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Maura's avatar

November favorite(s) The Expanse series (up to book 4 so far). Best book this year: A Gentleman in Moscow. Just the uplifting book I needed this fall.

To be honest, Jeremy, because of this stack -- and with a nod to your Pulitzer Project which inspired my own obsessive tracking spreadsheet (Pulitzer, Hugo, Nebula, Booker, Edgar...) -- I've enjoyed so many books this year. I'm back to reading under the covers with a nightlight like I did as a kid. How did I go so many years oblivious to this hunger for books?

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Justin Patrick Moore's avatar

I read The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham and boy did it cut like one. Along with the novels of John Crowley I read earlier this year, it's among the best books I read this year. It follow's the lives of several people, but one is centered more than the others, Larry Darrell who experiences trauma from his experiences as a WWI pilot. He is in love with a childhood sweetheart who comes from a higher social class than he, and the conflict centers around his refusal to get a job, and instead live on the pension from his service duty, and hang out in libraries and read books (good chap, he). He could have had it made in the shade and joined the company of a friend who was a stockbroker, but he was more interested in the search for wisdom. Maugham expertly contrasts this with the other characters who are all about rising up the ranks of society, making money and keeping up appearances. Darrell does work at times. He goes to a mine just for the experience and to give his mind a rest. He also does farm work and the like. He isn't afraid of getting his hands dirty. And this is one thing I think the book has to teach today's soi distant intellectuals: don't be afraid to do physical work, and it's probably not a good idea to trash talk those whose manual labor keeps things chugging along. The book covers the time period of the stock market crash in 1929, and let's just say Darrell isn't phased in the same way as the woman who could have married him, and the stockbroker friend she chooses instead of him. There is much else to mine from the book, including its profound spiritual dimension, that encompasses Christian mysticism as well as the wisdom of Vedanta and the East.

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