A Year in Reading: Conversational Reading

December 4, 2005 | 6 books mentioned

As the “A Year in Reading” series continues, I asked Scott, who runs one of my favorite blogs Conversational Reading, to share the best book he read all year. Not his favorite thing to do, but he indulged us nonetheless.

coverI hate picking my favorite of anything. I always feel like it’s so arbitrary, that the reasons I like certain things are so various that it’s difficult to compare and say one’s better than the other. With that huge caveat, I’ll say that my favorite read of the year is Yukio Mishima’s Runaway Horses. It has a killer plot (I read the last 200 pages in one day) and brilliantly drawn characters, and it’s the best examination of passion that I can remember reading. For those reasons, I feel like the book will never feel old, but it also happens to explore a society (Japan in the 1930s) that speaks very much to our own.

Runners-Up:

is the author of The End of Oulipo? (with Lauren Elkin), forthcoming from Zero Books in January 2013. His criticism has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, The Washington Post, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, The Barnes & Noble Review, and Publishers Weekly, among many others. He blogs at Conversational Reading and edits The Quarterly Conversation, an online magazine of book reviews and essays.