This post comes in a little late, as it is customary to close the passing year with a list of the best and to begin the new one with a list of the most expected books. This is not, at any rate, what I intend to offer here, as I gave up long ago any attempt at keeping up with the overwhelming mass of literary novelties. Every December I discover horrified that I have missed all that was (apparently) worth reading the previous eleven months and, so, it is only then when I select a few titles for the bottomless list of what I’d like to read. Add to this the classics, the accidental discoveries, and the odd, neglected books that surface from reading other books. I do wonder how the readers who appear to know what is relevant every year do manage. Or is it all marketing?

I keep track of everything I read since the tender age of 14 and this is the closest I have ever come to keeping a regular diary (excepting this blog). It is always exciting to close the list for the year and go through the books read each month to recall the best moments spent in the company of intelligent minds. And it is also exciting to open a new list and wonder how it will be filled as the months to come pass (or, rather, fly!). I don’t know that this in an average measure of any use beyond my personal experience but the 2018 list throws this result: I have much enjoyed about 40% of the books I have read but, basically, put up with the mediocrity of the remaining 60%. I mean here the books I have entirely read for I don’t count the many books I have abandoned, a figure that grows every year as I get more and more impatient with writers who do not care for producing good prose (also with those who care about the prose but not the content).

I’m not sure how this works for my academic colleagues in Literary Studies but about 50% of all the books I read each year are novels; the rest may also include fiction (short stories) but are mostly non-fiction and academic essays. No poetry, shame on me. Most of the worst books I read are novels and most of the best books are non-fiction, which either means that my own personal preferences are changing as I age, or that generally speaking, novels are overvalued and non-fiction undervalued.

Thus, if you ask me to choose just one of the 90 books in my 2018 list, I cannot hesitate: every person on planet Earth should read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1966), the non-fiction book that explained to the world how 1940s-1950s science had horribly polluted the whole environment with its pesticides and other venoms. I must seriously wonder what is wrong with our education since it has taken me so many years to get to this book, which I have only read because it kept surfacing in many academic works on science fiction. Why we think that reading such and such novel is more important than reading Silent Spring is a matter that we need to address urgently.

The justification used to be the artistic enjoyment supposedly found in reading novels but I find that few current novelists have either the literary skills or the intellectual equipment required to produce masterpieces, whereas the best essays (why has this been word abandoned for non-fiction??) contain both good, solid prose and admirable brainpower. Also, being myself a writer of academic work, I appreciate the hard work that often comes into writing non-fiction and in comparison to which fabulating novels seems a far less daunting task.

I have, then, much admired this past year books as diverse as David Grann’s The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Jungle (2010) and Judith Flanders’ The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed (2004). And taken off my imaginary hat before gigantic achievements such as Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) or Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), which need to be revisited now and then. I have likewise revered Ian Kershaw’s work in The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (1987) and, on the literary front, absolutely loved John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (2003) and Humphrey Carpenter’s The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s (2002). Sometimes books talk to each other without the authors knowing it in the individual experience of readers and, so, I find that Pavla Miller’s short but intense Patriarchy (2017) complements very well Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning (2018)–another book I would include in our basic education together with Carson’s.

Unfortunately, I don’t read illustrated books for children–I say unfortunately because we adults stupidly miss in this way the most beautiful books published each year. My personal award for prettiest book read in 2018 goes then to the British Library’s Harry Potter: A History of Magic (2017), the companion to the recent exhibition, and a book that manages to be highly informative and a true visual pleasure. Finally, I have already enthused here about Pablo Poó’s Espabila chaval (2017), worth one hundred novels because of his impeccable understanding of what is wrong with current secondary education or, rather, with under-18 students.

How about the fiction? Well, whereas I would award the books above named an A or A+ (or 4 to 5 stars in Amazon’s and GoodReads’ parlance), the best novels I have read are, with few exceptions, B+ to A-. I find, anyway, that recommending novels is harder than recommending non-fiction/essays for whereas all readers should read Silent Spring to be informed, regardless of whether it bores them or no, with fiction boredom does play a bigger role. Thus, I can insist that you should read Albright’s Fascism but I have fewer elements to argue that you should read Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935), the novel that best narrates what she discusses. I find Lewis’ tale very exciting but, then, you might not. Take, then, the following list as a very personal record of the fiction that has kept me turning pages, sometimes for hours.

Margaret Oliphant’s Hester (1883) is a splendid Victorian novel about a woman’s failure to pass on to the next generation the power she has acquired by accident. John Masefield’s The Box of Delights (1935) is a novel for children that many connect with Harry Potter but that is worth reading on its own, if possibly re-visiting the 1980s TV adaptation. I don’t particularly like the work of Doris Lessing but I have found much to enjoy in my second reading of The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974). I can say the same about Lucia Berlin’s short stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women (2016)–which everyone praised so highly a while ago–and young Abi Andrews’s The Word for Woman is Wilderness (2018), a mixture of fiction and non-fiction which is simply awesome. André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name (2007) and Michael Chabon’s Moonglow (2016) are the novels I would award an A, a mark I will also award to Octavio Salazar Benítez’ Autorretrato de un macho disidente (2017), if only because it is a brave, singular book which too many readers will miss.

Forget Kevin Spacey and the American TV series, and do read Michael Dobbs’s original trilogy: House of Cards (1989), To Play the King (1992), The Final Cut (1995). If possible, see the author speaking in any of the videos available on YouTube, he’s a most interesting gentleman! So is John le Carré, who cannot do female characters well but kept me up for hours one night reading his The Secret Pilgrim (1991), a fusion of the novel and the short story collection that works very nicely. I was also thrilled by Robert Harris’ Fatherland (1992), which has so many points in common with Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937) but is also a great thriller–and I speak as a reader who is not really into crime fiction. My one favourite author, Ian Rankin, has published this year possibly his best John Rebus novel, In a House of Lies (2018), a subtle tale suggesting that Mr. Jekyll has already overpowered Dr. Hyde. Following Rankin’s suggestion, I read Lawrence Block’s Everybody Dies (Matthew Scudder #14) (1998). Again: see the author on YouTube, what a lesson in writing!

For those of you who like SF, as I do, I must mention Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age (1965), Vandana Singh’s Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (2018) and Richard K. Morgan’s Martian novel Thin Air (2018). I found the tales in the collective volume by women authors I Premio Ripley. Relatos de ciencia ficción y terror (2017) very good. And was totally surprised by Iraqi author Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2016), a novel translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright which narrates the efforts of a local man to give peaceful rest to the victims of terrorist bombings by assembling a corpse out of their bodily remains. A corpse that is suddenly animated…

Do read Silent Spring. On second thoughts, do read Fascism: A Warning. It is even more urgent. And share with other readers what you love, for those books truly worth reading are too often by-passed by the list of the best. Life is too short to waste on bad books…

I publish a new post every Tuesday (for updates follow @SaraMartinUAB). Comments are very welcome! Download the yearly volumes from: http://ddd.uab.cat/record/116328. My web: http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/