Bibliography, January 2020

BOTM: T. Salih, Season of migration to the north (1966)

C. Birch, Jamrach's menagerie (2011)

M. Dinshaw, Outlandish Knight: life of Steven Runciman (2016)

E. Edugyan, Half blood blues (2011)

A. Forest, Autumn term (1948)

V. Franklin and A. Johnson, Menus that made history (2019)
S. Kelman, Pigeon English (2011)

J. Mahjoub, A line in the river (2018)

J. Ryle (ed.), The Sudan handbook (2015)

Lots of good stuff here. All of this was worthwhile, Edugyan and Kelman the best of the recent fiction (I'm back to the 2011 Booker shortlist). Two outstanding ones. Minoo Dinshaw's biography of Steven Runciman was absolutely delightful. It's a fantastic immersion into a world now gone, centred on Runciman himself, but illuminated by a vast cast of characters. Some of those are famous; some are now obscure, but deftly realised without losing the thread of Runciman's own life. It's a triumph. It is edged out however, by Tayeb Salih's short novel about the impact British influence had on the Sudanese. That sounds much drier than it is. It's a tight evocative piece looking at both Sudanese village life as it enters post-colonial 'modernity' and the experience of the African in early and mid twentieth century Britain. It also has a pleasing amount of drama and plot. It's a very good use of 169 pages.

And my ranking for the 2011 Booker shortlist is now complete. I think they got this right, though my memory of Barnes is imperfect. The commentators were also right: this was a poor list, with half of them being not really up to par. The top three were good, though not outstanding.

1. Barnes, Sense of an Ending
2. Edugyan, Half blood blues
3. Kelman, Pigeon English
4. Miller, Snowdrops
5.  Birch, Jamrach's menagerie
6. The Sisters Brothers

Bibliography, 2019

Disappointingly, despite a very strong first eight months (averaging just shy of ten books a month), the back third let me down (seven book average) and I ended the year on slightly less reading than last year. And a lot more fiction, which accounted for over half of the reading, though I had pretty poor returns in terms of quality. BOTMs were not reflective of this reading at all. Five were fiction (from 56 fiction books read); six were cultural (from 26) and one lone historical work (from 15).

For this and other reasons, this makes fiction in particular hard to discuss. I found all the fiction listed below worthwhile, and I'd add recommendations for a string of Science fiction and fantasy  Susan Copper's Dark is Rising series, Jemisin's science fiction trilogy, and Addison's The Goblin Emperor also good. So, for the second year running, the monthly system has let me down. Jemisin's opener, The fifth season, was exceptional. Imaginative, different, and fully fleshed out, it took a great premise and executed brilliantly. They are garlanded with multiple awards for a reason.

Also like last year, fiction and non-fiction were from the same month as the non-fiction winner. Here, I had an embarrassment of riches. I would heartily recommend all my non-fiction BOTMs. In fact, I've already bought them for people. But Bob Stanley's Yeah Yeah Yeah was never in doubt. Its scope and range are vast; yet for such a long book it retains a lightness of writing without sacrificing its seriousness. It's a masterpiece.

Finally, as a coda. It's now 2020. So for the decade past:

• This year's non-fiction may be a masterpiece, but it, and others, lose to Eminent Victorians (from 2012). It is fine-tuned for my interests, though I defy anyone not be enthralled by it. 
• For fiction, Gilead (from 2015) is the best book about Calvinism I've ever read. It may be the best novel I have ever read. 

Books of the Month:
January: B.Stanley, Yeah yeah yeah (2013)
February: A. Kurkov, Death and the penguin  (1996)
March: D. Levy, The cost of living (2018)
April: P.G.Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith  (1908)
May: J. Jeffs, Sherry (6th ed) (2016)
June: Y.N. Harari, Sapiens (2011)
July: W. Goldman, Adventures in the screen trade (1983)
August: A.A. Gill, Pour me (2015)
September; A. Maalouf, The rock of Tanios (1993)
October: B. Wilson, The way we eat now (2019)
November: D. Lessing, The grass is singing (1950)
December: W. Self, Umbrella (2012)

Bibliography, December 2019

BOTM: W. Self, Umbrella (2012)

DeWitt, The Sisters Brothers (2011)
A.D. Millers, Snowdrops (2011)
A. Moore, The lighthouse (2012)
A. Munro, The moons of Jupiter (1982)
L. Sciascia, The council of Egypt (1963)
J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

I've been reading old Booker shortlists again, and, though mixed, they do reliably throw up quality. Best of them, and I hate saying this, was Umbrella. It's a swirling chaotic novel, but, with the exception of the fourth fifth, tightly done. It is stream of consciousness, but it does it well. Early dispatches from the controversial 2011 shortlist indicate that the criticism is genuine - you wouldn't have seen Self's modernism on the previous year's list - and that's a shame.

Bibliography, November 2019

BOTM: D. Lessing, The grass is singing (1950)

M. Brearley, On cricket (2018)
T. Holland, Dominion (2019)
U.K. Le Guin, The real and the unreal: selected stories, volume 2 (2012)
A. Munro, Something I've been meaning to tell you (1974)
S. Tighe, Rethinking strategy (2019)
B. Wilson, The Hive (2004)
J. Worth, Call the midwife (2001)

It has been a mediocre month, and surprisingly so. I'm a big fan of many of the authors on this list, but it is clear I was not reading their best work. Of the stronger ones, Brearley was very enjoyable, but I have read lots of this kind of thing before; ditto Le Guin. More interesting was Lessing, both on its own merits, and in the context of when it was written. Its racial politics are clearly progressive for 1950, and in themselves unobjectionable, but it would be inconceivable to write such a novel now, with the black voice almost completely silent save as a foil to the disintegration of the whites.

A lengthy and specific coda now follows on Dominion, which I expected to be my favourite, but wasn't.

Good things first. This is a well written, very enjoyable, canter through the history of Western Christianity. Tom Holland writes nicely and has a great eye for interesting detail and insightful extrapolation, as well as good asides. As a narrative history, it's very good. But that's not the limit of the ambition of this book - it wants to show that Christian heritage drives much of the modern west's values, and are unique. I found both of these problematic, especially the latter.

Part of this I think is an unwillingness to do the major work, which I'll come onto, but there are also more minor questions of accuracy, noticeable perhaps only to people who have been over this ground many times before. Ulfilas, bishop to the Goths, is described as only really ministering to Christian captives on page 186, but six pages later is translating the bible into Gothic. Wittenberg was not, in 1517, 'poor and remote' (p.295), but the residence of one of the seven Electors of the Holy Roman Empire. These don't really matter, but are suggestive of a desire to ramp up the rhetoric at the expense of detail. Personally, I also found irritating the fact that Gregory VII, who animates a lot of this book, is interchangeably referred to as Hildebrand (his given name), though I accept that's personal only.

The central role given to Gregory is however, excellent. Canossa here is given its rightful place in the Christian narrative. The hinge of that narrative is the early part of the second millenium, and Holland does it well, though I would have liked to see more on Innocent III. This experience is western European only - this is after all, a history of 'the making of the western mind' - and is the first of my major objections: the book skates over the clear implications of this focus. Whatever we are talking about cannot be intrinsic to Christianity if it doesn't describe the experience and thought of the Christians to the east of the Adriatic, and indeed those east of the Euphrates. Holland knows the eastern church perfectly well, but much of what he claims to be Christian would I think be hugely undermined by an assessment of the Byzantine church and state.

Even more serious, and I think fatal, is the lack of engagement with any comparative religious analysis. Frequently, things are referred to a unique or unprecedented, but I just don't think they are. I'm not an expert on eastern religion, but it's very clearly not unique to Christianity to love the poor, nor even for the nobility to do it. Ask anyone from the subcontinent. I'm less familiar with some of the comparisons around sexual mores, both monogamy and homosexuality, but again, the only comparisons are classical and occasionally Islamic.  That's Holland's specialism, but I don't think it's credible to make claims about the distinctiveness of Christianity in a book, whose excellent index (for which many commendations) has a sole reference to Hinduism and none to Buddhism.

As I write this, I wonder if I'm being overly critical. For I am sympathetic to the view that Christian history has shaped modern thinking, and that many modern assumptions owe much to particular strands of thought in our Christ-drenched, though also classically influenced, backstory. Books that tell that story are welcome. And this makes clear the distinctions between parts of the ancient west and parts of the Christian west. However, to expand that thesis requires a lot more than is present here. I understand anyone not wanting to spend more time on Buddhism than they have to, but then they shouldn't make the claims contained here.

Bibliography, October 2019

BOTM: B. Wilson, The way we eat now (2019)

M. Atwood, The Testaments (2019)
M. Atwood, The handmaid's tale (1985)
E.M. Brent-Dyer, The new house at the chalet school (1935)
B. Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019)
C. Obioma, An orchestra of minorities (2019)
J. Paxman, The political animal (2002)
S. Rushdie, Quichotte (2019)
E. Shafak, 10 minutes, 38 seconds in this strange world (2019)

I love Bee Wilson's work. I think she writes well and has exceptionally interesting things to say. I need to read the lot. This is fascinating on our food culture (and depressing, particularly as I write this just after Halloween). Like all books of this kind, it makes me want to make bread, but it also makes we want to think more about a much wider range of foods (and drinks). Read it; and read her Consider the fork as well, which is even better.

It probably would have been book of the month anyway, but it wasn't really challenged by this years' Booker shortlist, which was weak. I agreed with the judges (I am ignoring the sentimental award to Atwood, which was emphatically not deserved), and thought Evaristo was the best. It was engaging, nicely phrased and vocalised from its various viewpoints. And I thought it managed the contradictions and and problems of its narrators well. There's a cute, semi-twist in a final coda that I quite liked, but some didn't. I don't think it matters very much. Of the others, it was tight between Shafak and Obioma, and I applaud the ambition of Ellmann. Rushdie and Atwood felt tired and shadows of the former selves. I reread the Handmaid's tale after this, which I liked a lot more than I did first time round, and just served to show how pedestrian the sequel is.

My ranking.

1. Evaristo
2. Shafak
3. Obioma
4. Ellmann
5. Atwood
6. Rushdie

Bibliography, September 2019

BOTM: A. Maalouf, The rock of Tanios (1993)

A. Bennett, Anna of the five towns (1902)
L. Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport (2019)
D. du Maurier, The scapegoat (1957)

Ducks, Newburyport was not my favourite, but it did take up most of the reading time. It has also been somewhat misleadingly reviewed. I think that may well be because many of the reviewers didn't finish it. It is accurately reported as being very very long, and definitely outlandish in technique. It is a stream of consciousness novel, but a very specific manner which is essentially a list. That makes it hard going, though the writing does make many of those fragments very quotable. Contrary to most of the reviews, it is actually full of plot. There's a whole biographical backstory packed into it, and central conventional narrative has a dramatic (one could say melodramatic) climax. It's far from perfect, and it could definitely be half the length or less, but it's an ambition to be applauded.

Everything else was high quality without being outstanding. Arnold Bennett remains consistently good, and given that consistency, ever more surprisingly unfashionable; Du Maurier was fun. However, Maalouf's evocation of the beginnings of modern religious conflict in Lebanon was particularly nicely done, and it's right on target for me. I'll be reading the rest of his.

Bibliography, August 2019

BOTM: A.A. Gill, Pour me (2015)

J. Arlott, Arlott on wine (1986)

F. Fernandez - Armesto, Millenium (1997)

P. Hensher, Kitchen Venom (1996)
C. Louvin, Satan is real (2012)*

L. Mangan, Bookworm (2016)

A. Marshall, Life's rich pageant (1984)

S. Runciman, The lost capital of Byzantium (1980)

D. Storey, Saville (1976)
J. Thayil, Narcopolis (2012)

A. Wilson, As if by magic (1973)

I read widely this month, but not well. I have though cleared the decks of some long overdue books, where I liked Millenium (a shamefully never completed 18th birthday present), but not Saville (one of three unread Booker winners, but with a dire, unconnected ending). Much of the rest was mediocre and some (Hensher, Wilson) were bad. I make Gill's memoir my favourite with some reluctance as other contenders fell away. Runciman was solid rather than sparkling; Mangan I did enjoy, but a) the distance between our childhood reading was too great (essentially because she's a girl) and b) I'm jealous of the number of books she must get to read even now. I did consider giving it to Arthur Marshall's rather lovely autobiography, but I think I would have needed to know who he was beforehand, though it had some very good lines. So it had to be the Gill, which I found both engaging and problematic. Lots is left out; and much of his fairly aggressive public persona is not engaged with or heavily glossed over. And that makes it a not very honest book, deliberately, despite claiming to be. It is affecting, but the compelling episodes add up to a disingenuous whole. The episodes are however often very well done. In fact, I enjoyed the digressions on art and on journalism more than the central plank of the book. That is problematic, but it does make a very worthwhile read.