Looking Back, Looking Forward
Posted by: Neil Hollands
The folks at The Millions are at it again, with a couple of strong recent posts. If you prefer to look back at 2011, try their Year in Reading, which asked a long list of authors, including some well known ones like Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan, Charles Baxter, Philip Levine, and Jonathan Safran Foer, what they liked best in their 2011 Reading. If you’re not familiar with this fine literary website, you might also enjoy perusing the 20 most popular pieces published there last year.
If you’re more forward looking, you’ll prefer their Most Anticipated: 2012 Great Book Preview feature. Book group readers may recognize Dan Chaon, Marilynne Robinson, Lionel Shriver, Ron Rash, and William Boyd among the authors with books in the first quarter of 2012, but many of the authors highlighted are new, up and coming, or newly translated writers whom you might enjoy getting to know. Some of the biggest guns come out later in the year, with Toni Morrison, Richard Ford, Peter Carey, Paul Theroux, John Irving, Mark Haddon, Martin Amis, and Michael Chabon on the agendain May or later. I can safely predict that whatever the future brings, we’re not going to run out of interesting books any time soon.
