2021 ends. Another year of reading, less than it could have been, but always necessary. However, it may be my age, but for a while now my finger on the tablet and my hands on the paper do not tremble when I have started one and it has not convinced me. Before I made the effort and finished it off. I know what it's like to write a book and the hours and laborious process of production and promotion to get it to the reader. But now ... Anyway, what has been said, will be the age and also know that there will be no material time to read everything that you would like. This selection of books is purely personal, to be clear, but I will also highlight a few others that were posted before. Hopefully next year will continue to bring us good stories. 2022 Happy!
First of all say that, thanks to the recovered Book Fair Madrid, I was able to greet and congratulate some of these authors for these chosen stories, such as Domingo Villar, Daniel Martín Serrano or Iñaki Biggi.
Readings of the year
El reino - Jo Nesbø
This is the international title with which I stay. Little surprise, given that the regular parish that reads me knows from afar that Jo Nesbø is my weakness.
Insomnia - Daniel Martin Serrano
And this is the national title that I highlight of this year. A debut in the novel - not literary - of this screenwriter, author and teacher who has not been able to make a better debut.
The dance of the crazy - Victoria Mas
I had a non-venal edition as a gift from a friend and I picked it up one afternoon. extraordinary novel by the French writer Victoria Mas that touched my heart and I've been recommending all year. Because of his strength, his denunciation and his social portrait of an era.
Some complete stories - Domingo Villar
It is no news that something that Domingo Villar writes is good, in the form of a 600-page novel or a stories like these. With illustrations as magnificent as only friends can make you, the result is an afternoon read that fills you with fantasy, emotion and nostalgia.
Die in november - Guillermo Galván
A Carlos Lombardy, Guillermo Galván, the former policeman turned detective in postwar Madrid, I met him last year and loved him. This third story has too. And more than for its plots, this trilogy stands out for me for its exquisite setting of that Madrid of the forties and the style richness in your writing.
Blacksad 6. Everything falls, part one - Juanjo Guarnido and Juan Díaz Canales
Twenty years in love with this graphic novel series —with only 6 titles— and a detective as classic as he is shocking John Blacksad, that big black anthropomorphic cat protagonist. His sixth story does not disappoint and the 22 will bring us his auction.
Special remarks
- Moses Project - Iñaki Biggi
I started the year with him and I couldn't do better. A great tribute from this San Sebastian writer to those war film stories set in the Second World Cup with titles such as Twelve from the gallows (your clearest reference) or The canyons of Navarone.
- The boy with the bobbins - Pere Cervantes
Moving and lasting at the same time this novel with a magnificent portrait of postwar Barcelona, with also a tribute to the cinema, a great protagonist and one of the best and most terrible villains of the genre.
And Manuel Bianquetti
Well yes. Quite a discovery for me to have read The turtle maneuver y The Sunflower Tragedy and discover its protagonist, the enormous Manuel Bianquetti in every sense created by Benito Olmo. Read (or rather devoured) in little more than a week, Bianquetti has crawled into that very exclusive list of protagonists of the genre that are taken instantly a piece of my blacker heart. This year I have also read your news, The big red, with another charismatic protagonist. But I'm definitely staying with Bianquetti.
Also, the best has been having been able to tell you personally a Benedict Elm and know what there will be film version already in production and with a cast that, of course, hits at least my imagined iconography right.