The five best books I read in 2007:

1. The Rotter’s Club (Jonathan Coe)
2. Boyhood (J.M. Coetzee)
3. So Many Ways to Begin (Jon McGregor)
4. Snow (Orhan Pamuk)
5. Havoc (in its Third Year) (Ronan Bennett)

Rachel Seiffert’s Field Study is the best –and only– compilation of short stories I read, while Frank Westerman’s Ararat is both the best work of non-fiction as well as the best book I read in Dutch. I must have written it here several times before, but reading books has become a new obsession and it’s a really good one. I honestly wonder how I used to spend all my time when I read five books of fiction a year. Especially those years when I didn’t own a computer.

Also, speaking of books, I realised that I lied when I wrote earlier that I never read a French book. I read Frédéric Beigbeder’s €8.99 –the oh-so-postmodernist novel whose title was also its price– a few years ago. It wasn’t very good.