more top 10's

This was the year that Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, at the urging of the New York Times Book Review, declared that fiction is dead. [from salon.com] Gee, guess all those great books I read this year & all the wonderful stories that appeared in various lit. journals don't count? Perhaps those who deem fiction "dead" should go off & do something else for a living & leave fiction to those of us with a true love for it. ahem.


I'm sure I'll think of several that I've left off the list but here are 10 books (or so) that came out in '05 that I think were worth the read:
Joan Didion, "the year of magical thinking"
William Vollmann, "europe central"
Joyce Carol Oates, "missing mom"
Cormac McCarthy, "no country for old men"
J. Lethem, "the disappointment artist"
C. D'Ambrosio, "orphans"
Chs Burns, "black hole"
marilynne robinson, "gilead" (though, I admit, I haven't finished it yet)
gaiman, "anansi boys"

most over-hyped books:
brat easton ellis, "lunar park"
curtis sittenfeld, "prep"
frey, "a million little pieces"
rowling, "half-blood prince"
foer, "extremely loud & incredibly close"
zadie smith, "beauty"
grisham, "the broker"
ishiguro, "never let me go" (enough already!!)

books I wish I'd read that came out this year
china melville, "looking for jake"
jeanette walls, "the glass castle"
john berendt, "city of fallen angels" (first chapter is great!)
tom reiss, "the orientalist"
judith moore, "fat girl"
doctorow, "the march"
iweala's, "beast of no nation"
and that stack of about 30 some books that I'll eventually get through in the next few months...