It’s been a good year for books. I’ve been glutting myself on them for months: reissued forgotten classics with sentences so crisp you can hear them ringing out through the decades, sprawling new novels that made me laugh and sigh and weep, philosophical nonfiction that has me reaching for my pencil to scrawl thoughts and addenda in the margins. As I’ve read my way through, I have saved the very best just for you.

I already pulled out my favorites from the first half of the year for you in July, and I invite you to revisit it now to make this list comprehensive. For the second half of the year, just start scrolling. I’ve selected books about love stories from 50 years ago and 100 years into the future; books written in conversation with ChatGPT and hand-drawn in painstaking analogue detail; funny books and sad books and thoughtful books. These are the stories that have brought me the most joy over the past six months, and I hope that they will do the same for you now.

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine

This year’s National Book Award winner, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible is also one of the most purely charming books I’ve read this year. It tells the story of Raja, a 63-year-old gay English teacher who lives in Beirut with his overbearing 85-year-old mother in a tiny apartment. Raja wrote one book 25 years ago, and as his true (true) story opens, he’s confused to find he’s being offered a writing residency in America on the strength of that one book. He’ll explain the problem with that, he assures us, but he’s got to tell us just one or two stories first…

Over the rest of the book, Raja loops back and forth from memory to memory, telling us the story not just of his own coming of age and the forging of his bond with his mother, but also the history of Beirut. Raja talks us through the civil war, during which he experienced his sexual awakening; the 2019 collapse of the economy, during which his mother became best friends with the local gangster; the Covid years; the 2020 port explosion. From time to time, he assures us he’ll come back to that residency — but just one more story before he does!

Alameddine’s prose is winsome, warm-hearted, and very funny, but it is still sophisticated in its evocation of the trauma Raja suffers. At the heart of the novel is the mother Raja keeps trying to consign to parentheticals, who, with indomitable spirit, refuses to be consigned. This book is a treat from beginning to end.

Disinheritance: The Rediscovered Stories by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is the kind of writer you don’t read much anymore, and I mean that in the sense both complimentary and derogatory. Reading her collected short stories in the new volume Disinheritance feels like communing with the ghost of a strange and shimmering past.

Jhabvala thought of herself as a permanent exile. Her father was a Polish Jew who fled to Germany during World War I to escape military conscription. Jhabvala herself was born in Germany in 1927 and fled to England with the rest of her family in 1933. In 1951 she married an Indian man, and she went with him to India, she writes in the essay that serves as the prologue to Disinheritance, “blind. If my husband had happened to live in Africa, I’d have gone there equally blindly; asking no questions and in fact fearing no fears.” 

Jhabvala lived in India for 25 years, writing Booker-winning novels and Oscar-winning screenplays for Merchant-Ivory films. In 1975, she relocated again for the last time, to New York, that city of exiles, where she lived until her death in 2013. Most of the stories in Disinheritance, though, are informed by India. A few are about English exiles in India, but most of them are about Indian people: married couples struggling with their extended families, class friction, adultery.

Jhabvala has little sympathy for the marriage-minded bourgeoisie of any nation, who she renders with satirical bite. Her sympathy she saves for the victims: the free spirited young woman who cheats on her older husband, but not the social-climbing neighbor who betrays her; both the woman trapped in a loveless marriage and the husband’s mistress, but not the husband himself. She is impatient with Westerners who romanticize India, but she doesn’t seem able to stop herself from romanticizing Indian women into either bright-eyed romantic beauties or into exotic grotesques.

Nonetheless, these stories are strange and beautiful to read. The sentences are affectless and curiously polite, as though to mask the irony and the fury running below them. Here’s that officious social climber who betrays her adulterous neighbor: “I didn’t cry long, for I knew that I had acted rightly in every way, and that if Lekha had been a person of principle, she would have understood that and felt grateful toward me. At any rate, I had nothing to reproach myself with. It was not my fault that Lekha chose to take this attitude. I had only done my duty.”

That crisp ratatat rhythm! The rage and self-pity and self-comfort running under those nice middle-class sentiments! What a strange book to read.........

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