Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books of 2017
These are my favorite reads since January 1, 2017. They are primarily fiction with three great non-fiction books. If I had to pick my favorite of the year I would choose Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. But the list is in no particular order. Several very good books just missed my top ten including A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare, Civil Disobedience by Thoreau, Phaedrus and other dialogues by Plato, and The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Two Years Before the Mast
by Richard Henry Dana
The Varieties of Religious Experience
by William James
Responsibility and Judgement: Essays
by Hannah Arendt
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
4 comments:
This is an impressive list. From it, I loved the books that I have read and I want to read those that I have not read. I liked the fact that you included Gulivers Travels. I think that work is often underestimated.
Brian,
Thanks for your comment. I share your opinion of Jonathan Swift. The list could have included five or ten more very good books, but this is my current take on favorites. I cannot praise Suttree enough and McCarthy as well since all of his books I have read over the last decade have made it onto my top ten lists.
10:
1. I cqn’t go along with you on Suttree. CM’s descriptions and portraits of life along the river and in the by-ways of old Knoxville are brilliant, astonishing really, the best parts of .the novel. Suttree doesn’t work for me as a character. His mysterious past, his alternating affection and coldness, his selfishness - I need more. I see a lot of Tennessee Williams and Faulkner in Suttree. Almost any of the characters I n the later novels are better realized, even the most repulsive. A near masterpiece by a master; fortunately for us, he worked af his craft.
2. About Gulliver: When I read GT for the first time I found it a repulsive work. Thinking about If, I am awed by Swift’s satiric daring. I try to imagine how early 18th cetury readers would have reacted. Remember, Gulliver brings the stink of the horses to his tale, and is put off by the reaction. 18th denture English knew horse stink. And Gullivrr put the horses over men. Swift was on to something.
M.,
Thanks for your observations. I agree with you that McCarthy's later novels are very good. In 2015 both Blood Meridian and The Road were on my annual top ten list.
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