1/ Looking for summer reads? Herewtith my top ten fiction and non-fiction for the year so far (point being I read them this year, not that they are out this year)
2/ Fiction: Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy (thinky-veiled autobiography of a couple in Bucharest & Athens in 1940 as the Nazis closed in); the Strugatsky Brothers' "The Doomed City" (1970s Soviet samizdat scifi);
3/ Fiction (cont). Simone de Beauvoir's "The Mandarins" (guess what? turns out Sartre was a dick!); Graeme Swift's "Waterland"; Min Jin Lee's "Pachinko"; Le Carre's "Legacy of Spies" (but read or re-read "Spy Who came In From the Cold" first, it makes way more sense that way)
4 Fiction (cont). My two Japanese faves: Haruki Murakami's "Wind-up Bird Chronicle" and Kezaburo Oe's "A Personal Matter", both excellent. And finally, #1 pick so far this year: Eshkol Nevo's "Three Floors Up".
5/ Non-fiction. Colin Jones' "Paris, Biography of a City" is everything a city history should. Oliver Hilmes' "Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August" is a very good re-counting of the Games, the Nazis, and the visitors' reactions.
6/ Non-fiction (cont). Peter Guardino's "Dead March", Benjamin Madley's "American Genocide" (re: California indians) and Pekka Hamalainen's "The Comanche Empire" will make you completely re-think the American West. (latter is dry but so novel you won't care)
7/ Non-fiction (cont). Svetlana Alexeivich's "Unwomanly Face of War" is as devastatingly good as you'd expect it to be. @alexvtunzelmann's "Blood and Sand" is a fun recounting of the Suez/Hungary crisis of 1956, and I also quite enjoyed Richard Vinen's "The Long '68"
8/ Non-fiction (cont.) Best Canadian read: @irbrodie's At the Centre of Government. Best read overall, though, by some distance: Timothy Snyder's "Road to Unfreedom". Not perfect (last chapter is a tacked on press-clipping-dump), but still brilliant.
9/ Wait, I forgot a fiction pick: "On Chesil Beach" by Ian McEwan. But look, everything by McEwan goes into a top ten, automatically, no questions asked.
10/ So those are my picks. What is everyone else reading that's good?
