Books, 2017

My mother keeps a notebook of what she reads, so it seems only fair that I keep a list. These are the books I finished this year, roughly in the order I read them, minus the ones I've already forgotten, which says something about them.

• The Trespasser, Tana French. A detective nobody on her squad likes, a case everyone wants closed by the end of the shift, and a narrator so prickly I underlined half the book. I read it in two nights on the bus.
• The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey. An inspector stuck in a hospital bed tries to solve a murder from the fifteenth century with nothing but library books and a portrait. My mother has been telling me to read it since I was fifteen. She was right, and she will want that noted.
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré. I read it before his new one came out in September. A spy who has been eased into retirement goes looking for the traitor at the top of his old service, and almost nobody in it says what they mean. You learn to listen to the pauses.
• Still Life, Louise Penny. I read it because my mother did, and now we compare notes on the phone about a village in Quebec where far too many people die for its size.
• Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders. A boy in a crypt and a crowd of ghosts who won't admit they're dead. I didn't know a novel could be built like this. It made me want to write dialogue differently, and I've been trying all fall.
• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro. I read it after he won the Nobel in October, which is a lazy reason, and I'm glad I did. A butler spends a whole book not saying one thing, and you hear it on every page. I thought of the blacksmith.
• Magpie Murders, Anthony Horowitz. A mystery novel inside a mystery novel, with the last chapter missing. Clever enough that it ought to be annoying, and it isn't.
• Bluebird, Bluebird, Attica Locke. Two bodies in a small East Texas town, and a Black Texas Ranger who knows exactly what the town thinks of him. Sharp and sad, with a sense of place you can smell.
• Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward. Not a mystery, though there's a ghost. I read it in November and it hasn't let go of me.
• The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. My yearly reread. Marlowe at his most worn out and his most decent. I don't think anyone has written a better friendship that goes wrong.

Ten books, which is fewer than I'd like and more than I feared in October.

One more thing. Sue Grafton died this week. My mother called me when she heard. She has the alphabet down the margin of a page in her notebook, checked off through Y, which came out in August, and Grafton's family has said there won't be a Z. I asked if she'd cross the Z off. She said a librarian doesn't erase, and she'll leave it as it is.

What was the best thing you read this year?