Last week, Marilynne Robinson delivered a lecture at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. In his introductory remarks, the poet Christian Wiman declared that reading Robinson's Housekeeping was, for him, a soul-shattering experience, one of those reading experiences that gives you faith in the power of a book to reveal something absolutely true and beautiful about the world and about yourself.

I didn’t quite have one of those reading experiences in 2014. (The last one for me happened in late 2013 with Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower.) But it’s been a very good year for books and a very good year for reading. Here is a short list of some of my favorite books of the year:

Fiction

Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation. I read this book, the first in Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, while staying by myself in a big, empty house in Chicago this summer, and I was scared out of my mind. Vandermeer is an accomplished writer of “weird fiction”—a generic term used to describe works that blend, among other things, tropes from horror and science fiction—and Annihilation is weird in all the right ways. The whole series deserves to be gulped down (I’ve passed along my copies to three different friends already, and all of whom loved it), but Annihilation stands apart.

Ben Lerner, 10:04. Lerner’s second novel is a singular work, and this despite the fact that it displays so many characteristics—a Brooklyn setting, a writer as protagonist, a comic scene set at a sperm bank—that we have encountered before. Many times before, in fact. 10:04, which centers on a Ben Lerner-like narrator’s journey from irony towards sincerity, is deeply intelligent, just as deeply funny, and ultimately quite moving. Plus, it’s the only novel this year to talk about Back to the Future AND Walter Benjamin with equal insight.

Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels. I’d read some of Ferrante’s earlier, slimmer works before, but this was the year that I cracked the longer novels in the Neapolitan series: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. These books follow the lives of two girls, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, both born in Naples in the 1950s, both brilliant, both trying to find a world that is bigger and better than their own cramped and poor city.

Marilynne Robinson, Lila. Any year in which Robinson publishes something new is a great year, and this novel lived up to the achievements of Gilead and Home, complicating these earlier novels in meaningful ways.

Jeffery Renard Allen, Song of the Shank. This novel deserved more attention. Allen tells the story of Tom Wiggins, a blind, young slave and musical prodigy who became world famous in the years before the Civil War. Put out in a typically lovely edition by Graywolf, Song of the Shank contains intoxicating prose that at times recalls Faulkner.

Novels that were published in 2014 that I can’t wait to read: Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests; David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks; Lars Iyer’s Wittgenstein Jr.

Poetry

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. I have a column featuring this book coming out in the new year, so I won’t say much. Rankine’s book mixes styles (lyric poetry, prose-poetry, cultural criticism) and media (text, photographs, paintings), all in the service of a devastating analysis of race in contemporary America. It might be the best book I read all year, period.

Spencer Reece, The Road to Emmaus. I wrote on this collection, which beautifully describes a life of religious vocation and many other things, here.   

Joshua Mehigan, Accepting the Disaster. Likewise, I wrote about this collection for the magazine. At times, Mehigan reads like Robert Frost; at other times, he reads like Elizabeth Bishop. But throughout, his poetry displays incredible formal skill and a patient exploration of what it is like to live and work in the twenty-first century.

Books of poetry that were published in 2014 that I can’t wait to read: Fanny Howe’s Second Childhood; Mark Ford’s Selected Poems; Les Murray’s New Selected Poems; Christian Wiman’s Once in the West.

Non-Fiction

David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke. Bromwich is a true public intellectual, someone who is worth reading not just on literature (he’s a professor of English and a wonderful critic of modern poetry) but on politics, culture, and history. This biography of Burke displays Bromwich’s many virtues: a lucid style, a generous mind, a deep familiarity with the archive, and a clear sense of the broader contours of intellectual history. Conservatives regularly cite Burke as a kind of patron saint. Bromwich shows that this philosopher and political theorist was much more interesting—and much more complex—than such ideological deployment suggests.

Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch. I taught Eliot’s Middlemarch for the first time this fall, and so it was delightful to read Mead, a writer for the New Yorker, on how much Eliot’s masterpiece has meant to her. This smart, lucid book is a fantastic entry into the world of Eliot and the world of her novel. (Mollie Wilson O’Reilly wrote on the book here.)

Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. To my mind, Lee is our best living literary biographer, and her treatment of Fitzgerald was typically brilliant. As a bonus, the publication has caused a rebirth of interest in Fitzgerald’s work, which is much to the good.

Hilton Als, White Girls. Als has an omnivorous imagination, and the braided essays in this book touch on Richard Pryor and Eminem, Flannery O’Connor and Michael Jackson, Truman Capote and Malcom X, gay experience and black experience and American experience. Als has the essayist’s most important gift: the ability to surprise, to have a piece or paragraph or sentence begin in one direction only to veer, unexpectedly and delightfully, in another. (This technically came out at the end of 2014, but I'm including it anyway.)

Books of non-fiction that were published in 2014 that I can’t wait to read: Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses; Charles D’Ambrosio’s Loitering: New and Collected Essays.

Best Books That I Read for the First Time This Year That Weren’t Published in 2014

Everything by Amy Clampitt; Millicent Bell’s Meaning in Henry James; Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword; Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories; Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest; Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.