1.23.2012

Favorite Books, 2011 Edition

We had not expected to be women like that. We had thought that we really would read all seven volumes of Proust.

Leah Stewart, Husband and Wife

Proust doesn't appear on my favorites list (below) nor in my reading journal of the 99 books that I finished in 2011. Some years, the goal in reading is simply to escape, even if my choices would give me no bragging rights at a reunion of UM English majors.

The Weird Sisters (Eleanor Brown)
Separate Beds (Elizabeth Buchan)
Hannah's Dream (Diane Hammond)
The Metropolis Case (Matthew Galloway)
The Foremost Good Fortune (Susan Conley)
Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses (Claire Dederer)
Three Stages of Amazement (Carol Edgarian)
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading (Nina Sankovitch)
Sister (Rosamund Lupton)
The Magician King (Lev Grossman)
The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern)
The Language of Flowers (Vanessa Diffenbaugh)
Blue Nights (Joan Didion)
Robopocalypse (Daniel Wilson)

"I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit," Eliot said. "Though that would explain a lot."

Lev Grossman, The Magician King