Fiction. If you go strictly by star ratings, I ended up with nine absolute five-star books, and three that hovered right on the edge. The year began with McCarthy, and what a beginning that was. From there, I moved on to Proust, though the entire series yielded just one full five-star read for me. Two […]
I read a lot this year, and it was fun—but I rated the books purely based on how they made me feel. Many of them could easily have ended up on my top list, barring a few misfires. There were also a couple of outright disappointments—Ambilimol and Vinoy Thomas’s attempts at sarcasm come to mind.
I just finished reading Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. Earlier, when I read and reviewed her novel Utmost (I’d once seen a humbug mock it), I had noted that her writing spilled over with anger and intensity. Now, in this memoir, she lists the reasons for that anger. She shows that her