1. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky - Patrick Hamilton
This book of three related short novels is now one of my top 5 favorite books ever. It is so beautiful and heart breaking and makes me long for London. The writing is rich and suburb. They just don't make books like this anymore.
2. Brooklyn - Colm Toibin
Another gorgeously written book that drew me in and left me wanting more when it was all over. There were many aspects of the story I could relate to and the characters are deftly and richly drawn. It's one of those books that makes me think about how little has changed about human nature while the world around us evolves so rapidly.
3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Steig Larsson
A fabulous crime thriller and an über-beach read. This book definitely lived up to the hype surrounding it and I have never been more willing to read 600 pages. I was a bit disappointed in the other two books in the trilogy, but the characters are so well developed and interesting that I couldn't abandon them to disinterest.
4. Can't Buy Me Love - Jonathan Gould
One of the most fascinating and educational books I have read in a long time, this Beatles biography shed a lot of light not only on the band, but also British society, pop culture, and music in the 1960s and early 70s. What I liked most about this book was its thoroughness and the fact that it provided so much context for the Beatles and their music. Many music books would have you believe that bands operate in a vacuum of their own (sometimes questionable) genius; Gould makes it clear that the Beatles were an outstanding product of their time.
5. The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
I'm a sucker for a good time travel story that challenges my logic skills and pulls on my heartstrings all at once. Niffenegger executes her story with a deft touch for both fantasy and approximate reality while making her theory of time travel seem almost plausible.
6. The Constant Gardener - John le Carré
John le Carré has been a rather challenging author for me. I like a good spy story almost as much as I like time travel (time traveling spys! any suggestions in that department?), but le Carré's work tends to be too intricate and dense for me to process so that I can enjoy it. Usually I finish one of his books and then ask "What the hell just happened there?" and/or "What was the point of that, exactly?" However, he finally got through to me with this one. Not only are the characters highly dimensional, but also the settings are gorgeously rendered and the plot moves at a lightening pace. le Carré was able to draw me in so that I ended up caring about Tessa as much as Justin does. Well played sir.
7. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
A beautifully written and touching existentialist story that carried me on a luminous wave of dreams mixed with reality.
8. The Alienist - Caleb Carr
I love a good crime story/mystery, and this recommendation from my mother and my colleague didn't disappoint. In addition to the proto-CSI plot, it was fun to picture a New York City so different, and yet still so similar in many ways, to the one I live in today.
9. Nine Stories - J.D. Salinger
As always, Salinger captures the quirky and the mundane and spins them into truly captivating sketches of life.
10. Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
In this book, Murdoch displays a writing style and sensibility similar to Patrick Hamilton, which is perhaps why I enjoyed it so much. Like Hamilton, Murdoch makes me long for London and simpler times. Murdoch also injects a wicked sense of humor and a deft understanding of human nature and fallibility into her writing, making it a joy to get lost in the seedier parts of Murdoch's London.
