Good morning,
We are approaching that wonderful time of the year once more – the award of the most irrelevant prize in literature, the 2018 TOA Book of the Year. The field was a little smaller than in years past – by my final count, I read 65 books this year, down from an average of just over 105 books read per year during 2015-2017 – but there were more than plenty of excellent works to choose from for this year’s shortlist.
So, without additional admin, here is the shortlist for the best book I read in 2018:
The Seven Deadly Chess Sins by Jonathan Rowson (January)
High Output Management by Andy Grove (February)
The Raqqa Diaries by Samer (February)
Bring The Noise by Raphael Honigstein (March)
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (May)
Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton (May)
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (May)
Plain Talk by Ken Iverson (June)
Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (July)
Deep Thinking by Gary Kasparov (July)
Tribe by Sebastian Junger (August)
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (September)
I Wrote This Book Because I Love You by Tim Kreider (October)
Sceptical Essays by Bertrand Russell (October)
Gridiron Genuis by Michael Lombardi (November)
Little Panic by Amanda Stern (November)
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Murakami, Haruki (December)
Daily Rituals by Mason Currey (December)
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (December)
We’ll resume the book award in a few weeks and start eliminating shortlist candidates one or two books at a time. When the list is narrowed down to around four or five, I’ll write a little more extensively about each candidate. Unlike in years past, I intend to get through the award much faster this year, but I suppose I shouldn’t make any promises.
Before we get to the books, however, I want to cover a couple of minor categories for the 2018 TOA Awards. So, next week I’ll start a review of my year in music. After I wrap up the music award, I may take an extra week or two afterward to mention highlights from other minor categories. We’ll circle back to the books soon enough, though, and start whittling down the shortlist each week until we have a winner.
