At last, the last catch-up of books from this year:

The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer
I really can't recommend this one highly enough. It is engaging, emotional and strangely believable, given the subject matter. For Max Tivoli lives his life backwards: or rather, he is born an old man, and becomes physically younger as he chronologically ages. It's also a moving love story, and it got to me the same way as The Great Gatsby does, because of that longing the author portrays so vividly.

Although it's a clever book, it's never self-conciously so. The narrator is so very human, it feels like a very personal book, and for that reason it pips The Dream of Scipio to be my favourite book of the year. It also contains a quote that has stayed with me all year, 'we are each the love of someone's life.'
(94.5/100)

Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult

Another Picoult novel, another annoying heroine, another courtroom drama, another good idea imperfectly executed. This one involves the Amish. I think she's slowly working her way through each and every US minority population.
(50/100)

As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann

I couldn't be bothered to read this book properly. It's a door-stop in hardback, and no wonder. McCann has done her research, and so she's gonna use it! Hence lengthy descriptions of everything from housing to a bloody marriage feast that had me asleep twice before I finished it (without a word of a lie). The protagonist, Jacob, seems to be an interesting character: a murderer so desperately in love with his wife of an hour that he beats and rapes her. But not interesting enough for me to wade through the turgid prose. So I skim read it, and was glad I hadn't wasted my time. This character is motiveless, from what I can see, just randomly acts out violence against those he supposedly loves (and those he doesn't), yet narrates as though he's Michael Palin (though who knows what darkness may lurk under THAT genial exterior!).

If you want to read about a violent, sexually-ambiguous maniac, American Psycho is at least well-written. If you want to sleep with irritatingly irrelevent details of the Civil War whizzing around your brain, you might want to try this.
(5/100)