Books, 2018

A list I had to work for this year, for a reason anyone who was reading here in the summer will understand. Between the end of May and the middle of August I read nothing but bug reports. The rest of the year I tried to make up for it.

• Brat Farrar, Josephine Tey. On Ruth Ann's advice, from the comments on last year's list. A young man turns up claiming to be the heir who was thought drowned as a boy, and the whole family has to decide whether to believe him. I couldn't put it down, and then I couldn't stop thinking about it.
• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin. I read it in February, after she died. An envoy on a planet locked in winter, and the long crossing of the ice near the end, two people hauling a sled and learning, slowly, to trust each other. It's the best book about cold I've read, and I grew up in Duluth.
• The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin. A reread. A girl whose name has been taken from her, in the dark under a desert temple. I understood it far better as a grown woman than I did at twelve.
• A Fatal Grace and The Cruelest Month, Louise Penny. Two more from that village in Quebec, read in order, of course. I was trying to keep pace with my mother. I failed.
• Educated, Tara Westover. A memoir of growing up in the mountains in Idaho, with no school and a family that didn't believe in hospitals. I read it in one weekend and called my mother afterward for no particular reason.
• Circe, Madeline Miller. The witch from the Odyssey, finally telling it her way. Quiet and furious at once.
• Transcription, Kate Atkinson. A young woman in 1940 typing up secretly recorded conversations for MI5, and what it costs her years later. Funny until it isn't.
• The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett. My first Hammett, which is embarrassing to admit for someone who has read as much Chandler as I have. Sam Spade is colder than Marlowe and doesn't pretend otherwise. I see now where a great many people learned to write a private eye.
• Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler. My yearly reread, a different one this time. Moose Malloy in a nightclub looking for a woman who doesn't want to be found.
• The Witch Elm, Tana French. Her first novel outside the murder squad, about a man who has always been lucky and then isn't. Long and unnerving. I read the last hundred pages in one sitting on a Sunday and missed lunch.

Eleven, counting the two Pennys separately, which I'm going to do.

What should I read next year? I'm asking for real. Last year's comments gave me the best book on this list.