bowling and books.

Latest WTF moment: I went bowling with my parents this afternoon, and it was a strange experience. For one thing, I got 55 points on the first game. I think this is the worst I've ever done at bowling. For another thing, the machine that replaced the pins was acting up. One person would finish, a new set of pins would come down, but some of the pins would be missing and bowling alley workers would have to come and push a button several times to get a full set of pins. Then one of the workers decided to clean our lane while we were playing. He didn't say anything, but he rolled a cleaning machine out in front of our lane while my dad was in the middle of a frame. He didn't really pay attention to us at all, actually. Then, when he sent the machine down the lane to clean it, he moved the machine to the next lane, but left the power cord stretched across our runway until another employee came over and moved it. Before that, he was walking between our lane and the lane next to us. He was wearing socks, but his socks were leaving a white powder on everything, so there were white footprints everywhere he went, and we walked on our lane and left footprints there. (Incidentally, this employee started bowling a little bit later, and he was pretty amazing. He would swing the bowling ball back almost completely vertical, then bowl it, and when he bowled the ball, it was incredibly fast and incredibly smooth). Right after this, another employee came over and, without saying anything to us, turned off our computer screen.

Anyway, here's my list of the ten best (as in favorite) fiction books I read this year, as promised. Tim (and I think this is the first time I've directly addressed a person while writing here), I'm sorry that you already know about at least most of these, but thats the way the milk curdles.


Top Ten Fiction
The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
City of Saints and Madmen - Jeff Vandermeer
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
Snow - Orhan Pamuk
Saturday - Ian McEwan
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
A Personal Affair - Kenzaburo Oe
Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami


Those are in no particular order. I had enough trouble figuring out what would be on my top 10 (it became pretty arbitrary at the end). There were a lot of good books I read that weren't on the list. I'm a little surprised that Saturday and The Road made it on, because I didn't think that much of them when I read them. Looking back though, they seem better. And...I don't really want to do a list of best non-fiction, so I won't.

So below here is a pretty complete list of what I read over the year. This doesn't take into account most of the poetry, any of the Bible, or some of the plays and articles and whatever else I read. It's basically just books that I read and finished this year, along with a few plays and epics.

A quick analysis of this list: about 60% of what I read was fiction. That means about 40% was non-fiction. I read authors from USA, Japan, Russia, Greece, Italy, Haiti, South Africa, France, Algeria, Germany, Holland, India, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Denmark. Next year, I'd like to get more Latin American and Spanish writers in (and I really want to read Jose Saramago, who is from Portugal).

Telling Secrets - Frederick Buechner
Remains of the Day- Kazuo Ishiguro
A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Theology as Big as the City - Ray Bakke
The Iliad - Homer
The Aeneid - Virgil
The Republic - Plato
Nichomachean Ethics - Aristotle
History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides
Masters of the Dew - Jacques Roumain
Maria Chapdelaine - Louis Hemon
Poetry Handbook - Mary Oliver
Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
Elements of Narrative - H. Porter Abbott
Foe - J.M. Coetzee
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Walking on Water - Madeleine L'engle
Confessions - Augustine
Discourse on Free Will - Luther/Erasmus
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
The Rule of St Benedict - Benedict
The Inferno - Dante
Paradise Lost -John Milton
History of the English Language - Albert C. Baugh
The Irresistible Revolution - Shane Claiborne
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse
Aristotle's Children - Richard Rubenstein
City of Saints and Madmen - Jeff Vandermeer
East, West - Salman Rushdie
Bel Canto - Ann Patchett
The Stranger - Albert Camus
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
Urban Tribes - Ethan Watters
Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee
The Moor's Last Sigh - Salman Rushdie
Language in Thought and Action - S.I. Hayakawa
Snow - Orhan Pamuk
Saturday - Ian McEwan
Freakonomics - Stephen Levitt
Four Quartets - T.S. Eliot
Silence - Shusaku Endo
Traveling Mercies - Anne Lamott
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Fires - Raymond Carver
The Great Divorce - C.S. Lewis
Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice - William Shakespeare
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Large Catechism - Martin Luther
Fear and Trembling - Soren Kierkegaard
The Divine Conspiracy - Dallas Willard
The White Castle - Orhan Pamuk
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima
A Personal Affair - Kenzaburo Oe
A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami
Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
Beowulf
The Sound of the Mountain - Yasunari Kawabata
The Wounded Healer - Henri Nouwen