best book list

Best of Ten!

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Cover for Crow LakeStarting with my 1300th review, I decided to do my Best Book series differently. Because I have gone to three postings a week, the Best of Five post came roughly every other week. Now, I plan to do this post every ten books instead, permitting me to post a few more reviews in the same period of time. So, this post will appear roughly once a month but may mention more books.

The Best Book for this period is Crow Lake by Mary Lawson!

Also recommended: Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf!

Top Ten Books for 2018-19!

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Cover for The Forty Days of Musa DaghSince it is my blog anniversary today, I follow my tradition of posting my top ten books that I reviewed during the previous year. This year was a difficult one, because I had three books by Dorothy Whipple appearing in my Best of Five series, and my rule is to select only one book by an author in my year’s top ten.

As usual, this is a mixed bag of books, combining one nonfiction and one short story collection with several classic books and only one contemporary one (if you don’t count multigenerational sagas). Historical novels feature quite heavily this year.

So, with no further ado except a comment that this year I decided to list them in backwards order from when they were posted, here are my top ten books for this year:

Cover for The Weight of Ink

  1. The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish
  2. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel
  3. They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple
  4. Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson
  5. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith
  6. In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut
  7. Coming into the Country by John McPhee
  8. The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
  9. Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien
  10. Atonement by Ian McEwan