Thread: Best Literature Novels and Poetry read in 2005

The 10 best Great Literature novels that I read this year, worth the time and sacrifice, are:

- THE FAMISHED ROAD, by Ben Okri (b. 1952, Nigerian)
- FATELESS, by Imre Kertész (b. 1929, Hungarian)
- BLACK BOX, by Amos Oz (b.1937, Israeli)
- DISGRACE, by J.M. Coetzee (b.1940, South African)
- HUMBOLDT'S GIFT, by Saul Bellow (b.1915-d.2005, American)
- RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT, by Patrick White (b.1912-d.1990,Australian)
- SNOW COUNTRY, by Kawabata Yasunari (b.1899-d.1972, Japanese)
- LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, by Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928 Columbian)
- THE BLIND ASSASSIN, by Margaret Atwood (b. 1939, Canadian)
- A PERSONAL MATTER, by Oé Kenzaburo (b. 1935, Japanese)

The best poetry I enjoyed this year was written by (they are all alive):

- TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER (Swedish)
- ANN CARSON (Canadian)
- GEOFFREY HILL (British)

Anyway, the order does not matter. It is just a random list. I hope you enjoy, but remember that this is pure Literature! No thrillers, no light fiction. It is, as Henry James once put it, "true fiction", not very attractive to all, but to the immense minority of us. I recommend these books and authors for those who are servants of the painful type of literature, which is in the end, true Art.

Ten Best Books I Read in '05

- Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler
- The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
- American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
- Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler
- Crash by JG Ballard
- The Castle by Franz Kafka
- Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

As for it having to be pure literature, I piss in the face of literary elitism and snotty canonization, so these are works I enjoyed (if I wanted to play the dead-white-man-groin-tug-game, I'd put the Kipling and Forster and Woolf books I read). So happy days.