Best Books of 2008

Now that 2008 is officially over, it’s time to pick the best books of the year! Golly gum golly, it was quite the year of reading for me. Here follow my picks for the best books I read last year (not necessarily published last year), month-by-month.

A note on the many, many links embedded here: Month names link to my full monthly book summaries, book titles link to Amazon, and author names link to either the author’s personal blog or website, or Wikipedia — whichever was more appropriate and/or extant.

March:

March is when I started doing this book blogging thing in earnest, and so it’s also the earliest point from which I’ve been tracking my reading. A good deal of March’s reading was for school, with a boatload of Pratchett thrown in to boot.

Best book: Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy

Honourable mentions: Whitethorn, by Bryce Courtenay; The King’s Daughter, by Suzanne Martel.

April:

I don’t know why, but April seems to be a bit thin on the excellent books front. I mean, Pratchett is excellent, and I read a lot of his stuff, but I didn’t read much of the Pratchett that really stands out as exceptional. And Atonement actually made me angry. But still, there was some good reading going on, and I give you my picks:

Best book: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov.

Honourable mentions: Thud! by Terry Pratchett; Dining with Death, by Kathleen Molloy.

May:

There are a lot of honourable mentions for May, because I read a lot of very good books. And now I’m thinking that perhaps it would have been easier to separate things by genre rather than by month — but, in for a penny, in for a pound.

Best book: Fall on Your Knees, by Ann-Marie MacDonald.

Honourable mentions: Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers; Agnes Grey, by Anne Brontë; Girl Meets God, by Lauren Winner.

June:

June was a bumper month for me; I read a whopping 26 books, mostly thanks to Roger Zelazny and Laura Ingalls Wilder (5 and 7 books each, respectively). I didn’t pick any of those as the best, though.

Best book: Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi.

Honourable mentions: The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkein; Four Fires, by Bryce Courtenay.

July:

Best book: Proust was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer.

Honourable mentions: Yellowknife*, by Steve Zipp; Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett; Smilla’s Sense of Snow, by Peter Høeg.

August:

I read some lovely and fascinating books last August. Here are three of them.

Best book: The Brain that Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge.

Honourable mentions: When We Were Romans, by Matthew Kneale; Résistance, by Agnès Humbert.

September:

September was when I started having to read books for school again. None of them made the “best” list, though… somehow… *cough*HenryJamesBoring*cough*.

Best book: Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood.

Honourable mentions: The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak; The Big Over Easy, by Jasper Fforde.

October:

Good books in October; yay, October books.

Best book: Looking for Alaska, by John Green.

Honourable mentions: Jpod, by Douglas Coupland; The Book of Lost Things, by John Connolly.

November/December:

I didn’t keep track of my reading in the last two months of the year well enough to be able to say what I read when, so I just smooshed the two months together. And I don’t know how I’m going to choose the best for these months, because I read a whole lot of books that are just crazy-excellent. But since it’s two months in one, I’ll just pick twice as many books for each category. Hooray!

Best books: Babel Tower, by A. S. Byatt; The Bartimaeus Trilogy, by Jonathan Stroud.

Honourable mentions: Tales from Outer Suburbia, by Shaun Tan; Paper Towns, by John Green; The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman; Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome.

*Note: I haven’t linked to Yellowknife because Google’s giving it a malware warning at the moment. Boogie-boogie!

And that’s it, folks! May 2009 bring us even more good books to read! What were your favourite picks this year?