Looking back to Manarola, the path from Manarola to Corniglia, Cinque Terre National Park, April 2017. So I managed to read 112 books for 2019. Somewhat ahead of my goal of 80 , and about 110 more than TV shows that I saw. The highlights? Well, I gave five stars to the following: Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones (dogfighting and Hurricane Katrina) Golden Boys by Sonya Hartnett (a wonderfully dark 1980s Aussie suburban coming of age novel) Jarett Kobek's blistering I Hate the Internet (Vonnegut for the post-ironic age) Andreï Makine's dreamlike The Archipelago of Another Life (a chase across the Siberian taiga at the tail-end of Stalin's rule); Żanna Słoniowska's complex The House with the Stained-Glass Window (a wonderfully translated cross-cultural, multi-generational tale of the women in one particular family in Lviv); This Is Not a Novel by Jennifer Johnston (an original novel framed around fragments of memory and the ways with which parent...