Bibliography, January 2017

BOTM: U.K. Le Guin, Rokannon's World

A.C. de Wiart, Happy Odyssey
G. Haigh, Stroke of genius (2016)
U.K. Le Guin, Planet of exile (1966)
U.K. Le Guin, City of illusions (1967)
P.K. Dick, Our friends from Frolix 8 (1970)

I expected this to be the memoirs of one of our most endearingly mad fighters, but while Happy Odyssey was absolutely splendid, I was captivated by Ursula Le Guin's early novels, which I read in a collected edition. I've bought Earthsea again after running into the sand on it twenty five years ago on the strength of it. The best was the first, I think, but they were all outstanding. Like all good science fiction, there is something enthralling about new worlds being drawn, and it's a marker of the quality here that they are done so deftly and quickly. They are gems.

Bibliography, 2016

A reminder:

Jan: G. Maxwell, The ring of bright water (1960)

Feb: H. Trevor-Roper, The hermit of Peking (1976)
Mar: R. George, The Big Necessity (2008)
Apr: R. Graves, Goodbye to all that (1929)
May: T. Capote, In cold blood  (1966)
Jun: E. David, An omelette and a glass of wine (1984)
Jul: P.K. Dick, Flow my tears the policeman said  (1974)
Aug: P. Frankopan, The Silk Roads (2015)
Sept: E.L. Carr, A month in the country (1980)
Oct: P. Beatty, The Sellout (2016)
Nov: H. Jeffreys, Empire of Booze  (2016)
Dec: J. Rayner, The Ten (food) commandments (2016) 

It's been a terrible year. I've read 75 books, ten below my previous low. Two thirds were fiction, and half of that was SF/Fantasy - some of which were outstanding, but too much was comfort reading. I blame the doctorate.

Fiction has taken the brunt of this and, despite the weight of reading, mustered only three BOTMs,m one of which was pretty much by default. I read a lot better works of fiction than Flow my tears... this year, just nothing in July. So sparse are the fiction pickings that, for the first time, I feared my monthly ranking is inadequate to the task. I briefly wondered if the best novel I read this year was Kathryn Stockard's The Help, which lost to Maxwell in January. However, that isn't the case. And although comparisons between the two options I have here are invidious - it is hard to line up a novella about English villages and churches with a freewheeling satire on US race relations in LA - I would plump for Carr on England, above other contenders. It's a gem.

Non-fiction should be harder. The list above is packed with quality, and is probably one of the most consistent of any year, both the famous and the obscure. I'd give honourable mentions and strong recommendations about Maxwell, Trevor-Roper, Capote and Jeffreys, but my favourite was Graves. It was probably always going to be.

Bibliography, December 2016

BOTM: J.Rayner, The ten (food) commandments

W. Cooper, Scenes from provincial life (1950)

P.K. Dick, Maze of death* (1970)

P. Suskind, Perfume (1985)
S.S. Tepper, Singer from the Sea (2000)

L. Thomas, The Lives of a cell (1974)

Nothing really to see here. I was underwhelmed by Perfume and this was the worst Tepper I have read. Both were good, I simply expected more. As with Lewis Thomas' collection of essays, which are really designed to be digested slowly; they felt disjointed when read in a couple of sittings. Rayner, similarly short, was punchier, more coherent and a good read. He's also been reading the same books as me. (I note that despite him also being struck by Michael Pollan's assertion that KFC ran an ad campaign with the slogan Women's Liberation [from cooking], I can''t find it. Though this is close). Worth a read. It was a perfect Christmas present.

Bibliography, November 2016

BOTM: H. Jeffreys, Empire of Booze (2016)

J. Bloodworth, The myth of meritocracy (2016)
D. Brown, The American West (1994)
J. Crace, The Pesthouse (2007)
A. Huxley, Antic Hay (1923)
D. Levy, Hot Milk (2016)

I was surprised by most of this list. Levy, rounding off the Booker shortlist, was surprisingly good - especially as the synopsis sounded dire. Huxley, Bloodworth and Brown all disappointed. Jim Crace didn't, but he never does.

There were no surprises around Book of the Month. I came across Henry Jeffreys in Slightly Foxed (which is also brilliant) some years ago, and he's been a great discovery, not least because he comes from my home town. More importantly, he has an excellent, accessible and interesting drinks blog. Now, he's written an amazing book, which I helped fund - in somewhat bizarre company. Now, given this, and the fact it's about two of my favourite things, Empire and Booze, I was bound to like it. But it is also excellently written, fascinating, practical, and makes good use of amusing footnotes. What more could anyone ask for?

In other news, my definitive Booker ranking this year

1. Beatty
2. Thien
3. Levy
4. Moshfegh
5. Macrae Burnet
6. Szalay

Bibliography, October 2016

BOTM: P. Beatty, The Sellout

G. Macrae Burnet, His Bloody Project
O. Moshfegh, Eileen
D. Szalay, All That Man Is
M. Thien. Do Not Say We Have Nothing

On my third, equally doomed, attempt to get through the Booker shortlist before it's announced, I managed three of them, though I did pick the winner. I read Eileen and the Szalay afterwards and they definitely did not change my mind - indeed I'm not sure what Szalay is doing on the list at all. Like the bookmakers, I thought the jury would choose Thien, and it was good - I was particularly struck by the obvious but important insight around how those in the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution were the parents of the 1989 protesters.

Beatty has his own kind of history to tell, and tells it rather brilliantly - but it's really about how we think about race now, or rather specifically how Americans think about race. It's well done, outrageous, and very funny. I've heard him say he doesn't want it to be labelled as a satire and it is hard book to pin down in a genre, though it is definitely at least partly a satire. I'd call it a somewhat madcap fantasy about the complexity of racial politics. That said, I certainly wouldn't want to be the person doing the press lines on the plot.

Bibliography, September 2016

BOTM: E.L.Carr, A month in the country

R. Adams, The coming of the Horseclans
R. Adams, Sword of the Horseclans
R. Adams, Revenge of the Horseclans
R. Adams, A cat of silvery hue
J. Smiley, A thousand acres
S. Pinker, the better angels of our nature

So, I read some classic (by which I just mean old) fantasy novels last month after I found them in Hay on Wye. They were splendid, especially given this intro:

However, it must be confessed everything else was actually better. I thought I was going to give this to Pinker which is well written and (for the first two thirds) and excellent history of the decline of violence, but a) the last section is about psychology and I lost a little bit of interest and b) having read it, I'm increasingly concerned about the robustness of some of the data. Instead, Carr's book, a sixth of the size, is BOTM. It's perfectly formed, charming and brimming with gentle mischief and melancholy. And it's got churches and religious art in it. I loved it.

Bibliography, August 2016

BOTM: P. Frankopan, The Silk Roads

K. Amis, The Riverside Villas murder
J. Littell, The Kindly Ones
M. Wickstead, Aid and Development

It took me two months to read Jonathan Littell's work on the Holocaust. Last month, I said it was brilliant, but harrowing. Having finally finished it, I'd qualify that. The end (and especially the bit before the end) is very weak. However, the book as whole is also deeply flawed. In some ways it is brilliant,  and it's one of the best treatments of the bureaucratic workings of the Nazi state and the Holocaust I've read. It really drives home the nature of how the task sucked in so many otherwise decent enough people; and in the first section, which is the best, it outlines what it did to them. But in the end, the book is hamstrung by the main character. He is sympathetic - given he is a murderer and a mass murderer, this is impressive - but he's also psychologically damaged before the action even begins. This means not only does the book fail to address the question that Littell posed himself - what would someone like me have done in Nazi Germany - but it also bloats the book with a fantastical subplot that adds little. A better book would have excised that entire element, which would have made it better and happily shorter.

So I've given, not without reservations, book of the month to Frankopan's on Central Asia and the Near East. I've issues with this too. It's a worthwhile book and is jam-packed with gems, but it suffers from two major issues. Firstly, I don't think it holds focus well enough in the middle, where we flit too rapidly from the ostensible subject of the book to the West. In a work seeking to correct western centric views of history, there's just too much on the European age of discovery rather than its impact on the aforementioned Silk Roads and this leads to real compression; Timur gets a single page. Secondly, and surprisingly given Peter's background (he taught me middle Byzantine history briefly), it has what might be termed 'Ferguson syndrome' where the lure of modern politics gets in the way of the historical analysis. That means that it's got too much modern in - we get to 1900 with 40% of the book to go. And some of it is too obviously the author's political view without enough backup: for example, he's keen to emphasise the Taleban's insistence in the 1990s that they wouldn't shelter Bin Laden if he committed terrorist acts, but no comment on their volte-face in the aftermath of 2001 two pages later. This is a shame ass the historical perspective he brings to the twentieth century is actually fascinating, just a) overlong and b) too partisan. 

I'd read both of these, but with caution.