Books of 2025

Alright, it's that time of the year again! It actually feels like winter around here, with frost in the night and a little sliver of ice on the ponds. Also, I finished reading a book last night and will not be finishing another, this year, so I am all set to muse on the books I read this year.
This year's total is even higher than last year's; 46 books in total. That cold December weather I just mentioned has been a big help in achieving that number, although I have (yet again) done a lot of rereading in the autumn and winter. But there were many exciting new reads as well!

The full list is:

1 Intentioneel leven

2 Orbital

3 Komt een land bij de dokter

4 The Professional Scrum Product Owner

5 Everything I know about love

6 So late in the day

7 Mania

8 The viscount who loved me

9 Het is oorlog maar niemand die het ziet

10 Intermezzo

11 Under cover aan het werk

12 Franny & Zooey

13 Maar ik wil helemaal geen moderne man zijn

14 Brooklyn

15 The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

16 Refuse to Choose

17 Dinner for Six

18 Whale Fall

19 Sweetness in the Skin

20 Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

21 The Anthropocene Reviewed

22 Dear Dolly

23 Clear

24 The end we start from

25 Ik ga toch iets zeggen

26 You are here

27 An offer from a gentleman

28 Everything is tuberculosis

29 The Bee Sting

30 The Glass Hotel

31 Romancing Mr Bridgerton

32 Op een andere planeet kunnen ze me redden

33 The Help

34 Onder Vrienden

35 Prophet Song

36 The dictionary of lost words

37 The Wedding People

38 Slade House

39 Schokbestendig

40 The Light Years

41 The Thursday Murder Club

42 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

43 The Proof of my Innocence

44 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

45 12 ways to kill your family at Christmas

46 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Like I said, lots of rereads in the autumn; one Emily St John Mandel, one David Mitchell, one Elizabeth Jane Howard and the three by J.K.Rowling. I've tried to get into a rhythmn of reading at least one new book in between rereads, so as not to get stuck in the whole Cazalet series or all the Harry Potter books. And other than that, there were still 40 new books to break down into lists.

Best English novel

1 Clear

2 The Help

3 Intermezzo

This is a difficult category to order this year. I read too many good books. Added to that, I awarded some books with 5 stars on Storygraph, which I in hindsight don't think are the best books I read this year, since they haven't stuck in my mind the way some others have done. So this is, at best, a tentative step towards the best books.

The first one, Clear by Carys Davies, nearly broke my heart. It is about Ivar, the last inhabitant of a small and remote Scottish Island, who is visited by a church minister. Ivar does not know this man has come to throw him off the island to turn it into grazing land for sheep, so he takes him into his home. I felt so dearly for Ivar, who loves his solitary life with the few animals that are left to him, but gradually also comes to understand that being alone all the time is no way to live. It is only 150 pages long, but it feels like three entire lives are contained in those pages.

I've written about both The Help and Intermezzo before, but I think what makes these books so great is that they, like Clear, are about real people that you get to know, can relate to and maybe even start to love a little bit. A real good book, for me, makes the characters come alive and makes me both sad and happy when their story ends. These are books that I will read again some time in the future, not because of the plot, but because of who lives in them.

Honorable mentions go to Whale Fall, Sweetness in the Skin and The Bee Sting for also being great reads.

Best Dutch novel

Once again, no Dutch novels on the list, even though 20% of all books I read were in Dutch. I read one work of fiction in Dutch (Onder Vrienden), but that is a translation of a Danish author. And I would not put that in any 'best' list.

Best classic

Storygraph let's you compare when you've read a book with when it was published, which gives me a nice scatterplot that is sloping slightly upwards as I read newly published books shortly after they've hit the local library or bookshop. In 2025, there is one book distinctly below the 1990 line; Franny & Zooey. I think we can call this a classic, although not everyone is in agreement on whether it is a novel (or a short story and a novella in one). One could argue that the Harry Potter books are classics in their own right, but since those are rereads, we'll leave only J.D.Sallinger on this list.

Best non-fiction

1 The Anthropocene Reviewed

2 Undercover aan het werk

3 Ik ga toch iets zeggen

30% of all books I read this year were non-fiction, however, many of those fall into the autobiographical category (see below). And some fall somewhat in between, so I've made the distiction as best I can.

When I was a student, or thereabouts, one of the new-fangled 'blogs' I used to read was De Recensiekoning, which translates to The Reviewking. This was written by semi-famous youngsters, who'd gotten the idea that if they wrote reviews about stuff (in a funny but thoughtful way), companies would send them free things or let them have free experiences, just so they could write reviews about them. This did not work out for them, although they did publish a book about it, which was a standard part of my student housing toilet's reading materials. (Years later, of course, influencers thought up the same thing with videos and social media and actually did get rich. And those Recensiekoning people ended up creating some of the most famous Dutch late night tv programmes, so everything turned out alright for them). All this is a longwinded way of saying: I like reading reviews about random things that are not generally reviewed. And that is exactly what John Green (of YA fame) does in his covid-time non-fiction work The Anthropocene Reviewed: he reviews the state of humankind, its history and the impact it's had on the rest of the planet. It is a wonderful, diverse, funny and sometimes depressing read.

The same goes for Undercover aan het werk by Jeroen van Bergeijk. He is a Dutch journalist famous for taking on low-paying jobs to show the working conditions of (mostly) immigrants who are extorted by (usually) big companies, but also the effects we as consumers/buyers have on those conditions. He goes undercover to write his stories, and this book is a compilation of recent years.

The final book on the list is by another journalist, Aaf Brandt Corstius, who followed the debates in Dutch parliament for a year and half, incidentally a period in which the cabinet fell, new elections were held and a new parliament was instated. She wrote not so much about the content, the ideas, of the debate, but about the social norms, the way people do things or don't do things. Even though she only wrote about public debates which she viewed from the public gallery, it reads like a 'behind the scenes' of the Dutch political debate. Very insightful.

Best autobiograhical

1 Op een andere planeet kunnen ze me redden

2 Maar ik wil helemaal geen moderne man zijn

3 Everything I know about Love

Many contenders for this category this year, which as I said slightly overlaps with the general non-fiction one. The first, by Lieke Marsman, is a haunting tale of life, death and her struggles with cancer. She used to be the Dutch Poet Laureate, but is better known to the wider public for her decision to amputate her arm to stop the cancer from spreading. Sadly, this did not work. In Op een andere planeet kunnen ze me redden, she discusses how her illness has brought her back to parts of the faith she had lost, going even further into believing that there must be alien life somewhere that could save her (all the while knowing she will die). It is a beautiful book about beliefs, quantum mechanics and the human will to live.

The second book is by Julian Althuisius, who writes a column in my favourite newspaper. This book is about his refusal to be 'a modern man', with all the social expectations and norms that come with that. It is a story of family life, expectations and breaking free of those. I think Lieke and Julian are both great Dutch writers with difficulties, but of a slightly different order of magnitude.

The last is by Dolly Alderton, whom I discovered last year. She has written two non-fiction works about love and relationships, one collection of her newspaper columns (Dear Dolly) and Everything I know about Love. The second feels more meta, as she also describes how she felt like a fraud, giving advice to readers when her own love life or relationships were in shambles. But it is that honesty that makes both books such great reads, even if I wouldn't follow every word of advice she has.

Best short story collection

No short story collections at all this year (unless you count Franny & Zooey, which would then still only be one short story). Must (as always) try to read some more next year.

Best scifi/fantasy

1 Orbital

2 Prophet Song

3 The end we start from

Alright, I'm taking some liberties with the definition of this category, as I only read one 'real' scifi or fantasy novel (apart from rereads), but I did read some hauntingly good dystopian novels. Which is sort of the same thing?

Anyway, I read Orbital in the beginning of the year and enjoyed it a lot, although it does have its faults. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is another Booker Prize winner and a very differnt cup of tea. It is set in a future Ireland that is slowing slipping into a totalitarian regime. This book kept me awake at night, partly because I was so annoyed at the main character for not acting, partly because I realised I would probably respond in the same way she did. Let's hope this remains a work of fiction, although some elements of the story are already becoming reality. Finally, I read The end we start from by Megan Hunter after watching the film, which isn't always the best way around. But the book is more suggestive of events than it is descriptive, so it was kind of nice to already have some idea of the plot. As the south of England is submerged by floods, a couple and their baby flee north in search of a safe haven. Both society and the characters show their ugliest sides, in yet another story warning us of what may be to come.

Okay, so maybe scifi and dystopian are not the same thing, since the former seems to focus on the nice things of scientific and social advances, on how we would like things to develop, while the latter feels more like a warning sign. But they both show possible stories yet to come, whether we like them or not.

Best romance

1 You are here

2 Romancing mister Bridgerton

3 An offer from a gentleman

A new category! I hesitated about putting one last year, but with all the extra Bridgerton novels passing through, I thought it would be nice to keep track of them. And the new David Nicholls also clearly falls into the 'romance' category and was actually a very nice read (after the huge disappointment of 2020). He could show Julia Quinn how it's done, but then again, nobody reads the Bridgerton books for their depth of character or literary flourish.

Best 'new' author

It is impossible to chose just 3 of the new authors I enjoyed reading this year, as there were so many. So here comes the full list; I would love to read more from Samantha Harvey, Colm Toibin, Elizabeth O'Connor, Ishi Robinson, Carys Davies, Kathryn Stockett, Paul Lynch, Pip Williams, Alison Espach, Richard Osman and Jonathan Coe. Most of these authors have written at least a couple of books already, so I will be spoiled for choice.

Most disappointing novel

1 Everything is Tuberculosis

2 Mania

3 12 ways to kill your family at Christmas

The first one isn't really a novel, it is yet another non-fiction book by John Green. But in sharp contrast to The Anthropocene Reviewed, I did not like this one. It feels too contrived, with the history of tuberculosis interspersed with a personal human interest story that feels fake or at least exaggerated... It was the most disappointing because I liked his other book so much. 

Mania is a book by Lionel Shriver, who've I've been ambivalent about for some time, but this one was the worst yet. I wrote about why I disliked it earlier. 

The final book on the list is one in a series of 'cosy crime' I've been reading (which I've been wanting to write a post about, but which hasn't happened yet). I thoroughly enjoyed books like The Thursday Murder Club or Proof of my Innocence, but 12 ways to kill your family at Christmas was not cosy, it was filled with horrible characters and a murderer reveal that was so unrealistic and not in line with the rest of the book that after finishing it, I immediately put it on the pile of books for the second-hand bookshop.

Authors I read more than once:

- Julia Quinn (3)

- J.K. Rowling (3)

- Dolly Alderton (2)

- John Green (2)

Some usual suspects on the multiple reads list, but also many new authors I enjoyed reading. This year was a very varied bag, even though I didn't read any Dutch fiction or short story collections. I'm sure 2026 will bring loads more new books, as I continue to reread some old favourites.

Books of 2024

Well, sharing my love for Storygraph was the last thing I posted about books here... Funny how that works, as with finishing a book on Storygraph I also fill out a short review, which apparently fulfills my need to share anything about what I've read anywhere else. Let's see if I can fix this in 2025!

For although I did not post about them here, I did read loads in 2024, with a grand total of 43 books. That is the same amount as I read in 2023, which amazed me then and it amazes me again. Several of the 43 were library books, proving once again that joining your local library is one of the best things you can do to read more. 

I am currently in the middle of reading 3 other books, but since I probably won't finish any of them before midnight, now is the time to share the list:

1 The Whalebone Theatre

2 The Instant

3 Kaas uit eigen keuken

4 Astonish me

5 I know why the caged bird sings

6 Looking for Alaska

7 Cat's Cradle

8 Loathe to love you

9 The Singer's Gun

10 Turtles all the way down

11 Voor ieder wat waars

12 Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

13 Love, theoretically

14 Day

15 Waarom vuilnismannen meer verdienen dan bankiers

16 Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

17 The Firm

18 Childern of Time

19 De Onmisbaren

20 High Fidelity

21 De terugkeer van de wespendief

22 Skippy dies

23 Yellowface

24 The Lola Quartet

25 Persuasion

26 Morele ambitie

27 The five dysfunctions of a team

28 De supermarktsurvivalgids

29 Armoede uitgelegd aan mensen met geld

30 Chain-Gang All-Stars

31 Atalanta

32 The Wake-up Call

33 Circe

34 Station Eleven

35 We are all completely besides ourselves

36 Simon vs the homosapiens agenda

37 The Hours

38 Good Material

39 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

40 The Bone Clocks

41 The Duke and I

42 The Pier Falls

43 Everything I never told you

Lots of Dutch non-fiction and also lots of rereads (7 in total), which partially might explain why I didn't post anything about them here. But still, 36 new books to break down into neat little lists!

Best English novel

1 Chain-Gang All-Stars

2 Day

3 Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

I read Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah in 2019 (how time flies), when I said I hoped he'd write a novel. Well, he did. Chain-Gang All-Stars is a horrible book. It's also a great book. It's one of those books that tells you things you don't want to know about, but you want to keep on reading anyway, because some part of you does want to know how it ends and hopes for the best. The end left me somewhat shattered, as only great literature does. This is one of those books I wanted to post about, but couldn't get my head around to actually start writing, as there is just too much to say about it. Read this book, if you haven't.

All the other new novels this year somewhat pale by comparison, but Day by Michael Cunningham was another good read. His stories are always small, centering on a single day and a few characters (as in The Hours) but in that smallness they tackle the big things in life. This novel was started before covid but changed by it. I think it is a testament to the strange times we lived through, as are Ali Smith's seasonal novels.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is a library book from the beginning of the year, which was somewhat eclipsed by later reads. It was a nice read; it is always difficult to create neurotypical main characters without at some level also making fun of them, but Gail Honeyman managed that nicely, especially as more and more details of Eleanor's past are revealed. In the end, the story turned out to be more uplifting than I expected from the outset.

Honourable mention to Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. This somewhat felt like a Secret History make-over, but turned out to be completely different. His The Bee Sting has been on all the top 10 lists this year and has also found its way to my bookshelf, so we will see about that next year.

Best Dutch novel

Did not ready any of these this year... There was a graphic novel (De terugkeer van de wespendief) but that deserves its own category when I actually read more than one.

Best classic

I read a couple of books that are considered classics, such as I know why the caged bird sings, Cat's Cradle and The Firm, but I wouldn't put any of them in a 'best classic' list. I also read a couple of books that are retellings of actualy classical stories, namely Atalanta and Circe. These obviously don't count as 'actual' classics, but they were better reads than the 'real' classics nonetheless. So the only book that I would put down as best classic is one of my rereads; Persuasion. This has been my favourite novel by Jane Austen for a couple of years and reading it again proved to me once again why.

Best non-fiction

1 Waarom vuilnismannen meer verdienen dan bankiers

2 Morele ambitie

23% of the books I read this year were non-fiction, again mainly thanks to the library. Some of these were very practical (cheese making) but most were concerned with social or moral issues. They were informative, but not the best. The two books mentioned above, both by Rutger Bregman, stood out in that they had some original ideas and practical tools to get started. Interestingly, I also read two books by Rutger Bregman in 2015, the year of my original 52 book challenge. He is apparently still very current almost 10 years later.

Best autobiographical

1 The Instant

The Instant is the follow-up to Amy Liptrot's autobiography The Outrun, which I read in 2017 and wasn't too positive about. Having just seen the film adaptation, I am now curious to read that first book again. In The Instant, Amy leaves Orkney and moves to Berlin. Although it is supposed to again be autobiographical, some of the details struck me as a bit too fanciful. The blurb describes it as giving us an 'unapologetic look' at her addictions (firstly to alcohol, in this sequel mostly to love), but to me it felt a bit too good to be true sometimes.

The only other book I read that could be considered autobiographical is I know why the caged bird sings, which I did not care for at all. This might be an American thing I fail to understand, but I couldn't make anything of Maya Angelou's story. Maybe if you've read some of her other works, this reads as a rags-to-fame narrative, but now knowing a lot about here, it was mostly confusing.

Best short story collection

1 The Pier Falls

Only read the one, but it deserves mention here. The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon has sat on my bookshelf for at least a decade, but I finally got around to reading it. It is dark, it is suspenseful, it is populated by characters who have lost any sort of light in their lives, although not for lack of trying. Some of these stories have stuck around in my head for the last couple of weeks, although they are also starting to blend into each other in their bleakness. Maybe not the best thing to read in the dark final days of the year.

Best scifi/fantasy

1 Children of Time

I would always put Station Eleven and The Bone Clocks here (in that order), but those are very fond rereads, so we'll go with the only other real scifi book I read, Children of Time. This took me a while to get into, mostly because Adrian Tchaikovsky insists upon making everything scientifically explainable, and not in the way of Andy Weir. So that made for tough going, but it was a gripping story nonetheless. I have the two sequels ready on the shelf, hopefully I'll get around to them in the coming year.

Best 'new' author

1 Gail Honeyman

2 Joanna Quinn

3 Dolly Alderton

Again, not a full list, and sadly not the quality of authors I put here last year. Gail Honeyman only wrote the one book so far (see above). Joanna Quinn almost made the list below this one, but honestly, she shouldn't. I hope she can redeem herself with another novel soon. Dolly Alderton has written a couple more, one of which I got for Christmas, so we'll see whether that makes any of the lists the coming year. Good Material was a nice read, but not the best.

Most disappointing novel

1 We are all completely besideds ourselves

2 Yellowface

3 Astonish me

I was somewhat tempted to put The Whalebone Theatre here at first, but rereading what I wrote about that in January, and looking back on the other novels I read, it is nowhere near making the cut for most disappointing. It wasn't all it could have been, but it was so much better than some other novels.

So the ones that are on this list are books that I had high expectations of, but which failed me miserably. We are all completely besideds ourselves is written by Karen Joy Fowler of The Jane Austen Book Club, but it is nothing like that. In fact, I found it a horrible read, depressing and sad. I won't go into too much detail why, as it will give away one of the main plot points of the novel, but I really did not like the characters, the plot or the stance it takes on a couple of moral issues.

Yellowface is quite popular in the bookshops, but I am glad I got my hand on a library book. The story was very thin and flat, the main character completely unlikeable and the whole point of the book is seeped in American attitudes. I can see how it works well on BookTok, which is all about sharp opinions and lack of nuance, but I am not a fan.

I wrote on Astonish Me in February. I think this may not be a disappointing book in and of itself, but my expectations of it were just so much higher after the joy of reading Great Circle. I hope Maggie Shipstead returns to the greatness of that book soon.

Authors I read more than once:

- Emily St. John Mandel (3x)

- Ali Hazelwood (2x)

- Rutger Bregman (2x)

- John Green (2x)

- Michael Cunningham (2x)

Last year, there were a lot of new authors in this category, most of whom I did read more of this year. This year, I've read all of them before. Emily St. John Mandel will stay a firm favourite, as the only author to appear in this list 3 years in a row. I enjoyed The Singer's Gun and The Lola Quartet, but compared to her later novels, they don't make any of the lists above. I hope she'll have a new novel out soon. On the other hand, I am now quite done with Ali Hazelwood and John Green, these are typical library snacks that you read once and never look back to.

I was tempted to put a 'Best romance' category, since I borrowed quite a lot of those from the library, but non of them actually were all that good, so the honest top 3 would have been mostly rereads, with again Persuasion as the top book. As I probably only reread books I enjoyed the first time, they give a somewhat skewed perspective. So let's hope that in the coming year, I will read some more great new books!

Sea of Tranquility

The nice thing about GoodReads is that it stores all kinds of data about the books you read. For example, the date on which you finished reading a particular book (if you enter the date correctly, of course). This means I can see that I finished reading You have a friend in 10A on April 9th and Sea of Tranquility on April 11th. Which means I read Sea of Tranquility in just two days.
This may not be that surprising, since Emily St. John Mandel was my favourite new author of 2022 and I couldn't wait to get my hands on a paperback copy of her newest novel (which I surprisingly did not find in the biggest European bookstore in London but in my own local bookstore-around-the-corner). And I was on holiday in early April, so plenty of time to read. But the novel that originally drew me to her work, Station Eleven, was one of those that I like to spread out over as much time as possible, just for the story not to be over. I would have thought Sea of Tranquility would have the same effect, but somehow, I flew through it. 

The reason I haven't written about it earlier is that I still can't fully make up my mind about the book; how much do I like it?

The novel takes a similar pattern to Cloud Atlas, with several interconnected stories set apart in time and featuring different protagonists. We first travel forward in time from 1912 to 2401, and then back again to 1918. Just like David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel has recurring characters in all of her novels, which gives another layer of interconnection. Even thought it is executed well, it sometimes made the whole thing feel like a bit of a combined copy of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks (added to which, while David Mitchell's novels lean more towards fantasy, there is an apocalyptical undertone to both authors).

Although the interconnection is a nice element, it can become somewhat of a lazy read because you already know some of the main characters or the people they interact with. Ah, yes, the guy who stole his sister's videos and has now become a big artist by setting them to music. We know the guy, we know his sister Vincent, we know how their stories end. There are new things to learn of course, like how Mirella's story ends after Vincent looses sight of her in The Glass Hotel, but those chapters somehow feel like a sequel to that novel, knocked out to cash on something that already worked before rather than an original new story.

Added to that, some parts of the story seem too easily autobiographical. One of the protagonists is a female author on a book tour after the success of her novel on a post-pandemic apocalyptical world. She has repeated discussions with readers concerning a death scene it that novel, which is eerily familiar to exactly that scene in Station Eleven. The descriptions of a book tour, the people met and the loneliness felt, clearly tell us something about the author's experience after her novel became a big seller. Added to that, several parts are again set on Vancouver island, albeit in the distant past, but it felt like things I had read before, places I had already been.

Which is maybe why I liked the chapters that included wholly new storylines and characters better. Especially the parts set in space, where man has colonised the Moon as a trial version of later colonies further away, with the trial now having become redundant and the Moon colonies just another sad backwater to grow up in. The theme of time travel runs throughout the novel, with its own mind-bending puzzle at the end; if they had not travelled in time, would the need to travel in time actually have been there, causing the whole story to unravel? I can never get my head around these things, but in this novel it felt neatly wrapped up.

And as always, the writing is beautiful. Sometimes just two or three sentences suffice to set an entire scene or describe an entire personality. Sea of Tranquility felt a lot shorter than the other novels, as thought the writing was a bit lighter, less filled with meaning. That is to say, the meaning is mostly in the plot and the musings on time travel, and less in the words on the page.

All in all, I enjoyed reading the book immesely. It has made me buy all three books published before Station Eleven, just to have the matching set. But I do hope that in a next novel, we get to meet new characters, discover new places, discuss new ideas. For even though this book does not feel like the same trick all over again, there are many fresh ideas and new angles, it does start to feel a bit stale around the edges. 

The Glass Hotel

While in Portland I bought Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which I read immediately and enjoyed immensely. At the same time I bought another of her novels, The Glass Hotel, which I saved for later. But with great new authors, later always comes sooner than I expect, so when the weather turned grey I turned towards her fifth novel.

Now Station Eleven is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, but The Glass Hotel stays closer to home. We meet a couple of characters, who all at some point find themselves in the same hotel (mostly made of glass) on Vancouver Island. Afterwards they go their separate ways, but their lives remain interconnected less obviously but tied in nicely towards the end of the story.

Now apparently Barack Obama included the novel in one of his recommended reading lists, so it must strike a chord with some people, but it sadly left me a bit underwhelmed. I liked most of the characters, but I couldn't really sympathise with them. Some of them disppeared for long stretches of the novel, which made it unclear who exactly were the main characters. Also, most of them don't get a happy ending, but I wasn't particularly interested in their fates. 

Apart from the characers, the language and writing style were good, but the themes and subjects just didn't really grip me. Two searching millenials, trying to achieve something but at the same time trying to hold each other back doesn't make for happy reading. The most enjoyable part was the collapse of the business of one of the other characters, which is probably not supposed to be the high point of the novel.

I read somewhere that St. John Mandel is working towards an inclusive universe, where all her novels are interconnected and characters can be found in several places, like David Mitchell does in his works. In this novel, the Georgian Flu that wipes out most of the population in Station Eleven is quickly quenced, and we meet a couple of characters from that novel in more detail. However, they didn't strike me as the most interesting characters then, and they weren't that special here. It is a nice touch, but it doesn't give you the surprise element that often happens in David Mitchell novels, where you meet the grandson or best friend of a character from an earlier novel, and a throwaway remark suddenly brings the two together. Here, it was more on the nose, which clashes with her otherwise pretty subtle style.

So all in all, it left me underwhelmed. It is always hard to follow-up on a very good novel, as the recent example of Sally Rooney also proved, so maybe my expectations were just too high. Luckily, St. John Mandel already has a new novel out. The only annoying thing is that I now have these two novels in a specific edition and want to buy all her other novels in the same edition. Which are nowhere to be found. I may have to travel back to the US, possibly even Portland, to locate the right versions...

Books of 2021

Wow, where did this year go? It does not feel like it is supposed to be the last day of 2021 by at least a couple of months, but apparently, here we are.
Apart from going pretty fast, this was not a year to remember for its good qualities in many respects. But book-wise, it was a pretty good year for me. I read a whopping 32 books, which is even higher than my already pretty high score of last year. I discovered a couple of great new writers but also reread some old favourites. 

 So my full list is:

1 Daring Greatly

2 The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse

3 The Luminaries

4 Focus aan/uit

5 No Bones

6 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

7 Thinking in systems

8 Soul Tourists

9 Wish you were here

10 Life after life

11 Klara and the sun

12 The Three Musketeers

13 Utopia Avenue

14 Here we are

15 Weather

16 The Midnight Library

17 Summer

18 Beach Read

19 The Switch

20 Such a fun age

21 The Flatshare

22 Anxious People

23 Beautiful world, where are you?

24 Public Library and other stories

25 The man in the red coat

26 Normal People

27 Expectations

28 The Eyre Affair

29 Sweet Tooth

30 Mansfield Park

31 A Man called Ove

32 The Christmas Pig

So I (almost) started and finished the year with children's books. I read The Christmas Pig, J.K.Rowling's newest, during a feverish Christmas Day, so chances are I won't remember much about it in a couple of weeks. But it is a better note to end on than last year, when illness drove me to romantic drivel.

I had a couple of rereads when I wasn't really in the mood for trying new things, mostly during October (The Eyre Affair, Sweet Tooth and Mansfield Park). Rereads from earlier in the year were The Luminaries and Life after Life, two novels I loved but didn't really fully understand the first time I read them. Upoin rereading I liked them better than before; sometimes you have to go back after a couple of years and look at such stories with fresh eyes. Normal People was a reread after I was so very disappointed in Sally Rooney's newest novel.

Again, only 1 'classic' novel in The Three Musketeers. No Dutch novels at all. But a surprising amount of non-fiction, especially in the start of the year.

Best English novel

1 Wish you were here

2 Such a fun age

3 Utopia Avenue

So many great novels to choose from! I am really spoiled for choice here. But in a stark contrast to last year; my top 3 contains just 1 female author. I read a lot of books by female writers, but apparently they were not the greatest (and at least 3 of them were romantic summer reads). For example, I immensely enjoyed Ali Smith's Summer, but it was not enough to make the top 3. Maybe if I'd reread the rest of the quartet first, but now it just felt a bit too rushed and unconnected to make the grade.

So what did I love? Wish you were here took me four years to receive and read, but of all the novels I've read this year, it is the one that still sticks out in my mind the most. The whole atmosphere of the novel, with two people so at odds with each other and with the world for all the wrong reasons... I've just reread my original review from March, and apparently the novel really grew on me after that. The same is true for Such a fun age, which I apparently didn't even write about it when I first read it. But it paints such a pointed, accurate picture of current 'woke' times and the way people interact with others; careful to be correct while at the same time doing that mostly so others will think better of them. It is one of the few very American novels I read this year, but the whole American atmosphere only improves on the story it tells. Finally, I would never have thought that David Mitchell could write a novel that would not go to the top of my list that year, but Utopia Avenue apparently does the trick. I loved it, it is certainly in my top 3, but it is not his best novel. 

Best Dutch novel

Zero Dutch novels in the entire year, and just 1 non-fiction book in Dutch (which won't make any list, but it was a nice read on how to focus).

Best non-fiction

1 Thinking in systems

2 The man in the red coat

3 Daring greatly

So I read a lot of non-fiction this year, some of which was an overflow from last year, when a December illness drove me to reading soppy romantic stuff. Thinking in systems opened my eyes on how to see things in connection with each other. I rate highly on the 'system thinking' score in personality questionnaires, so this really spoke to me. The man in the red coat is by Julian Barnes, and at first I didn't realise it was a non-fiction book about an actual person, Dr Pozzi. But being Barnes, the language reads almost like a novel. That I read most of it during an Italian holiday probably also helped with setting the atmosphere of the belle epoque. Finally, Daring greatly is Brené Brown's famous book on how to overcome your inhibitions and dare greatly. I liked her writing style and was interested in reading more, but seeing her online personality as some sort of pep guru makes me wonder if this really is the thing for me.

Best short-story collection

1 Public library and other stories

I read only the one, by Ali Smith, but it was a beautiful read. She combines stories about libraries and books with eyewitness accounts of people's connection to a specific library, now that apparently they're being closed down all over the UK.

Best scifi/fantasy

1 Klara and the sun

I think this is the only novel I could realistically put in this category, although it perhaps fits better in a new sort of 'dystopian' category (but maybe it feels that way because I'm currently reading The Every and everything connected to tech feels somewhat tainted). Apart from that, it is a beautiful, haunting novel. I must really read some more Ishiguru (as I actually said in my original review, back in April...). 

Best 'new' author

1 Frederik Backman

2 Anna Hope

Frederik Backman is a Swedish author whose novels I've read in English. Apparently they've been pretty popular for a while, with films and series made after them. I discovered him through his newest novel Anxious People, which led me to also try some of the older ones. I like his style and his insights, even though the Swedish setting does not always translate well through the English language. From Anna Hope I read her newest novel Expectations, which was so much better than Sally Rooney's new novel. I am really looking forward to reading Wake, also an older novel that sounds really good based on the description and reviews.

Most disappointing novel

1 Beautiful world, where are you?

2 Here we are

3 No bones

So the first one should be obvious from what I wrote about it before: somehow Sally Rooney's third novel is plagued by the 'second novel' effect, in my eyes at least. Here we are is not a bad novel in itself, but after reading the profound depth of Wish you were here, it fell a bit flat on its face. Graham Swift can be a bit hit and miss apparently. The same is true of No Bones; after reading Milkman my expectations for this novel were so high, that they could only be disappointed.

Authors I read more than once:

Ali Smith (2x)

Graham Swift (2x)

Sally Rooney (2x)

Frederik Backman (2x)

Utopia Avenue

The first novel I bought on the first time I was back in a bookshop after the lockdown ended was Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell. Not because it was newly published; it came out months and months ago and I could have ordered it online at any time since then. But because it is a novel by David Mitchell, one of my favourite authors of all time, I wanted to have it in the right edition, the one that would fit in with his other novels on my bookshelf. So I waited until that beautiful day, on which I bought six novels in one go.

So David Mitchell. He is known for his magical realism novels, mostly for Cloud Atlas, but more recently for The Bone Clocks, which I reread a couple of months ago. Utopia Avenue is seen as one of his more 'realistic' novels, comparable to Black Swan Green, which has long been one of my absolute favourites. The wonder of his novels is that they all fit together into one big Mitchellverse; characters from one novel reappear in the next, or their parents, or their children, even if the novel is set in another country or century or different realism realm. I'd heard good things about Utopia Avenue, but I tried to keep away from any spoilers, to have the joy of that magical first read.

So Utopia Avenue. It's a band, three guys and a girl, trying to make it big in the final years of the 1960s. They are an unlikely combination, coming from folk, jazz and more electronic types of music to combine into a magical sound mix. They also each come with their own set of problems, psychological, sexual, social, and/or financial, which gives them more than enough source material for their songs. Unfortunately, we cannot of course hear their actual music, although Mitchell's descriptions make it seem he at least could hear their songs in his head. 

The novel's chapter titles are all taken from these songs, with the author of the song being the main character of their own chapter. The lyrics are interspersed with the action, usually a bit later than the actual chapter, since the events in a chapter are the inspiration for a song that still has to be written. This structure feels a bit forced at times, with several big events of a similar vein crammed into one chapter  to show all the inspiration for that particular song.

The characters themselves are nice, even though they can feel a bit flat. It's probably because there are four (actually, five) of them, but I felt I got to know them less well than Holly in The Bone Clocks or Jason in Black Swan Green. They are struggling with growing up, with the changing times, with their changing lives. As any good Mitchell character, they are swept up as the tides of their lives take them from good to bad luck, inspiring their songs along the way. It felt like they came out of this novel as better people than when they started, but how they grow exactly is not always particularly clear. 

In the meantime, it is a cameo fest. As they make their way through the 1960s music industry, first in the UK and then in the US, we meet anyone and everyone, from Janis Joplin to David Bowie. Some took me by surprise, some felt a bit too obvious. None of them really added anything to the story, apart from 'a-ha!' moments and entertainment value. But there are other cameos too, the characters from other novels I previously mentioned. I was very happy to have read The Bone Clocks so shortly before, as there are many allusions to its storyline and characters. But other, smaller mentions too; Luisa Rey, Crispin Hershey, Robert Frobisher. Each of these brought a little smile, a little mental jump of joy.

But sadly, those were the things I enjoyed most about the novel. Sure, it is an interesting picture of the 1960s world, of the cultural and social change taking place, of how music brought young people together and could liberate them, in a way. And Mitchell paints that picture well. And sure, I enjoyed spending time with his characters, learning about their lives and their struggles, seeing how they become a band and push each other to greater heights. And of course, I loved the language, Mitchells writing style and the way 400 pages seem to fly by. But apart from a couple of moments, I didn't feel I was reading a novel by David Mitchell. I was reading a great novel, sure, but not one of the best I'd ever read. Not even when I got to the end, where as usual the knife that has slowly been inserted into your heart, the knife you don't know that is there until David Mitchell suddenly twists it and then pulls it out, leaving you feeling devastated and fulfilled at the same time, did it feel like the great read I had upon first reading his other great novels.

So I enjoyed it, I would recommend it, it's a good read, but it's not one of his best.

Books of 2017

Another year in books has flown by. After my book challenge in 2015, I've been keeping lists of all the books I read through 2016 and this year. As in previous years, I'm always surprised to find which books I read not even half a year ago; amazing how quickly you forget when it was that you read something. On the other hand, some novels I feel like I've just finished them while that turns out to have been more than a year ago.
No reading goals, just keeping up the numbers. I read 23 books this year, which is 2 up from last year. Mainly, I think, because I didn't tackle any big literary reads (like Anna Karenina last year) and there were some rereads, which are always faster. As always, some books have already been discussed at length, while others may have their first mention on this blog right below.

The complete list for 2017:

1 The High Mountains of Portugal
2 The Sellout
3 Juliet, naked
4 Black Swan Green
5 The Outrun
6 Last Orders
7 The Handmaid's Tale
8 How to be good
9 The Jane Austen book club
10 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
11 Hag-Seed
12 The Joy Luck Club
13 England and other stories
14 Mijn Meneer
15 The Light Years
16 The North Water
17 Marking Time
18 Here I am
19 Confusion
20 The Best of Adam Sharp
21 Cloud Atlas
22 Exit West
23 Casting Off

So, five rereads; Juliet, naked, Black Swan Green, The Jane Austen bookclub, Harry Potter, and Cloud Atlas, two of which are by the ever-popular David Mitchell. The Joy Fowler and JK Rowling were because there was a bit in the summer where I wanted to read but not invest actual brainpower into the reading, so I went back to some really easy rereads. Only one Dutch book, which is also the only non-fiction title on the list (although it is partly fictionalized, it is the autobiographical account of Ted van Lieshout's youth). Technically only one short story collection (England and other stories), although one could count The Joy Luck Club as short stories (I read one of the chapters as a 'separate' short story during my studies). No classics at all. I was going to say 'no Americans' until I realised both The Sellout and Here I Am are written by Americans; somehow they both disappeared from my mind pretty quickly. No new novels by Ian McEwan, or David Mitchell, or any of my other popular authors, simply because there weren't any. Actually, now that I think of it: no Ian McEwan at all this year. After the triple McEwan there may have been a slight overdose, but still; this must be the first time in about 10 years that I read no novel by Ian McEwan for a whole year. This will surely be rectified in 2018.

Let's break the novels that I did read down into some lists:

Best English novel
1 Exit West
2 Last Orders
3 The Handmaid's Tale
A difficult choice this year! Exit West is clearly the winner; another Mohsin Hamid novel that I dearly loved. It is a very contemporary novel, featuring a couple from a unspecified Middle Eastern country fleeing through one of the mysterious doors that keep opening up all over the world, leading to other places. It is both mystical and very realistic, and I'm sad it didn't make Man Booker this year, as it would have been a deserved winner (I've just started reading the novel that did win, and Exit West would beat it with its hands tied behind its back at this point). Do read something by Hamid!
Last Orders is Graham Swift's Man Booker 1996 winning novel, which gave me the combined emotions of a WWII novel and The Full Monty, with it's 'band of brothers'-like bantering and the emotions simmering under a surface of beer and beautiful language. Same goes for The Handmaid's Tale; it's old, it's great, I've written all you need to know when I read it. Funnily enough, both Last Orders and The Handmaid's Tale could count as my 'classics' this year; they are both over 20 years old, and still very current.

Best Dutch novel/classics
Non-existent this year. Strange, as I did get lots of new novels, and have a pretty long backlog in both these categories. They must never have been at the top of the to-read list.

Best non-fiction/best short story collection
Only one novel in each of these categories this year, so not really lists to speak of.

Best fantasy/scifi novel
1 Exit West
2 The Handmaid's Tale
3 The High Mountains of Portugal
Not a lot of these to go around either, but I would of course have put in Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green if they hadn't been rereads. Two of these also feature in my Best English novel list, but The High Mountains of Portual deserves special mention. Yann Martel, like Mohsin Hamid and David Mitchell, can capture you with a world that is very much like ours, but than turns out to be slightly unlike ours in a magical way, and your suspension of disbelief just goes with that until you find yourself in their made-up world still fully believing that these things could really happen here and now. Realistic fantasy, a true escape into literature.

Best 'new' author
1 Elizabeth Jane Howard
2 Graham Swift
3 Margaret Atwood
Only Elizabeth Jane Howard is really a 'new' author for 2017, and I've written enough about her novels in my previous blog post. But Graham Swift and Margaret Atwood are some of my recent discoveries of whom I want to read more. I'd read my first novel by Swift, Mothering Sunday, as one of my last novels in 2016 and this year I continued with Last Orders and his short-story collection England and other stories. I'd have wanted Wish you were here on the list as well, but it went into reprint just as I ordered it, so that will have to go for 2018 (when I wrote about Last Orders in March it had also disappeared from view in the bookshop, so I'll have to look into that...). Margaret Atwood is not really a 'new' author for me, as I read Oryx & Crake during my English studies, but she is one of the authors I've put on my 'must read more' list. This year I read The Handmaid's Tale and Hag-seed, both of which are great in their own way. I got The Heart goes Last a couple of weeks ago, so she will also feature in the 2018 list.

Most disappointing novel
1 How to be good
2 The Sellout
3 The Outrun
(4 The Best of Adam Sharp)
Wow, this was really the easiest category to fill this year. Not a good sign. I was looking forward to How to be good, one of the few Hornby novels I'd never read, but it was thoroughly disappointing. Moralistic, full of angry relationship issues, with a wavering plot and unlikeable characters. The Sellout was the Man Booker winner of 2016, so naturally I read it, but I didn't like it at all. It is supposed to be a funny social commentary on contemporary America, but I can't remember finding any bit of it funny. The main character struck me as pathetic, his backstory was unbelievable and the plot even more so. The Outrun appeared to be good at first; girl returns to small town Orkney life after her big-city London life blows up in her face, but in the end it didn't really go anywhere, the character didn't come to life for me as in so many of these 'woman retreats to find herself' novels. Special mention for The Best of Adam Sharp, again a novel by Graeme Simpsion that disappointed. It felt like a slight do-over of The Rosie Project, with some High Fidelity elements thrown in. He really turned out only one good novel, his first, and I will now stop reading whatever else he writes until the recommendations tell me it really is too great to miss.

Authors I read more than once
- Elizabeth Jane Howard (4x)
- Margaret Atwood (2x)
- Graham Swift (2x)
- Nick Hornby (2x, one reread and one new)
- David Mitchell (2x, both rereads)

Books to go

A couple of months ago, I read an interview (I can't remember with who, or where) that has been haunting me ever since. It was with someone aged around 60, who had decided to only read new books, and about once or twice a year reread a book that he already knew he loved. Because, as he reasoned, he read only about 20 books per year, and as he had only about 20 more years to live (at least, that was the number he was aiming for) that made a grand total of 400 books left to read in his entire lifetime. He felt sorry that he hadn't read more great novels when he had the time (in his teens, twenties, and generally before he had a job or children) and now he wanted to make every book worthwhile.
Imagine that! I mean, it is a noble idea, of course, and great planning on his side, but the whole depressing thought of knowing how many books you're still going to read in your life, basically means saying 'no' to a lot of books, and closing the door on so many reading experiences. And when you read a new novel that you absolutely love, you automatically go 'aw, but I won't ever read you again, because I don't have enough slots left for rereads!' Horrible thought.

But still, the man had a point. I mean, my situation is not nearly as dire, as I am only 31, read 40 books per year, so with his projected life expectancy I would still have 2000 books to go, but I too have spent time reading novels I didn't enjoy, didn't think were going anywhere, or just read out of politeness to the person who lend it to me. I am terrible at not finishing a novel; once I've started, I feel like I am committed to finish it, no matter how awful I think it is. (Non-fiction is different, by the way, I have about 10 non-fiction books laying around with bookmarks stuck somewhere in the first 50 pages that I'm not sure I will ever finish.) But all those non-enjoyable books take up a lot of time. Even more time than the good ones, respectively, because I automatically read less when I don't like what I'm reading, so it takes more time to finish them.
So, time for a change.
In 2015, I gave myself the challenge of reading 52 books, and of only reading books I hadn't read before. I didn't make the number, but I did read all new novels. This is a great idea in principle, but some of those novels I did not enjoy. Still, I kept reading, to reach my goal. New rule from now one: if I don't like a novel, or feel myself avoiding reading, I will stop reading that novel and start something else.
Next up; rereads. I like rereads, especially during busy periods when my mind is too distracted to dive into a complex new novel; rereads are like a familiar warm bath that relax my brain and don't care if I miss out on some smaller details because I already know the main plot. During the renovation and move, I read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, for example. Which is great, but too many rereads get in the way of new novels. So; rereads are only allowed when needed.
Finally, I have several authors who are my absolute favourite and whose every new novel that comes out I read immediately. Examples include Ian McEwan and David Mitchell. There are also some authors who would probably make it onto that all-time-favourite-have-read-everything-will-read-every-new-novel-that-comes-out list, but who I keep forgetting about, until I by accident read another one of their novels, go 'this author is great, I should read more by them!' and then forget about them again. Examples include Margaret Atwood and Graham Swift. So, third new rule; read more novels by potential to-love authors.

As always with literature, I will probably break any rule I make within half a year, but they do give me some comfort with the depressing 'the end is neigh!' feelings I have been walking around with for a while. And if you'll excuse me, I will now get back to my John le Carré, a novel that I felt was sagging a bit in the middle, but did not put down, for, er... reasons.

Books of 2016

In 2015, I set myself the goal of reading one book a week, or 52 books in a year. As you may remember, I failed at that, but still managed to read 41 books in total. The catch was that I could only read books I'd never read before, which put both a strain on my finance, and made me ache for some the books I wanted to reread, but wasn't allowed to. And also, I didn't really have the time to finish a book each week, with the size of the novels I was reading (The discovery of heaven just takes a couple of weeks, at best).
This year, I did not set myself any reading goals, but I did keep track of ever book I read. Just a short list at the back of my agenda, which worked well for me in 2015, and again so this year. I think this is a habit I will keep, as it is nice to see how much you've read, but also which novels. On one of the first days of this year, I made some lists about what I'd read in 2015, and as I'm pretty sure I won't finish any books in 2016 anymore, I will now do the same for this year.
In total, I read 21 books, which feels about right for a 'normal' year in which I wasn't trying to push any particular number. Looking back on the list I had some "wow, did I read that this year?" moments, for books which feel like they've been inhabitants of my bookcases for years. Other books I'd simply completely forgotten about. and some I will never forget about. Some I've written about extensively, others I've apparently never mentioned here.

This is the complete list for 2016:

1 Grief is the thing with feathers
2 The Art of Asking
3 Bonita Avenue
4 A God in Ruins
5 Pluche
6 As in tas
7 De verwarde cavia
8 Anna Karenina
9 Me before you
10 The Martian
11 Slade House
12 In the light of what we know
13 Magnus
14 A little life
15 After you
16 Northern lights
17 On Chesil Beach
18 Amsterdam
19 The buried giant
20 Mothering Sunday
21 Nutshell

Some differences from 2015: there are two rereads in this list (both by Ian McEwan), and there are more Dutch books, relatively speaking. Only three non-fiction books. Fewer classics.
So, to destill some lists (of just the newly read books):

Best English novel
1 A God in Ruins
2 Mothering Sunday
3 Nutshell
This was a difficult one. I read a lot of great books this year, and one would probably expect the much-praised A little life or In the light of what we know to be in this list too. However, this year has confirmed for me that I love two things in novels: small, intimate plots, and what we shall call 'literary' language. This explains for Mothering Sunday and Nutshell, which are both very small, very literarily written (yes, that is a word), and take place in the space of a single day or a single womb. And A God in Ruins (can you believe I'd actually forgotten I read that book this year?) is just beautiful. Kate Atkinson previously wrote Life after life, which was great too, but this (sort of) sequel is even beter. I cried when I finished it, probably the only book I cried about apart from Slade House (and Me before you, if I'm to believe what I've written before). I'd never expected two 'new' authors to jump ahead of my beloved Ian McEwan, but Nutshell just wasn't good enough for the competition.

Best Dutch novel
I'm supposed to put a list here, but really, I didn't like any of the Dutch novels I read this year. Bonita Avenue is hailed as some sort of magnus opus, while being a debut, but I didn't really see it. Magnus is by one of my favourite comedians, but it wasn't all that great. De verwarde cavia was just cheap. It was a sad year for Dutch literature in my list.

Best non-fiction (whichever language)
1 Pluche
2 The Art of Asking
3 As in tas
None of these were really great, but As in tas is really just cashing in on the author's father's dead, while I've written enough about what is wrong with The Art of Asking in another post. Pluche is the memoirs of one of my favourite politicians, and while not perfect, definitely the best of this lot.

Best fantasy/scifi novel
1 The Martian
2 The buried giant
3 Slade House
The Martian is definitely one of the best realistic scifi novels I've read in a long time. It is funny, dramatic, scientifically realistic, and as I'd already seen the movie, I kept picturing Matt Damon, which is pretty nice too. The buried giant is the most unlikely fantasy novel I've ever read, deeper and darker than I'd expected. I would not normally put a David Mitchell novel at the bottom of a list, but Slade House was just too short, and it felt a bit too rushed. Like he wanted to get a short novel out there before going on to one of his normally much lager ones. Let's hope we get one of those in 2017.

Most disappointing novel
1 After you
2 De verwarde cavia
3 A little life
Funny how much a book can disappoint you even when you aren't really expecting anything great from it. After you is the sequal to Me before you, and it doesn't get any more cliche. Really, don't read it. De verwarde cavia was self-published by one of my favourite comedians and non-fiction writers, so I had my hopes up, but it is really about nothing. fluff. Wasted time. I feel almost ashamed for putting A little life in this list, because it has been so acclaimed, and everybody loves it. And I loved it too, the first two-thirds of it. Then it just got too... not gruesome, although I've heard enough people say that too. It just got too lost in it's own plot. The author really wanted to complete the whole 'life', and as such threw in a lot of stuff that a good editor would have taken out again. Really, at 60% of the pages, a more condensed, focussed story would have made for a better novel. So this novel really became a disappointment as I was reading it, and if it hadn't been for the final 200 pages, this book would be at the top of my "Best English novels" list. Funnily enough, when I wrote about it earlier, I was far more positive about this novel, so apparently my opinion changed radically in hindsight.

And finally, because I put it in last year:

Authors I read more than once
- Ian McEwan (3x)
- Jojo Moyes (2x)
Like last year, one of my favourite authors is the most-read one (last year it was David Mitchell and Dave Nicholls). I could do a McEwan top 3 (On Chesil Beach, Nutshell, Amsterdam) but really, who does that sort of thing?

52 Books Challenge - The lists

Now I'm not normally a person for lists or ratings or 'highlights of the past year' or something, but given that I have 41 books which I can group into a couple of meaningful categories, I'm going to give it a go in this instance. These are the things that popped into my head while looking over the books I'd read this year.

Best English novel
1 The Children Act
2 Black Swan Green
3 One Day
Pretty typical, in a year where I'm reading only new novels, that my favourite novels still come from that group of male British authors that I've loved over the years. Must be my style. Also, the only Ian McEwan novel I read all year (and the first novel I read this year) is still a firm number 1. New to this list is of course Dave Nicholls, who I hadn't read before this year, but am now a really big fan of.

Best Dutch novel
1 Tongkat
2 Kom hier dat ik u kus
3 De Aanslag
This was a pretty hard choice between Tongkat and Kom hier dat ik u kus, because they are both beautiful, wonderful novels in their own way. But Tongkat is just so special, I cannot really get my head around it (I will reread it in the near future).

Best non-fiction (whichever language)
1 Dit kan niet waar zijn
2 My Brief History
3 Gratis geld voor iedereen
Three widely divergent books, but all three good in their own way, and all three containing lots of personal notes/touches/stories of the author.

Best short story collection
1 Speaking with the angel
2 The Beautifull Cassandra
3 The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
I didn't read that many short story collections, and none of them were really brilliant, but still, a top 3. Also, my only Jane Austen reading of this year is in there.

Best WWI/II novel
1 The Narrow Road to the Deep North
2 All Quiet on the Western Front
3 Slaughterhouse 5
As always, I read a lot of War novels this year, and some stand out. The Narrow Road... won the Man Booker for a reason; it is a beautifully written, deeply haunting novel about WWII in Asia. Nr 2 and 3 are classics in the genre, and for a good reason. I've said it before, and I will say it again; if everybody would read these horribly fantastic novels, no one would ever start a war again.

Best comic novel
1 Shades of Grey
2 Funny Girl
3 Starter for Ten
I don't often read funny novels, but when I do, they're usually by Nick Hornby or Jasper Fforde, who find themselves high on this list. And then there's another Dave Nicholls, of course.

Classics (whichever language)
1 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
2 Brideshead Revisited
3 De Aanslag
Brideshead Revisited and De Aanslag are technically both also WWII novels, but when looking at them as classics, they somehow rank higher than some of the other WW novels. And the John le Carre novel just blew me away - I will definitely read more by him in 2016.

Most disappointing novels
1 The Rosie Effect
2 All the Light we cannot See
3 The Book of Lost Things
Not everything was good. I was really looking forward to The Rosie Effect, because I loved The Rosie Project, but this was one of the most disappointing sequels I've ever read. All the Light we cannot See won the Pullizer, but really, it's such a hyped-up American WWII novel, I couldn't care for it in any way. And The Book of Lost Things is one of the worst fairy tale retellings I've ever read. If you want to read a good one, go for The Sleeper and The Spindle (my only Neil Gaiman novel, which I couldn't fit anywhere else).

And to complete the list craze, not a top 3 but another neat list:

Authors I read more than once
- David Mitchell (3x)
- Dave Nicholls (3x)
- Rutger Bregman (2x)
- John le Carre (2x)
- Harry Mulisch (2x)
- Nick Hornby (2x)
Again, some of my all time favourites are also recurring reads. I could do you a top 3 of Mitchell novels (Black Swan Green, The Bone Clocks, Number9dream) and Dave Nicholls (One Day, A Starter for Ten, Us), but that would be stretching things.

52 book challenge - September

I will be back to blogging regularly at some point, but that point is still somewhat vague and far away, so please don't hold your breath. In the meantime, I am still reading books, and I will still post my book challenge lists, if only to show that books are indeed one of the great escapes.
Where I stand now:
32 The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell
33 All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
34 Shades of Grey - Jasper Fforde

The Bone Clocks is Mitchell's biggest and bestest book so far. Somehow, he managed to incorporate what made Black Swan Green so great, into the structure of what made Cloud Atlas or Ghostwritten so great. I can't really say that much about it, because saying anything will give away the plot, but I recommend everyone to read it. Although of course you should read all of his other novels first, in the order they came out, because some of his characters (or their parents, children, or siblings) reoccur in several of his novels. Which is just one of the many, many layers to be found in The Bone Clocks.
Then I read All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer this year. I am not generally fond of American novels and novelists, and reading this novel, I remembered why. Everything is just a bit too polished, to convenient, there are no loose ends or sharp edges. All the characters fit just a bit too snugly in their little corner of the world, and they have just exactly those experiences and talents and qualities that lead them to be on exactly the right place for the big denouement. Also, the structure didn't really work, with alternating chapters between the male and female protagonists, which didn't quite fit at some crucial points, so then Doerr just put in a repeat chapter of the same character. Pick a structure and stick to it, or don't have one at all; a botched up alternating structure doesn't work. The ending was slightly surprising, until it all became a bit too much Sarah's Key. Just yesterday I listened to someone who had written her thesis on "the Americanisation of the holocaust", which is exactly what happened here, and which maybe something I will write more about in the future.
Finally, I read Shades of Grey, which has nothing whatsoever to do with 50 Shades of Grey, and was published 2 years earlier. It's about a dystopian future, set after Something Happened, and in which people can only see very little colour. There is a ranking according to which colour you can see, with Purple being the highest, and Grey the lowest. This is just one example of the complex, bewildering, and utterly pointless rules in place in this society, which also include regular 'leapbacks', in which perfectly functional technology is cast aside to create a society deteriorating itself on purpose. I loved Fforde's Thursday Next series, and this novel was great fun too. It's the first in a trilogy, with the next novel coming out next year, an if you're into comical dystopianism, it's one to read.
So wildly differing novels, all contemporary, and in varying modes of realism and seriousness. I'll save the classics for when my mind has enough space to properly absorb and digest a piece of good literature, although David Mitchell's novels are nothing less.

52 books challenge - June

Wow, is this year going faster than other years, or what? I feel like May has just begun (I've just come back from China), and suddenly it's almost July already! We're bracing ourselves for some of the hottest days to come this year (30+ temperatures, the whole country is in an uproar) and in the meantime I even managed to read some books!
19 De vegetarier (The Vegetarian) - Han Kang
20 The assassination of Margaret Thatcher - Hilary Mantel
21 Us - David Nicholls
22 Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
23 Gooseberries - Anton Chekov

I alllmost managed to finish The Talented Mr Ripley as well, but then sleep overtook me, so that will have to go in next month's list.
But considering that the last full week of June was last week (week 26), and I'm now at 23 books, I seem to have actually caught up by one book! I am now only 3 books behind!
So I read some wildly differing books this month. The Vegetarian is by a South Korean writer who I'd never heard of, and it is a very beautiful but also slightly disturbing book about a woman who decides to stop eating meat, and the events that unravel because of that choice. It makes you wonder whether anyone is actually in their right mind at any time. I feel that Us is this years The Rosie Project: the book about a scientifically minded man (first-person narrator) who falls in love with this artsy girl but can't quite get the affection across because of his slightly autistic nature. Only in Us, the couple are actually married (much to the surprise of the protagonist) and their marriage is falling apart. Also, Us has a wonderful sense of humour, which makes me want to read more books by Nicholls. Then there was Gooseberries, short stories by Chekov, to complement the short stories by Hilary Mantel. And finally Black Swan Green, of which I've written a lot already.
Hopefully the approaching summer weather will mean lots of lazy afternoons filled with reading and eating home-grown strawberries...

Black Swan Green

So I've been reading quite a lot to keep up with my 52 Book Challenge, and one of the books I've recently read was Black Swan Green by David Michell. Now I may not have written all that much about him here, but David Mitchell (not to be confused with the comedian of the same name) is one of my favourite authors.
As with most of my favourite authors, I first read his most well-known novel, Cloud Atlas, because you have to start somewhere, and if lots of people are saying a book is great, you start to believe them. And it is great, beautifully written, very intricate, with seven different 'layers' of story all interweaving into one big saga. Most people know the novel, or the film, which was less good but still nice. Then I read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which is about a Dutchman living in Decima in Japan. This novel doesn't have the whole 'separate stories making up one bigger story', but that is a good thing, because it lets you focus on how great the actual writing is. The sentences are very well-constructed, with lots of imagery and metaphor; it is almost poetic. Which meant that I'd become hooked, and that I had to read his three earlier novels too, while waiting for a new one to come out.
His 'earlier' novels, before he became really famous for Cloud Atlas, are Ghostwritten, number9dream, and Black Swan Green, and I read them in that order (although Black Swan Green was published after Cloud Atlas, it never go the same amount of attention, weirdly enough). I've done the same with Ian McEwan's novels after 'discovering' him with Atonement and Saturday, and I think this is a great way to get to know an author, see how they've developed with regards to themes and characters, but also the things that really show their style, who they are as an author. Ghostwritten follows a slightly similar pattern as Cloud Atlas, only less complicated and well-developed: it travels through various countries and characters in various chapters, as the protagonist 'moves' through different people. You can definitely see his style as an author and his way of combining different stories into one, and the mystical elements that become part of all of his novels, but this is clearly a 'first novel'. Then in number9dream and Black Swan Green, we follow the live of a young, teenage male protagonist during a difficult period in their lives. number9dream is set in Japan, and it is a coming-of-age story in which a boy searches for his long-lost father, getting further entrenched in the Japanese underground world. In this novel, there a strong sense of imagination; some scenes don't really happen, but just take place inside the head of the main character as he ponders his options. It is sometimes confusing to read, but very nicely done, and it keeps you as a reader on your toes.
And then there is Black Swan Green. In this, we follow 13-year-old Jason for one year, from January to December 1982, and experience one (or sometimes several) day of each month through his eyes. The chapters begin and end quite suddenly, so you sometimes don't really know what happend until someone mentions something in a later chapter, and some things you never really find out. Which is okay, because again the writing is some of the most beautiful I've ever written (Jason is a poet, after all) and the scenes just take on a magical atmosphere of their own. What happens, really, is nothing out of the ordinary for a 13-year-old in the early 1980s, but because of Mitchell's style, it becomes almost fairytale-like to read. Also, I've just found out that it's semi-autobiographical, which gives it a whole extra layer of complexity. In all, I think Black Swan Green may be my favourite Mitchell novel, even ahead of Cloud Atlas.
So Mitchell is great with his (written) language, and his characters are very well-rounded and deep, and his plots are amazing (even when nothing really happens, which is a lot of the time). But there is one final thing that makes his novels so interesting to read; they are all interconnected. Where Marvel has its Marvel Cinematic Universe, with all of their super-hero movies combined into one larger story, so all of Mitchell's novels are also connected. Characters from one novel appear in another, or are referenced to, or there are other connections that you only see when you've read the novels quite carefully. For example, take Mrs. Crommelynck, who teaches Jason about poetry in Black Swan Green. She mentions she is the daughter of a famous composer from Belgium, whose last sextet was actually written by a young man named Frobisher. This sextet, and the character of Frobisher, form a very important part of Cloud Atlas. Then there is the song '#9 Dream' by John Lennon, played in Black Swan Green, but obviously a reference to number9dream. Several other characters, including classmates and teachers of Jason, appear in other novels or short stories by David Mitchell. So all in all, you get the feeling that not only some of his novels consist of several smaller stories making up one bigger story; no, all of his novels combined make up one large David Mitchell universe, with some things actually taking place in this place and time, and some in mysterious pasts, unknown futures, or mystical 'other' worlds very similar to our own. He does count on his readers to be intelligent, attentive, and amazed. Although the novels are just as nice without seeing the connections, it just adds another layer of brilliance.
Luckily for me, his newest novel The Bone Clocks is out already, and waiting on my 'to read' pile (and another novel, Slade House, is said to come out this year). But as with all great writers, I have to take a little break with some other, lighter novels, before I can dive into one of his intricate and beautiful stories again. It is an experience you can't get enough of, but one you should take in small, measured quantities, or all other novels will seem unoriginal, unintelligent, and uninspired by comparison.

Holiday novels

Someone asked me whether I'd had a relaxing holiday and read lots of books. I said yes to both, but when they (jealously, as they had been on holiday with 3 small children) asked me which books I'd read, I couldn't remember any of them! They were quietly amused, and I sat there cracking my head at which ones they were all through the rest of the conversations.
Finally I managed to remember 3, and including the one I'm still reading now that makes 4. Somehow the fifth book has completely disappeared from memory.
I think that is quite interesting, because I remember liking, enjoying, and maybe even getting a little emotional at all novels I read. So they had some impact while I was reading them, but not enough impact to actually remain with me?

One of the novels I can remember is a Dutch book by Bert Wagendorp called Ventoux. It is supposedly about the 'magic of male friendship', and the author has stated in several interviews that he thinks male friendship is deeper and more special than female friendship, because only men could not talk to each other for 30 years and then meet again, pat each other on the back, and go drink a beer. Which is probably true, but that does not mean female friendships (or male/female friendships, of which I tend to have more) are not as deep as the full male bonding, it just means that the author is male and had enforced his male perspective.
While a fun read, it was not really life-changing.

I am currently still reading Wolf Hall, because I read Bring Up the Bodies and then discovered that this is actually the sequel to Wolf Hall, so I decided to read them in the wrong order because the main plot line is known anyway: Henry VIII kills or disposes of everyone in his way to marry Anne Boleyn, and in the sequel he does the same to marry Jane Seymour. Also, the novels are great anyway, whichever order you read them in.

The novel that made the most impact was Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, which can be seen as a sort of study for his real masterpiece Cloud Atlas. You can see the same sort of techniques and interweavings at work, but also where he will improve and how he will learn to give his characters more depth of personality. Still, a brilliant novel.

Then I read a non-fiction work about how the digital world is destroying all our mental capacity, which was fun and disturbing. And then there was the fifth book, which I cannot remember.

So really, the novel that had the strongest impact on me recently must be The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, even though I bought that as an afterthought and finished it in an afternoon. I even cried a little towards the end, which is in my eyes the mark of a really good novel. And it just goes to show that great authors keep on getting better and producing better things, even when it's just a novella, even when it's fantasy. Which makes me very hopeful about David Mitchell's upcoming works.