Bibliography, May 2015

BOTM: M. Robinson, Gilead

J. Braine, Room at the top
J. Crace, Being dead
E. Crispin, Buried for pleasure
U. Eco, The Prague Cemetery
B. Greene, Liechtenstein: Valley of Peace
A. Huxley, Island
H. Macdonald, H is for hawk
M. Robinson, Home

Gilead - perfect; everything else (and several were outstanding) - not Gilead.

Bibliography, April 2015

BOTM: P. Lively, Moon tiger

J. Barnes, A pedant in the kitchen*
A. Bennett, Clayhanger
W. Golding, Rites of passage
P.H. Newby, Something to answer for

Astute observers will notice that I am filling in the missing Booker winners I've not yet read. I'm getting very close to being able to produce a definitive ranking.  Astute observers will also note that I haven't actually managed to do much reading, but there is much to remark about on these. What I'm most struck by is the fragility of literary reputation. Newby and Bennett are obscure now, yet neither deserve to be - Bennett is particularly marvellous. I'd also comment on the loss of Egypt as a setting in modern fiction. From the 1950s onwards, Egypt crops up again and again. I'm thinking here of Durrell, Olivia Manning, Waugh et cetera - most of course about the war. Lively's, with The English patient five years' later, is really the last hurrah (I am happy to be corrected on this). It's all India now and that's a shame. Anyway, Moon tiger was great. Elegantly written and deeply affecting. Go find it. It's quite short and well worth it.

Bibliography, March 2015

BOTM: P. Barker, The Ghost Road

P. Barker, The Eye in the Door

E.M. Brent-Dyer, A princess at the Chalet School

A.S. Byatt, On histories and stories
T. Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's
J. Huley, A matter of taste: a history of wine drinking in England
O. Jones, The Establishment

A. Leckie, Ancillary justice

S. Middleton, Holiday
H. Saberi, Tea: A global history

Despite a strong showing from Leckie's multigarlanded science fiction debut, only one author was going to win BOTM. I did have some difficulty choosing which one, but - like the Booker judges - I came down on the final volume of the Regeneration trilogy. It's exquisitely done. I read them at the time, but hadn't remembered very about them. Perhaps I was too young. Nonetheless, they are pretty much pitch perfect in their recreation of a very specific slice of the War, and the real and fictional blending is done very well indeed. It's also much softer on the heartbreak than it could be. The deaths aren't melodramatic, but just sad. I think that makes it a cut above those novels that hammer home the point. It's superior in most other ways too.

Bibliography, February 2015

BOTM: J. Wood, the fun stuff

C. Achebe, Things fall apart
P. Barker, Regeneration*
E.M. Brent Dyer, Jo of the Chalet School*
I. Fleming, From Russia, with Love
U. Le Guin, The left hand of darkness
S. Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh*

I note, a) I've begun to really step up the rereading, which may damage my calculations about how many books to retain in the house and b) this has been an exceptional month. I reckon at least three of these would have taken BOTM in January (Wood, Barker, Rushdie). And I could make a case for Le Guin and Achebe. I think this is the last of Rushdie's great works, and it makes painful the decline he has suffered since. Comparing this to The Enchantress of Florence (which has strong echoes of this in it) is painful.

Not though as painful as Paul Auster would find James Wood's essay on his output. It's a savage, and richly deserved, binning. And just one of the succession of gems in his latest collection of essays. It helps of course that I think he's right on most of the authors he discusses, but really it's the penetration and elegance with which he approaches each subject that makes this outstanding. As a bonus, we don't just get literary criticism but an astounding essay on the late Keith Moon, decades after his death. It's been richly lauded, and I heartily concur. Unless of course you're a huge fan of Paul Auster.

The simple things

When I was much younger, I used to aim to make Ash Wednesday mass as late as possible on the day. As Lent only starts then, you can get two drinks in after work before the 7:30 service. I remember once pelting through central London on a bike after glibly promising my drinking companion I could get from Charlotte St to Camden in under 10 minutes (you can't, but it's close enough). That was when I had time; and evenings. Now I try to work Ash Wednesday more efficiently and knock it off during the day. It's amazing how hard that is.

I suspect it's true that you can tell a lot about any organisation by how well they do the irregular activities. It's certainly true that you can tell a lot about a church based on what happens outside Sundays. Getting Ash Wednesday right should be easy. If you're a city church near a lot of workplaces, you should have an Ashing service at lunchtime. You might well want to have one after work too, but don't have it at 7:30. If you're residential, do it after dinner (7:30 is fine). And tell people about it - at the very least put a poster up outside, and you should really learn to use the Internet - I don't believe it's that hard anymore. People who are looking for a service near work should be able to look you up. In London, the diocese could even co-ordinate.

On Wednesday, I had to walk 20 minutes in the centre of London to find a church I knew had a service. I walked past two churches on the way. Even after looking at their noticeboards, I couldn't work out if they had a service at all, let alone at lunchtime. I mourn the fact that Ash Wednesday isn't a fundamental part of the rhythm of modern life, but I'm just angry that the churches don't even seem to trying. Anathema.

P.S. My old and new churches did this just fine.

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.