"A half-read book is a half-finished love affair."

By about 2016, I will probably have found enough time to both read and organize a list of the best books of 2010. In the meantime though, I thought I would offer up the best book I have read this year (regardless of publishing date) in case anyone was looking for last minute reading recommendations for the holiday season.

I have never attempted nor do I plan on attempting to be a fiction writer. I am so obsessively solipsistic I would probably only be able to produce one of those thinly veiled memoirs that funds self-publishing presses.

I suppose this is the principle reason I am drawn to authors of seemingly boundless imagination: Calvino and Pynchon, to name two.

I was often reminded of both while reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which - I admit - is a dangerous comparison to make as it sets up some unreasonable expectations. While Mitchell isn't as impulsively profound as Pynchon (Cloud Atlas's central metaphor is a bit unidimensional) or formally adventurous as Calvino (Mitchell strikes me as more concerned with character than experimentation), he is just as much of a stylistic chameleon. And perhaps most important of all: just as funny.

I don't want to talk too much about this book because one of its greatest pleasures is its unpredictability. I will just say that I haven't been this excited about an author in quite some time.

And maybe by 2016, I will discover that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was the best book of 2010 to boot.