The Battle of Books

My last posts were mostly about statistics, and here is another one. I promise it will be the last for the 2025 reading. It is a different approach to choose your favourite book of the year.

Some year ago I followed a youtube blogger; Books with Emily Fox who had an interesting approach for choosing the best book read in 2022. I saw that another book blogger, The Plant Based Bride who does a similar exercise.

What you do is to write down all the books your have read, or like me, use a random number generator, put the slips in a jar and randomly draw the book titles. Arrange them two by two, and choose the best book of the two. It sometimes mean that you have to choose between two favourite books, maybe early on. The books that ‘won’ you let go for another round, until you come down to two books.

My best book for 2025

I did this with the 120 books I read last year. At one time I ended up with an uneven number so choose a book from the rejected ones to even out the numbers. I think it worked out rather well.

The last four books were:

• Tunnel 29 by Helena Merriman

• Trust by Hernan Diaz

• The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

• Tychonium, Experimentet by Jan Johannesson

  
  

Of which Tunnel 29 and Trust went on for the final choice. I chose the best book to be:

Tunnel 29 by Helena Merriman

“He’s just escaped from one of the world’s most brutal regimes.Now, he decides to tunnel back in.It’s summer, 1962, and Joachim Rudolph, a student, is digging a tunnel under the Berlin Wall. Waiting on the other side in East Berlin - dozens of men, women and children; all willing to risk everything to escape.From the award-winning creator of the acclaimed BBC Radio 4 podcast, Tunnel 29 is the true story of the most remarkable escape tunnel dug under the Berlin Wall. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with the survivors, and thousands of pages of Stasi documents, Helena Merriman brilliantly reveals the stranger-than-fiction story of the ingenious group of student-diggers, the glamorous red-haired messenger, the American News network which films the escape, and the Stasi spy who betrays it. For what Joachim doesn’t know as he burrows closer to East Germany, is that the escape operation has been infiltrated. As the escapees prepare to crawl through the cold, wet darkness, above them, the Stasi are closing in.Tunnel 29 is about what happens when people lose their freedom - and how some will do anything to win it back.”

If I had chosen myself?

Where would I end up if I had chosen myself? I have chosen seven of my favourites.

1. Tunnel 29 by Helen Merriman

2. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

3. Shooting Butterflies by Marika Cobbold

4. Trust by Hernan Diaz

5. All for Nothing (Alles Umsonst) by Walter Kempowski

6. The Night Travellers by Armando Lucas Correa

7. Tychonium by Jan Johannesson

As you see, all the four books that ended up in the battle of books, are also on my personal list. I had to let go of number 3, 5 and 6 during the battle.

What about you? Have you done a similar exercise to choose your best read for a year? Please let me know.