Pinch of Nom by Kate Allinson & Kay Featherstone
21. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
20. A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer
19. The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
18. Good Vibes, Good Life by Vex King
17. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend
16. Atomic Habits by James Clear
15. Delia Smith's Complete Illustrated Cookery Course by Delia Smith
14. This Is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay
13. A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
12. The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden
11. Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
10. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
09. Rosemary Conley's Complete Hip and Thigh Diet by Rosemary Conley
08. Wild Swans by Jung Chang
07. Delia Smith's Summer Collection by Delia Smith
06. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
05. Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
04. Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
03. Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course by Delia Smith
02. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray
01. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

That is an interesting snapshot of UK reading (or at least buying). I'm actually very surprised by it - shocked there isn't more Harry Potter! And who is this Rosemary Conley?? Never heard of her.

I'd be interested to see a parallel list from the New York Times of the same time period.

>60 japaul22:
On the Harry Potter front, I was surprised too, but the introductory article suggests that "the sequels all sold enormously, but generally in concentrated bursts". I remember queuing outside the local bookshop with my growing son at midnight on several publication days!

Rosemary Conley was a diet/health guru of the 1980s, and sold in bucketloads. Her whole approach looks horribly dated now. The precursor of the modern day 'influencer'. Very female orientated, so no impact on me (not that diet gurus have ever done much for me!), unlike Delia Smith, who remains one of my favourite cooks, and whose Cookery Course I continue to use regularly, over 40 years after its initial publication (and my buying it!).

>59 Willoyd: Delighted to see Wild Swans so high up on the list.

>59 Willoyd: I will own up to reading 4 of those

>59 Willoyd: >63 baswood: 6 for me, plus a few I didn’t finish.

>63 baswood: now, it depends which four (i’ve read six. I didn’t mind them)

>64 FlorenceArt: i think i also jettisoned one or two. Sapiens…

>65 dchaikin: There are three that I really loved, The God of Small Things, Watership Down (but that was a long time ago) and Angela’s Ashes. I was lucky to read enough about Harari that I didn’t get to waste time on Sapiens. Thinking, Fast and Slow didn’t wholly convince me, it’s one of those that I DNF.

I own up to reading two, and there’s another one there that I recognize and either read or attempted.

>63 baswood: >64 FlorenceArt: >65 dchaikin:
I've read, or attempted to read, 18 of these, and we've bought another 5 as reference. Didn't finish Brief History - just reached a point where I didn't understand it. Don't think I was alone! IMO there's a lot of dross in there, but some good 'uns too. Complete Yes Minister was excellent, although TV was better! Enjoyed both the Attenborough and Bronowski as follow-ups to other outstanding TV series as well. Disliked intensely Girl on a Train (unfinished), Da Vinci Code, Secret Diary of Adrian Mole and 'Where the Crawdad Sings.

A few people have been talking about top-10s on labfs39's thread, and ever one for a list, I decided to compile some of my own. It was suggested I should put them up here, so here goes! It's an interesting exercise, and one I've found horribly difficult in some ways (almost easier choosing a single favourite, or even fewer!).

Starting off with some fiction, then moving on to non-fiction.

Top-10 novels.....
A Month in the Country by JL Carr - my #1
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (could equally have been Emma!)
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Sea Road by Margaret Elphinstone
A Very Long Engagement by Sebastian Japrisot
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

(Noticeable that only two are from living authors: Elphinstone and Seth).

.....and 3 series
None of these includes an individual book that achieves my top 10, but as series they're up there.
The Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian
The Maigret novels by Georges Simenon
The Rougons-Macquart sequence by Emile Zola

Top-10 living fiction authors
Quite a difficult list this - as the list above shows, much of my reading seems to be around deceased authors. Although I do read a fair amount of those living too, there are very few of whom I've read more than one, maybe two, books. This is particularly so since I started my World and American projects, although these have introduced me to a whole load of new writers, who I've started to explore. So, a list that may well change (a lot!).

Tracy Chevalier
Sarah Dunant
Margaret Elphinstone
Bernardine Evaristo
Melissa Harrison*
Donna Leon (go-to comfort reading!)
Andrew Miller
Monique Roffey
Francis Spufford*
Stella Tillyard*

*non-fiction writers too

The above lists are very Anglo-centric, mainly because that's how my reading was largely for many years, and it takes time for a book to become an all-time favourite, so for balance a list with a different slant.

Top-10 non-British novels in translation
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (Italian)
Standing Heavy by GauZ (French, Cote d'Ivoire)
A Very Long Engagement by Sebastian Japrisot (French)
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (Arabic, Sudan)
Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (French)
Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann (German)
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Spanish, Colombia)
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Polish)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Spanish)

- a special mention to Michel the Giant by Tete-Michel Kpomassie - not a novel, but brilliant
- note the Zola and Simenon series of books listed above; again, no one novel gets in the top 10 here, but each as a series is up there.
Later edit: I had to exclude one book as it was actually originally written in English, so have had to replace it - with Umberto Eco (which should have been there originally anyway!).

Now for non-fiction:

Top-10 non-fiction
The History of the Countryside by Oliver Rackham - my #1
Crow Country by Mark Cocker - birds
Thunderclap by Laura Cumming - art / memoir
Chasing the Monsoon by Alexander Frater travel
The House by the Lake by Thomas Harding micro-history
Germany, Memories of a Nation by Neil MacGregor history
The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker psychology / science
Small Is Beautiful by EF Schumacher economics
Wilding by Isabella Tree conservation
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf biography

A list that reflects some of my biggest interests - birds, natural history, geography, Germany and history. Oddly, nothing on books/reading, although a couple came close (not least Ann Fadiman's Ex Libris). I could easily have expanded some of these genres out, but, following labsf39's example, will stick with the history one for the moment.

Top-10 history books
Biographies excluded!

The Pursuit of Glory by Tim Blanning. European history from the end of the Thirty Years' War to Waterloo.
Waterloo by Tim Clayton. Three battles in 4 days
Letter from America 1946-2004 by Alistair Cooke. A selection of Cooke's long running weekly radio essays explaining the USA to the British
The House by the Lake by Thomas Harding. Microhistory: 20thC Berlin told through the story of one house.
All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings. One volume history of WW2.
Germany, Memories of a Nation by Neil MacGregor. History of a long-fragmentary nation told through examination of shared memories.
The History of the Countryside by Oliver Rackham. The evolution of the British (man-made) landscape.
The Five by Hallie Rubenhold. The very different lives of the 5 Ripper victims, and what they tell us about Victorian London social history (nothing about the murders or the Ripper himself).
East-West Street by Philippe Sands. Investigation into author's family history and its involvement in the recognition of genocide and crimes against humanity as legal concepts
Storm and Conquest by Stephen Taylor History of the 1809 naval campaign in the Indian Ocean

Top-10 non-fiction authors
Most of the non-fiction writers above, I've read just the one book. However, the following are my top-10 authors, i.e. I've read at least 3 of their books. My favourite of their books is listed.

Paula Byrne - The Real Jane Austen
Richard Mabey - Gilbert White
Lisa Jardine - Going Dutch
John Lewis-Stempel - The Running Hare
Jan Morris - Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere
Adam Nicolson - The Seabird's Cry
Simon Schama - Rough Crossings
Claire Tomalin - Samuel Pepys, The Unequalled Self
Jenny Uglow - The Pinecone
Gavin Young - Slow Boats to China

>69 Willoyd: beautiful. I especially like your novels list. Three titles I’m unfamiliar with - The Sea Road, The Very Long Engagement, and This Thing of Darkness

I played with my own lists earlier this year

Top ten 21st-century books

1. Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante (2014) - novel
2. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009) - novel
3. Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (2019) - novel
4. When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant (2000) - novel
5. Just Kids by Patti Smith (2010) - memoir
6. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (2010) - nonfiction
7. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2003) - graphic memoir
8. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004) - novel
9. White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000) - novel
10. Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (2014) - science

Top ten in translation - Classics

1. Divine Comedy by Dante
2. Swann’s Way by Proust
3. Metamorphosis by Ovid
4. Anything by Sophocles – Oedipus Rex? Antigone? Elektra?
5. Gilgamesh
6. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgahkov
7. 100 years if Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (although I prefer his novellas)
8. Stories by Checkhov
9. Lysistrata by Aristophanes
10. Bacchae - Euripides
11. The Homeric Hymns
12. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
13. The Lais of Marie de France

Top ten in translation - somewhat more recent stuff

1. If this is a Man by Primo Levi/ Fatelessness by Imre Kertéz/Night by Eli Wiesel
2. A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz
3. Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante
4. Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Prospector by J.M.G Le Clezio
6. The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric
7. Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
8. Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa (graphic)
9. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

>71 dchaikin:
I completely forgot about ancient classics! Have slightly rejigged my own books in translation list, as one book (from Africa) which I though was originally written in Kikuyu, was actually in English from the start. Which means we now share two books - Eco and Marquez. Andric and Alexievich on my global tour list to be read.

And here are my contributions (cross-posted from my thread):

Favorite books

Bloodlands : Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (because it changed so much of what I thought I knew about Eastern Europe)
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes (because it is so intricately constructed, intelligent, and well-written)
Too loud a solitude by Bohumil Hrabal (because I fell in love with it the first time I read it and it remains such a strong pleasant memory)
Tisha: The Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaska Wilderness by Anne Purdy as told to Robert Specht (because I found it so inspiring as a youngster)
Maus II : a survivor's tale : and here my troubles began by Art Spiegelman (because it was my first graphic novel and I was mesmerized)
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (because despite its flaws, for me it is the epitome of the heroic quest)
The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz (because it is one of the most lyrical books I've ever read)
Translation is a Love Affair by Jacques Poulin (because it is perfection in a tiny package)
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (because it is spellbinding historical fiction)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (because it is a perfect novel)

Favorite living authors (in alpha order)

Fredrik Backman
Philippe Claudel
Diana Gabaldon
Eowyn Ivey
Ben Macintyre
Jacques Poulin
Mary Doria Russell
Kim Thúy
Andy Weir
Jacqueline Winspear

Favorite history books

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder
Gulag: A History by Anne Appelbaum
Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War by Ben Macintyre
A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France by Caroline Moorehead
The whisperers : private life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes
Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus by Samuel Eliot Morison
Mao's great famine : the history of China's most devastating catastrophe, 1958-1962 by Frank Dikötter
Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt by David McCullough
Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler by Lynne Olson
Fallout : the Hiroshima cover-up and the reporter who revealed it to the world by Lesley M.M. Blume

>56 Willoyd: This really sounds like a dream: I'm so envious of your membership in the Leeds Library. We have nothing equivalent here.

>57 lilisin: Great list, thanks for sharing! A new Mishima translation, that's surprising.

>73 labfs39: i love your reasonings. The Issa Valley - hmm. Noting

The Goethe Institut has published the 2024 shortlist for the Wolff Prize, which is awarded to the best German to English translation of fiction and nonfiction annually.

https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/kul/bks/hkw/24s.html

- Jon Cho-Polizzi for his translation of Max Czollek's Desintegriert euch! De-Integrate: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century
(Restless Books, 2023)

Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson for their translation of Thomas Brussig's Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee / The Short End of the Sonnenallee (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)

Tess Lewis for her translation of Ernst Jünger's Auf den Marmorklippen / On the Marble Cliffs (New York Review Books, 2023)

Greg Nissan for their translation of Yevgenia Belorusets' Anfang des Krieges. Tagebücher aus Kyjiw / War Diary
(New Directions, 2023)

Simon Pare for his translation of Florian Illies' Liebe in Zeiten des Hasses / Love in a Time of Hate (Riverhead Books, 2023)

Peter Wortsman for his translation of E.T.A. Hoffmann's Der goldne Topf / The Golden Pot and Other Tales of the Uncanny
(Archipelago Books, 2023)

https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/kul/bks/hkw/24s.html

I only have the Brussig book on my radar so far.

Greatest books, per algorithm

https://thegreatestbooks.org/the-greatest/fiction/books/page/7

>77 dchaikin: 2 and 3 are in my personal favorites list too!

>77 dchaikin: that's a fun list. I've read a lot of them and agree that they are what I think of as "greatest books".

>78 FlorenceArt: >79 japaul22: very in-tune with conventional wisdom. Which makes it really informative

>77 dchaikin:

Lists are there to be disagreed with so....!

Catcher in the Rye at no. 5?! What was that algorithm again? That is simply bonkers.

Gone With the Wind that high? Above As I Lay Dying?

It's certainly very US-Europe orientated.

Plays aren't books (and if they were, Hamlet only at 63?). So Margaret Mitchell also greater than Sophocles too?

And, as an aside, must admit, I've never heard of #43 - not often that happens on a list of greatest books. Must investigate!

>77 dchaikin: I was interested in what criteria were used for this list but didn’t trust the link to the list.

I googled
“The Greatest Books.org uses an algorithm to create a master list of books based on how often a book appears on other lists. The algorithm also takes into account other features to create a more equitable and historically balanced ranking”

So it’s a really useless list.

We don’t have lists of famous paintings without tight criteria. I’m sticking to a few lists whose sources I trust.

>81 Willoyd: "Plays aren't books"

Oh, I disagree. Certainly if you can see a production of a play, that's the best way to experience it. But when that's not possible -- which might be "almost always," depending on where you live -- reading a play can be a delightful experience.

>81 Willoyd: >83 kjuliff: Surely we can expect a program to not have several oddities...even as we expect our human reviewers to pick perfectly....

>85 dchaikin: Dan, the computer programs *are* using human choices, they are just putting them altogether, jumbling them up and putting them in a different sequence.

>84 KeithChaffee:
I totally agree about the experience, and have several on my shelves, but they've not been written to be one, and would never include them if listing favourite books. That may explain why they feature so lowly here: a lot of lists won't include them as they're not regarded as books. Taking that a stage further too: why is poetry traditionally not included (often not being regarded as fiction even), and not included here, but plays written as poetry (eg Hamlet) are?

>85 dchaikin: Too true! But still bonkers - seems to me a problem with the algorithm Old phrase: GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). Not garbage by any means, but something definitely wobbly!

>77 dchaikin: I enjoyed perusing the list, and even more the algorithm (which was made open source). With any meta list of reviews or review aggregator (think Rotten Tomatoes for movies), you get weird anomalies, but they do provide a high level overview. Because by the nature of the beast, I had read or was at least familiar with the majority of these, which made me very curious about the ones I did not know.

>77 dchaikin: oh goodness, it doesn't have an end! It just keeps loading more and more books.....

ETA: the link goes to page 7, so the last page is apparently page 316, for a grand total of 7882 books included.

The algorithm also needs a little tweaking regarding listing works twice -- A Good Man is Hard to Find is two spots lower than The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor (which contains the former). And of course the First Folio with 36 Shakespeare plays was including as well as several individual plays.

>87 Willoyd: the poetry exceptions being old epic poetry of course -- The Iliad, The Odessey, The Aeniad, even Paradise Lost were included as were others, I'm sure.

>89 ELiz_M: i never did find an end. I enjoyed the date filters

>88 labfs39: it’s really nice how open and transparent it is. I aslo scanned through for new titles…but then had a lot do guilt for all the unread familiar titles. 🙂

>88 labfs39: where can I find the algorithm?

>92 kjuliff: https://github.com/ssherman/weighted_list_rank

I've recently started hanging out some at BlueSky, one of the several would-be Twitter replacements that have sprung up in the wake of Elon and the enshittification of X. One of the common ways that newbies introduce themselves in "BookSky" -- the BlueSky community of readers -- is with this challenge:

The challenge is to choose 20 books that greatly influenced you. One book per day, for 20 days. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

I just finished my own set of 20, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well they draw a picture of my reading life. Some of them I've talked about here at LT, some I haven't:

>94 KeithChaffee: They look together. Sounds fun

>93 dianeham: I’m a little suspicious of “the Exponential strategy for ranking” apparently used here. The method is an attempt to solve an NP-complete problem evaluation of the comparative worth of number of books. But if have to talk to other more current computer scientists in order to refresh my mind on this methodology.

It seems an archaic approach from why I can understand of the pseudocode given, and in any case this is not the appropriate audience.

All I will say is that I’m giving this greatestBooks.org a big miss.

The wonderful magazine, World Literature Today, has their Sept/Oct issue out, and it is dedicated to women writers from Japan. In it they have a list of top current women writers, writing in Japanese. I'm posting a link to the list below, along with a link to the issue, for anyone who might be interested.

Some of us read Butter by Asako Yuzuki which is on the list (a bit unfortunate to see her name misspelled though). I don't have many of the other authors or books on my radar, except The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani which I was hoping to read.
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2024/september/further-reading-japanese-wom...

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2024/september

>97 rv1988: An interesting list, but I'm surprised the compiler left off Hiromi Kawakami. Maybe instead of four books by Mieko Kawakami, they could have make some room for Hiromi. I loved Nakano Thrift Shop.

Although some have called Easy Life in Kamusari young adult because the protagonist is a late teen, I enjoyed reading about forestry and Shinto practices in Japan. I have been meaning to read the sequel which sits on my e-reader.

>98 labfs39: I have noticed this trend of lists including several books by one author rather than a spread of authors. I think it's algorithm driven, rather than based on any actual selection. Of course, I have no way of backing up that claim!

>99 rv1988: I think this is especially important for lists trying to promote potentially new authors, such as this case where the author is trying to promote Japanese authors who are women. It seems like including a variety of authors would suit the purpose of the list. If it were a list of "greatest" authors or some such, then multiple works by a single author is more understandable.

Of course, as someone mentioned above, mostly these lists are to generate discussion or spinoffs. I also read somewhere that lists are often weird numbers, like this one is 34, because our brains are attracted to the novelty and we are more likely to click on it.

Verso Books have a list of 10 Books Every Student Should Read. I haven't been a student for a very long time, but I'm always happy to learn, so I had a look at the list. Of course those are all books published by them, so it's a tad biased, but aren't all lists?

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism *
by Benedict Anderson

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life **
by Theodor Adorno
Translated by Edmund F.N. Jephcott

The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View **
by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Aesthetics and Politics
by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa **
by Walter Rodney

Critique of Everyday Life **
by Henri Lefebvre

If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance
by Angela Davis

Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis
by Nancy Fraser

A Companion To Marx's Capital
by David Harvey

* I have that one, it was a free ebook of the month some time ago at Chicago university press. Not particularly planning to read it but who knows.
* * Those sound particularly interesting to me

Shortlists for one of my favourite prizes, the Wainwrights, announced in the past days:

Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing
Uprooting by Marchelle Farrell
Bothy by Kat Hill
Local by Alastair Humphreys
Dispersals by Jessica Lee
The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing
Late Light by Michael Malay
Rural by Rebecca Smith

Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation
Blue Machine by Helen Czerski
Wasteland by Olivia Franklin-Wallis
Groundbreakers by Chantal Lyons
It's Not Just You by Tori Tsui
Fire Weather by John Vaillant
Nature's Ghosts by Sophie Yeo

Not read any of these yet myself, but do have the Laing and Czerski on my TBR shelves, and the Lyons and Yeo on my shortlist. Not sure in some cases how they distinguish between Nature Writing and Writing on Conservation (and, in some cases, especially on the Longlist, what constitutes Nature or Conservation), but the lists are always interesting.

>102 Willoyd: Several books on this list sound interesting, thanks for sharing. The Laing book has been mentioned in several CR threads already.

The UK's Baillie Gifford Prize is awarded annually for nonfiction writing. This is the 2024 longlist.

Gary J. Bass (American) Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
Jonathan Blitzer (American) Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
Rachel Clarke (British) The Story of a Heart (Abacus, Little, Brown, Hachette UK)
Rachel Cockerell (British) Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land (Wildfire, Headline, Hachette UK)
Richard Flanagan (Australian) Question 7 (Chatto & Windus, Vintage, Penguin Random House)
Annie Jacobsen (American) Nuclear War: A Scenario (Torva, Transworld, Penguin Random House)
Việt Thanh Nguyen (Vietnamese-American) A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial (Corsair, Little, Brown, Hachette UK)
Sue Prideaux (British) Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (Faber & Faber)
David Van Reybrouck (Belgian) Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World (The Bodley Head, Vintage, Penguin Random House)
Translated by David Colmer and David McKay
Salman Rushdie (Indian-British-American) Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Jonathan Cape, Vintage, Penguin Random House)
Helen Scales (British) What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean (Grove Press UK, Grove Atlantic, Atlantic Books)
Adam Shatz (American) The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (Apollo, Head of Zeus, Bloomsbury)

__

Reybrouck on Indonesia and Shatz on Fanon were already on my reading list, but seeing this, I'm also interested in the Nguyen book.


(edited to fix the touchstone for one book)

>104 rv1988: I'm drooling, a little. I've read Knife. I wonder what's available on audio. Question 7, likely.

>105 dchaikin: Question 7 is on audio. I think the touchstone was wonky.

>105 dchaikin: >106 kjuliff: I hadn't noticed! The touchstone has been corrected.

>104 rv1988: Judgement at Tokyo, Revolusi, and Man of two faces all look intriguing to me.

https://www.nationalbook.org/2024-national-book-awards-longlist-for-translated-l...

2024 Longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature:

Nasser Abu Srour, The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom
Translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren
Other Press

Bothayna Al-Essa, The Book Censor’s Library
Translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain
Restless Books

Linnea Axelsson, Ædnan
Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)
Translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland
New Directions Publishing (to be released 19-Nov-2024)

Layla Martínez, Woodworm
Translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott
Two Lines Press

Fiston Mwanza Mujila, The Villain’s Dance
Translated from the French by Roland Glasser
Deep Vellum / Deep Vellum Publishing

Fernanda Trías, Pink Slime
Translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary
Scribner / Simon & Schuster

Fernando Vallejo, The Abyss
Translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert
New Directions Publishing

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue
Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
Graywolf Press (to be released 12-Nov-2024)

Samar Yazbek, Where the Wind Calls Home
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
World Editions

>109 ELiz_M: The only one I've read is The Book Censor's Library, but I loved it. I'm so glad to see it getting some visibility.

>109 ELiz_M: Interesting! I had the Trías and Axelsson books on my radar already, but not the others.

The Booker Shortlist

Held
Creation Lake
Orbital
James
The Safekeep
Stone Yard Devotional

>112 dchaikin: I'm just getting started with Held (and enjoying everyone's comments on the Booker list as they read).

The British Academy has an award for nonfiction writing every year. Here's this year's list:

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future by Ed Conway (WH Allen / Ebury Publishing / Penguin Random House)

Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh (John Murray / HarperCollins India)

The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Global History of Mathematics & Its Unsung Trailblazers by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell (Viking / Penguin Random House)

The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 by Marcy Norton (Harvard University Press)

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues by Ross Perlin (Grove Press UK)

Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare by Annabel Sowemimo (Profile Books / Wellcome Collection)

Edit: link to source: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/british-academy-book-prize-2024-shortli...

The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories, published in 2000 contains 78 short stories, each by a different author. It was a delight to pick it up a decade after purchase and realize how mny more authors I had read and how many more I recognized.

However I still have not read another book by the following authors:
Toni Cade Bambara
Richard Bausch
Ann Beattie
Raymond Carver
Patrick Chamoiseau
Vikram Chandra
Daniele del Giudice
Deborah Eisenberg
Victor Erofeyev
Nuruddin Farah
Herve Guibert
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Barry Hannah
Pawel Huelle
Roy Jacobsen
Torgny Lindgren
Bobbie Ann Mason
Colum McCann
Mary Morris
Mohammed Mrabet
Murathan Mungan
Ben Okri
Francine Prose
Ken Saro-Wiwa
Ingo Schulze
Rose Tremain
Luisa Valenzuela
Zoe Wicomb
John Edgar Wideman
Joy Williams
Jeanne Wilmot
Can Xue

>114 rv1988: Interesting list. I own novels by several of these authors, but have only read Paradise by Gurnah.

Terrific list. I’ve read some books by some, generally good. Gurnah is magnificent. Bausch wrote a wonderful short novel on his WWII experiences - Peace.

>115 ELiz_M: Rose Tremain (whom I haven't read) seems an odd person to fit in with what I know of some of the other authors. Does she actually fit in to the mix?

>117 dchaikin: Good to know! That is an author I haven't heard of before.

>118 SassyLassy: I can't answer that right now. Let me know what authors Rose T fits in with and I'll let you know if they are included in this collection. ;)

It gets increasingly difficult to keep track of all the many book prizes, but I try and keep an eye on the translation awards in particular. Here are the finalists for the Cercador Prize 2024, which is awarded to literature in translation by "a committee of independent booksellers based across the United States."

- Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's The Silence of the Choir, translated from the French by Alison Anderson | Europa Editions
- Alki Zei's The Wildcat Behind Glass, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich | Yonder
- Munir Hachemi's Living Things, translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches | Coach House Books
- Jean-Baptiste Del Amo's The Son of Man, translated from the French by Frank Wynne | Grove Press
- Adèle Rosenfeld's Jellyfish Have No Ears, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman | Graywolf Press
- Eva Baltasar's Mammoth, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches | And Other Stories
- Agustín Fernández Mallo's The Book of All Loves, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead | Fitzcarraldo Editions
- László Krasznahorkai's Herscht 07769, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet | New Directions
- Yuri Herrera's Season of the Swamp, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman | Graywolf Press
- Scholastique Mukasonga's Sister Deborah, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti | Archipelago Books

Of these, the Sarr and Herrera books were already on my radar, and I just read a review of Sister Deborah earlier today. I'm looking forward to checking out the rest.

>22 Willoyd: mentioned the Wolfson History Prize. They just announced their shortlist too.

https://www.wolfsonhistoryprize.org.uk/2024-wolfson-history-prize-shortlist-anno...

- Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century by Joya Chatterji
(The Bodley Head)

Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire by Nandini Das
(Bloomsbury Publishing)

Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Nicholas Radburn
(Yale University Press)

Our NHS: A History of Britain’s Best-Loved Institution by Andrew Seaton
(Yale University Press)

Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage by Jonny Steinberg
(William Collins)

Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 by Frank Trentmann
(Allen Lane)

>121 rv1988: Courting India sounds interesting. Well, I’m sure they all are, but this title caught my eye.

The Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize

Fiction Longlist
Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad (Vintage)
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Knopf)***
Mister, Mister by Guy Gunaratne (Pantheon)
The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach Dean (One World)
Witness: Stories by Jamel Brinkley (FSG)
And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott (Dutton)
Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem (Ecco)
Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck (Marysue Rucci Books)
James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
Bellies by Nicola Dinan (Hanover Square Press)

Nonfiction Longlist
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer (Penguin Press)
What We Remember Will Be Saved: A Story of Refugees and the Things They Carry by Stephanie Saldaña (Broadleaf Books)
How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair (37 Ink)
Postcards from the Underworld: Poems by Sinan Antoon (The University of Chicago Press)
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraquib (Random House)
Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class by Blair L.M. Kelley (Liveright)***
Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against "The Apocalypse" by Emily Raboteau (Henry Holt & Company)
The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture by Courtney Thorsson (Columbia University Press)
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal by Bettina L. Love (St. Martin's Press)

***winners

Han Kang wins Nobel Prize

Han Kang’s work from Wikipedia. Some have two English titles

1995 여수의 사랑 Love in Yeosu novellas Moonji
1998 검은 사슴 Black Deer novel Munhakdongne
2000 내 여자의 열매 My Woman's Fruits novellas Changbi
2002 그대의 차가운 손 Your Cold Hands novel Moonji
내 이름은 태양꽃 My Name is Sun Flower novella Munhakdongne
2003 붉은 꽃 이야기 The Red Flower Story novella Yolimwon
사랑과, 사랑을 둘러싼 것들 Love and Things Surrounding Love essays Yolimwon
2007 가만가만 부르는 노래 A Song to Sing Calmly essays Bichae
천둥 꼬마 선녀 번개 꼬마 선녀 Thunder Little Fairy, Lightning Little Fairy short story Munhakdongne
채식주의자 The Vegetarian novel Changbi
2008 눈물상자 Tear Box short story Munhakdongne
2010 바람이 분다, 가라 The Wind Blows, Go novel Moonji
2011 희랍어 시간 Greek Time novel Munhakdongne Greek Lessons
2012 노랑무늬영원 Yellow Pattern Eternity novellas Moonji
2013 서랍에 저녁을 넣어 두었다 I Put Dinner in the Drawer poetry collection
2014 소년이 온다 A Boy Is Coming novel Changbi Human Acts
2016 흰 White novel Nanda The White Book
2021 작별하지 않는다 Don't Say Goodbye novel Munhakdongne We Do Not Part

I've requested We Do Not Part from the library: it appealed more than The Vegetarian :-) They only carry those two books - no doubt they'll have more in six months' time! This will be my first Han Kang. Does anyone here know her work?

>126 Dilara86:

Personally I quite hated The Vegetarian; thought it was a mess of a book. It's actually quite the divisive book. I decided not to read The White Book due to the feeling it gave me that was similar to the former. However, her historical fiction Human Acts was fantastic and intrigued me more as it echos the events of Tiannemen Square and other student revolts around the world. I think which work works for you will depend on your general preferences for reading.

>127 lilisin: It's interesting - I haven't read of Han Kang's works myself, but you are the third person I've seen who says The Vegetarian, her best known work, is not actually her best work. I will try Human Acts!

>126 Dilara86: I requested the four books my library has. Do Not Part wasn’t an option.

>127 lilisin: I’m interested in Human Acts now. That’s one i was able to request.

>129 dchaikin: I requested the four books my library has. Do Not Part wasn’t an option.
That'll be because it - the English translation - isn't out yet: you'll have to wait until February :-) Strictly speaking, I requested Impossibles adieux, which is the French translation published in 2023.

>104 rv1988: The Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction shortlist

Rachel Clarke (British) - The Story of a Heart (Abacus, Little, Brown, Hachette UK)
Richard Flanagan (Australian) - Question 7 (Chatto & Windus, Vintage, Penguin Random House)
Annie Jacobsen - (American) Nuclear War: A Scenario (Torva, Transworld, Penguin Random House)
Việt Thanh Nguyen (Vietnamese-American) - A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial (Corsair, Little, Brown, Hachette UK)
Sue Prideaux (British) - Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (Faber & Faber)
David Van Reybrouck (Belgian) - Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World (The Bodley Head, Vintage, Penguin Random House), translated by David Colmer and David McKay

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/inside-the-covers/news/the-prize-announ...

>130 Dilara86: ah. I hadn’t considered that. ☺️

>131 rv1988: ooh! Those all look incredible.

>133 dchaikin: I'm reading Revolusi now, it's fascinating. The writing is a bit clunky, but I assume that is because of the translation from - I think - Dutch? The Gauguin memoir -edit - oops, biography - also looks interesting. Who has enough time!

>134 rv1988: Who has enough time!
Not me! But I'm going to take a peek at Revolusi. I also just obtained another historical volume, James Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia: a founder's journey from slave trader to abolitionist by Michael Thurman (currently the CEO of the county I live in.) I heard him speak at the Decatur Book Festival last weekend.

>127 lilisin: >128 rv1988:
The only difference between us, is that I would remove the word 'quite'. No quite about it - I just hated it. I can't say I wasremotely inclined to try any more, but your comments about Human Acts suggests that one should never say never!

>133 dchaikin:
Interesting - inspires completely the opposite reaction in me.Think that's the nature of non-fiction even more than fiction, perhaps because the content is so central to reading? It:seems a very emotionally orientated list that leaves me completely cold. Some BG lists have looked fascinating, but not this one.

Orbital wins the Booker Award

The longlist for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/womenintranslation/longlist2024/

I know that Han Kang's Greek Lessons and Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos are probably already on people's radars, as well as Clarice Lispector. A lot of the other names were new to me. I've only read one on this list - Death of the Red Rider by Yulia Yakovleva (translated from Russian by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp), which is a well-written historical crime novel, set during the Russian Revolution. Linnea Axelsson, Ædnan: An Epic, translated from Swedish (Sweden) by Saskia Vogel, is on my list too.

>138 rv1988: wow. Cool!

>138 rv1988: - why not. Here’s the full list

- Linnea Axelsson, Ædnan: An Epic, translated from Swedish (Sweden) by Saskia Vogel, published by Pushkin Press.
- Yulia Yakovleva, Death of the Red Rider: A Leningrad Confidential, translated from Russian (Norway/Russia) by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, published by Pushkin Press.
- Stella Gaitano, Edo’s Souls, translated from Arabic (South Sudan) by Sawad Hussain, published by Dedalus Limited.
- Hiroko Oyamada, The Factory, translated from Japanese (Japan) by David Boyd, published by Granta.
- Han Kang, Greek Lessons, translated from Korean (South Korea) by Deborah Smith and e. yaewon, published by Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House UK.
- Maria Stepanova, Holy Winter 20/21, translated from Russian (Russia) by Sasha Dugdale, published by Bloodaxe Books
- Marosia Castaldi, The Hunger of Women, translated from Italian (Italy) by Jamie Richards, published by And Other Stories
- Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos, translated from German (Germany) by Michael Hofmann, published by Granta
- Grazia Deledda, Marianna Sirca, translated from Italian (Italy) by Graham Anderson, published by Dedalus limited.
- Mieko Kanai, Mild Vertigo, translated from Japanese (Japan) by Polly Barton, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
- Nelly Sachs, Revelation Freshly Erupting, translated from German (Germany) by Andrew Shanks, published by Carcanet Press.
- Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless, translated from French (France) by Penny Hueston, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
- Clarice Lispector, Too Much of Life: The Complete Chronicles, translated from Portuguese (Brazil) by Robin Patterson and Margaret Jull Costa, published by Penguin Press.
- Urszula Honek, White Nights, translated from Polish (Poland) by Kate Webster, published by MTO Press.
- Lena Merhej,Yoghurt and Jam (or How My Mother Became Lebanese), translated from Arabic (Lebanon) by Nadiyah Abdullatif and Anam Zafar, published by Balestier Press.

>138 rv1988: Thanks, Rasdhar! As you pointed out I do have Greek Lessons and Kairos on my Kindle, so I'll start with them and look more closely at the other finalists.

>140 dchaikin: Thanks for posting the whole list!

>10 rv1988: I posted the longlist for the Cundill Prize for History here; the winner has just been announced.

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal (Penguin Random House). From the award page:

The culmination of a 25-year project, DuVal shows how long before colonization, Indigenous peoples adapted to climate change and instability with innovation, forming smaller communities and egalitarian government structures with complex economies which spread across North America. Challenging dominant narratives, DuVal refutes that the arrival of Europeans led to the end of Indigenous civilizations in North America, instead she vividly reveals the interactions and complex relationships that developed between nations.

https://www.cundillprize.com/news/2024winner

While I don't think I'll get around to the winner any time soon, I'm currently reading one book from this list (Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by David Van Reybrouck) and have two more on my upcoming reads: Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J. Bass (Picador, Pan Macmillan) and Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan by Ruby Lal (Yale University Press)

Native nations sounds fantastic. How is Revolusi?

>144 dchaikin: So far, very interesting - but the prose is a bit slow, and I don't know if that's because it was translated that way (from Dutch) or if it is how the original text reads. But the subject matter is so interesting that it is fine.

Held by Anne Michaels won the Giller Prize for Canadian literature. It was shortlisted for the Booker as well. I think it was very good.

https://www.cbc.ca/books/anne-michaels-wins-the-100k-giller-prize-for-novel-held...

These are the other books that were shortlisted for the Giller Prize along with the jury citations:
https://gillerprize.ca/2024-finalists/

Eric Chacour - What I Know About You
“One man’s love for another breaches the norms of gender, society and class in the otherwise modernizing, secular Egypt of Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Tarek, a doctor, nurtures a love that comes to him unexpectedly and neither his country, nor his family is able to accept. Elegantly told and profoundly affecting, What I Know About You speaks to the inherited moral structures constraining us, and to the alienation of a man’s inner life rendered external. Tarek leaves Cairo and his marriage for Montreal, a cold and foreign city in which his otherness is of a more ordinary kind but, when circumstances finally permit, returns to confront the past and its consequences nebulously in pursuit of him. Here is a quiet, touching story in which the acts of yearning, stymied hearts transcend their troubled genesis and move their hosts towards the possibility of redemption that is love’s essence.”

Anne Fleming - Curiosities
“Anne Fleming’s Curiosities begins in 17th century England beset by the plague and rife with superstition and fear. A series of archived memoirs that the amateur historian Anne is researching provide a puzzle and the means by which this thrillingly inventive novel immerses us in the historic and illuminates the contemporary. Joan, the only one of her family to survive “the sicknesse,” takes up with another child, Thomasina, alone and nursed by a goat. They find allies where they can, notably “Old Nut,” an ostracized woman who is imprisoned, tried and executed because she is thought to be a witch, as Joan is later assumed to be, before their paths, perilous and radically different, diverge. “Tom,” disguised as a boy, joins the crew of a ship sailing through Hudson’s Bay, while Lady Margaret Long, a naturalist and thoroughly modern woman, takes Joan underwing. Singular and surprising, Curiosities is a captivating story of hope, change, and belonging, and first and foremost a testament to varieties of love that endure beyond any one history or era.”

Conor Kerr - Prairie Edge
“Conor Kerr’s Prairie Edge is both a propulsive crime narrative built around successive, compounding blunders and a work of literary art that tells us about what it means to live in a world where action and rhetoric around decolonization fail to align. Its two main characters, an idealistic, would-be academic and an endearingly naive ex-con, both Métis, hatch a quixotic plan to re-home bison from national parks to downtown Edmonton, where they once ran free, as a bold statement against the settler status quo. Kerr extracts maximum amounts of comedy and pathos from the novel’s premise while populating this fictional world with resonant characters whose difficult experiences with group homes, social services, and activist circles are softened by enduring family bonds and friendships. Kerr entertains us with a contemporary caper while inviting readers to consider a future that has reckoned with the past.”

Deepa Rajagopalan - Peacocks of Instagram
“An utterly absorbing, often hilarious story collection, Deepa Rajagopalan’s Peacocks of Instagram reimagines the literature of the Indian diaspora in the age of globe-trotting IT workers, climate change, and social media influencers. A divorced woman channels her grief over the demise of her marriage into a bestselling line of ceramics. A factory owner in Johannesburg learns about the “secret” life led by his sometimes girlfriend in Toronto at her funeral. A young woman takes revenge on her oil lobbyist foster dad. Written in mature, perfectly rounded prose embroidered with telling detail and pithy dialogue, the loosely linked stories of this arresting debut collection follow an array of appealing characters who not only withstand heartbreak and misunderstanding but occasionally triumph over it by dint of their wit and cunning. In their discovery of themselves and their capabilities, Rajagopalan’s stories continually surprise.”

Yay! I took to Held. I’m hoping to read it again.

I’ve started Native Nations. A bit of political overload. Many things she complains about feel vastly overstated. Well, still early.

James by Percival Everett wins the American National Book Award.

https://www.nationalbook.org/awards-prizes/national-book-awards-2024/?cat=fictio...

The Palestinian poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha won the National Book Award for Poetry for her latest collection Something About Living:

"Something About Living explores Palestinian life through the lens of American language, revealing a legacy of obfuscation and erasure. What happens when language only permits ongoing disasters to be packaged neatly for consumption and subsequent disposal?"

She gave a very impassioned speech about the ongoing suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza, and as a result I will get this collection from one of my local libraries and read it early next year.

All the winners of 2024 National Book Awards:

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE:

Shifa Saltagi Safadi, Kareem Between
G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House

TRANSLATED LITERATURE:

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue
Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
Graywolf Press

POETRY:

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Something About Living
University of Akron Press

NONFICTION:

Jason De León, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
Viking Books / Penguin Random House

FICTION:

Percival Everett, James
Doubleday / Penguin Random House

>150 dchaikin: Thanks for posting the entire list!

>120 rv1988: I posted the longlist for the Cercador Prize for Translated Literature here: the winner is Agustín Fernández Mallo’s The Book of All Loves, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead. Here's the jury statement about the book:

The Book of All Loves begins during a strange apocalypse, as two lovers parse the many facets of their love with gripping, categorical precision. The novel covers an enormous range of subjects—linguistics, metaphysics, geology, nature, poetry, artificial intelligence, deep time, philosophy—with a quality of thought that propels the reader to the book’s surprising conclusion. By no means a traditional novelist, Mallo is a writer for outsiders, his complex prose and style on the cutting edge of literary form, and Bunstead’s translation of The Book of All Loves balances the technical, the analytical, and the aesthetic. As Mallo’s only English-language translator since Nocilla Dream was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2015 (and eventually brought to American readers in 2019 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, along with Nocilla Experience and Nocilla Lab), Bunstead’s commitment to the author is clear, and his vision for the text strikes an ideal harmony. Readers of all kinds will find lasting meaning in these pages. The Book of All Loves is a sheer pleasure, a text that reminded our committee why we read, and what wonderful discoveries are available to us in the trade of bookselling.

It certainly sounds intriguing!

>151 rv1988: It certainly does! The book doesn’t seem to be translated to French yet, but a couple others of his are, and the English translation is included in my Kobo subscription, so I added it to my books.

the rooster tournament of books starts in March below is a link to 70 books that they are considering for reading. Some are familiar but must are books Ive not heard discussed here, Even if you dont join in the reads, its fun to read the book discussions.

https://www.tournamentofbooks.com/the-year-in-fiction-2024

Here's a personal list. I'm going to Paris with my husband for our 20th anniversary in February, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to get to all the "French" books on my shelves. I also have read 47 books that I've tagged "French literature" or "French history" in my LT catalogue, so I do think I've read a lot of the classic French lit. Any of your favorites that I should add that I might not have heard of yet?

French Books I own and want to read (French authors, topics/subjects, history, settings, colonies):

Yann Andres Steiner by Marguerite Duras
The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart
Dimanche and Other Stories by Irene Nemirovsky
The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir
The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles
The Years by Annie Ernaux
The Seven Ages of Paris by
Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret
Jean de Floret and Manon of the Springs by Marcel Pagnol
The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal
A Woman’s Life by Maupassant
The Three Musketeers by Dumas

From my library or wish list:
The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Joan by Katherine J. Chen
Mademoiselle Chanel by C.W. Gortner
Athenais by Lisa Hilton
Versailles: A Biography of a Palace by Tony Spawforth
Charles Bovary, Country Doctor by Jean Amery
Like Death by Guy Maupassant
The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier

>151 rv1988: Intriguing,indeed!

>154 japaul22: I looked at my books labeled 'French literature,' then ordered them by the rankings I had given the ones I had read. Only one book earned 5 stars, The Plague by Albert Camus, but I gave 4.5 stars to these books, some of which are works of Francophone literature:

This Blinding Absence of Light, Tamar ben Jelloun
The German Mujahid, Boaulem Sansal
The Last Brother, Nathacha Appanah
Lightning, Jean Echnoz
A Man’s Place, Annie Ernaux
Monsieur Linh and His Child, Philippe Claudel
The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts, J.M.G. Le Clezio
A Woman’s Story, Annie Ernaux

I definitely encourage you on Ernaux’s The Years. I’m not sure how exactly Le Clezio applies, since he grew up on his island in the Indian Ocean, but his best books are terrific

>155 kidzdoc: Thank you! I haven't read any of these, and Camus is definitely a hole in my French reading.

>156 dchaikin: I will almost certainly get to The Years in 2025.

>156 dchaikin: Dan, I mentioned The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts because its characters are people living on the margins of society in the French Riviera. Several of the other books are admittedly works of Francophone literature, but I loved all of them.

>154 japaul22: Jean de Florette and Manon are on my all time favorites/desert island list. I highly recommend them (I read them as one book). I also loved The Years and A Woman's Life, both of which I read very recently. Not on your list, but if you haven't read Cousin Bette by Balzac I also highly recommend that. (And anything Zola).
Re Daryl's list at >155 kidzdoc: I also loved This Blinding Absence of Light, and highly recommend it, but I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as French. Also liked The German Mujahid but again, don't think of it as French.

>158 kidzdoc: I will check them all out! Thanks for letting me know about them!

>159 arubabookwoman: I’m glad to hear another rave review of Jean de Florette and Manon! I bought it after a review in the 1001 books group. I’m deep into Zola, but haven’t read Cousin Bette yet - I’ll add it to the list!

>154 japaul22: I loved The Bridge of Beyond, I had forgotten that Guadeloupe is a department of France, so in my head, I thought of it as Caribbean literature.

I enjoy Gide's writing, Strait Is the Gate is set in 1880s Normandy and The Counterfeiters is more of a coming-of-age and coming to terms with homosexuality story
If you can stomach comic levels of violence, I really enjoyed The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Vipers' Tangle is a well-written dysfunctional family story

Everything else is more obvious choices and mostly from the 1001-list.

>161 ELiz_M: I have not read any Gide yet, so I’ll try to get to something.

It isn't even December and already people are publishing 'Best of 2024' / 'Notable Books of 2024' Book lists. Here are a few:

Time, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024
Financial Times, Best books of 2024: Roula Khalaf, Janan Ganesh and other FT journalists pick their favourites
Washington Post, The 10 best books of 2024
NPR2024: Books We Love
Book RiotBest Books of 2024

I accept that these lists have limited value (and are sometimes filled with PR copy/marketing fluff) but I still enjoy going through them and adding more to my endless TBR.

>163 rv1988: Fun stuff. Thanks for sharing.

>154 japaul22: Following Darryl's method, here's what I would suggest:

5*
Brodeck and Monsieur Linh and His Child by Philippe Claudel
At night all blood is black by David Diop (set in Senegal, but Diop was born in Paris)
4.5*
Germinal by Zola
HHhH by Laurent Binet
Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart
By a Slow River by Philippe Claudel

I also loved Capitaine Rosalie by Timothee de Fombelle. It's juvenile lit, but excellent.

>165 labfs39: Thank you!

On the French theme, another voice to sing the praises of Emile Zola. Am loving the Rougon-Macquart sequence.
Other favourites on my shelves that I don't think have been mentioned so far:
Les Miserables - Hugo
A Very Long Engagement - Sebastian Japrisot
The Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas
Madame Bovary - Flaubert
The Identity of France - Fernand Braudel
Citizens - Simon Schama
I've recently discovered Patrick Modiano and am really enjoying.
And of course there's the Asterix books - especially Asterix in Britain!

The New York Times Book Review's The 10 Best Books of 2024

Fiction:
All Fours By Miranda July
Good Material By Dolly Alderton
James By Percival Everett
Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar
You Dreamed of Empires By Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Wimmer

Non Fiction
Cold Crematorium By József Debreczeni; translated by Paul Olchváry
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here By Jonathan Blitzer
I Heard Her Call My Name By Lucy Sante
Reagan By Max Boot
The Wide Wide Sea By Hampton Sides

==
I've read one: You Dreamed of Empires (and James is on my TBR list). Which is not very surprising :)

>168 AnnieMod:
I read the NYT full list of "100 Notable Books from 2024" with some interest: had barely heard of a majority of the books. Of the 100, I have read all of two (Creation Lake, The Safekeep) and have two others to read on my shelves (James, Praiseworthy). I'd heard of just 18 of the other 96 books, including just 6 non-fiction, in spite of the fact that I actually read a fair chunk of NF. I can't say I actually added any 'must reads' to my (already bulging!) list either. That Atlantic 'pond' is more a gulf when it comes to book lists - although I've taken plenty of recommendations from Americans on board from discussions here!

The full list (cut and paste from a word document, so apologies for lack of Touchstones):

Fiction
All Fours – Miranda July
Beautyland – Marie-Helene Bertino
Black River – Nilanjana Roy
Bluff – Danez Smith (Poetry)
The Book of Love – Kelly Link
The Bright Sword – Lev Grossman
The Coin – Yasmin Zaher
Colored Television – Danzy Senna
Creation Lake – Rachel Kushner
Dead in Long Beach California – Venita Blackburn
The Empusium – Olga Tokardzuk
The Familiar – Leigh Bardugo
A Film in Which I Play Everyone – Mary Jo Bang (Poetry)
Forest of Noise – Mosab Abu Toha (Poetry)
Funny Story – Emily Henry
Ghostroots – Pemi Aguda
The God of the Woods – Liz Moore
Godwin – Joseph O’Neill
Good Material – Dolly Alderton
Great Expectations – Vinson Cunningham
Headshot – Rita Bullwinkel
The Hunter – Tana French
Intermezzo – Sally Rooney
James – Percival Everett
Joy in Service on Rue Tagore – Paul Muldoon (Poetry)
Long Island Compromise – Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Martyr! - Kaveh Akbar
The Might Red – Louise Erdrich
Modern Poetry – Diane Seuss (Poetry)
My Favourite Thing is Monsters Book 2 – Emil Ferris (Graphic)
The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels – Janice Hallett
Neighbors and Other Stories – Diane Oliver
Our Evenings – Alan Hollinghurst
The Pairing – Casey McQuiston
Piglet – Lottie Hazell
The Practice, The Horizon and the Chain – Sofia Samatar
Praiseworthy – Alexis Wright
Rakesfall – Vajra Chandrasekera
Reboot – Justin Taylor
Rejection – Tony Tulathimutte
The Safekeep – Yael van der Wouden
The Sequel – Jean Hanff Korelitz
Shred Sisters – Betsy Lerner
The Silence of the Choir – Mohammed Mbougar Sarr
Smoke Kings – Jahmal Mayfield
Someone Like Us – Dinaw Mengestu
Wandering Stars – Tommy Orange
Whale Fall – Elizabeth O’Connor
What Does It Feel Like – Sophie Kinsella
Wild Houses – Colin Barrett
You Dreamed of Empires – Alvaro Enrigue (top 10)
You Should Be So Lucy – Cat Sebastian

Non-Fiction
The Achilles Trap – Steve Coll
All The Worst Humans – Phil Elwood
All Things Are Too Small – Becca Rothfeld
The Anxious Generation – Jonathan Haidt
Be Ready When the Luck Happens – Ina Garten
The Black Box – Henry Louis Gates Jr
The Black Utopians – Aaron Robertson
The Bluestockings – Susannah Gibson
Challenger – Allen Higginbotham
Chop Fry Watch Learn – Michelle T King
Circle of Hope – Eliza Griswold
Cocktails with George and Martha – Philip Gefter
Cold Crematorium – Jozsef Debreczeni
Connie – Connie Chung
Cue the Sun! - Emily Nussbaum
Do Something – Guy Trebay
Every Valley – Charles King
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here – Jonathan Blitzer
Fi – Alexandra Fuller
Health and Safety – Emily Witt
The Hidden Globe – Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
I Heard Her Call My Name – Lucy Sante
I Just Keep Talking – Nell Irvin Painter
John Lewis – David Greenberg
Knife – Salman Rushdie
Language City – Ross Perlin
Lovely One – Ketanji Brown Jackson
Madness – Antonia Hylton
The Message – Ta-Nehisi Coates
The New India – Rahoul Bhatia
The New York Game – Kevin Baker
No One Gets to Fall Apart – Sarah LaBrie
Private Revolutions – Yuan Yang
Reagan – Max Boot (top 10)
The Rebel’s Clinic – Adam Shatz
The Return of the Great Powers – Jim Sciutto
Salvage – Dionne Brand
Soldiers and Kings – Jason DeLeon
Splinters – Leslie Jamison
Stolen Pride – Arlie Russell Hochschild
The Swans of Harlem – Karen Valby
There’s Always This Year – Hanif Abdurraqib
Undivided – Hahrie Han
A Walk in the Park – Kevin Fedarko
When the Clock Broke – John Ganz
The Wide, Wide Sea – Hempton Sides
A Wilder Shore – Camille Peri

By way of some sort of comparison, the following are some of the category lists and all the category 'winners' (first book where there's a list) from Times/Sunday Times Books of the Year, published over the Saturday and Sunday editions last weekend. You've only got to look at the Politics list to see how Anglo-centric some of it is! From what I can see, 10 books are common to both lists - these have been asterisked (BTW, I've read or have on my TBR shelves 16 of these!).

Fiction
Our Evenings - Alan Hollinghurst*
Orbital - Samantha Harvey
Wellness - Nathan Hill
James - Percival Everett*
Intermezzo - Sally Rooney*
Long Island - Colm Toibin
How I Won a Nobel Prize - Julian Taranto
Goodwin - Joseph O'Neill*
Shy Creatures - Clare Chambers
My Friends - Hisham Matar
Creation Lake - Rachel Kushner*
The Voyage Home - Pat Barker
The Husbands - Holly Gramazio
The Safekeep - Yael van der Wouden*
You Are Here - David Nicholls
The Ministry of Time - Kaliane Bradley
Caledonian Road - Andrew O'Hagan
Butter - Asako Yuzuki

Historical Fiction
The Heart in Winter - Kevin Barry
Time of the Child - Niall Williams
Lightborne - Hesse Phillips
The Painter's Daughters - Emily Howes
The Glassmaker - Tracy Chevalier
Precipice - Robert Harris
The Bells of Westminster - Leonora Nattrass

History
Some Men in London, Queer Life 1945-1967 - Peter Parker (ed), 2 vols.
Little Englanders - Alwyn Turner (Edwardians)
The Barn - Wright Thompson (Emmett Till murder)
Augustus the Strong - Tim Blanning
Embers of the Hands - Eleanor Barraclough (Vikings)
Spice - Roger Crowley (16thC spice trade)
Oliver Cromwell, Commander-in-Chief - Ronald Hutton
Endgame 1944 - Jonathan Dimbleby
The Scapegoat - Lucy Hughes-Hallett (biog Duke of Buckingham)
The Eagle and the Hart - Helen Castor (Richard II and Henry IV)
The Eastern Front - Nick Lloyd (WW1)
Republic - Alice Hunt (English Commonwealth 1649-1660)
Hitler's People - Richard J Evans
The CIA, An Imperial History - Hugh Wilford
Vertigo - Harald Jahner (Weimar Germany)
Paris '44 - Patrick Bishop
The Price of Victory - NAM Rodger (long-awaited Vol 3 of Royal Navy history)
Henry V - Dan Jones
The Golden Road - William Dalrymple (Indian history)
The Siege - Ben MacIntyre (Iranian Embassy siege 1980)
Operation Biting - Max Hastings (1942 paratroop assault)

Literary Non-Fiction
Knife - Salman Rushdie*
Rural Hours - Harriet Baker (group biography women authors)
And Then? And Then? What Else? - Daniel Handler (autobiography)
Hardy Women - Paula Byrne (Thomas Hardy through women in his life)
Didion and Babitz - Lili Anolik
Feh, A Memoir - Shalom Auslander
The Haunted Wood - Sam Leith (history of children's literature)
V13, Chronicle of a Trial - Emmanuel Carriere

Biography and Memoir
A Voyage Around the Queen - Craig Brown
The Story of a Heart - Rachel Clarke
Sonny Boy - Al Pacino
Melting Point - Rachel Cockerell
Question 7 - Richard Flanagan
Raising Hare - Chloe Dalton
A Very Private School - Charles Spencer
All That Matters - Chris Hoy
From Here to the Great Unknown - Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keogh
Sociopath - Patric Gagne

Ideas
The Anxious Generation - Jonathan Haidt*
Born to Rule - Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves
Nexus - Yuval Noah Harari
Heresy - Catherine Nixey
Mortal Secrets - Frank Tallis
On the Edge - Nate Silver
The History of Ideas - David Runciman
How The World Made the West - Josephine Quinn

World Affairs
How To Win an Information War - Peter Pomerantsev
Private Revolutions - Yuan Yang*
To Run the World - Sergei Radchenko
The Achilles Trap - Steve Coll*
The Retreat from Strategy - David Richards & Julian Lindlay-French

Politics
Keir Starmer, The Biography - Tom Baldwin
Unleashed - Boris Johnson (reckoned by many to be better placed in Fiction)
Truss at 10 - Anthony Seldon
Blue Ambition - Michael Ashcroft (Kemi Badenoch biog)
Kingmaker - Graham Brady (memoir)
A Woman Like Me -Diane Abbott (ditto)
On Leadership - Tony Blair
War - Bob Woodward
Autocracy Inc - Anne Applebaum

Science
The Genetic Book of the Dead - Richard Dawkins
Alien Earths - Lisa Kaltenegger
Nature's Ghosts - Sophie Yeo
Why We Die - Venki Ramakrishnan
Why We Remember - Charan Ranganath
This Is Why You Dream - Rahul Jandial
Love Triangle - Matt Parker (trigonometry!)
Into The Clear Blue Sky - Rob Jackson

Books of the Year
Crime Fiction: Between Two Worlds - Olivier Norek
Thriller Fiction: The Peacock and the Sparrow - IS Berry
Food and Drink: Sift - Nicola Lamb (baking)
Art: Wild Things - Sue Prideaux (Gauguin biog)
Music: A Thousand Threads - Neneh Cherry
Sport: Munichs - David Peace
Self-Help: Women Are Angry - Jennifer Cox

>170 Willoyd: >169 Willoyd: - I saw these lists and was unimpressed by the fiction ones. I don’t know what criteria they used but I won’t be using these lists at all.

The New Yorker offers its "best of 2024" book lists at

https://www.newyorker.com/best-books-2024

They've broken it down into fiction/poetry and nonfiction, and chosen a dozen essentials in each category, with a few supplemental titles. The essentials:

Nonfiction:
The Achilles Trap, Steve Coll
The Burning Earth, Sunil Amrith
Challenger, Adam Higginbotham
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, Jonathan Blitzer
The Freaks Came Out to Write, Tricia Romano
Health and Safety, Emily Witt
Knife, Salman Rushdie
LatinoLand, Marie Arana
The Light Eaters, Zoe Schlanger
Madness, Antonia Hylton
Patriot, Alexei Navalny
Reagan, Max Boot

Fiction/Poetry:
All Fours, Miranda July
The Anthropologists, Aysegul Savas
The Empusium, Olga Tokarczuk
Forest of Noise, Mosab Abu Toha
Intermezzo, Sally Rooney
James, Percival Everett
The Mighty Red, Louise Erdrich
Modern Poetry, Diane Seuss
My Friends, Hisham Matar
On the Calculation of Volume (Book I), Solvej Balle
Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte
The Silence of the Choir, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

>168 AnnieMod: >169 Willoyd: >170 Willoyd: >172 KeithChaffee: these lists are all so fun!

>171 kjuliff:
I don't know enough about the books on the NYT list to comment, but, of the ones I know, I've got no issues with those on the Times list. My own gripe is that they are all pretty mainstream - nothing to really 'discover' - about as safe as the big publishers play. So, I get some tips, but relatively few. I've found over the past few years, prompted by my Reading the World project, that an increasing proportion of my fiction reading is with smaller publishers like Peirene, Fitzcarraldo, Charco, Tilted Axis, And Other Stories etc who, apart from Fitzcarraldo, barely get a mention, but are generally much more interesting to explore.

>153 cindydavid4: And the shortlist for The Tournament of Books is:

All Fours by Miranda July
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa
The Book of George by Kate Greathead
The Book of Love by Kelly Link
Colored Television by Danzy Senna
The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft
Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
History of Sound by Ben Shattuck
James by Percival Everett
Liars by Sarah Manguso
Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu
The Wedding People by Alison Espach

>175 ELiz_M: Ooh, I had forgotten that Dinaw Mengestu had published a new novel that has had positive reviews. Onto my planned reads for 2025 it goes.

>175 ELiz_M: that’s a nice list. Three Booker listed. I’m very interested in All Fours.