Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope that whatever you do during this season that all is well with you and that the remaining days of 2017 are just how you want them. Perhaps I can help you find a book . . .

It’s always fun to reflect on the past reading year! It started with a lot of reading. For the first several months I was a judge on the Best Translated Book Award, and books were piled all over the house. I whittled them down, unable to stop reading long enough to write proper reviews here. Looking back on my blogging year, I reviewed only one book in January: César Aira’s Ema, the Captive, which will not be listed below. That surprised me, but I see it was the same in February! It pretty much continued in this vein until BTBA judging was over.

Once it was over, though it was a wonderful experience, I found myself languishing with the debilitating gift of choice! I had a hard time finding my reading groove again. In fact, before sitting down to compile this list, I wasn’t sure I’d reviewed ten books that I’d want on this list and was thinking of putting books on here that I have not reviewed. That’s not an unreasonable approach; it would allow me to list these, for example:

• Chronicle of the Murdered House, by Lúcio Cardoso, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa; this was our ultimate BTBA winner (purchase from Amazon)
• Radiant Terminus, by Antoine Volodine, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman (purchase from Amazon)
• For Two Thousand Years, by Mihail Sebastian, translated from the Romanian by Philip Ó Ceallaigh (purchase from Amazon)
• Compass, by Mathias Énard, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell (purchase from Amazon)

Those four would certainly be on the list below, had I reviewed them already, but I’m looking at rereading them soon so I can write a review proper and add them next year. Plus, then I’d have to figure out what books below should be booted, and I don’t need that! So check out the list below, with links to the original reviews.

Other links, by the way, are to Amazon.com; if you click on them and purchase the books, The Mookse and the Gripes gets a small portion of the price.

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season, and may you lose yourself in a good book!

The Company She Keeps
by Mary McCarthy
(original review from April 6, 2017)
purchase at Amazon

Earlier this year, The Library of America released a two-book set called Mary McCarthy: The Complete Fiction. It’s an exceptional set that contains all seven of McCarthy’s novels as well as her short stories. Her debut, and the one I read right when the box arrived, is The Company She Keeps, which I loved from page one:

She could not bear to hurt her husband. She impressed this on the Young Man, on her confidantes, and finally on her husband himself. The thought of Telling Him actually made her heart turn over in a sudden and sickening way, she said.

McCarthy, I’ve found, is a very important twentieth-century author, and I was glad for the introduction.

The Little Buddhist Monk
by César Aira
translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor
(original review from May 31, 2017)
purchase at Amazon

A new Aira always has a good shot at making my year-end list, and this one, one of my favorites in years, was a certainty the moment I put it down. In classic Aira fashion, the book starts innocently enough before taking us for a strange, disorienting ride. More than he’s done recently, Aira writes about his own writing process and his relationship with the trusting, unsuspecting reader. For me, it all came together beautifully.

Night had fallen, and the little Buddhist monk had been left all alone, far from home. His plan had failed: the birds had flown. With hindsight, he realized he had let his imagination run away with him. How was someone so small and weak going to trap such huge powerful quarry in his nets? Greater feats had been heard of, but not in cruel reality.

Thus Bad Begins
by Javier Marías
translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
(original review from July 26, 2017)
purchase at Amazon

I’ve read this book first last year (I even mentioned it in my 2016 year-end post), but I reread it this year and reviewed it finally, so here it is, listed again! I love Marías’s work. While I do not consider Thus Bad Begins to be his best books (or even in his top three), that’s mostly because he’s written so many strong books — this one, again about the futile quest for pure truth — is still phenomenal.

In those days, in those years, certain distant events were just beginning to be discussed in private, things that many Spaniards had been obliged to keep quiet about in public for decades and which had only very occasionally been talked about in whispers within the family and with ever-longer intervening silences, as if, quite apart from the forbidden nature of the subject matter, there was a desire to confine such events to the realm of nightmares, to relegate them to the bearable fog of what may or may not have happened.

Ties
by Domenico Starnone
translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri
(original review from August 1, 2017)
purchase at Amazon

Jhumpa Lahiri’s name was what really got me to start reading Ties; the story itself kept me going late one night. Here we get another exploration of a relationship, spread out over time. We see how unresolved conflict can fester and pervade a relationship that both parties, for their own reasons, feel compelled to perpetuate. Here a husband and wife have a falling out, split up for quite some time, and then come back together. We capture them late in their life, untrusting but wary of splitting and experiencing that particular kind of pain and loneliness again.

Enough, sorry, I’m going overboard. I know you, I know you’re a decent person. But please, as soon as you read this letter, come home. Or, if you still aren’t up to it, write to me and explain what you’re going through.

Alexander’s Bridge
by Willa Cather
(original review from August 4, 2017)
purchase at Amazon

I’ve read several of Cather’s novels, and I’ve admired her for years. Still, I’d never made it a point to study up on her and read all of her work. But Thomas Otto and The Library of America reminded me of how nice it might be to venture into her work again. I started with her debut Alexander’s Bridge. She’d been writing poems and short stories for years before settling into this longer — but still quite short — work. She’s already a master as she explores ambition and the disappointment that might hit when you achieve your goals.

He had expected that success would bring him freedom and power; but it had brought only power that was in itself another kind of restraint.

My Heart Hemmed In
by Marie NDiaye
translated from the French by Jordan Stump
(original review from August 10, 2017)
purchase at Amazon

Another that would contend strongly for the absolute tip-top spot if I were ranking these books, NDiaye’s My Heart Hemmed In is my favorite work (so far) from this remarkable and remarkably important writer. It’s strange and elusive as Nadia seeks to understand things she’s probably tried hard to hide from herself. So what does she do? Goes about looking for the solution in a roundabout way that shows us just how labyrinthian our inner selves can be.

What exactly am I not supposed to see? And why doe she imagine I’m hoping to see it, whatever it is? Doesn’t he know me, doesn’t he know I always want to know as little as possible of things that fill me with horror?

Friend of My Youth
by Alice Munro
(original review from August 18, 2017)
purchase at Amazon

Betsy and I spent the last few months of 2017 reading and writing about every story in Munro’s 1990 collection. It’s a strong collection, coming just at the beginning of my favorite point in Munro’s exceptional career. This books sits at the exact center, the seventh of her fourteen books, the one with 22 years of publications preceding it and 22 years of publications coming after. Her characters are getting older, reflecting on their youth, on their already passing adulthood, and on the few options that seem to be in front of them. Did they become what they hoped they would? Is there still time for change? We finished it just last week, so I’m happy to include it here!

Sundays in August
by Patrick Modiano
translated from the French by Damion Searls
(original review from August 29, 2017)
purchase at Amazon

This is a list of my ten favorite reads, in no particular order. If I were to order them, Modiano’s Sundays in August would be very close to the top. Crime, deception, betrayal, love, time’s eraser. Modiano deals with these themes in a fantastically structured book that touched me deeply when I read the final paragraph. The book arrived at just the right time, and I read it straight through in one of the beautiful, long August days.

He kept walking, toward the Ruhl Casino and Jardin Albert I, leather bag on shoulder. All around me men and women, stiff as mummies, drank their tea in silence, eyes fixed on the Promenade des Anglais. Maybe they, too, were on the lookout for silhouettes from their past amid this crowd passing before their eyes.

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic
by Daniel Mendelsohn
(original review from September 28, 2017)
purchase at Amazon

I was excited to read this book well before it arrived. Mendelsohn is a great writer and teacher of the classics, so his exploration of The Odyssey already sounded compelling. That this was also a memoir exploring his relationship with his father, who at 81 signed up for one of Mendelsohn’s classes on The Odyssey, made it a must read. I had high expectations and they were exceeded by quite a distance. This is a great analysis of many aspects of The Odyssey, and I found that aspect very fulfilling. And while there might be the fear that adding the personal story about Mendelsohn and his father would unbalance this or detract from the meat, that’s simply not the case; that story strengthens the exploration of the text and shows just how beautifully a book can help one experience life.

Children always imagine that their parents’ truest selves are as parents; but why? “Who really knows his own begetting?” Telemachus bitterly asks early in the Odyssey. Who indeed. Our parents are mysterious to us, in ways that we can never quite be mysterious to them.

A Start in Life
by Anita Brookner
(original review from October 11, 2017)
purchase at Amazon

This is it, though, folks. If I were ranking books I read and reviewed in 2017, this would top the list at number one. Anita Brookner’s debut A Start in Life is my favorite book I read this year. This lonely, funny, incredibly insightful story was perfect. I read it while taking a walk in the autumn air during my lunch time, and I’ll never forget those walks, feeling like I was really getting to know Ruth’s family and her painful disappointment at her own life. Why is such a thing compelling? I don’t quite know. I’m not a lonely or disappointed person, and I feel bad knowing of other’s loneliness. Is it that Brookner communicated pain and I felt a desire to rework how I treat people? Maybe. It was a beautiful experience, however it came to be so beautiful.

In her blue dress, in which she had not taken Paris by storm, and her wool coat, Ruth felt shabby and obedient. The girl wore trousers and a pullover, the man a well-cut suit of tweed. A great desire for change came over Ruth and a great uncertainty as to how this might be brought about. For she knew, obscurely, that she had capacities as yet untried but that they might be for ever walled up unless her circumstances changed. Love, she supposed, might do it, but there was no one with whom she might fall in love.