The second category in my books of the year list is for best book group books. If you've taken part in the Cornflower Book Group at all - and look, we're famous now! - please join in here and let us know which titles made the biggest impression on you. I'm giving my top four, though others are close contenders, but these books stood out in my fiction reading overall this year, not just in what the group has read.
J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country was a beautiful, finely-balanced study of a brief period in a man's life, both for what it was and for what it might have led to. (Our thoughts on it are here).
Robertson Davies was another author I'd never read before he came up on the list of suggestions for the group, but his Fifth Business was a most interesting, thought-provoking read, with a narrative of "page-turning force".
Elizabeth Jenkins' The Tortoise and the Hare, a study of an uneasy marriage undermined by an unlikely affair, certainly got us all talking!
Wallace Stegner was another great find for those of us who read his Crossing to Safety; much to admire and much to ponder.
Karen, I only managed to read four of the CBG selections this year. Interestingly, these were the four I read. I look forward to your choices for 2010.
Posted by: Lisa W | 10 December 2009 at 06:40 PM
I felt that The Tortoise and the Hare was the book that grew on me more than any of the others. Some of the characters "stayed with me "even when I finished the book.
Posted by: anne | 10 December 2009 at 10:16 PM
I'm afraid I didn't get to read along as many times I would have liked to (hopefully more next year), but I loved The Tortoise and the Hare and expect it will be on my list of favorites, too. And how cool you were on the radio (is it archived online somewhere?).
Posted by: Danielle | 14 December 2009 at 08:22 PM
For once this will be easy! Alain Fournier's The Lost Estate without any shadow of doubt. The best book of the CBG so far (I apologise for missing out on a few this year). I'll not repeat my comments, interested readers (as if!) can find them, with all the others, here.
Posted by: Dark Puss | 20 December 2009 at 01:13 PM
Better hurry, only a few hours left I think!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p6tn2#synopsis
Posted by: Dark Puss | 20 December 2009 at 01:16 PM