This is a bit belated, but I hope that you all had a lovely Christmas and are currently enjoying, if you fortunate enough to have one, a proper respite from work/academia.  I myself had an enjoyable stay at home, received some imminently practical presents and one not very practical (but utterly adorable), and played enough Just Dance 3 on my family’s Wii to ensure a persistent soreness in my arms and shoulders.  On Monday, my parents, with sister more or less willingly in tow, came down to DC with me for a short visit.  The three of them stayed in my apartment, transforming my urban accommodations into a single-family domicile.  It is possible, believe it or not.  While I was at the office and before they left, my parents decided to clean the oil stains off my stove and take out the trash for me; this is to say nothing of the customary transfer of delicious foodstuffs – freshly picked oranges! dumplings! Mother’s signature homemade cookies! – that follow trips back home.  Chinese parents are the best.

Anyway, to get to the original point of this post, it’s time to reprise the tradition of presenting the number of books read during this calendar year.  At the beginning of 2011, I made a resolution to read at least thirty non-school-related books and am pleased to say that I met my goal!  Here are the thirty-one that I finished; asterisks denote that the book was a re-read, and bolded items are those that were in some way thought-provoking and memorable (re-reads are excluded from this…with two exceptions, mostly because I want to talk about them – and this is my blog, so I can!).

1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling (January 1)*
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (January 2)*
3. The Tales of Beedle the Bard, J.K. Rowling (January 2)*
4. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, Margaret MacMillan (January 10)*
5. An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears (February 7)
6. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder (February 12)
7. Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt (February 17)
8. The Dream of Scipio, Iain Pears (March 7)
9. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis (March 10)
10. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (March 31)*
11. Great Philosophers Who Failed At Love, Andrew Shafer (April 2)
12. Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, Tony Judt (April 24)*
13. The Memory Chalet, Tony Judt (May 2)
14. Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo (May 24)
15. A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin (May 30)
16. A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin (June 2)
17. A Storm of Swords, George R. R. Martin (June 7)
18. A Feast for Crows, George R. R. Martin (June 18)
19. Essays in Persuasion, John Maynard Keynes (July 3)
20. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (July 9)*
21. A Dance with Dragons, George R. R. Martin (July 15)
22. The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British, Sarah Lyall (July 18)
23. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (August 12)*
24. The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown (August 22)
25. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (September 17)
26. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (September 25)*
27. The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, David Brooks (October 1)
28. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (October 14)
29. Eli the Good, Silas House (October 16)
30. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Alex Ross (December 5)*
31. A Week in December, Sebastian Faulks (December 11)

An Instance of the Fingerpost and Bloodlands were discussed briefly here, and my initial positive responses to them have not lessoned over the subsequent months.  Bloodlands, as you can see, set me on a Tony Judt binge.  Ill Fares the Land is his defence of social democracy in an age when such a concept seems utterly passé, but it was his memoir The Memory Chalet, a series of recollections about his childhood woven into broader considerations of European history that were composed during the final months of his life, that I found most captivating of all.  His voice here is shorn of the academic overtones of his masterpiece Postwar and the polemics of his essays: it is simple, understated, and elegiac.

I picked up The Big Short while killing time before a flight – who knew that an account of the origins of the financial crisis could attain the status of airport reading?  It really is quite a gripping read, though: it was the first time I had read anything by Michael Lewis, and I was taken by his snappy and cynical style of prose.  I am now eagerly waiting for his latest book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, to come out in paperback…

The Remains of the Day is technically a re-read.  The first time I picked it up was for a summer reading assignment before my final year of high school.  The novel centres on a butler reflecting on his experiences of serving in one of England’s great noble houses and had come to me highly recommended, but, by the time I reached the end of it, I was quite nonplussed.  A few years later, I read my second Ishiguro novel, Never Let Me Go, and was everything but unmoved.  In the course of discussing these two novels with a friend, said friend mentioned that perhaps I had to be older to appreciate The Remains of the Day more fully.  That indeed proved to be the case.  If there is a unifying theme of Ishiguro’s body of work, it is the disconnect between the perceptions of we have of ourselves and the reality in which we ultimately exist.  His protagonists are of the introspective, melancholy sort, transfixed by memories of a past rooted in misunderstanding, denial, and naïveté – one needs a certain worldliness to identify with them.  I am still young, of course, but the narrative tension and quiet devastation of The Remains of the Day were far more evident to me this time around.  (That Downton Abbey has made me more acquainted with the upstairs-downstairs dynamic of the old aristocratic households also helped, I would guess.)

Just for the record, I didn’t bold any of the titles in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire saga because I am generally of the opinion that book series ought to be considered as a cohesive whole rather than individual volumes.  That said, I really loved ASOIAF and basically spent the entirety of my three-week summer break devouring these books.  The first three instalments had some truly epic stuff, while I was less impressed by books four and five.

As for Infinite Jest, you can read my thoughts on it here.

On Beauty is one of those critically acclaimed works of contemporary fiction that I simply never got around to reading until now.  At the novel’s outset, I found it difficult to empathise with many of the characters and sometimes got the feeling that Zadie Smith was showing off, stylistically, just for the sake of doing so.  Ironically, it was Smith’s writing that ultimately won me over about a hundred or so pages in.  If I had to name one aspect of her writing that is simply superlative, it is her dialogue.  She has a way of giving voices to her characters that are marked, above all, by an uncanny authenticity (though I shouldn't be surprised by this).  Even when the person speaking in question is a hopelessly pretentious English major at a liberal arts college, none of the dialogue feels contrived or forced, and it gives her stories, which would easily fall apart in the hands of lesser writers, a real kind of vivacity.  Beyond the writing, the book actually is very enjoyable read.  Smith combines effortlessly lowbrow and highbrow, the sordid and intellectual, and anybody who has ever gotten into intractable arguments about postmodernism, aestheticism, literature, art, etc., or is/has been a resident fellow of the ivory tower – which I imagine must be many of you – will be able to identify with large portions of On Beauty.

I wasn’t planning on picking up The Rest Is Noise again this soon – I read it only last year – but I found myself flipping through it while at home for Thanksgiving while doing some research for my novel and that somehow led me to read it from cover to cover?  These things happen, I suppose.  Back in 2010, I mentioned that the book, which concerns itself with the hydra that is twentieth-century classical music, “can be quite erudite,” and, by that, I meant that it can be somewhat bewildering.  Before I read The Rest Is Noise, much of this music (and especially post-1945 stuff) was marked with a menacing “HERE BE MONSTERS” sign.  In the year since, however – and in no small part due to Ross’s advocacy – it has become much more familiar territory to me, and having at least a fundamental grounding in the subject allowed me to enjoy the book even more the second time around.

And that’s a wrap, I think!  What are some of the best books that you read this year?  Do you wish to hear me ramble about any other literary creations that I consumed in 2011?  Are you wondering why The Lost Symbol is on this list?  That is what the comments section is for, dear readers!