During the first half of 2009, I was very lucky with my choice of books. Then during the second, for a number of reasons, I had less time to dedicate to reading. After finishing Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections over New Years (which makes you wonder why Elizabeth Strout even bothered with Olive Kitteridge), I compiled for 2010 a roster of books that included both fiction and non-fiction:
- Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
- Mother Comes of Age by Driss Chraibi
- A Hope in the Unforeseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League by Ron Suskind
- The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
- Little Bee by Chris Cleave
- Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of a True American Original by Robin Kelley
- Desert by J.M.G. Le Clezio
- On Beauty by Zadie Smith
- The Conquest of Morocco by Douglas Porch
- Summertime by J.M. Coetzee
- Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami
- Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
- The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
Of what I have gotten to so far – from Random Family to Desert – the non-fiction (Random Family, Hope in the Unseen and Thelonious Monk) have stolen the show. The first half of Poisonwood Bible was excellent, while the second half seemed to lose credibility. Nevertheless, it did spark my interest in reading King Leopold’s Ghost. And regardless of having thoroughly disliked all of the characters in Geoff Dyer’s Paris Trance (which I read in 2009), the Monk biography has only made me want to read more non-fiction about Jazz, including Dyer’s But Beautiful: A Book about Jazz.
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