I am not as eloquent as Scott over at Conversational Reading. He spread his Top 10 favorite books out over 10 posts. Plus I just don’t have the time. I blog at work and you can imagine what a retail store is like at this time of year. So I will just put up the books I loved the most. I know 10 is nice, good round number but I really had a hard time coming up with the tenth book. I read so much, I often forget books. The ones that do manage to stick in my mind are usually the good ones (or books I did not care for, such as The Names by Don DeLillo, which is odd since I really liked White Noise). Without further ado, my favorite books of 2004:

1. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who reads this blog. I loved the creativity of this book. Each of the 6 tales were wonderful in their own rights and as a group they became quite a powerful novel.

2. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
The story of Private Detective Jackson Brodie investigating three unrelated cases of missing persons. Except the cases start to relate to one another as the victims’ families each deal with the loss in their own ways. It’s a brilliant story with great character development.

3. Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village by Sarah Erdman
Erdman moves to a small village in the Ivory Coast as a member of the Peace Corp. She has the responsibility of aiding in the health of the community, but she really shines as she becomes one of the villagers. This is a great book filled with many fascintating people.

4. The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers
An underrated novel by a great author, I loved the story of this complicated family. A German Jewish immigrant meets an African American singer, they marry and produce a family through the violence of the 60s. They want to raise their kids beyond race, in a musical atmosphere but it becomes more complicated as the children get older.

5. The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand
Little Brown is thankfully reprinting the works of this Pulitzer Prize winning author (this is the book that won the prize). This tells the story of a distinguished Boston family in the early 20th century. Through this adept portrait of Boston Brahmins, you glimpse Marquand’s satire as depression and regret reveal themselves in the characters.

6. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
I started reading Roth with his most recent book The Plot Against America. I was so blown away with it, I decided to read some of his older work. In American Pastoral, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, you find an average man lamenting how extraordinary his life has become. His daughter blew up a post office in 1968, killing a man, and has been on the run for years. Swede Levov is left with the aftermath and wonders where he went wrong. A powerful and sad novel, it leaves you feeling somewhat hollow inside.

7. Aloft by Chang Rae-Lee
The narrator of this book Jerry Battle lives on Long Island and flies planes for a hobby. He does not seem to fully inhabit his life, preferring to soar in his two-seater plane over the neighborhoods around. On the verge of turning 60, he must deal with the death of his wife 20 years ago, his live-in lover, and his two children, who have had to deal with his faults. It’s a great novel on ther risks of living.

8. You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon
Two characters wonder what their lives might have been like in this sad novel. Moving back and forth through time, one of the characters struggles with his daily life. And the other, his brother given up at birth, wodners how his life might have been better had he not been adopted. It’s moving in places and makes you think about how fragile time can be.

9. The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer
I just read this a few weeks ago. It had been on my list ever since reading Ed’s review in January magazine many moons ago. So read his review, as it’s better than mine. I’ll just say that there is wonderful play with time and it deals again with the chances that life presents.

When I first flipped through this book, I noticed the many recipes accompanying each chapter. I hoped this wasn’t some hokey gimmick and as I read this book I wasn’t disappointed. Diana Abu-Jaber grew up with a father passionate about most everything, but particularly about food. Living in upstate New York, surrounded by her extended American and Arab family, she describes the various meals shared with them. What’s impressive about Abu-Jaber’s writing is her ability to inhabit the ages of which she writes. What I mean is that when she writes of her life at age 8, it’s not her looking back and reflecting, you really feel how she saw the world at age 8. It’s an amazing way of writing.

She describes being torn between two cultures with spare beauty:

I have recently come to understand something about myself, which is that I am—as my uncle Hilal might say—a hopeless case. Even if I had somehow, down the line, brought myself to have babies and to stay in my hometown in a house with an easy, wide-hipped porch, none of that would have made any difference to the sleepless part of me. Like a second, invisible body, I sit up out of my sleep at night, wander across the room, stop beside a darkened window, and dream my way through th eglass. It is more than looking: the elements of darkness and distance release my mind liek a dash of sugar on the surface of hot water. In the distances between stars, it seems there is no flavor or scent (although I think I might detect the purple black glisten of eggplant skin within the night air, the slyest reminder of how the forms of life and the physical world are infinite and everywhere). Come back, I want to say to my second self, there is tea and mint here, there is sugar, there is dark bread and oil. I must have these things near me: children, hometown, fresh bread, long conversations, animals; I must bring them very near. The second self draws close, like a wild bird, easy to startle away: It owns nothing, and it wants nothing, only to see, to taste, and to describe. It is the wilderness of the interior, the ungoverned consciousness of writing.

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