I can vouch for Kafka on the Shore as being a fabulous novel. Alas, it is the only one I've read.

Wonder who actually selects these and what would the criteria be?

Most sound dreary.

Yes, I must rush out and buy The Year of Magical Thinking - sounds so uplifting!

I've read two of the novels - Saturday and On Beauty. They were OK, but there were better novels this year (IMHO).

I quite enjoyed Harr's The Lost Painting; Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece. It was a quick read; an interesting combination of sleuthing and a glimpse into the world of museum archiving and art restoration.
The quest begins when an Italian university student discovers clues in a musty palazzo in Recanati, Le Marche and continues her search in Rome and Dublin.

I thought I'd post this here instead of opening a new thread. Hope nobody minds. The link below is for the Washington Post's best books of 2005. The last page also contains the best non-fiction books. I think it's a great list (but it was a little long to cut and paste, hence the link).

Here is a link that might be useful: Washington Post Book Raves

I just read YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING and it is a superb book. Its nearest literary relative is A GRIEF OBSERVED by C.S.Lewis. If you are not now bereaved, and plan never to be bereaved in the future ever, then you need to read neither of these books.

Brenda

DorieAnn,

Thanks so much for the Washington Post link. I printed the whole thing out. There are quite a few of them that I want to read.

PAM

Joan Didion's book was so incredible. It was magic reading it!

Re: the general criteria of the Times choices...think preppy, yuppy, politically correct New Yorkers...and that's what you get. They are often the books that non-readers buy for their friends; the books that the libraries get the reserve calls for on Monday morning after people read the best seller list.

DorieAnn,

thanks for posting the WP Book Raves list. I often go to their site to look at their reviews and had the 2004 list bookmarked. I didn't know they had released their 2005 list yet. I always get good ideas from their lists.

A Year of Magical Thinking is just being released here in the UK, and it's getting a lot of coverage.

I still don't feel any need to read it, though. It's too private a thing. (And frankly, too depressing.) If Joan Didion wants to write about bereavement and how it affected her, then fine. If others want to read that, and in doing so they get solace, pleasure and magic from that, also fine.

But, Brenda, I have been bereaved in the past and managed without this book, and also A Grief Observed - I expect that if - probably when - I am bereaved in the future I will survive that too, without recourse to these books.

The only book on the list I've read is Prep. I didn't care for it at all - too much teenage angst that I can no longer relate to.

As long as we are sharing top 10 lists, Discover Magazine has a list of top science books for 2005:

Here is a link that might be useful: Discover Magazine's Top Science Books

Here's another Top Ten list I liked, courtesy of *The Historian* author, Elizabeth Kostova. It's her list of Top Ten Literary Mysteries. I've not read any of the NYT list, though *The Lost Painting* sounds very interesting (sorry about the stars and lack of spacing ... where did the HTML functions go?).

Here is a link that might be useful: Elizabeth Kostova's Top Ten

I've read five of Kostova's list and tried Possession but gave it up as a lost cause.

Martin-I agree-although I do have friends who were very moved by Didion's book, I simply can not read the outpouring of another's deepest soul. Even though it's been published with at the least her blessing, since she wrote it and sold it, I still feel as though I am looking where I shouldn't, and where I wouldn't want others looking at me. (imagine that I paragraphed here) On the other hand, I'm setting out for a copy of THE LOST PAINTING immediately. (paragraph) And-I want to know how come the list above has spacing and line breaks and all that good stuff-is it because it was cut and pasted? have we perhaps found a way around the gremlins?

Of the ones on the list, I have only read Didion's book and thought it gripping and very well-written, but painful. It was even more painful to learn from a local newspaper recapitulating this year's stories that her daughter, Quintana Roo, who was seriously ill at the time when Didion's husband suddenly died, also ended up dying (this past August.zxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxz Several months or a year ago, I tried to read one book by Murakami because it was up for discussion in this forum, and a good deal in it disgusted me to such an extent that I never joined in the discussion. I can't help suspecting that Murakami deliberately writes the way he does for the sake of notoriety, and I plan never to read anything by him again. Maybe, just maybe, "Kafka..." (Reduced to using quotes for titles because the usual formatting won't work.) contains no disgusting scenes, but "Once bit, twice shy." zxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzxzx Ha haaa! The thing wouldn't let me even make paragraphs, but I have partially thwarted it--or so I hope--by typing strings of zxzxzx. Come on, Powers that Be, if only for the sake of clearer expression, give us back the ability to indent, leave double spaces, and write short lines of poetry if we want to!

Biwako, LOL! I love the way you "fooled it/them". I'll have to remember your trick....