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Saturday, December 14, 2013

The Best Books I read in 2013: Top 5 books by living writers

Once again it's very hard for an amateur reader such as me to name the top 10 books of the year, as I've read such a narrow selection, especially of books published in 2013 - and have plenty more on my list of books I'd like to get to. But people always ask: What are you reading? What did you like? What would you recommend? It amazes me how books that I'm so engaged in while reading sometimes slip through my mind - I'll either forget that I re-read them within the past year, or sometimes forget entirely that I've read them, or at least started to do so. I'm definitely a reader willing to put down a book at almost any point if it's not moving me or informing me or entertaining me in some way. Later, I will post on some of the books I "put down," that is, the most disappointing books, for me, in 2013 (I always start a book hoping to love it - why else, outside of a class assignment, would anyone start reading a novel or collection of stories), so when I don't finish I'm a bit saddened, and sometimes annoyed at my own bad judgment or at the publicity machine that led me down a forsaken path. But on the brighter side, I read many great books over the past year. Last year's list was almost entirely made up of classics, but for 2013 there was some fine new fiction - as well as not so new fiction by living writers. So there are, in alphabetical order, my top 5 books from 2013 by the living. Tomorrow, my top five books by the late:

Best books I read in 2013 - Living Authors

Selected Stories, by Alice Munro. A year in which Alice the Great wins her much-deserved Nobel is a great year for literature. This collection from 1996 gives us a good look at her first stories, and reading through it you can see her style develop and mature over time. We need a new Selected, or a Complete, set of stories from AM.

The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers. We're starting to see the first wave of fiction about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and Powers, in this debut novel, has written one of the best novels of the year.

Goodbye, Columbus, by Philip Roth. Roth's first published book, a collection of stories from 1960, still holds up really well. The title story is of course a classic, but there are other gems in this group as well, such as Conversion of the Jews and Eli, the Fanatic. When will he follow AM and earn the Nobel he deserves?

Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter. Another excellent novel published in 2013 (or late 2012?), with a lively plot, many twists and turns, lots of characters including some cameos, lots of dead-on satire about Hollywood, not ordinarily the kind of book I'd go for but I was completely won over the Walter's fine storytelling.

Tenth of December, by George Saunders.  Another great work of fiction from 2013, Saunders is our most imaginative, funny, and disturbing short story writer, and this collection measures up to his best work.


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