May
“I still walk into a bookstore or a library convinced that I might be on the threshold that will open up onto what I most need or desire, and sometimes that doorway appears. When it does, there are epiphanies and raptures in seeing the world in new ways, in finding patterns previously unsuspected, in being handed unimagined equipment to address what arises, in the beauty and power of words.” — Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence
43. Street of Thieves – Mathias Énard
42. Recollections of My Nonexistence – Rebecca Solnit
41. Orphic Paris – Henri Cole
40. The Distance Between Us –Renato Cisneros
39. Shah of Shahs – Ryszard Kapuściński
38. Skylark – Dezső Kosztoláni
April
“You see, every story is like a small stream that eventually spills into the broad sea of thousands of other tales. And if a storyteller dies along the way, another must replace him and carry on the story from one river to the next and on out to sea.” — Bachtyar Ali, The Last Pomegranate Tree
36. Exercises in Style –Raymond Queneau
35. The Remains – Margo Glantz
34. Elena Knows – Claudia Piñeiro
33. Trout, Belly Up – Rodrigo Fuentes
32. The Last Pomegranate Tree – Bachtyar Ali
March
“Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the ‘real’ everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are so much more. They are a way of being fully human.” — Susan Sontag, A Letter to Borges – Where the Stress Falls
27. The Enchanted April – Elizabeth von Arnim
26. Journey Into the Mind’s Eye – Lesley Blanch
25. The City and the House – Natalia Ginzburg
24. The Algebra of Infinite Justice – Arundhati Roy
23. Every Fire You Tend – Sema Kaygusuz
22. Where the Stress Falls – Susan Sontag
21. Three Summers – Margarita Liberaki
20. The Unwomanly Face of War – Svetlana Alexievich
February
“And so the role of literature on this earth: It is that thing seeking beauty.” — Sait Faik Abasıyanık, A Useless Man
16. The President’s Room – Ricardo Romero
15. The Levant Trilogy – Olivia Manning
14. The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig
12 & 13. The Musical Brain and Artforum – César Aira
January
“Our literature teacher at school used to say that everyone had their own language, and that you could understand some with flowers and others with books.” – Burhan Sönmez, Istanbul Istanbul
9. The Balkan Trilogy – Olivia Manning
7 & 8. Istanbul Istanbul & Labyrinth – Burhan Sönmez
6. Portraits Without Frames – Lev Ozerov
5. Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me – Teffi
4. Broken Mirrors – Elias Khoury
3. The Time Regulation Institute – Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar
2. Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate – Daniel Mendelsohn
The Book-Butterfly 