2007 Reading

The best books (in no real order, except the first which is one of the best books I’ve ever read) I happened upon in 2007 were:

The Obscene Bird of Night – José Donoso
The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolaño
Shamrock Tea – Ciaran Carson
Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
Nazi Literature in the Americas – Roberto Bolaño
Amulet – Roberto Bolaño
Shapeshift – Sherwin Bitsui
A Country Doctor’s Notebook – Mikhail Bulgakov
The Adolescent – Dostoevsky (or was that last year?)
The Stray Dog Cabaret collection
Zeno’s Conscience – Italo Svevo
Black No More – George Schuyler
The Last Clear Narrative – Rachel Zucker
The Invisible Player – Giuseppe Pontiggia
Ice – Vladimir Sorokin

Notable contenders:

Breaking News – Ciaran Carson
Fascination of Evil – Florian Zeller
The Human Line – Ellen Bass
Man and Camel – Mark Strand
Oubliette – Peter Richards
Hidden Camera – Zoran Živković
The Ministry of Pain – Dubravka Ugrešic
The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read – Andre Schiffrin
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics – Mikhail Bakhtin (I really only read half of it)
If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents – Gregory Rabassa (which I need to look at again, but sadly don’t own)

Next up (yeah, right):

The poetry of Cesar Vallejo
Hopscotch – Julio Cortázar
Montano’s Malady – Enrique Vila-Matas
By Night in Chile – Roberto Bolaño
The Bad Girl – Mario Vargas Llosa
The Garden Next Door – José Donoso
The poetry of Frank O’Hara
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (when school’s done)
Malvinas Requiem – Rodolfo Fogwill
The Green House – Mario Vargas Llosa
Lost City Radio – Daniel Alarcón
The poetry of Adam Zagajewski