Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock

Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock. I loved the sense of place, of geography and geology informing the stories. I'd love to see the country around lake Huron. These characters seemed less distant, sharper than others of hers I've read.

Nicholas Harberd, Seed to Seed

Nicholas Harberd, Seed to Seed: the Secret Life of Plants. A journal sketchbook about plants: growth, life, reproduction, and death. The life cycle of a thale cress plant in an English graveyard describes global growth and development. An explanation of transcription factors and how genetic material connects the growth of the plant to the world. A discussion about science, communicating a series of minute observations, and how to connect them back to the encompassing world. How one scientist can hold the world as sacred, and view it in awe and wonder for its order and beauty.

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Virginia Woolf, Orlando. A flowery and playful story of a young nobleman/noblewoman, aspiring poet, hero, patron, and general dreamer and layabout. I loved the gender and time-stretching nature of Orlando and the settings. The style was pompous and sly - toying with literary biography and period literature - but sometimes too half-there, too elliptical. Moments of wit surprised me - for short stretches, the book was so funny, so insightful - but there were also tedious expositions that sapped the story.

China Mieville, Perdido Street Station

China Miéville, Perdido Street Station. This book grew on me like a harmless and grotesque tumor. At first I was annoyed by the florid language, but I stopped noticing, and then deep into the story it seemed a piece with the fecund world of New Crobuzon. Likewise the sprawl of settings and variety of organisms was messy and distracting early, but settled into complex and satisfying patterns.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards! and The Light Fantastic

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards! and The Light Fantastic. Silly, snorkly, and endlessly entertaining. I'm glad there are so many of these to read - I'm going to ration them through med school as emergency fun.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own. Read it.

John Updike, My Father's Tears

John Updike, My Father's Tears. He wrote the same stories over and over again in dozens of gentle variations, exploring every permutation and perspective. Every time I read a collection of his, I remember that I prefer his novels. But I also enjoy thinking about the nature of memory, and defining stories that evolve as they are told over our lifetimes. So if you want to read about a solitary and beloved only child who moved from the town to a farm (or a middle-aged man dealing with bodily decay and the aftermath of divorce or adultery) told and retold in beautiful language, read Updike's short stories.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Cormac McCarthy, The Road. The apocalyptic waste land crossed by vaguely doomed and asymmetrically flawed travelers is Cormac McCarthy's logical end point. The Road is minutely engrossing (like most stories of scavenging survival), and the parent-child emotion pulls more blatantly even than usual. I always love all McCarthy's characters, despite the inevitable, and against my will. I think that's his point though - people love every damn thing and it can't be helped.

Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff

Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff. Good stories, but harsh. And not harsh like drinking bad whiskey, harsh like eating cigarette butts soaked in bad whiskey.

William Nicholson, Slaves of the Mastery and Firesong

William Nicholson, Slaves of the Mastery and Firesong. The rest of the Wind on Fire trilogy. These are dense, allegorical, and unique. The morality is much more nuanced than most fantasy, although on the surface the world is simple. The Mastery is superficially the most totalitarian and brutal state imaginable (just as Amaranth was the most repressive social hierarchy in the first book) but each story element unfolds into a more interesting state. I don't mean to say that the morality is not finally clear, just that the stories recognize complexity and potential for both good and evil in the heroes and villains. These two books didn't have quite the mythical feeling or emotional pull of the first in the trilogy, but the whole story was imaginative and powerful.

Georges Simenon, Inspector Cadaver

Georges Simenon, Inspector Cadaver. My first Inspector Maigret mystery (I don't know how I missed him in my Agatha Christie phase). A provincial investigation of a suspicious death, with a country house, snobbery, hostile gossip, and a sleazy house guest. Inspector Maigret is restrained, ruminative, and reluctant. Well-written, and even in translation the language is unmistakably french.

Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle

Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle. Pretty humid, not to say moist. But Molly Bolt is a girl worth the humidity. She's fierce enough to rival Scout and she's less of a brat than Holden.

Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief

Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief. This was interesting. I would have liked more on the orchids and less on the people. The botany is incredible and the descriptions needed large color plates. I thought the contemporary orchid people were a little boring, but I would definitely read an entire book on the Victorian era orchid hunters. The story was scattered, running off in all directions, but when it focused on the flowers or on the character of LaRoche it was fascinating.

Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Neil Gaiman, American Gods. This was pretty disappointing. It was a fine thriller but it wasn't really funny or especially creative. The story had moments of spark, but mostly it seemed mechanical. I think the author like describing the background of middle America and the stories of the gods more than writing about the main character. Evidence in favor of my theory that strong silent men make crappy protagonists. And Shadow is a stupid name, anyway (it made me imagine him as a cross between a German Shepard and "The Rock").

Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment and Going Postal

Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment and Going Postal. More fun. Monstrous Regiment is about the small criminally insane nation of Borogravia and its very unusual recruits. It changed my relationship with socks. Going Postal follows the, er, choice of the very talented con man Moist von Lipwig to go straight (more or less) and take a civil service job reviving the post office.

V.S. Naipaul, Magic Seeds

V.S. Naipaul, Magic Seeds. The next half of Willie Chandran's life (or the next third of it, anyway). Willie floats with the same reserve and disconnection. He somehow drifts through years of fighting with a guerrilla revolutionary force and further years of imprisonment. He lives more and more within his own skin and the best parts of the story are the details of how he connects minute to minute of time. His return to England pulls away from that focus, and in the end it's no different than his first arrival. He's still amiable, but full of less and less potential.

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch. Marvelous. Scratched so many itches at once that I'm going to have to invent a new category of fun reading. This one had all the satisfaction of a good mystery/police novel smooshed in with science fiction and a really great imaginary universe and slathered all over with just slightly over the top hilariousness. Like Douglas Adams with more plot? No, not exactly. But that absurd humor that makes me snort when I'm reading and whisper lines out loud to myself just to hear them again. I can't exactly recap the plot, but Commander Sam Vimes is the kind of archetype who's fun to read about even when he's boring, and he was definitely not boring.

Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar's Children

Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar's Children. These are longer short stories, but the book doesn't have the scattered feeling of some collections. They are coherent and narratives transition smoothly: the people aren't connected, but the personality of the growing city of Washington provides continuity. Many of the characters are transplants, leaving rural communities behind, while others never left but are seeing their city change around them.

Kevin Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places and King of the Middle March

Kevin Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places and King of the Middle March. The second two books in this Arthurian trilogy. Again, the short chapters and the interweaving of two stories are original and pleasing. The book is meticulously researched ("our" Arthur's story is at end of the twelfth century) and therefore absolutely fascinating. The narrative is vivid and nuanced at the same time, which is hard to pull off when writing a squire's account of events leading up to a crusade.

V.S. Naipaul, Half a Life

V.S. Naipaul, Half a Life. Willie Chandran moves from continent to content, half escaping and half creating. He leaves behind his parents, but not quite their resentment and shame. And so he lives a life of repetition. The hypocrisy and entanglement of class and pigment follow him around the world. He's always almost absent, always leaves himself a backdoor open for escape. He manages to never be fully invested, to be continually making time. His half lived life has so far been cushioned by falsehoods and protective coloration. And yet he's attractive, amiable, full of untapped promise.