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Your Top Ten Books of 2005

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They don't have to have been published in 2005, so long as you first read them this year...

1. Small Island, Andrea Levy
2. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
3. Collected Stories, Richard Yates
4. Explorers of the New Century, Magnus Mills
5. Mobius Dick, Andrew Crumey
6. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
7. Essential Tales of Chekhov, ed. Richard Ford
8. Young Hearts Crying, Richard Yates
9. Mutants, Armand Marie Leroi
10. Everything That Rises Must Converge, Flannery O'Connor

and bubbling under...
  • Arthur & George, Julian Barnes
  • Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke, Rob Long
  • Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
  • Oracle Night, Paul Auster
  • The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
  • Fifth Business, Robertson Davies
  • The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Sloan Wilson

What does your list look like?
 
Here is my list for 2005.

1. “Liveship Traders” trilogy by Robin Hobb
2. “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides
3. “The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque” by Jeffrey Ford
4. “Jennifer Government” by Max Berry
5. “The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated by Lucia Graves
6. “The Virgin Suicides” by Jeffrey Eugenides
7. “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini
8. “Veniss Underground” by Jeff VanderMeer
9. “The Great American Novel” by Philip Roth
10. “The Etched City” by K. J. Bishop

Honorable mention:

11. “Paper Crown” by Jim Peterson
12. “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski
13. “Eight Men Out” by Eliot Asinof (non-fiction)
14. “Tuesdays With Morrie” by Mitch Albom (non-fiction)
 
(I can't rank them, so they're alphabetical by author.)
Success — Martin Amis
Case Histories — Kate Atkinson
Little Black Book of Stories — A.S. Byatt
The Epicure's Lament — Kate Christensen
A Ghost in the Machine — Caroline Graham
Bibliophilia — Michael Griffith
The Healing — Gayl Jones
Lipstick on the Host — Aidan Mathews
Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
The Parts — Keith Ridgway
 
I have two left I hope to finish by the end of the year and I expect both of them to make the top ten so I will include them at the end of the list asterisked. I'm blown away by Dostoevsky so I can't imagine Notes From Underground not making the list and Eco's book is on there solely by reputation. I'm starting that book today.

1. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
6. Hawaii by James Michener
7. Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat
8. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
9. Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky*
10. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco*

Honourable mentions: Orwell's Animal Farm, Follet's The Pillars of the Earth and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
 
Difficult to choose, but here's my collection of pretties.

1. The Life of Pi - Yann Martel
2. About a Boy - Nick Hornby
3. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
4. The Grapes of Wroth - John Steinbeck
5. The English - Jeremy Paxman
6. Who Runs Britain? - Jeremy Paxman
7. Autobiography - John Major
8. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
9. James and The Giant Peach - Roahl Dahl
10. Through the Looking-Glass - C.S.Lewis

(thats in no order)
 
No Country for Old Men by Cormac MacCarthy
Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Until I Find You by John Irving
I, Lucifer by Glenn Duncan
The Reunion by Laura Antoniou
The Company of Strangers by Robert Wilson
Submission by Marthe Blau
Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee
Dispatch by Bentley Little
 
I can't rank them, so into alphabetical order they go:

Oryx and Crake -- Margaret Atwood
Ender's Game -- Orson Scott Card
Darkfall/Darksong -- Isobelle Carmody
Cross Stitch -- Diana Gabaldon
Dragonfly in Amber -- Diana Gabaldon
Voyager -- Diana Gabaldon
Memoirs of a Geisha -- Arthur Golden
Life of Pi -- Yann Martel
His Dark Materials series -- Philip Pullman (cheating a bit, I know, but I couldn't choose!)
Day of the Triffids -- John Wyndham

and honourable mentions:
Fall on Your Knees -- Anne Marie MacDonald
Palindrome Hannah Micheal Bailey
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer
 
I read mostly classics:

1. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2. The Way by Swann's - Marcel Proust
3. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
4. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
5. On the Road - Jack Keroac
6. The Divine Comedy - Dante
7. Ulysses - James Joyce
8. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare
10. Notes from the Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Some others:
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
Harry Potter Number 6 - J. K. Rowling
 
Here are mine - just the ones from which I got the most pure enjoyment:

1. Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie
2. Four to Score by Janet Evanovich
3. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
4. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
5. In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson
 
Hard to narrow down to ten, but I'll give it a go...

In no particular order:

Tales From Two Pockets - Karel Capek
The Big Hunger - John Fante
Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman (re-read)
Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Wind-Up Bird Cronicle - Haruki Murakami
1984 - George Orwell (re-read)
The Hustler - Walter Tevis
A Writer At War - Anthony Beevor
Rotten: No Irish No Blacks No Dogs - John Lydon

Mentioned in dispatches:

The Rape of Nanking - Iris Chang
Screen Burn - Charlie Brooker
Bobby Fisher Goes To War - David Edmonds & John Kidman
Charley's War - Pat Mills

Out of all of them the big suprise was The Hustler, an absolute gem of a book from a purely speculative purchase. The scene with the first pool game between Minisota Fats and Fast Eddie is probably the best peice of writing I've read all year.

K-S
 
In no particular order:

Losing Julia – Jonathan Hull
The Memory of Love – Nicole Krauss
The Death & Life of Charlie St. Cloud – Ben Sherwood
The Ha-Ha – David King
The Memory of Running – Ron McLarty
Peace Like a River – Leif Enger
Six Bad Things – Charlie Huston
The Death Collectors - Jack Kerley
Sudden Death – David Rosenfelt
Blood Lines – Jan Burke

...and looking forward to 2006!
 
Here they are in no particular order:

1. Cold Sassy Tree-Olive Ann Burns

2.On Writing-Stephen King

3.The Sea of Trolls-Nancy Farmer

4.Confederates in the Attic-Tony Horowitz

5. Hunters of the Dark Sea-Mel Odom

6. Dies the Fire-S.M. Stirling

7.The Song Reader-Lisa Tucker

8. A Patchwork Planet- Anne Tyler

9. A Game of Thrones-George R.R. Martin

10.Book Lust-Nancy Pearl


Honorable mentions:
The Long Rifle-Edward White (thanks muggle!)
Blue Like Jazz-Donald Miller
Prince Caspian-C.S. Lewis
Tales From the Turtle-ed. Piers Anthony
Dernyi Rising-Katherine Kurtz
 
Kookamoor said:
Ooo! Please start a thread! Is this the final book in the Obernewtyn chronicles, *FINALLY*????
Click to expand...
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but no. These are the first two books in a different trilogy by Carmody (I'd post a link, but as she's quite obscure overseas, and this trilogy even more so, I can't find any good ones). The new one isn't out until about 2007, which means she would have been writing it for at least 6 years :mad:

Speaking of Obernewtyn, do you think that they are worth reading? I've heard from some that they are great, but from others that they are a bit simple and it's a bit too obvious that she was young when she wrote them, well the first at least.
 
These aren't in any particular order.

NF:
Pledged - Alexandra Robbins
Confederates in the Attic - Tony Horowitz (how shocked am I that I'm not the only one to list this)

F:
Small Island - Andrea Levy
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Club Dumas - Arturo Perez-Reverte
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim - David Sedaris
Sideways - Rex Pickett
Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
 
mehastings said:
These aren't in any particular order.

NF:
Pledged - Alexandra Robbins
Confederates in the Attic - Tony Horowitz (how shocked am I that I'm not the only one to list this)

F:
Small Island - Andrea Levy
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Club Dumas - Arturo Perez-Reverte
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim - David Sedaris
Sideways - Rex Pickett
Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Click to expand...



I'm reading No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency at the moment, and enjoying it very much. It could go on my top of the year favorites too if there were room . What's funny, I tried it over a year ago and couldn't get past the first chapter. This time I pulled out my world atlas and did a background check on Botswana on the net. That helped a lot.
 
abecedarian said:
I'm reading No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency at the moment, and enjoying it very much. It could go on my top of the year favorites too if there were room . What's funny, I tried it over a year ago and couldn't get past the first chapter. This time I pulled out my world atlas and did a background check on Botswana on the net. That helped a lot.
Click to expand...

Yes, it is a funny little book. I don't think it was up near the top of the ten, but I enjoyed the humor in it so I added it in. My mom has read all of them and keeps pushing me to continue the series. I will at some point, but right now I'm just not into it.
 
MonkeyCatcher said:
Speaking of Obernewtyn, do you think that they are worth reading? I've heard from some that they are great, but from others that they are a bit simple and it's a bit too obvious that she was young when she wrote them, well the first at least.
Click to expand...
Bah! :mad: See new thread/rant on Isobelle Carmody.

I don't know. I haven't picked up Obernewtyn since I read it (a second time) for school in... um... 1994? Maybe? So I don't think I can really discuss whether or not her writing has changed. It certianly was her first book, though, so I would expect that she has improved greatly since then. I wouldn't recommend starting the series until it is complete, though. And by the time that happens you may have a teenage daughter of your own to steal it from :rolleyes:.
 
Top ten for 2005 (not ordered):

  • The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford and other stories - Philip K. Dick
  • The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy (nf) - David Barsamian
  • The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
  • Guns, Germs and Steel (nf) - Jared Diamond
  • The Memory of Running - Ron McLarty
  • Runaway - Alice Munro
  • Time's Arrow - Martin Amis
  • Bird by Bird (nf) - Anne Lamott
  • If On a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino
  • Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

Honourable mentions: The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon; The Club Dumas - Arturo Perez-Reverte; The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

ps. Kook, I like your Christmas duds. :)
 
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