I did this last year, and I can see no reason for not turning it into an annual feature. So here are my top ten, bottom four and ten assorted really good reads of the year. Last year the bottom as well as the top had ten titles; but this time I can't come up with enough novels sufficiently bad for that humiliation. I must have been doing something right. The titles are in alphabetical, not rank, order.
Outstanding and no mistake:
Top 10
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
Home by Marilynne Robinson
Love and Summer by William Trevor
The Reef by Edith Wharton
Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James
The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins
Whatever their rep, to be treated with disrespect:
Bottom 4
Feast of Love by Charles Baxter
Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
Recapitulation by Wallace Stegner
Highly recommended:
10 really good reads
All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West
Fly Away Peter by David Malouf
A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
The Master by Colm Tóibín
The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton
The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
Serious Things by Gregory Norminton
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple
