This year has been the year of fiction. Mostly because it was an especially intense year in terms of work, and when I find myself overwhelmed with academic reading, writing, and teaching, I find fiction a much-needed way of relaxing. There are two fiction books I am currently making my way through which I hope to finish before the end of the year, but I haven’t added them to the list; one is Pachinko by Min Jin Lee and the other is 4321 by Paul Aster (1200 pages!) Pachinko in particular is just stunning, and it’ll be a painful one to say good
I had big dreams to buy the Neapolitan novels in paperback (only have them on Kindle at the moment) and read them over the summer, but I couldn’t find the time. I did manage to re-read Ahdaf Souief’s In the Eye of the Sun at the start of the year, for the fifth or sixth time. I’m so in love with this book; I could read and re-read it endlessly.
Anyhow, here are my favourite books of 2017!
- Cruel Optimism – Lauren Berlant
- Monstrous Intimacies – Christina Sharpe
- Industrial Sexuality – Hanan Hammad
- In Other Words – Jhumpa Lahiri
- Third World Protest: Between Home and the World – Rahul Rao
- Femonationalism: In the Name of Women’s Rights – Sara Farris
- The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri
- The Arabic Freud – Omnia el Shakry
- The Language of the Night – Ursula Le Guin
- A Prehistory of the Cloud – Tung-Hui Hu
- Familiar Stranger – Stuart Hall
- Human Acts – Han Kang
- The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – Arundhati Roy
- The Idea of the Muslim World – Cemil Aydin
- Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism – Elizabeth Povinelli
- Names of the Lion – Ibn Khalawayh, David Larsen
- Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri
- Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century – Dana Sajdi
- This Census Taker – China Mielville
- Strange Weather in Tokyo – Hiromi Kawakami
- The Return – Hisham Matar
- Living a Feminist Life – Sara Ahmed
- The Calcutta Chromosome – Amitav Ghosh
- La Frantumaglia – Elena Ferrante
- His Bloody Project – Graeme Macrae Burnet
- Swing Time – Zadie Smith
- Hitler’s American Model – James Whitman
- Eileen – Ottessa Moshfegh
- Last Utopia: Human Rights in History – Samuel Moyn
- The Mushroom at the End of the World – Anna Tsing
Neo-Colonialism and it’s Discontents : A blog by Sara Salem on Postcolonialism, Marxism, feminism and other conspiracies. Twitter: @saramsalem
