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)