It's time to wrap up this reading year. It has been a good good year - all in all I read 35 books. I was aiming at 40 but that didn't happen, most likely because I started studying again. (A side note - I haven't got any feedback about my Hermeneutics essay, it's probably because no-one wants to read it. I don't blame them.) The best things that happened to me this year were my UK trip in April and Dr A. N.'s visit in October - both of them gave me a couple of extremely good books. I'm so grateful to A. N. because her advice really has proven to be priceless.

So here's my top five books from last year (in a random order):

1. Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine. It was William Dalrymple who made me fall in love with good travel writers, writers who don't just try to be funny or smart but who, uhmm, actually study history in Cambridge University before hitting the road. Tim Mackintosh didn't quite overthrow Dalrymple's throne in my mind but he came close and that's a serious achievement too. He's a worthy writer, an Oxford-educated Arabist. And his attempt to travel in the footsteps of one of the greatest travelers of all times, 14th century Moroccan traveler Muhammad Ibn Battuta, is absolutely brilliant. Funny - yes. Smart - yes. But most of all, educated - yes, yes, yes! I remember reading this book in May when I went to preach in Helsinki, sitting in the quietest corner I could find on the ferry, ignoring drunk Finns, and just devouring the book. It was a pure delight.

2. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! When I started reading this book, I would not have thought it could make my top books list. It was so annoying, like, who writes sentences half a page long?! But I got used to it and started to enjoy Faulkner's style soon enough. It's a strange book, nothing is said directly and not much is happening, but Faulkner finds a way to put you under his spell. And the topic is a tough one - racism, slavery, love, hatred. 19th century America, wild and harsh. It's a book that makes you very serious indeed. Here's my favourite sentence from that book (sorry, it's about half a page long), just to give you a taste: You make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rag; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and then sun shines on it and after a while they don't even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter. It gives me the shivers!

3. Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone. It was during my heavenly vacation at my cousin's summer house that I read this book. I basically read in one go, it was nearly impossible to put it down, and I had all the time in the world. To be able to see war through the eyes of a little child is really something. As I understand, Kadare really was a kid in a small Albanian village when the WWII hit the country so it is based on his own memories but the way he's able to describe it is just brilliant. After my vacation I went on to read two more of his books but I didn't like them half as much as I liked the Chronicle.

4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Words. I love a good autobiography. And that's one good autobiography. Actually, it's almost too good. It's a book where Sartre talks mostly about his early childhood and how he got into writing, and it's written in a way that makes me just a little bit suspicious - is it actually possible for someone to remember their childhood in such detail? Don't people as talented as him just make it up afterward? I don't mean to say they're lying but it's as if they're creating a whole new reality by writing about their lives like that. I don't know. I'm not a literary critic. All I know is that my own memoirs of my early childhood would be embarrassingly short and shallow.

5. Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace. Buechner is one of the best Christian writers I know. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction kind of speaks for itself... It was the third time for me to read his Alphabet and it was still as good as ever. It's basically a description of an ordinary day in his life where not much happens. But as it turns out, everything is significant and everything has a meaning, and grace is everywhere. After reading this book you can't help but notice the grace in your own ordinary day too. Such a great book!