...I wish there was a way to just view your own posts in a thread. And I'll post my winners in the next day or so. The front runner for Best In Show is... Credit goes to @Minnman for the recommendation.
yBest Fiction: Francine Prose, The Blue Angel Honorable Mention to The Damned United by David Pearce. Though some days I might flip flop this selection. Pearce is definitely the best soccer-related book I've read this year. Best Literary Biography: Joyce Johnson, The Voice is All, Jack Kerouac's life from Lowell to the publication of On The Road. Honorable Mention for Lisa Jarnot's life of the poet Robert Duncan, and for Anna Beer's life of John Milton. Travel: Things of The Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain by Christopher Merrill (author of one of the first soccer books written by an American, The Grass of Another Country Honorable Mention to Hail Babylon by Andrei Codrecsu Memoir: Ardent Spirits by Reynolds Price Non-Fiction History/Culture etc: Esalen: The American Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey Kripal. Also the runner-up for Book of the Year. Honorable mention to Eugene Taylor for Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America New discover: the Guido Brunetti mysteries of Donna Leon. Far and away the best American crime writer who sets her stories in Venice. Best hard to classify book: Geoff Dyer's Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room Best volume of poetry: Harryette Mullen: Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary. Big fan of urban nature writing: Walking along the green path with buds in my ears, too engrossed in the morning news to listen to the stillness of the garden. ***** Clicking through images downloaded from your camera. Those buskers haven't finished playing, and already they're in your archive.[/INDENT]
Best Fiction (re-read): Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman - Thomas Hardy Best Fiction (1st read) : My Ántonia - Willa Cather
Best of 2014 Best Fiction (re-read): Moby Dick or The Whale - Herman Melville Best Fiction (1st read): Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero - William Makepeace Thackeray
Best of 2014 for me Fiction: His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. Non Fiction: Cheating Lessons by James M. Lang (not quite finished). About course and classroom structural elements that tend to increase cheating by students and how to construct courses to eliminate them.
Best in show for me: Iain Sinclair's American Smoke: Journeys to The End of Light Memoir: Life as a Literary Device by Vitaly Vitaliev. History: Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk was America's Favorite Sport by Matthew Algeo Literary History/Biography: East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg by Gordon Ball (Special mention to Philip Gura for Transcendentalism: a History and to Dana Greene for her biography of the poet Denise Levertov) Walking: The Art of Wandering by Merlin Coverley Fiction: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano And finally, best hard to define, multi genre work (poem/essay/memoir/criticism), not to mention book design: Gadsden by my friend and former colleague Rich Blevins...
Hmm.... I must be in a rut because 2014 was not a particularly memorable year for reading. A couple of unremarkable niche histories and waaaay too many crappy cozy mysteries that are still better than the one I've been writing. And this was the year I was going to try and read much Shakespeare. I ended up reading probably 1500 pages about the Bard, most of it over the top, but the best, which I have already re-read was Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage. Highly recommended, both for his breathtaking brevity and great wit. As for fiction, I greatly enjoyed re-reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, though the conversations I was hoping to have with my son, who read it for class, never materialized. Most interesting non-fiction: Michael Erad's Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean