Fiction
Asimov, Isaac: I, Robot
Barbeau-Lavalette, Anaïs: La femme qui fuit (en français)
Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451
Carson, Jan: Quickly, While They Still Have Horses
Cusk, Rachel: Coventry (my 2nd reading)
Cusk, Rachel: Parade
DeLillo, Don: The Silence
Egan, Jennifer: A Visit from the Goon Squad
Erskine, Wendy: The Benefactors
Flanagan, Richard: Question 7
Gallant, Mavis: Montreal Stories
Harding, Paul: Tinkers
Holloway, Patrick: The Language of Remembering
Lalami, Laila: The Dream Hotel
McCormack, Mike: Getting it in the Head
Ní Chuinn, Liadan: Every One Still Here
O’Neill, Heather: Valentine in Montreal
O’Neill, Joseph: Godwin
Ryan, Donal: heart, be at peace
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft: Frankenstein
Thien, Madeleine: The Book of Records
Tolstoy, Leo: The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Non-fiction
Arendt, Hannah: Eichmann in Jerusalem
Bouchard, Serge: Caribou Hunter / Récits de Mathieu Mestokosho, chasseur innu (In English et en français)
Cron, Lisa: Wired for Story
Gallant, Mavis: Montreal Standard Time
O’Connor, Sinéad: Rememberings
Stonebridge, Lyndsey: We are Free to Change the World
Poetry Collections
Collins, Billy: Aimless Love
MacNeice, Louis: Autumn Journal
Muldoon, Paul: Selected Poems
There are a few connecting threads: Hannah Arendt's life and work for example (the books by Thien, Stonebridge, and Arendt herself), my interest in evolving views of AI and consciousness (Asimov, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), and my exploration of the possibilities of the short story (Carson, Gallant, and Ní Chuinn).
In previous years it's been difficult to pick a single favourite read of the year, but I have no such problems this year. Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is far and away the best thing I've read in a long time. It's an extraordinary book, a combination of fiction, biography, and non-fiction, that delves deep into Flanagan's family history while sweeping across the arc of the 20th century. I loved his Booker-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Flanagan has explained how his father's experience as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese was one of its inspirations. In Question 7 his father's experience is once again a starting point, as his father was released when Japan surrendered, an event that could conceivably have its origins in the love affair between Rebecca West and H. G. Wells...
Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan project there is no lever at 8.15am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them.
I'd rate Question 7 as highly as the best work by W. G. Sebald, which is the highest praise I can offer. This review in The Guardian came to the same conclusion.
