2002 in books

[millionreasons]

Some books Ive enjoyed this year, or at least given 4 stars to on Goodreads.

1. The Girls by Emma Kline. Suburban boredom, adolescent yearning, a murderous cult.


2. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. We got stars directing our fate....Walter Moody and The Mysterious Case of the Missing Aurora Gold.


3. The Constant Gardener by John Le Carre. Death in Kenya.


4. Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg. Voodoo in Manhattan.


5. Winter by Ali Smith. Christmas in Cornwall.


6. In A Lonely Place by Dorothy B Hughes. The Making of a Murderer in 1950s San Francisco.


7. King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher. Small town class war shenanigans in Devon, kind of like Jonathan Coe, if JC wrote gay orgy scenes.


8. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. In which Jonathan Lethem invents a new genre - neuro-divergent noir.


9. Outline by Rachel Cusk. A Greek businessman, an Irish writer and a Sapphic poet walk into a story.


10. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Little Women in the Congo.


11. Station 11 by Emily St John Mandel. What will remain of us is art.


12. The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith. A night in Tunisia; moral relativism in 250 pages.


13. Who Will Run The Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore. Bildungsroman in upstate NY.


14. Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. Like Neal Stephenson and William Gibson crossed with Philip Pullman.


15. A Word Child by Iris Murdoch. A darkly funny melodrama about lives of quiet desperation and drinking on the Circle line.


16. Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd. On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Subjects of Literature.


17. A Writer's World by Jan Morris. Travel stories from Hillary on Mount Everest to the fall of the Berlin wall.