Best Books of the 2012 (So Far)

We're halfway through the year, so it's time to look back on 2012's reads so far and list favorites:

The End of the Affair - Graham Greene:  Loved this!  Set in London during and just after World War II, the novel examines the obsessions, jealousy and discernments within the relationships between three central characters: writer Maurice Bendrix; Sarah Miles; and her husband, civil servant Henry Miles.





The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje:  Again, set during World War II.  The story deals with the gradually revealed histories of a critically burned English accented Hungarian man, his Canadian nurse, a Canadian-Italian thief, and an Indian sapper in the British Army as they live out the end of World War II in an Italian villa.



  

The Painted Veil - W. Somerset Maugham:  Maugham is one of my favorite writers.  This is set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s and is the story of the beautiful but shallow young Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to a remote region of China ravaged by a cholera epidemic.





 
Consequences of the Heart - Peter Cunningham:  Wonderfully engaging.  A love story, a war story, a thriller, and a generational story of two Irish families.








Old School - Tobias Wolff:  Prep school, literary contests, famous writers - this is a book for book lovers and would-be writers!  Set in the early 1960s and narrated by the unnamed protagonist from the vantage point of adulthood, a scholarship boy at a New England prep school grapples with literary ambition and insecurity.








The Traveler - Antal Szerb: More Hungarian authors! I loved the two Dezso Kosztolanyi novels I read last year, but The Traveler tops them both. What's not to like? A honeymoon in Italy, a secret past, a missing childhood friend - I could not stop reading and cannot wait to find a copy of Szerb's Journey by Moonlight.





 
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins: My first Wilkie Collins and, so far, my favorite. This is a perfect mystery!









Lorna Doone - R. D. Blackmore: I finally read this novel after watching the 2001 film dozens of times. It's enormous and thankfully so. Blackmore managed to draw out the drama of Lorna Doone's life without once losing my interest.








The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde: It's hard to believe, but I had not read Dorian Gray before this year. That was my loss, really. I love this story (I have seen the 1945 film - featuring this painting - many, many times), and the end will never cease to surprise and shock me.







Piccadilly Jim - P. G. Wodehouse: I have previously read a few Jeeves and Wooster tales and Leave It to Psmith, but Piccadilly Jim is currently my favorite Wodehouse novel. There is Wodehouse's typical mistaken/false identity surrounding the character of Jimmy Crocker and convoluted plots for revenge. It is filled with witty scenes and a brilliant character in Ann Chester.

Old School - Tobias Wolff

     Don't you love it when you stumble across a book that you know nothing about and fall in love with it?  That's what happened to me with Tobias Wolff's Old School.  I was attracted to the cover, saw that it was a Pen/Faulkner finalist, and decided to give it a try.  I was not disappointed.

     The novel is set in a boys' New England prep school in the early 1960's where life revolves around literature.  Each year the school hosts visiting writers and the boys are allowed to compete for a private audience with the writer by composing a poem or story.  The entries are judged in advanced by the visiting writer, making the selection of the winner an even greater honor.  Inevitably, the competitions are fiercely competitive and the boys calculating and conniving in their pursuit of the coveted prize.

     The narrator, a boy from a less prominent background hiding his Jewish ancestry, wants to become a writer and desperately desires to win an audience with one of the visiting writers.  After failing to win an audience with Robert Frost and Ayn Rand, he is determined to win the chance to meet his hero, Ernest Hemingway.  The dean of the school is thought to be a friend of Hemingway's from World War I and the writer's visit is anxiously anticipated.  As the boy struggles to compose the winning story, he is faced with writer's block.  He finally finds his "voice" and his inspiration through imitation.  When his story is selected by Hemingway, the honor is short-lived.  He finds himself disgraced and his life is changed forever.  Only years later learns of another's fall from grace at the same time.

     The book is an homage to literature and the literary life.  It's a concise little treasure of a novel that carries weighty themes of honesty, identity, friendship, shame, and redemption.  It is definitely a book for book-lovers, would-be writers, and those who see writing as an essential part of who we are as humans.

~ Frances