1) William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early
American Republic
Alan Taylor, 1995
Rivals any American novel in the density of its portrayal of American life. A biography of
politician and land speculator William Cooper and a dynamic portrait of the settlement he
founded, Cooperstown, New York. Cooper's fortunes rose and fell with that of the Federalist
party. Cooper's son, James Fenimore, would reflect ruefully on the landed gentry's decline
in his fiction. Taylor's book is unusually colorful and pungent for an academic writer.
2) The Door
Magda Szabo, 1987
A Hungarian novel about the relationship between a bourgeoise writer and her mysterious
peasant housekeeper. Part folie a deux, part power struggle, the bond between them is too
chimerical to pin down, but resounding enough to fill this wonderous masterwork.
3) Cloud Cuckoo Land
Anthony Doerr, 2021
In its polyphonic scope, similar to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. The differences are
interesting. Mitchell constructs post-modern vignettes, while Doerr hews more closely
to a modern realism with roots in George Eliot, Dickens and Hemingway. A worthy
successor to All The Light We Cannot See and a treat for bibliophiles.
4) Ingres
Georges Vigne, 1995
A scholarly study of the French painter, Definitive and eye popping.
5) Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, 1981
The most compact and straightforward of his masterpieces.
6) The Polish Officer
Alan Furst, 1995
Superior World War 2 spy fiction.
7) Hug Chickenpenny: The Panegyric of an Anomalous Child
S. Craig Zahler, 2018
The film director is a talented writer of varied works including Gothic Westerns such as
Wraiths of the Broken Land. This novel is a bit of a departure for the author. It chronicles
a talented outsider in a fable that is aimed at literate children and adults. It would make a
good Tim Burton film.
8) Listening for Coyote
William L. Sullivan, 1988
A naturalist hikes across 1,300 of Oregon. One of the best portraits of the state and its people
and still as timely as when it was published.
9) The War That Ended Peace
Margaret MacMillan, 2013
A diplomatic history of Europe in the years leading up to the First World War. A good
companion to Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower.
10) The Princess and the Goblin
George MacDonald, 1872
MacDonald writes unusually clean well-lit sentences for a fantasist. I am indebted to Jonathan
Cott's Beyond the Looking Glass, a collection of Victorian fairy tales, for hipping me to
Macdonald.
I very much enjoyed and can't believe the following did not make the list...
Titan, Ron Chernow, 1998
There's a Mystery There..., Jonathan Cott, 2017
Reconstruction, Eric Foner, 1988
Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz, 1965
Trespassers on the Roof of the World, Peter Hopkirk, 1982
The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner, 2021
The Kremlin Ball, Curzio Malaparte, 1957
Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker, 2017
The worst book I read this year, by leaps and bounds, was...
1601 and Is Shakespeare Dead?, Mark Twain, 1880
Unrelieved tedium.
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