Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is my favorite from 2005.

It hit me similarly. I had no idea I even cared until, all the sudden, I was a freakin' mess. It was very impressive, because I knew Ishiguro was heading towards a conclusion like that, but when it arrived, it just devastated me.

However, my favorite recent novels out of the books I read in 2005 were David Maine's The Preservationist, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, and Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead

oh yes. This left me with tears streaming down my face more than once. In public.

That was an amazing piece of work. The writing was so gorgeous that a lesser novelist would have had a hard time creating a character rich enough to talk and think that way. Especially one who's never left the small town he lives in.

Have you read Housekeeping?

I was just thinking that two of the first short stories I really loved were "The Sound of Thunder"...

Ah, the story that made me wish I could go back in time and prevent Ray Bradbury from signing away the movie rights.

Have you read Housekeeping?

It's one of my favorite books evah.

The narrator of Gilead reminded me of my paternal grandfather. In a way that I can't really explain. My grandfather was from Mississippi and Texas not the midwest and was a teacher/football coach not a preacher but something about the Gilead narrator's voice so strongly evoked my grandfather's for me that it gave me chills of recognition.

something about the Gilead narrator's voice so strongly evoked my grandfather's for me that it gave me chills of recognition.

Lovely. My paternal grandfather's internal monologue was probably a lot closer to The Judge's rambling stream o' violence in Blood Meridian.

And the way she knew she was really married was when she and her husband finally combined their libraries, with all the attendant angst.

Loved that, although nothing of the sort happened at Chez Bee: fantasy and history just didn't combine well with tomes of programming lore and serious sf. DH and I have read the same novel maybe 10 times in 15 years and most of those were Harry Potter. We settled for a melange of my shelf/your shelf/shelf of very large books.

I like short stories, and I've always disliked the m/u/a ending because it made me feel the author had copped out and made me do the heavy lifting. If it's well done, I don't mind thinking it over and drawing my own conclusions, but if the answer is "almost anything could have happened," then I feel quite irritated.

What I like about short stories is that they don't have a chapter entitled, "I am Born."

Kidding. I do enjoy, though, the presentation of a character or situation where you don't get to know what happened before; you only have these little bits; and that's all you'll ever see of these people. Like impressionist paintings, or off-the-cuff photos.

Which is to say, ambiguous endings don't bother me except inasmuch as they are abused. The ending of a short story doesn't usually overlap with everything in a character's life being resolved, because the story isn't usually about a whole life. That woman who has an epiphany will still worry about her job the following Thursday.

(Except in those SF short stories where the universe is destroyed in the last line.)

A friend loaned me Son of a Witch; do I need to re-read Wicked (since it was long, long ago when I first read it) for it to make any sense?

No. You need to remove your brain and any sort of comprehensive reading skills for it to make sense.

Also, being drunk might not hurt.