Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 2005
2005 was a year in which grief arrived in literature with unusual precision. Joan Didion published her account of the year following her husband’s sudden death and produced what is now considered one of the finest books ever written about loss. Kazuo Ishiguro published Never Let Me Go and withheld his revelation so expertly that by the time it arrived it felt like something already half-known. Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead, a novel written as a dying man’s letter to his young son. Nicole Krauss published The History of Love. Ian McEwan set a novel inside a single February Saturday in London. And Freakonomics began teaching a generation to look for hidden patterns in things that seemed to have no pattern at all. It was a year of quiet books that have not stopped resonating.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Published 2005
Never Let Me Go
Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth grow up together at Hailsham, a seemingly idyllic English boarding school somewhere in the English countryside. The school is unusual — its students are kept physically healthy, encouraged in art and creative work, and sheltered from the world beyond its grounds. Kathy narrates from adulthood, looking back on their childhood and on what came after: first the Cottages, where former Hailsham students drift in and out, and then the work they were created to do. Ishiguro withholds the novel’s central disclosure long enough that when it arrives it lands not as a surprise but as a recognition — something the reader has been carrying without naming. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and named by Time magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923. It is Ishiguro’s finest novel after The Remains of the Day.
The novel works by restraint: Kathy’s narrating voice is careful, circling, repeatedly offering to explain something and then deferring. This is not accidental — it mirrors the way the students themselves have learned to approach their future: sideways, never directly. What Ishiguro is writing about is acceptance, and the question the novel poses — whether the acceptance his characters display is a form of grace or a form of damage — is one it refuses to answer on your behalf. The final pages are among the most quietly devastating in contemporary fiction. You will think about this book for a long time after you finish it.
The Year of Magical Thinking
On the evening of 30 December 2003, Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne came home from visiting their daughter Quintana, who was unconscious in hospital with septic shock. They sat down to dinner. Dunne suffered a massive coronary and died. Didion wrote about the year that followed — its irrationality, its physical weight, the way grief distorts time, the impulse to keep the dead person’s shoes because they might return and need them. While she was writing it, Quintana died too. Didion brought to grief the same precision and cool analytical intelligence she had applied to California and American culture throughout her career. The book won the National Book Award in 2005. It is one of the finest accounts of loss ever written, and also one of the most honest accounts of how grief actually works in a highly intelligent, self-aware mind.
What makes The Year of Magical Thinking different from most grief memoirs is that Didion doesn’t console herself or the reader. She describes grief as a form of irrational thinking — hence magical thinking — and she tracks her own irrationality with the same detachment she has always brought to her subjects. The result is a book that is both analytical and completely without distance from its subject. She is inside it and watching herself from outside simultaneously, and that double perspective is what makes the book so accurate. If you have lost someone and found the usual language of loss inadequate, this is the book.
Gilead
John Ames is seventy-six years old, a Congregationalist minister in Gilead, Iowa, and he knows he is dying. His wife is young; his son is seven. He writes the boy a letter — a letter the child will not read until he is grown and his father is gone. The novel is that letter. It covers Ames’s life and the lives of his father and grandfather, both ministers; his long years of solitude before his late marriage; his friendship with a neighbouring minister named Boughton; and his complicated feelings about Boughton’s prodigal son Jack, who has returned to Gilead after decades away and whom Ames distrusts and cannot quite bring himself to stop loving. Robinson wrote Gilead as an act of sustained attention to the ordinary texture of a life: light, time, grace, memory, and what it means to have loved people you will not live to see grow up. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005.
Robinson writes a kind of prose that is unlike almost anyone else working in English: slow, exacting, full of ordinary things observed at a level of attention that makes them radiant. Gilead is not a plot-driven novel — it is a meditation, a mind turning over its own life — and it asks you to read at a different pace than most fiction. What it gives you in return is an account of a life that feels, by the end, as real and as weighted as any life you know. The question at its centre — how do we face the end of our time with the people we love? — is one it holds without sentimentality. It is one of the finest American novels of the twenty-first century.
The History of Love
Two stories run in parallel. Leo Gursky is an elderly Jewish man in New York — a Polish Holocaust survivor who escaped to America while the woman he loved, Alma, escaped to South America without knowing she was pregnant with his child. He has spent sixty years believing the book he wrote as a young man, called The History of Love, was lost. Alma Singer is a teenage girl in New York whose mother is translating a book called The History of Love and who sets out to find its author, partly to find a gift for her grieving mother and partly because she was named after a character in it. The two stories move toward each other across the novel. Krauss weaves them with the formal control that won The History of Love the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and established her as one of the most significant novelists of her generation.
Krauss is writing about what survives — what a person leaves behind and how it travels. Leo’s book, written out of love for a woman he lost, has been read by people he never imagined, has shaped lives he knew nothing about, and has finally returned to find him at the end of his. That is the argument: that the things we make out of love have a life we cannot track or predict, and that this is one of the few consolations available. The novel is also very funny in places, particularly in Leo’s sections — he is one of the great comic-melancholic narrators of recent fiction.
Freakonomics
Economist Steven Levitt had a habit of applying the tools of economic analysis to questions that economists had not previously considered worth asking: why do drug dealers live with their mothers? What do sumo wrestlers and teachers have in common? Why did crime in America drop so sharply in the 1990s? Stephen Dubner, a journalist, wrote a profile of Levitt for the New York Times Magazine in 2003; the profile generated so much response that the two wrote a book together. Freakonomics was published in April 2005, spent two years on the bestseller list, and has sold over five million copies. It established popular economics — the application of economic thinking to unconventional social questions — as a mainstream genre.
Freakonomics is on this list not because its individual arguments have all held up — some have been contested since publication — but because of what it did to how people thought. It made explicit a method of thinking: look for incentives, look for unexpected data, resist the conventional explanation, ask what the numbers actually show. That method, applied even imperfectly, is more useful than most things you can acquire from reading. The abortion-crime thesis in particular generated debate that is still ongoing. Whether or not you find the argument convincing, working out why you find it unconvincing teaches you something about causation.
Saturday
Henry Perowne is a neurosurgeon in London. On Saturday 15 February 2003 — the day of the largest anti-war demonstration in British history, when two million people marched in London against the imminent invasion of Iraq — he wakes early, sees something in the sky, drives his son to a squash game, has a minor car accident with a man named Baxter, takes his daughter to the airport, visits his mother in her care home, goes to watch his son’s band play, and comes home to a dinner party with his family. Baxter intrudes on that dinner. The novel is set entirely within that one Saturday. McEwan constructed it as a counterpoint to Mrs Dalloway: the same single-day structure, the same London, the same accumulated texture of a particular life, but a Saturday in the twenty-first century with the Iraq War as its political background.
The achievement of Saturday is the density McEwan manages within a compressed frame. Perowne’s profession — a surgeon who spends his working life inside human skulls — gives the novel a particular way of thinking about consciousness, about what the brain is and what a person is, and that runs against the political backdrop of a war being fought partly in the name of freedom and democracy. The scene in which Baxter is disarmed by Perowne’s daughter reciting Matthew Arnold is either the most contrived or the most precisely right scene in the novel — possibly both. McEwan at full control is something to watch.
How to navigate this list
If you read one novel from this year
→ Never Let Me Go. It will stay with you. The final pages are among the quietest and most devastating in contemporary fiction.
If you want the best grief memoir ever written
→ The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion brings analytical precision to the most irrational experience. There is no better account of how loss actually works.
If you want a novel that rewards slow reading
→ Gilead. Read it the way it was written — attentively, without rushing. Robinson’s prose is unlike anyone else’s.
If you want the nonfiction book that changed how people think
→ Freakonomics. Not all the arguments have held up. Read it for the method, not the conclusions.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2005
What books were published in 2005?
2005 produced several essential books across fiction and nonfiction. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro appeared in hardback and immediately established itself as one of the decade’s most important novels — shortlisted for the Booker Prize and named by Time as one of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923. Joan Didion published The Year of Magical Thinking, her account of grief after her husband’s sudden death, which won the National Book Award. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize. Nicole Krauss published The History of Love. Ian McEwan published Saturday. And Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner became one of the decade’s most widely read works of popular nonfiction.
What is Never Let Me Go about?
Never Let Me Go follows Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth, three friends who grow up together at Hailsham, a seemingly idyllic English boarding school. The novel is narrated by Kathy looking back on their childhood and young adulthood, and it gradually discloses the nature of Hailsham and the futures its students have been created for. Ishiguro withholds the central revelation long enough that when it arrives it lands as something already half-known — a dread the reader has been carrying without acknowledging. The novel is about memory, loss, and what it means to accept the limits of your own life, and its final pages are among the most quietly devastating in contemporary fiction.
What is The Year of Magical Thinking about?
The Year of Magical Thinking is Joan Didion’s memoir of the year following the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, who died of a heart attack at the dinner table in December 2003. The book is an account of grief — its irrationality, its physical dimensions, the way it distorts time and logic — and of the year during which Didion also watched her daughter Quintana fight for her life in hospital. Didion brought to grief the same precision and cool analytical intelligence she had applied to California and American culture throughout her career. The book won the National Book Award in 2005 and is considered one of the finest accounts of loss ever written.
What is Gilead about?
Gilead is written as a letter from John Ames, a seventy-six-year-old Congregationalist minister in Gilead, Iowa, to his young son — a letter the boy will not read until he is grown and his father is dead. The novel covers Ames’s life, his family’s history of ministers, his friendship with a neighbouring minister named Boughton, and his complicated feelings about Boughton’s prodigal son Jack, who has returned to Gilead. Robinson wrote it as an act of sustained attention to the ordinary texture of a life: light, time, grace, and what it means to have loved people you will not live to see grow up. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and is considered one of the finest American novels of the twenty-first century.
What is The History of Love about?
The History of Love interweaves two stories. Leo Gursky is an elderly Jewish man in New York, a Holocaust survivor who escaped Poland and has spent sixty years believing that the book he wrote as a young man — a book called The History of Love — was lost. Alma Singer is a teenage girl in New York whose mother is translating a book called The History of Love and who sets out to find its author, partly to find a gift for her grieving mother and partly because she was named after a character in it. The novel is about love, survival, loss, and the way a book can travel through time and reach people its author never imagined.
More reading lists
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The Inheritance of Loss, The Road, Never Let Me Go.
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