By now, I can stop counting, but for the record, this is the eleventh year in a row that I’m writing a January post to review the books I read and the movies I watched in the previous year.
In 2017, I read 48 books and saw 11 movies; those numbers are down from the year before, but hey, this isn’t a contest. Last year, the number of fiction works I read was close to the number of non-fiction: 26 to 22. Fiction genres ranged from short story collections to classics to contemporary novels to mystery/thriller. The non-fiction books included history, history of math and science, biography/memoir, social science, nature, and travel writing. Because they are rather idiosyncratic, I won’t submit my counts by category.
As happened last year, the number of movies I watched was way below a previously calculated average, but that was because I again spent a lot of time watching downloaded TV shows and streaming PBS shows such as Mystery of Matter, Fabric of the Cosmos, Our National Parks, and of course the epic Ken Burns-Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War. The few movies I did watch included biopics, comedy, adventure, a black-and-white classic, documentaries, and family drama.
As in the past few years, I could not pick a top five or six titles as Best of, even though that’s what these posts are supposed to be about, so this year I’m again doing something a bit different for both books and movies.
For movies, because there were so few, I picked my all-around favorite, which was the Hollywood feature film Manchester by the Sea. As runners-up in the film category, I’ve chosen the independent film Tangerine which was shot on iPhones and the Oscar-winning Moonlight.
For books, I decided I would simply highlight the books that I felt were well worth reading but that might not necessarily be that well-known. So even if this post is supposed to be “Best of,” the books list, alphabetically by title below, is not that.
- Personal history of surfing – Barbarian Days
- Absorbing biography – The Invention of Nature
- 20th century classic – The Makioka Sisters
- Lyrical ode to New York by immigrant writer – Open City
- European best-seller – Shadow of the Wind
- Very funny experimental sci-fi – Super Sad True Love Story
- First novel deserving of the hype – The Sympathizer
Click here for the complete lists. Enjoy, and feel free to submit non-snarky comments.