It's Friday afternoon; it's that time of year when many other media outlets (ahem!) are doing the same sort of thing; and I just happen to feel like sharing with you, all my readers (pensive, quizzical, boisterous, alert, distracted), my top ten, my bottom ten and ten assorted 'really good' reads of the year. Do not underestimate the pain I have taken in compiling these lists. What to put in? What to leave out? Still, here they are, for your delectation, guidance or mockery. They're in alphabetical, not rank, order.
No praise is too high:
Top 10
Amongst Women by John McGahern
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Have the Men Had Enough? by Margaret Forster
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Washington Square by Henry James
Whatever their rep, dull and/or pointless and annoying:
Bottom 10
A Friend from England by Anita Brookner
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
Morgan's Passing by Anne Tyler
The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
Ordinary Love by Jane Smiley
The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Rector's Daughter by F.M. Mayor
24 for 3 by Jennie Walker
Highly recommended:
10 'really good reads'
The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
The Believers by Zoe Heller
Cousin Phillis by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
Summer by Edith Wharton
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
