Recommended Books of 2010!

[elanor_x]

This is the 3rd year of now traditional books' post with a new feature. Ever pitied the time wasted on not good enough books? For me, sometimes the mistake becomes obvious only after a lapse of time, so after almost each book will appear a short explanation why it is or isn't recommended and its' topic. Hope you'll discover at least one good book. Feel free to ask questions about any of them and I would appreciate to hear your opinions and recommendations too!

The Best Books of Prose & Verse

1) "Summer morning, summer night" by Ray Bradbury My favorite book of his. A small collection of short stories, (iirc all) without any magical elements, just regular people living in a small town.
 

2) Ian McEwan "On Chesil Beach" Found via Clarissa's Blog recommendation, which gets the title of The Best Blog Discovered in 2010. Can't say it better than she did. 

3) "The House of Bilqis" by Azhar Abidi A novel. From this great interview with the author: Pakistani-born author raises a series of difficult questions: What are the consequences of leaving home and marrying outside one’s culture? And how does one address familial obligations, never stated but always present, that demand sacrifices grown children don’t want to make?

4)  Larissa Miller "Golden Symphony" Translated as "Dim and Distant Days" (Vol. 25 of the GLAS Series) [is on Amazon]. This autobiography of the Jewish poetess let me glimpse into the world of my grandparents' and parents' generations in USSR. Check her English site for poems and prose extracts.

5) Leonid Andreyev's short stories. [Amazon link to English translation] (1871 –1919) Life in Russia before and after the 1905 Russian Revolution. Wiki calls him "one of the most talented and prolific representatives of the Silver Age period in Russian history".  He reminded me of Chekhov both since he's that good and because their stories in big quantities create a feeling of depression. To be honest, Chekhov used satire, while Andreyev is deadly serious. One of the hardest to read books of the year.  

6) "Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran" by Roya Hakakian Interesting, informative, easy to read autobiography.

7) Yevgeny (or Evgeny) Schwartz's plays : "Cinderella" &  "The Emperor's New Clothes".  The plays "are brilliant, imaginative satires of corruption and tyranny, disguised as fairy tales for adults". They're really funny too, see:
[Cinderella] "It's bad for your health not to go to the ball when you deserve it."

8) Arthur Miller's plays:

"The Crucible" Loved psychological analysis of Salem witch trials, of people's motivations and mindset. 

"Incident at Vichy" So depressing that I didn't finish this one act play "about a group of detainees waiting for inspection by German officers during World War II", but you can't say it isn't brilliant.

9) George Bernard Shaw. Discovered the play "The Devil's Disciple". Now intend to read "Saint Joan".

10) Nathaniel Hawthorne "The House of the 7 Gables" It wouldn't get the honor, but for Chapter 18, "Governor Pyncheon". The style of writing in it, the feeling it conveyed stayed with me after closing the book and even now after forgetting most details. Any book with such a chapter is worth reading (unless you've to suffer through 1000 pages to get to it).

11) From the Borderlands – Stories of Terror & Madness – edited by Elizabeth E. Monteleone and Thomas F. Monteleone. Iirc, not all stories have supernatural elements, but almost all are a pleasure to read.

12) The Pocket Book of Popular Verse edited by Ted Malone

I found this rarity by chance. Rarity since it was printed in July, 1945. On the first page was written "THIS IS A WARTIME BOOK". The yellow pages were crumbling, so I was forced to copy the poems and throw away the original. Thankfully, most of them appear in the new book:

"Best Remembered Poems" Edited and Annotated by Martin Gardner

It is even better because of the explanations about the authors and the poems in question. Inspired by Ted Malone, I checked some of the poems of several poets I liked and discovered:

Elizabeth Barrett Browning – A Rhapsody Of Life's Progress

Thomas Hood – read & loved most of his poems, funny and insightful. To get a taste, see some of my favorites: "Stanzas on Coming of Age" "The Bridge of Sighs"   "A Plain Direction" "The Pauper's Christmas Carol" His poems are on-line here.
Christina Rossetti –"Will These Hands Ne'er Be Clean?" (to a murderer); "Last Night" (to the unfaithful lover), "A Birthday" and "A Prodigal Son" are here.

 

More Good Books:

13) Stephen King "The Green Mile" His best book I read, told by a guard working on death row during the Great Depression.

14) Stephen King "Firestarter" I liked the idea, thus am glad to have read it.

15) "The Seamstress" A (Holocaust) Memoir of Survival by Sarah Tuvel Bernstein

16) Mosab Hassan Yousef "Son of Hamas" Since I live in Israel, the book was of special interest.

From Amazon: The oldest son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founding member of Hamas … turned away from terror and violence…. reveals new information about the world's most dangerous terrorist organization and unveils the truth about his own role, his agonizing separation from family and homeland.

17) Terry Pratchett "Unseen Academicals" One of Pratchett's best. Satirizes football in an entertaining way even for sports haters, with Ankh-Morpork's version of Romeo and Juliet on the side.

18) Azar Nafisi "Things I've Been Silent About" Lots of family history, a memoir about her life in Iran and USA.

19) Edmund Gosse "Father and Son" [A classic Autobiographical study of the clash of temperaments in post-Darwinian England] I understand it's good, but the writing style and the detailed focus on the father's religious beliefs weren't for me.

From wiki: The book focuses on the relationship between a sternly religious father who rejects the new evolutionary theories of his scientific colleague Charles Darwin and the son's gradual coming of age and rejection of his father's fundamentalist religion.

20) John Knowles "A Separate Peace" Boarding school novel. Set in 1942, the war is felt through the book, but the main theme is the internal war of Gene, the narrator, against "some ignorance inside me", as he deals with his love-hate relationship with his best friend, Phineas. Wrote a post about it with some quotes and the best fan-made trailer. 

21-22) Ray Bradbury "The Machineries of joy" & "Long after Midnight" Bradbury's usual stories, this time with magic.

23-25) Arthur Miller "A View from the Bridge"

Barbara Kingsolver "The Poisonwood Bible"

Kazuo Ishiguro "Never Let Me Go"

Good books, but I don't feel enthusiasm. If in doubt, google whether it's your type of book.

26) Stephen King "On writing" Only if you're interested in the autobiographical facts or/and are a writer searching for tips.

27) Barbara Kingsolver "Small Wonder" Essays. The ones on genetic engineering (one) and on 11/9 (several) were interesting to read. However, the book has 23 essays, not 3 or 5, and the rest of the time she made the point "I am against consumerism & care about environmental issues" essay after essay in cutesy stories – "We released a crab, instead of taking it home to die in unsuitable for it environment" (Message: We are not alone on this planet, people!), "My daughter helps with chickens" (Message: Local farming is the way to go!), and so on... Everything she told about the topics was even summed up in one of the essays in less than a paragraph!

 

28-30) A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. (Read 2 first entirely; looked through the last 2.) Then the first two parts were quite enjoyable, but in retrospect I wouldn't recommend the series. Not since it won't be finished; if a book is worth reading, it's worth reading. Imo, 4 huge tomes, some of which exceed in length later HP books, should deliver much more than Martin provided to be worth the hours spent. In the last place since they took the most hours out of my life.