My goal was to read 36 books in 2015, but – largely due to an unfortunate dalliance with One Hundred Years of Solitude – I only made it to 31.
Here they are, in order of preference, and handily subdivided for your convenience. Don’t say I never did anything for you.
First-Rate
Books I would recommend to anyone who loves reading.
1. Brat Farrar, Josephine Tey (1949)
One of my new favorite novels – a work of deep humanity, compassion, artistry, and suspense.
2. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams (1987)
A tour de force of plotting, humor, and imagination. Adams has many imitators, but his work is in a class by itself.
3. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)
Beautiful, honest, and heartbreaking. A masterpiece of emotion and restraint.
4. The Tiger in the Smoke, Margery Allingham (1952)
The detective thriller as spiritual parable. Exceptionally vivid and atmospheric.
5. The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey (1951)
Part history lesson, part mystery story, part character study – and all fascinating, despite the fact that novel’s action is entirely confined to a single hospital room. (BONUS: This novel led indirectly to the recent discovery of Richard III’s remains.)
6. Tales of Adventurers, Geoffrey Household (1952)
Household’s Rogue Male is one of my all-time favorite novels, but this book of short stories is almost equally impressive. Ranging from the humorous to the chilling, with many notes in between, these stories are the work of a master. There isn’t a dud in the bunch.
Excellent
Books that fall just short of the above standard – but still vivid, fully realized, and well worth taking the time to read.
7. Rim of the Pit, Hake Talbot (1944)
A dexterous and thoroughly mystifying mystery, set in the forbidding North Woods, and saturated with a delightful feeling of supernatural dread.
8. Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem (1999)
A clever hybrid of “literary” and genre fiction – vividly written, and evoking a not-very-long-ago Brooklyn that already feels exotic and remote.
9. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie (1939)
Ruthless, ingenious, and masterful. A classic for a reason.
10. Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
A rollicking old-fashioned yarn like this is as close to pure literary pleasure as anything I know.
11. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1884)
Not nearly as coherent – or as didactic – as its reputation would suggest. In truth, Huckleberry Finn is barely a novel; it’s really just a collection of strung-together incidents, but for all that, it’s engaging as hell.
12. The Human Factor, Graham Greene (1978)
Distinguished by a chilly beauty and a kind of remorseless compassion, this is a hard book to love, but it’s impossible not to respect.
Enjoyable
Solid, pleasurable reads, but perhaps not truly memorable or inspired.
13. The Problem of the Green Capsule, John Dickson Carr (1939)
A particularly tidy and elegant mystery, with a nicely understated love story underneath it.
14. The Blind Barber, John Dickson Carr (1934)
A farcical madcap of a mystery story – which somehow manages to end rather chillingly.
15. Greenmantle, John Buchan (1916)
Deliciously, vibrantly, breathlessly naive – in everything from its worldview to its prose to its coincidence-laden plotting. Buchan sure knows how to tell a lively, preposterous yarn – though it’s never quite clear to what extent he knows it’s preposterous. Ultimately silly, but hard to resist.
16. The White Spider, Heinrich Harrer (1959/1964)
It’s strange how unlikeable Harrer manages to be in the course of what should be a fairly straightforward narrative of various attempts on the Eiger’s North Face. He comes across as self-serving and hypocritical – but his subject is riveting, and his mountaineering descriptions are captivatingly sharp.
17. Till Death Do Us Part, John Dickson Carr (1944)
This is perhaps the most fully developed example of Carr’s “Am I in love with a madwoman?” subgenre. It all looks quite thoroughly damning – until, of course, it doesn’t.
18. The Case of the Gilded Fly, Edmund Crispin (1944)
Genteel as they come, and perfectly solid, but it didn’t leave me fascinated, or craving more.
19. The Sleeping Sphinx, John Dickson Carr (1947)
The ending isn’t particularly satisfying, but the opening is one of Carr’s best, and the love story is particularly affecting.
20. The Deep End, Fredric Brown (1952)
Just a lean, blunt, hard-boiled mystery novel – lively but ultimately disposable.
21. Manalive, G.K. Chesterton (1912)
Chesterton writes gorgeously, but his treacly carpe diem philosophy – conveyed through an endless series of coy paradoxes and boisterous eccentricities – is a tough pill to swallow. The prose is delicious, the content irritating. It makes for a strange experience.
22. The Bride Wore Black, Cornell Woolrich (1940)
Compellingly lurid, though in the end it doesn’t add up to much.
23. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (published with “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Purloined Letter”), Edgar Allan Poe (1841/1843/1844)
All three are plodding, and “Marie Roget” is unbearably pointless, but it’s interesting to observe the mystery story in its first throes of life.
Flawed
Books that, for one reason or another, fall a bit shy of the mark.
24. Last Stand at Papago Wells, Louis L’Amour (1957)
A spare, slender Western, curiously blending realism and melodrama. Sometimes elegant, sometimes clumsy. An odd beast.
25. The Problem of the Wire Cage, John Dickson Carr (1939)
Almost every detail of the “solution” feels arbitrary – but the characters are sharply drawn, and the book does boast one of the most thoroughly unlikeable murder victims on record.
26. The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje (2011)
The flashbacks that compose the main body of the narrative are charming, but the present-day stuff is an annoyance and a distraction. A miscalculated book.
27. A Wreath for Rivera, Ngaio Marsh (1949)
Unobjectionable, forgettable jazz-themed mystery.
28. In Spite of Thunder, John Dickson Carr (1960)
Carr is always fun to read, but this is one of his paler efforts, and the resolution is distinctly disappointing.
Weak
Books with more against them than in favor.
29. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
Yes, I know it’s a masterpiece, but it’s numbingly redundant and grossly overlong. I admit I felt an unexpected surge of emotion on the last page, but it wasn’t worth the 800 pages I slogged through to get there.
30. Hallowe’en Party, Agatha Christie (1969)
Some lovely passages, but this is the weak-tea version of Christie – and worse, it’s bewilderingly repetitive.
Lousy
The worst of the worst. Books that should never have been born.
31. 44 Scotland Street, Alexander McCall Smith (2004)
A miserable trudge through a series of meaningless trivialities that lead inexorably to nothing – all rendered in smug, self-satisfied, wince-inducing prose. One of the worst books I’ve ever had the stubbornness to finish. Avoid at all costs.
