nomadreader

The Top 14 As I sat down to make my list of favorite reads of 2011, I ended up with a top 14. Last year I lucked into a top 10 , but I also read about twenty more books this year, so that makes sense. I don't like to set an arbitrary number of titles for my Best of the Year list, so here are my favorite reads of 2011 (all are books I read in 2011, but not all were originally published in 2011.) 14. The Lover's Dictionary  by David Levithan ( my review ) A love story told through dictionary definitions sounded so interesting I had to try it, even as I doubted how it would work as a novel. It worked beautifully and brilliantly, and it was a surprisingly emotional read. 13. Untold Story  by Monica Ali ( my review ) Untold Story  was one of the titles I was most excited to read in 2011, as I adore literary fiction about real people. Monica Ali's imagination of what life would like today if Princess Diana had faked her own death was a suspenseful, character-driven n...

The backstory: The Sense of an Ending is shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize . The basics: This short novel tackles the major themes of time, memory, perception, friendship, family, parenthood, suicide and love through Tony, the narrator, who is looking back on his life and examining his younger days. My thoughts: I loved this novel in so many ways. Barnes has an impressive ability to explore theme deeply, and I thoroughly enjoyed the discussions on time and memory. As the novel moved on, I was amazed how much plot he infused into it as well. For such a short novel, this one packs an impressive punch. The pondering prose grabbed me from the earliest pages: "We live in time--it holds us and moulds us--but I've never felt I understood it very well...And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go mi...