The Year's Best

Of the books you read in 2011, which ones make your personal “best books read in 2011” list?

Many lists of the best books of 2011 are being published now. I’m scanning them avidly and adding to my future-reading list. Once again, I read 52 books this year. So much for last year’s resolution to knit more and read a little bit less. Of the 52 that I read, 10 were non-fiction and 42 were fiction.

My 2011 favorites came primarily from non-fiction: Let’s Take the Long Way Home (memoir by Gail Caldwell), Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (on the Catholic Church by Garry Wills), and The Warmth of Other Suns (Black migration during Jim Crow by Isabel Wilkerson). My favorite fiction was the quirky Bangkok 8 by John Burdett.

Unfortunately, a whole bunch of the rest of the fiction comes under the heading of “hate to admit I spent time reading that.” They were guilty pleasures like the Sookie Stackhouse books, Janet Evanovich books, and a number of cheesy romance novels. I should probably resolve to raise the level of my literary intake, but my success rate with resolutions is abysmal.