Bibliography, January 2015

BOTM: M. Cunningham, The hours

L. Barber, An education
R. Blythe, Akenfield
E.M. Brent- Dyer, The school at the chalet*
E. Crispin, The case of the gilded fly
C.L.R. James, Letters from London
M. Marquesee, War minus the shooting*
R. Silverberg, Downward to Earth*
B. Unsworth, Pascali's Island

In some ways, I'm bottling this. My delight about the delivery of the complete Chalet School series from home is profound. There is a creeping inevitability about me reading them all. The first is excellent and was a strong contender for BOTM. As was Mike Marquesee's book on the 1996 cricket world cup. Instead, I've plumped for Michael Cunningham's famous, highly lauded, concept novel. It is of course better written than the Chalet school and structurally more complex. It's also exceptionally clever and well done. It's not a long book and it's packed tight (note of course that it's not really three stories but two and a prequel). I find Virginia Woolf unreadable, but this briefly made me think I wanted to revisit her work. Instead I've started book two of the Chalet school. I'm happy with that.

Bibliography, 2014

So, here's what I said:

Jan - J. Crace, Harvest

Feb - L. Hughes-Hallet, The Pike

March - N. MacGregor, A history of the world in 100 objects

April - D. Hendy, Life on Air

May - P.L. Fermor, Between the woods and the water*

June - B. Wilson, Consider the fork

July - A. Solomon, Far from the tree

August - M. Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

September - D. Brown, Bury my heart at wounded knee*

October - E. Waugh, Men at Arms*

November - R. Flanagan, The narrow road to the deep north

December - S.S. Tepper, The gate to Women's country

To be honest, it's been the worst reading year of my adult life. The monthly average is down to seven, and it's propped up with some, shall we say, lighter efforts. Fiction dominated, though actually less than the last two years (61%). Also worth noting was the strengths of the rereads. Three BOTMs were rereads, and I could easily have had a fourth in December. Anyway:

I read a lot of novels, but the list is majority (7:5) non-fiction. This should make fiction easier to award, and it's really a Booker duel. Harvest, which should have won 2013's prize, was better than the actual winner of the 2014 edition. For me, it remains as astounding evocation of the medieval rural world. A fitting swansong for Jim Crace. Idiot Booker judges.

Non-fiction is a lot harder. Almost all of the monthly non-fiction were astounding. I even cried at some of them (actually two of them, and one was about Radio 4), and choosing one of them is very hard. In the end though, it came down to another duel of two great enterprises, both asking us to re-imagine how we think about America (Bury my heart at Wounded Knee) or children (Far from the tree). Both were transformatively brilliant. Solomon edges it by being a) about children when I had a pregnant wife and b)being read for the first time.

Bibliography, December 2014

BOTM: S.S. Tepper, The Gate to Woman's country 

C. Booker, The Seven basic plots

M. Bulgakov, A dog's heart
W. Gibson, Neuromancer 

T. Pratchett & N. Gaiman, Good Omens*

P.G. Wodehouse, Sam the sudden 

I liked a lot of these, though none were absolutely stellar. Booker was terrible, after about page 250 (there were a lot more). I was tempted to put Good Omens at the top, but I have read it enough times before such than many of the great jokes were remembered as much as read. I almost put Gibson at the top for the reverse reason, namely I've never read it, but it now feels very familiar - it's famously a book that launched a subgenre - but it does feel dated now. So, with these caveats, my favourite was Tepper's feminist envisioning of a post-apocalyptic world. and I can't really believe I'm writing that.

Daniel John Garrood

b. 01:43, 30.xii.2014, London, 8lb 6oz (3.8kg)

Daniel for:
the Prophet
the Stylite

John for:
the Baptist
the Revelator (as this, not as imagined by DH Lawrence)
Tzimiskes
Cash
And my grandfather, John Garrood

Disappointingly, Anna vetoed Charles.

Bibliography, November 2014

BOTM: R. Flanagan, The narrow road to the deep north

G. Flynn, Gone Girl
P. Mansel, Constantinople: city of the World's Desire
R. Mortimer, Dear Lupin: letters to a wayward son
J. Norman, Edmund Burke
P.G. Wodehouse, Cocktail time

So, I've done this already, Flanagan's Booker prize winner is deserved. It's also the best book I've read this month, in what is a strong field, with the return of the Earl of Ickenham in a late Wodehouse and the compelling account of Ottoman Constantinople, which was very well done indeed. Anyway, I won't rehearse my reasons for Flanagan, which was almost entirely well and effectively done (there's an annoying and pointless Jane Eyre like coincidence in the plot that I hated, but it was a small detour). The subject is fascinating and I think it's a mark of how well it's done that the Japanese sections work as well as the Australian.

Bibliography, October 2014 (Booker edition)

BOTM: E. Waugh, Men at Arms

J. Ferris, To rise again at a decent hour

K.J. Fowler, We are all completely beside ourselves 

H. Jacobson, J
N. Mukerjee, The lives of others
A. Smith, How to be both
E. Waugh, Helena
E. Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen
E. Waugh, Unconditional Surrender
M Zusak, The Book Thief

&, for completeness but not actually finished till November, R. Flanagan, The narrow road to the deep north 

This has become a bit difficult. I delayed this because - for the first time ever - I've managed to read all the Booker shortlist. Unlike last year, they appear to have been right. So, Flanagan would have been BOTM had it been in the month, but it wasn't. Anyway, It's still difficult to award pick a favourite then because I can't really call out which one of Evelyn Waugh's war trilogy is the best. The last one is the nicest to read because it gets resolved, but I think it's the first one that does what it does best, though that may be because I found the great character of the mad brigadier (Ritchie - Hook) more amenable than the monstrous Ludovic who stalks Officers and Gentlemen. The trilogy, it goes without saying, is magnificent.

For the record, I'd rank the Booker shortlist as follows: 1. Flanagan, 2.Fowler, 3. Mukerjee, 4. Ferris, 5. Smith, 6. Jacobson. If I could have read just the first half of Ferris or the second half of Ali Smith (in my version, the modern story), they'd have done better.

Bibliography, September 2014

BOTM: D. Brown, Bury my heart at wounded knee*

M. Atwood, Oryx and Crake

J. Berger, Ways of seeing

M. Kundera, Immortality

L. Lee, A moment of war

D. du Maurier, My cousin Rachel

H. Murakami, Hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world

R.L. Stevenson, Kidnapped*

I've had to abandon my objection to Margaret Atwood doing Science Fiction, because - aside from the Handmaid's tale, which is a bit clunky - it turns out she does it really well. However, her achievement pales beside the feat of historical re-imagining that Dee Brown manages with his famous, and wonderful, account of the history of the end of the plains Indians. Reading it for the second time, I looked up the reaction, and the criticism. Some of that criticism is probably fair. It is a whitewash, and no attempt is made to analyse and understand the acts of the settlers. But, more than ever, I don't think that matters. What he does is to give a vanished people a history, albeit one without a happy ending. And he does so with a voice that isn't that of the victorious Americans. That's astonishingly hard to do - we are all prisoners of own historiography - and here it's done with style and an emotional punch that still smarts long after I finished reading. Were I to do one of those ten books challenges, it would be there.