Fiction

Fiction books I’ve particularly enjoyed from the past few years. Most of this is “literary ficiton” – the highbrow stuff – but I do read my share of pulpy stuff too.

• The Secret History Donna Tartt Perhaps my favorite book. I adore the novel’s New England backdrop and black foreboding. It’s also technically striking: Tartt kills a character in the first 500 words, rewinds, and then spends 300 suspenseful pages getting to the death.

• Swamplandia! Karen Russell A funny, lovely story about growing up in a particularly-crazy family (they operate a kitschy gator-themed amusement park) in particularly tough economic times (a big waterpark just opened on the mainland.) And I thought being a teenager in Central Ohio was tough ..

• All the Light we Cannot See Anthony Doerr Two entwined, beautifully-written stories of teenagers during World War II. You kinda know what’s going to happen the entire time – World War II isn’t that much of a surprise – and it absolutely doesn’t matter.

• The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes Probably the closest I’ve felt to a middle-aged man going through a midlife crisis. It was off-putting in an addictive way.

• Shipping News E. Annie Proulx Annie Proulx writes about strong willed, hard-shelled people in desolate, hard-scrabble places. I encounter very few of these people day-to-day, which might be why I enjoy her stories so much.

• Netherland Joseph O’Neill A novel about upper-middle and lower-middle class immigrants chasing the American dream, swathed in a few Staten Island cricket games. Much better than that description makes it sound.

• Open City Teju Cole The best treatise I’ve come across on ordinary solipsism – the quotidian decisions, words, and actions we all use that make so much sense to us and infuriate others so thoroughly. We are all the heroes of our own stories.

• A Happy Marriage Raphael Yglesias Desperately sad semi-autobiographical reflection on two lives lived mostly, but not entirely, together.

• A Fine Balance Rohan Mistry A novel in which nothing good happens, ever, and just when something seems like it might improve, it all gets unimaginably worse instead. Some of my friends don’t like the book for that reason (it’s a bit overdrawn), but I was oddly attracted.

• Zuleika Dobson Max Beerbohm Funny, witty, and fast. A bildungsroman that doesn’t take itself seriously.

• Suite Française Irene Nemirovsky Simple stories of people during a complicated time. The characters in this book feel like real people – for better or worse – which I don’t find true of most books.

• Red Plenty Francis Spufford An absurd look at the planned Soviet economy of the 1950s and 60s. It’s a total House of Mirrors, and all fun and games, until you realize – oh. This is barely a fiction book.