Top 10 Read - 2006

Time really flies, perhaps also because the past year has been a busy one. Enough about that for now. As tradition obligates, I present my top 10 read for 2006 in random order:

1) Yu Hua's To Live (My tears stained every page of this novel)
2) Yasunari Kawabata's Thousand Cranes (chillingly eerie Noh-play-like novel)
3) Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country (a strange, unforgettable love story that truly deserves a re-read)
4) Yasunari Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain (To me, this is one of Mr Kawabata's best novel)
5) Neil Gaiman's Stardust (Lovely writing; just like an old fairy tale)
6) Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (As this overnight sensation exhibits: literature never fails to enrich our lives)
7) Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (I still believe that Kafka has somehow travelled back to early 1900s)
8) Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (The only regret I have is I never quite understood this when I first read it as a small boy)
9) Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (I still believe, as the novel seems to conclude, that it is the process that matters, not the ending)
10) Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (One could not help but tear relentlessly as another prays piously for his loved one's life in spite of having lost his religion for decades.)