The Ten Best Books (I read) in 2012

For one reason or another, two themes have dominated my reading in 2012: Increasingly, I'm drawn to reading classics rather than contemporary literary fiction. I find myself drawn back to some of the works I'd read much earlier in my life that I've largely forgotten or new translations of works that I'd read previously or lesser-known works from writers with whom I'm pretty familiar. Second, I find myself often drawn to short stories and novellas - in part because I find shorter pieces more accessible when I'm traveling and in part because I'm always scoping for good material for our book group, which does very well with novellas and less so with longer pieces of fiction. So the list of the 10 best books I read in 2012 is dominated by these two themes, and, to my surprise - I didn't realize this until looking back over my year's reading - the list contains no novels published during the past year, not even close. Here's my list, alphabetical by author:

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights Hadn't read it since college, and found this novel much darker and creepier than I'd remembered. I think my view of the novel had been altered by the movie version and the popular culture, which tends to romanticize Heathcliff. In fact, he's monstrous and scary. And the mysterious story of his origin haunts the entire novel.

Willa Cather: My Antonia Just a great account of life on the American prairie, told with a complete absence of sentimentality - some really chilling scenes of death and privation, if that's your cup of tea.

Anton Chekhov: Stories Still the greatest writer of short stories ever, with many of his best covering the entire span of his short writing life brought together in the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation, notably Ward No. 6, The Darling, In the Ravine, Lady with a Little Dog, Gooseberries - the list could go on. Read them all.

Henry James: The Princess Casamassima Totally atypical James - his most overtly political novel, with a terrific opening scene at a debtors' prison, the closest James ever came to Dickens and Dostoevsky.

James Joyce: Dubliners All 20th-century short stories derive from Dubliners, in which Joyce single-handedly redefined the parameters of and potential for short fiction - clear, open, enigmatic. Franz

Kafka: Selected Stories The darkest of the great 20th-century European writers, no doubt best known for The Metamorpohsis, but there are other great stories in this (Modern Library) collection, notably In the Penal Colony and The Hunger Artist - all with Kafka's unique vision of the nightmarish desolation of contemporary life.

Thomas Mann: Death in Venice and Other Stories The title story is by far the best known, but there are other great stories in this collection (Vintage) often overlooked, notably Tonio Kroger and Mario and the Magician - the most thoughtful and analytic of the great European modernists.

Carson McCullers: Collected Stories Not a uniformly great collection but worth reading for Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Member of the Wedding, the first a real oddity and the 2nd one of the great pieces of writing about adolescence, and antecedent of Catcher in the Rye.

Katherine Anne Porter: Pale Horse, Pale Rider Three excellent novellas gathered in this collection, Noon Wine being the most famous but the other two, though less anthologized, are fine, particularly Old Mortality, an exemplar of economy in storytelling.

Marcel Proust: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower The great 2nd volume of the new translation of In Search of Lost Time, in which, after hundreds of pages of anticipation, Marcel finally meets the love of his life, Albertine Simonet - this volume, much of which takes place at a French seaside resort, is the most joyous volume in the great work, which grows increasingly dark and troubled over the course of time.

Later this week: The most disappointing books I read in 2012.