The 10 Best Books of 2010 – NY Times

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The New York Times have chosen their top ten for 2010 and I have actually read something on it! I must read more in 2011!

Here’s a couple of choices from the list but go here for all titles:

The one book I have read and recommended is Room by Emma Donoghue:

ROOM

By Emma Donoghue.

Little, Brown & Company, $24.99.

Donoghue has created one of the pure triumphs of recent fiction: an ebullient child narrator, held captive with his mother in an 11-by-11-foot room, through whom we encounter the blurry, often complicated space between closeness and autonomy. In a narrative at once delicate and vigorous — rich in psychological, sociological and political meaning — Donoghue reveals how joy and terror often dwell side by side.

Freedom is on my list for 2011:

FREEDOM

By Jonathan Franzen.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.

The author of “The Corrections” is back, not quite a decade later, with an even richer and deeper work — a vividly realized narrative set during the Bush years, when the creedal legacy of “personal liberties” assumed new and sometimes ominous proportions. Franzen captures this through the tribulations of a Midwestern family, the Berglunds, whose successes, failures and appetite for self-invention reflect the larger story of millennial America.

The New York Times also has an interesting list of the 100 Notable Books of 2010.

Books of the Year

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The Guardian has posted the books that have most excited writers this year. Here’s a couple of extracts:

Purple Hibiscus writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie –

In Red Dust Road (Picador) Jackie Kay writes lucidly and honestly about being the adopted black daughter of white parents, about searching for her white birth mother and Nigerian birth father, and about the many layers of identity. She has a rare ability to portray sentiment with absolutely no sentimentality. Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House) is a fresh and wonderful history of African-American migration. Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war’s legacy. And David Remnick’s The Bridge (Picador) is a thorough and well-written biography of Barack Obama. The many Americans who believe invented biographical details about Obama would do well to read it.

Jackie Kay

 

Kazuo Ishiguro writes brilliantly about nostalgia. In Nocturnes (Faber), his rich and satisfying quintet of stories – each playing a different piece of music – the characters’ voices are as rich as the music itself, striking true notes about the nature of love, regret, choices and roads not taken.

 

Another wonderful collection of stories to emerge was Petina Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly (Faber): an impressive cast of characters and stories emerge in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, with fighting spirit, making you think about survival, love and grief.

 

Rupert Thomson’s moving memoir This Party’s Got to Stop (Granta) is a surprisingly funny study of grief. Three brothers move back into their father’s house. It’s a riot and tear-jerkingly sad.

 

Room by Emma Donoghue

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I read this novel a couple of months ago and it is one that I would recommend to most people. Room was short-listed for the Man Booker prize and it is about Jack and his small world – Room. Jack is the five year old narrator of the novel and it is through his limited point of view that we hear his story. As readers we know what Jack knows, and we wonder how he and his mother have come to be in this place. The relationship between Jack and his mother is at the heart of this story and it is a very powerful one.

It doesn’t take long before we realise that Room is a prison and that the villain of the story  is a particularly despicable one. If you have followed the stories of Elizabeth Fritzl and Jaycee Lee Dugard you can guess what things may have prompted Donoghue’s book but this is no generic thriller. I read it in a couple of hours and it was a very satisfying read.

Loss of innocence

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In this column Leigh Hart discusses his personal connections to the mining community and the Pike River tragedy.

“Christ, not again!” That was the immediate response of an old timer upon hearing about the Pike River tragedy. That old timer is my father.

I have never really thought of my father as an “old timer” before but, according to much of the media covering this tragedy, that is what he is. Old timer or not, fortunately he was one of the men lucky enough to walk out of the infamous Strongman disaster in 1967. Nineteen other men, all of whom he knew personally, were not so lucky.

The Strongman disaster occurred three years before I was born and has been, to most of the country, just another historic event. But to him, it still seems like yesterday.

Read the rest on the NZ Herald site.

 

Never Let Me Go

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“It’s an existential fable about people trying to wring some happiness out of life before the lights go out”

Time Magazine

Everyone is on holiday now and you can relax and get into some reading. If you want to stay with the dystopian novels try ‘Never Let Me Go’ by Japanese-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize (an award Ishiguro had previously won in 1989 for The Remains of the Day), for the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award and for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award. Time magazine named it the best novel of 2005 and included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Time magazine gave this summary of the book in its 100 Best English -language Novels list:

Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are students at Hailsham, a very exclusive, very strange English private school. They are treated well in every respect, but as they grow older they come to realize that there is a secret that haunts their lives: Their teachers regard them with fear and pity, and they don’t know why. Once they learn the secret it is already far, far too late for them to save themselves. Set in a darkling alternate-universe version of England, and told with dry-eyed, white-knuckled restraint, Never Let Me Go is an improbable masterpiece, a science fiction horror story written as high tragedy by a master literary stylist. It’s postmodern in its conception, but Ishiguro isn’t playing games or chasing trends: The human drama of Never Let Me Go, its themes of atrocity and acceptance, are timeless and, sadly, permanent.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,1951793,00.html #ixzz16WEBYqDu