A Year in Reading: Conversational Reading

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.

I 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:

• River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit
• The Windup Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
• Like a Fiery Elephant by Jonathan Coe
• Boredom by Alberto Moravia
• Hunger by Knut Hamsun
• Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro