The Hobbit. Jeremy thinks I should be embarrassed that I have only read this twice. (The first time was in 1997 or so, under threat of being dumped if I didn’t read some damn Tolkien.) I think I should be embarrassed that I have spent the week googling Middle Earth maps to find out what the geographical relationship is between the mines under the Lonely Mountain and the Mines of Moria. (Answer: none, really; they are pretty far apart.)

Maya wants to see Top Fives for the year. I might post my other top fives over at Jerbet if I can ever decide on five albums, but books I can do right now.

This was sort of a grim year for me, book-wise. I did not read very much that was not on my comp exam list, and I had already read everything on the list, mostly multiple times. After the exam I was just burned out and did not want to read much of anything, so I spent the rest of the year rereading Jane Austen, a lot of children’s books, and some bad crime fiction. So there are not many contenders for my “best” list. (Although I am listening to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and it might qualify if I manage to finish it before Sunday.)

Here are the five best new-to-me books I read this year:

• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. Pure fun. I know a lot of people hated it or found it too long and convoluted, but I loved it.
• Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray. I read this at the same time that I was listening to Jonathan Strange, which made for a weird experience since they are set in the same time period and even cover some of the same battles. Also pure fun.
• Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. I dreaded this book for years but in the end it answered every complaint I had about Jane Eyre, and made me appreciate the latter more than I had before. Really a beautiful book.
• Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen Gold. You might notice a theme here — most of the books I loved this year were books I’d classify as “fun,” but the kind of fun that doesn’t make you feel dirty when you’re done. This one also fits the theme.
• Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut. The last choice for this list was a close call between this one and We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. I chose Vonnegut in the end, because I guessed how the Jackson novel was going to end, but Vonnegut surprised me.

And here are the five worst:

• Solar Storms, by Linda Hogan. I might not have hated this so much had my expectations not been so high. But I did hate it.
• The Kite Runner. See above re: expectations.
• The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. I didn’t hate this one, exactly, but it was not a very good book. Another disappointment.
• The Fourth Hand, by John Irving. This one was not a disappointment because I did not expect much. I used to love John Irving but it is way past time for him to retire. Maybe he can get a blog or a puppy or a motorcycle or something. Anything to make him stop writing books.
• The Game, by A.S. Byatt. I did not finish this one, because oh, my God, was it boring. I am never reading anything else by Byatt; life is too short.

Little Men. Reviewers always diss this book, but when I was a kid I liked it much better than I liked Little Women, in spite of the syrupy moralizing. While the March girls mostly sat around dropping literary references that went right over my head, the boys in Little Men actually did stuff: tamed horses, set the house on fire, ran away.

Rereading it as an adult, I can see where the critics are coming from, and I think I can pinpoint the problem. In all three of the books about the March family, Louisa May Alcott is sort of telling her own story, but not really. The early lives of the March girls are somewhat autobiographical, but the later books veer off into pure fiction, since of course Alcott did not marry a German professor and start a school and later a college. It’s not just the story that becomes fictional, though; the character of Mrs. Bhaer is not the same character as Jo March. And I think the problem is that at some point Louisa May Alcott stopped writing her own flawed but engaging autobiography, and started writing a fictionalized biography of some woman (or amalgamation of women) whom she admired.

She always writes best about people she does not entirely admire. The best characters in Little Women are Jo and Amy, and the earliest version of Meg: the characters based on Louisa May Alcott and her living sisters. By the time Meg is out of the house and married, she is portrayed in as treacly and angelic a light as are Beth and Marmee and Mr. March. Amy also turns into a distant angel by the time Jo’s Boys comes along, which is probably explained by the author’s note indicating that the sister on whom she was based had died before she began writing that installment: the author must not speak ill of the dead. Meanwhile, Mrs. Jo turns into a paragon of motherly virtues as her story diverges from Louisa May Alcott’s own.

I am not explaining this very well. Basically, I suspect that Alcott did not like to portray any characters in a negative light if those characters were modeled after her heroes, or after loved ones who had died. I suspect that Mrs. Jo is not remotely based on Alcott herself, but on some other woman whom she admired a great deal. And the story suffers from that, because the character is not fun and endearing and engaging like the very flawed Jo March, but is instead distant and, well, kind of revolting.

This reading also made me realize why most girls reading these books now don’t realize until someone tells them that Alcott was in any sense a feminist. See what Mrs. Jo has to say about the education of girls:

My girls shall learn all I can teach them about [needlework], even if they give up the Latin, ALgebra, and half-a-dozen ologies it is considered necessary for girls to muddle their poor brains over now-a-days.

Blech. I always preferred Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, anyway.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Remember when I read that first collection of her stories and immediately loved her and thought that I’d better never write another word? Yeah, same thing here. I understand the reviews that complain that this novel is too disjointed, but I think those reviews are dumb. I loved this little book; I think Moore gets all the details of girlhood exactly right.

This is also for my new book club.

Mother Night. I should be ashamed of myself that this was my first Vonnegut. I read it for my new book club, which meets at a bar by my house. I think books and beer might be even better conceptually than books and pie. I enjoyed this book a lot, although I wasn’t as sure as the other book club members that the point of the novel was “judge not lest ye be judged” or whatever. I am not sure about that. I am sure, however, that it was dumb of me to lump Vonnegut in with the white-men-on-drugs like Thompson or Robbins or Kerouac or Burroughs, all of whom I am thoroughly sick of. I will read more, I promise.

The Beet Queen. This was my first Erdrich novel, and I hesitated to read it because I have heard her compared so often to Linda Hogan, whom I apparently hate. But I loved this book. I love it whenever I get female characters who are interesting even when they aren’t falling in love, and who aren’t pretty or even very smart or noble. Because most actual humans aren’t very pretty and aren’t especially smart or noble, and we are all boring when we are falling in love.

Little Women. I have read this novel 8,347 times and until this year I never noticed how totally insufferable it is. I wanted them all to get scarlet fever.

The Historian. Well, that’s over with. Not exactly the reaction I expected to have to finishing this book — from the early reviews, I really expected to love it. But I did not love it. I did not hate it, exactly, although I don’t think it is a very good book. If I had to sum it up in one word, I would be torn between “amateurish” and “dull.”

I will start with what’s good. Kostova writes reasonably well. The prose is occasionally lovely, and I chose that word deliberately. Despite the dark subject manner, this is a very pretty book.

I also like what she does with the character of Dracula. He’s not well fleshed-out, but that seems appropriate. We don’t meet him until very late in the novel, but then we recognize in retrospect his presence in earlier chapters, and I like that. I really enjoyed Kostova’s version of the manner in which Dracula cheated death; I like her vision of how he has been spending the last 500 years. His current obsession is fascinating. This may be my favorite take on Dracula himself, as a character.

But that’s about it on the positive scale. In most ways this book is just fluff; Kostova tries for some deeper meaning and some clever structural play, but she doesn’t really accomplish what she is setting out to do here. Her structure is more maddening than clever: the time leaps, the multiple narrators, the improbable letters. The flaw that undermines every aspect of literary cleverness here is a simple and pervasive one: every character sounds exactly like every other character. Not one of them sounds like a 17-year-old girl in the 1970s, and I’m not even convinced that the principal narrator sounds like a middle-aged scholar/diplomat in the same time period. He certainly doesn’t sound like a middle-aged scholar/diplomat who is writing under enormous stress and in a very big hurry.

So the novel’s deep flaws prevent it from standing as any kind of serious literature, but unfortunately, it’s not really successful as a fun plot-driven novel, either. Because mostly, the plot is boring. People go to libraries, run into someone else who just happens to be researching the same subject, and wait a minute, just the other day I saw something in a book … here it is! Here is the tidbit of information that will lead you to the next library and the next plot contrivance.

As you can see, the historical research angle really irritated me, even though I expected to love it. We never see any of the characters doing any research; we just see a lot of annoying coincidences. After 600 pages I still have no reason to believe that either Paul or Helen are real scholars, except that the novel keeps informing me of their brilliance.

I was also very frustrated by the fact that even given the exotic locations and grim historical periods Kostova is visiting here, the novel rarely achieves a sense of time and place. You do get a sense of Istanbul and maybe of Bulgaria, but the cold war stuff never seems to gel into a real atmosphere. This was a novel that begged for some atmosphere, but it just seemed like a lot of description of scenery and buildings, without really making me see or feel history. Quite a letdown.

I really did expect to love this novel. I like vampire stories, horror, epistolary novels, novels that unfold slowly and don’t have much plot, novels set in Eastern Europe, novels that jump around confusingly in time, historical fiction, and literary experiments. But I did not like The Historian.

Carter Beats the Devil. And finally, just like that, my temporary (post-exam) aversion to contemporary fiction seems to be behind me. I have already communicated this sentiment elsewhere, but I am going to reiterate it here: all of you people who read this book in 2001 or 2002 or whenever and did not order me to sit down and read it immediately? You people are assholes. I bought this book in 2002 and promptly shelved it and forgot about it. And I choose to blame you.

I read a few reviews that said that Carter Beats the Devil was a better book than The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but I won’t go that far. Too much about Carter feels like a first novel; there are some serious pacing problems and sometimes I worried about anachronisms. (Wasn’t Thailand still Siam in the 1920s?) In scope and theme, however, this novel reminded me not only of Kavalier & Clay, but also of Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. Of the three, Gold’s work is probably the least accomplished, but that is faint condemnation since the other two would go on my all-time favorites list.

I look forward to seeing what Gold writes next, because while I loved this book a whole lot, I do think it had some rough edges and I think he will be a better writer in the future. I plan to reread Carter many times before I die, though, and I will make my husband read it, and I will make you read it so you don’t later find out what you missed and call me an asshole.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I just went back and read what I originally wrote about this book the first time I read it, and since I still feel the same way about it, I will just repost that:

I did not hate this as much as I thought I was going to. Order of the Phoenix is pretty badly flawed, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t hate it. The main problem, as I see it, is that there is too much going on here, so that the last quarter of the book has absolutely nothing to do with the part that came before. The introduction was too long, too slow, and too repetitive, and then the ending was rushed and felt tacked-on. Those are pretty major complaints, as are my complaints about the bad grammar and sloppy language. (Kids learn proper sentence construction from reading, not from diagramming sentences in school, so don’t publish kids’ books that are full of dangling modifiers, for pete’s sake. Jesus.)

I liked the Umbridge story line. I have read complaints that she is too cartoony as a villain, but all I can think is that the people making those complaints have been asleep for the past four books. The Dursleys? Straight out of Looney Tunes. The evil face sticking out of the back of his minion’s head, covered by a giant turban? Please. Umbridge may be cartoony but she is a totally fun kind of villain, the kind where you cheer when the students finally stand up to her. She’s like Principal Snyder with magic powers. My only complaint is that her story was abandoned without a good resolution, leading me to think that Rowling should have put Umbridge earlier in the series and not tried to tack on the big Voldemort ending.

The final section of the book was really pretty terrible, I think. The big fight was confusing and hard to follow (which is pretty standard for Rowling; I never know what the hell happens at the end of any of her books), and moreover, it was really hard to care. They dragged out the suspense about what was going on with Sirius for so long that it no longer felt pressing and scary, because the kids had been traipsing around the forest for so long that if Sirius had been in any actual danger he would have been dead for hours by the time they finally showed up. The giant story was totally superfluous and should have been cut because it interrupted crucial action while adding nothing of worth. And then, in the final battle, we get all these new villains who have barely been introduced, and the big horrible murder is committed by someone we barely know (I couldn’t even remember who she was by the time I got to the end of the book) and don’t care about. We’ve been set up to care about Umbridge and suddenly we’re in a different book altogether, and it was a big fat letdown. I know she had to advance her larger story arc, but this was a bad way to do so.

But I do want to know what happens next, so I guess Order of the Phoenix is a success in that sense. I have two predictions for how this will end, and they both involve Neville being the actual subject of the prophecy. First thought: Neville turns out to be the prophesied one, and he does something noble and brave and heroic and completely stupid, and Voldemort kills him and all is lost. And then Harry kills Voldemort, not because he’s the child of the prophecy but because he’s suffered and learned and death is his gift and he is full of love and yadayadayada. Second thought: Harry faces Voldemort in what he thinks is their prophetic battle, and he is heroic and saves some people but in the end he’s just not strong enough, and he dies. And then Neville steps in and kills Voldemort, probably through sheer bravery or maybe with a Voldemort-eating plant, and it turns out that it was Neville all along. But we get to see Harry in an afterlife with his parents and Sirius and whoever else Rowling has killed off along the way.

Or maybe not. I guess we will know in another three or four thousand pages.

Actually, I felt better about the big fight at the end this time around, maybe because I read the book instead of listening to it, so I was able to follow things a little better. I still think the Umbridge story needed a better resolution, and I think that the centaurs and giants should have been left out of this book since it was too long to begin with and those plot elements felt forced and frankly kind of stupid. I mean, I get that she is setting up something about half-breeds and non-human magical creatures and whatnot, but the giants and centaurs were distracting in this novel and should have been left out.

And Rowling is still a a pretty terrible writer sometimes. The CAPITAL LETTERS drive me crazy. I actually think she is getting better — her writing is much better here than it is in everyone’s favorite, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. That may have been the tightest story of the bunch, but the book is full of dangling modifiers and CAPITAL LETTERS and ellipses. Bah.

I know I am alone in this, but I have enjoyed the last two books far more than the first three, and especially the first two. I do think she’s getting better, but wow does she need an editor with a big red pen.

Northanger Abbey. Am I done with the Jane Austen yet? I am ready to be done with Jane Austen. This is still my least favorite of her novels. I don’t think it quite works as a satire because the satire is so uneven, and I think the target of the satire jumps around too much. Her later books are so perfect in their construction that the flaws in this one are especially obvious when you read it immediately after something like Pride and Prejudice.

I read this in a hammock on a Carribean beach while I was so sick that I lost seven pounds in five days. It was the only book I finished — I took the George MacDonald along as well, but it really sucked. I got so desperate that I was actually looking for a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code in the airport before the flight home, but the bookstore only had hardbound copies, and I am not buying a hardbound copy of that stupid book.

Persuasion. Last week I said that I thought Anne Elliot was a doormat. I was probably unfair, but she is still my least favorite Austen heroine, far behind Fanny Price and even behind that conceited pain in the ass Emma. (Yes, I definitely think Emma is worse than Fanny.)

Objectively I can see why so many consider this to be Austen’s best novel. But it leaves me a little cold. I don’t care for Anne and the novel is so short that I don’t really have time to get involved and warm up to her before it all ends very abruptly. Unlike the other Austen novels, which I have grown to love more on each reading, I liked this one best the first time I read it, and it feels like it’s all downhill from here.

Mansfield Park. Okay, you were all wrong. I liked this book just fine. I liked Fanny just fine. I still think she should have stuck with Mr. Crawford, and I think her dumb prig of a cousin should have gotten the stick out of his butt, but I liked Fanny. (I certainly like her better than that annoying martyr, Anne Elliot.) I enjoyed seeing Austen kind of in retreat from her more amusing novels; I have a hard time believing she was as penitent as all that, but it’s interesting to note that she obviously felt she should have been penitent.

I suspect Austen herself was much more like Elizabeth Bennett than Fanny Price or Anne Elliot. But clearly she herself saw that as something of a character flaw.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Another long-ago gift from Kymm, which I left on the shelf for years and then read in two hours after I finished The Haunting of Hill House. I liked this one even better, but I am glad I never got invited to Shirley Jackson’s house for dinner.

Then There Were None. I have read every Christie novel at least four times, most of them more often than that. Most memorably, I reread the entire collection — including the short stories — while I was studying for the bar exam in 1993. I own them all in cheap, falling-apart paperbacks that I store on a shelf over my closet.

I haven’t reread any for some time, because the last time I tried I could not get past the cliches and the terrible prose and all the Agatha Christie nonsense, but I decided to reread this one after seeing it mentioned in a movie review.

I don’t think I will go with my first impulse after I finished it, which was to chuck the whole collection into the recycling. I might get brain fever some day and need something easy to read, or I might someday have a sixth grader living in my house. But otherwise, I think these are just going to collect dust.