Books of 2025 Part 4: Top Ten

 Not sure if this needs a preamble, but this is obviously the last of my book posts for 2025. I'll take some time soon enough to post a list of my top albums and songs of 2025 as well but otherwise this is all I'll write on my blog until the same time next year. Or maybe not, who knows maybe I'll get into blogging again somehow in 2026. (Narrator: he won't)

But let's start the final countdown with...

10) Travels with My Aunt - Graham Greene

This is officially the last book I read in 2025, as I started it in December and finished it early in January to trigger this blog series, it was quite funny that I had this book left over from my previous visit to the library when I had Something to Answer For by P.H. Newby arrive as an interlibrary loan, largely because I was reminded of Greene while I was reading that book, so I ended up following it up with an actual Greene novel I hadn't read. I think I've seen this before at my library but passed it over because "travels" is already a bit of a turn-off for me, while "with my aunt" doesn't exactly ameliorate my personal aversion to aimless travelogues which I've mentioned frequently in previous book posts (cf. going back to my original reading challenge of TIME's best books, Kerouac's On the Road and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises with a nod as well to last year's A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke, among others). But as Newby did with his Greene-esque setting, Greene himself surprised me with this book. I will admit that from the title that I thought this would be more autobiographical and observatory in style, while it instead tells a fictionalised story of Henry Pulling, a recently retired bank manager who refreshes his acquaintance with his elderly aunt Augusta (who I kept feeling was also one of the names of one of Bertie Wooster's many aunts) at his mother's funeral, and obviously - no spoiler alert necessary - subsequent goes on at least two trips with her. It's worth noting that there are some passages of describing landscapes, making observations while exploring unknown cities, which are typical of 'travel' literature and I found less compelling even in Greene's very capable hands. However, what makes this book compelling is the character of Aunt Augusta, who is almost a prototype of the 'manic pixie dream girl' figure as she enters Henry's stuffy, boring existence looking after his dahlias and shakes up his world to get him out into seeing the world. But more than just being an inspiration and energising figure, Aunt Augusta is also a morally ambivalent one, who narrates many dalliances she's had with larger than life figures throughout her life, and much of the travelling narrated in the book are spent in search of old acquaintances, or performing particular tasks for old acquaintances and lovers of hers. She's quite an incorrigible figure, strongly outspoken and while her fate seems to be intertwined with Henry's while also jolting him out of his humdrum existence, this never seems to be a particular design of hers but just the inevitable influence she has on people around her. The frequent coincidences that happen throughout their travels, where the same figures crop up everywhere or people with improbable connections to earlier acquaintances, don't tend to fall into Dickensian cliché but are rather part of Greene's comedic vision here painting a version of global hegemony that's manipulated by small, everyday players. And I can't help but read Henry's ultimate fate in this book as a kind of indictment from Greene on how most of us live our lives, keeping out of trouble by steering clear of adventure, while small changes could make us part of something bigger, more exciting and potentially gravely dangerous as well. But it's all delivered with an affable irony that reminds me of why I like Greene in a number of different writing modes.

9) John Dies at the End - Jason Pargin (writing as David Wong)

I grabbed an eBook of this for a couple of reasons, but it was mainly triggered by a thought I had while reading Jason Pargin's later book, I'm Starting to Worry about this Black Box of Doom, which was: knowing that he wrote this similarly foreshadowingly-titled book, is that a whole stylistic motif of his, to write these books that basically give away events in the title only to then rein in how foreboding the doom is as the book goes on? In this case, the answer's a little more complicated. I kind of knew that there was a "John Dies at the End" series but the upshot of the ending of this particular book - without any major spoilers here - is that it being a series, John doesn't actually die at the end of this book. But the other reason it's complicated is because it almost doesn't matter whether John dies, at the end, or at all during this book. Because it's kind of a bonkers chaotic tale about death and reanimation and cloning and parallel multiverses and so forth. Again no major spoilers but John is at some point indeed dead in this book. So is David, our narrator. So are lots of people. But they also have this tendency to exist outside of the usual time-space continuum and outside the usual constraints of causality. So this book is a fair bit more of a wild ride than IStWAtBBoD and is in the same way a lot more convoluted. It's an interesting question as to whether I've read these books in the correct order, since the latter book is far more controlled and far more targeted in its themes and the ideas it explores, whereas this is a messy Jackson Pollock of a novel, and I think I enjoyed them both but preferred IStWAtBBoD if only because it was easier to follow what was going on. That said, this like the latter, is a very funny book and I think the way to enjoy this book is to just let go of piecing together the narrative threads and just enjoy the ride. One thing I did find a little odd about this book though is how politically incorrect a lot of the language is. I'm not exactly a prude when it comes to things like this but I simply couldn't see the reason for the narrator's constant use of the word "retarded" to describe something broadly 'bad'. It didn't seem to serve any character-building purpose (i.e. we weren't meant to see David as especially politically incorrect because he's using this word all the time), and therefore I couldn't really see it as necessary at all yet it's constant throughout, along with a few instances of the n-word that were more couched in "I'm just referring to someone else saying this you understand" kind of terms. Anyway, it wasn't a huge damper on my enjoyment but it was a questionable choice by Pargin that never really seemed to reconcile itself with any purpose at the end of the book and therefore could easily have been avoided completely. But willing to overlook that, there were a number of chuckle and even laugh-out-loud moments for me; even sometimes just at the silliness and absurdity of the situation our two buddies found themselves in. John as a character is definitely the one to latch onto in a lot of the ways where the first-person narrator becomes merely our eyes and not necessarily a fully-fledged character in his own right, while John is far better drawn and textured while also just being a strange conduit for such supernatural goings-on as the book describes. A pretty chaotic bit of nonsense but undoubtedly a very amusing diversion.

8) The Sisters Brothers - Patrick DeWitt

Following on from reading Paul Theroux's Mother Land which I didn't care for at all, this was a welcome tonic. This one was given as a birthday present from Catie, who I can imagine told the clerk at the book store some of her own favourite books and then asked for a recommendation for the diametric opposite in order to hit on something that would appeal to me. And it chagrins me to say that this approach, or the book clerk, were spot on with this because I did very much enjoy it. It's a very blokey story of course, being a western tale about two brothers who are hired killers travelling from Oregon to California on a hitman mission from their wealthy landowner employer. Eli Sisters, our narrator, is the younger and more sentimental of the brothers, and spends much of the book trying to forge connections with people as well as dreaming of a peaceful life beyond the pattern of killer-for-hire that he and his brother find themselves in. His brother Charlie is more ruthless, cynical but also with a more mercurial personality who finds greater success with personal interactions than Eli despite Eli having more need for that connection. I did find the book had an entertaining moral ambivalence to it, where the brothers are cold and clinical in their dispatching of people who stand in their way, and it's entertaining just in the same realm as westerns generally - at the frontier of civilisation where laws are mutable and survival is the end goal. So the brothers make for interesting protagonists as they have this invulnerability to them (you might even call it plot armour in an ungenerous reading); their efficiency with their guns makes them feared and respected, but Eli as our narrator tends to gravitate towards trying to find an end point and it always feels like he's stuck in a life and destiny he can't escape from. I did find that the ending of this story was a little bit too chaotic; DeWitt kind of forces a turning point into the story where the brothers have a choice to make where they can end the cycle of violence they find themselves in, while also injecting a number of different roadblocks that mean that neither path is clear for them to take and everything seems to involve more misfortune and more violence. As a result I do find myself remembering fondly a number of the mid-points of the story and a lot of the key events as it unfolded, but with little to no feeling about the conclusion of the book, which was fairly open-ended as well as somewhat ambivalent. And given the inconclusive nature of the ending it also leaves me wondering about some plot points that never seem to have been resolved throughout the story. It was an entertaining series of events, but the inconclusive nature of some of them left me feeling a bit unsatisfied, despite the fact that of course real life doesn't always follow a pattern or logical sequence.

7) Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves - P G Wodehouse

I always get that line from Black Books in my head whenever I consider reading Wodehouse - "Hang on, I've read this one - that's the trouble with Wodehouse, isn't it?". In fact when I was picking this one up from many options in the library, I was also considering another one that I realised I had, in fact, read. But the reason that line is particularly relevant to this particular book is that throughout this book I had to keep questioning to myself whether in fact I had read it and just forgotten about it, years ago. It would have pre-dated my blog summaries since there's no mention of it, but the main reason why I kept second-guessing myself is basically because this book feels fairly late in Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster oeuvre and therefore it contains a lot of references to previous escapades and old stories, plus a fairly pastiche approach to a lot of the hijinks that ensue here. This is very much a sequel to the earlier book The Code of the Woosters in that it marks a return to the dreaded Totleigh Towers for Bertie and Jeeves and continues on a number of the disagreements, misunderstandings and suspicions of the previous book (which I'm pretty sure I have read and hence also why so many plot points of this book felt familiar). So there is that pastichey feel to this and a feeling that Wodehouse is treading fairly familiar ground: Bertie's getting himself into hot water and bailed out by Jeeves, unwanted romantic attention, delightfully sardonic barbs being exchanged by Bertie and more insufferable members of the aristocracy, etc. For that reason it doesn't quite land all of the plot points as well as it could and it ultimately follows a somewhat predictable path through its back-and-forth chaos, but what does shine through as strongly as ever is the wonderfully underhanded wit on the part of Bertie and his affected superiority of all those around him. The book I read immediately prior to this - Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami - elicited a few small tears from me during its more moving passages, while this one had me frequently wiping my eyes throughout from laughing so hard. I don't think this particular book is necessarily the pinnacle of Wodehouse's work but I think it clearly represents Wodehouse at the pinnacle of his powers, full of an innate cognisance of the humour of sarcasm, false civility and the intrinsically absurd nature of gentility.

6) Persepolis (The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return) - Marjane Satrapi

I haven't watched the film based on this book, and I'm glad that I chose to read the graphic novel before watching the film, simply because I can already completely picture how the film would be presented and effectively it's really just putting animated movement into these pictures and the dialogue, explication, etc. can pretty much remain unchanged. That's all to say that this is a very vibrant and evocative graphic novel. Satrapi's art style is fairly simplistic which allows for plenty of emotion and narrative function to be served by changes in facial expression, gestures and so forth (which I believe is one of the tenets of animation, keep facial characteristics simple so that changes are obvious). But it also does mean that the book is largely dialogue-driven, and the fact that it's presented in graphic/comic form really is an artistic choice rather than a necessity to deliver the same story as she does. It does also though frame this as fairly episodic, so it's told in a series of vignettes that are broadly chronologically arranged but don't necessarily lead from one to the other and therefore it feels like the kind of book that can be picked up at random and you can enjoy one isolated story just as much as you can enjoy the full thing. But overall it provides a deeply personal and interestingly faceted story of personal identity, starting from her childhood in Iran as the Islamic republic takes power and begins gradually but steadily to erase individual freedoms and particularly the identity and freedoms of women. It then follows her life as an emigrant in Austria followed by her return to Iran and her attempt to forge a new individual identity in a far-advanced Islamic republic. Her stories are largely light-hearted and follow the foibles of her own personality, but often they do reach climaxes where great dramatic truths or personal revelations are detailed, and she makes some trenchant commentary about Islam, Iranian identity and the particular elements of subjugating women as she goes along - usually casually delivered as part of a more individualised story which makes them hit harder. I do at times find Satrapi an ambivalently sympathetic figure though - her personal development feels erratic at times, and some of her individual choices feel questionable wherein I feel she's as much the engineer of her circumstances as much as she's a victim, but this is something that's very much laid bare by her warts and all self-portrait. One story late in the piece though did feel tonally divergent from the remainder of the piece - in this story she panics at the sight of some approaching guardians of the republic, and in order to save her own hide she accuses a random passerby of lewd behaviour and gets him arrested in her place. This could have been quite a poignant story if she portrayed herself as desperate and clutching at the only possible means of escape, but instead she portrays herself as finding the situation amusing, and that just fell flat to me even though she gets redressed for her behaviour later. It just doesn't seem consistent with her level of self-awareness and wordliness throughout most of the rest of the story. So that felt like a strange diversion very late in the piece which blunted the overall impact of the story somewhat just because of how much it flew in the face of everything that came before it, and otherwise how astute and adept the social observations and commentary are throughout this book.

5) The Man Who Saw Everything - Deborah Levy

This is the third book from Levy that I've read and I think it's fair to say that I haven't fully 'got' any of her books just because of the way she writes, but at the same time I think this has been the most affecting as well as the most devastating of her books I've read. It tells the story of Saul Adler, a historian specialising in the psychology of fascist dictators, as he prepares to travel to East Germany in 1988 to research life on the 'other side' of the Berlin wall. But Levy writes in a dreamy, surreal way that reminds me a fair bit of Kazuo Ishiguro except where Ishiguro's prose is often subtle and fluid in its dreamlike state, Levy reverts often to strange surreal jolts where unexpected twists are injected into the story, and it gives her dreamlike narrative more of a nightmarish quality. The fact is that she layers these sudden jolts into the story from the get-go (and this is true of the other two books of hers I've read, too) so when the narrative more explicitly starts to blur the lines between reality and unreality and between the past and present, I was prepared for the uneasiness of the feeling and the ambiguity. However, what surprised me was how captivated I was by that feeling of unease, of feeling disoriented and disembodied as Saul struggles to keep hold of what's real, imagined and present vs memory following a traumatic car accident. Levy layers into the surreal narrative a lot of wry humour that almost feels like fourth wall breaking in the sense that it's a clear nod to the audience that what is going on in our first-person narrator's head is not part of reality, so there's a sense of dramatic irony in how deep his delusion and even Stasi-inspired paranoia from his time in the GDR goes. There's a fleeting quality to the narrative overall as a result of this fracturing of reality, so it's hard to get a feeling of full empathy and clear adherence to the steps of the story - and this is how I feel generally about Levy's stories, they can be captivating but often from afar because the prose and its meaning are often quite elusive. However in this case it's an interesting and claustrophobic examination of trauma and how it affects our protagonist's relationship with his past, with the various loves and losses throughout his life, and how he deals with the regret about choices made and not made, while looking back on and reliving his past existence through a kind of morphine-induced haze. As captivating as this experience was, it's kind of a devastating read, with even the most humorous and sentimental elements being tinged with that nightmarish and surreal quality of regret and uncertainty about past, present and future.

4) I'm Starting to Worry about this Black Box of Doom - Jason Pargin

This was my first read of the year and it was a book group choice. This was the first book group book since the revival that I've genuinely enjoyed, but my enjoyment does have a limit to it, which I'll get to. The title of this book is obviously a story in and of itself, and it's part of Pargin's clever writing and plotting that the 'black box' that is tangibly central to the story actually has no real doom to it at all - instead the 'black box of doom' of the title is a metaphor referring to how people feel when they are addicted to doomscrolling and online communities - i.e. they are trapped in this black box where only they and their inner circle think the same way, and everybody who disagrees with their point of view is secretly plotting their doom and the destruction of the world as they know it (sound familiar? Get off the fucking internet). So this book tells the story of a madcap cross-country journey undertaken by Abbott, a Lyft driver, and his client who goes by the name "Ether" who needs to transport a mysterious black box from California to Washington D.C. within three days. The story then becomes a pointed and delightfully farcical parody of internet discourse and how a small rumour can spiral out of control into the most extremist conspiracy theories and absurd fantasies, all while maintaining a very humanist viewpoint at its centre. Essentially Pargin has an agenda - or more kindly, a thesis - at the heart of this story which is spelled out in multiple occasions on the story, namely that in order to save the world, we need to disconnect from our devices and actually have a conversation with people in real life - in doing so we may still disagree but we'll get a deeper understanding of how people reach differing viewpoints to ours and thereby maintain our mutual sense of each other's humanity. Where I felt this book maybe over-extended itself is that I found it both engaging and entertaining, but also quite stressful, as the car trip goes awry in multiple ways and the internet discourse that somehow arises about this car trip becomes more and more unhinged. But it reaches a fairly 'explosive' climax at one point and yet it's only about two thirds of the way through the book. And I feel like Pargin should have tidied up the plot points a little better to ensure that the story actually culminated in that 'explosive' climax, because everything that follows after that feels like a bit of an afterthought even though there's plenty of action and plot still left in the story including some actual resolution following the second 'climax'. The fact is that part of the conceit of the story is that there's so much telegraphing of potential doom-filled scenarios, and the whole book hinges on the contents of that black box, but the black box then becomes more of a conduit of doom rather than the Pandora's box itself, and so an astute reader (which - I'm on record on this blog as stating, I'm incredibly not and I'm very happy to be suckered into book conceits) can easily tell that the contents of the box itself are most likely to be a red herring or anticlimax themselves based on Pargin's clearly demonstrated understanding of irony and satire. And I felt that the elongation of the story beyond its most dramatic point felt like he was enjoying his own conceit a bit too much, and wanted to inject a few more Dickensian coincidences and characters coming to terms with stuff, when I personally think he could have achieved that in a few pages of resolution and instead organised for all of the climactic events to happen at once - it's all a bit chaotic anyway so the book felt like it overstayed its welcome a bit, even though that welcome was warmly granted by me throughout most of the read.

3) Fever Dream - Samanta Schweblin

I picked this one up for the same reason I picked up the read previous to this - Yan Lianke's The Years, Months, Days – i.e. it was short, but unlike the latter which took me a good week or so to read despite being less than 100 pages in length, this was around 150 pages and I finished it in less than 24 hours. That's not even a function of this prose being lighter or the subject matter being more pleasant (neither is the case) but because I found this utterly compelling. It helps that this is written in a style that's consistently fascinating to me, and it's no spoiler to say that it's effectively a literary dreamscape. I mean presumably that's not a spoiler since that's the title of the book, but moreover it's clear from the first few sentences that our narrative is going to be fragmented and feverish. It largely takes the form of a dialogue between our first-person narrator Amanda, and David - a strange boy who we soon learn she met on holiday through David's mother, Carla - and becomes a kind of therapy session wherein David is trying to help Amanda solve the mystery of how she ended up in this state in this hospital clinic by going back through the details of her last few days. As mentioned, this kind of narrative is consistently fascinating to me - see how much I loved the disjointed yet strangely fruitless prose of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (my #1 book of 2017) - and this book reads (even in translation from the original Spanish) like a nightmare tour through memory and the subconscious. Every action is strangely surreal, while characters flit in and out of the real and the dreamlike; the dialogue between David and Amanda is a key conduit into the strangeness of the goings on as David keeps prompting Amanda to focus on the details, and insisting that she will know when they get to "the really important part". The fact is that the whole story is a foggy, blurry, mishmash of a nightmare and it doesn't get to a place that makes everything clear or explains all of the unsolved questions. I remember thinking to myself at some point that I was mesmerised by the narrative tricks Schweblin was pulling, and wondering if after all these prosaic gymnastics if she'd be able to stick the landing. And that's honestly a question that's hard to answer, because the book doesn't provide us with any easy answers, and it certainly doesn't allow us a pleasant ending to the dream where Amanda figures out what's going on or wakes up and resolves the issues. On the contrary, the whole book is a journey to an unforgiving world where people are paranoid, the environment is toxic, and it's a constant struggle and threat to keep your loved ones close and safe from harm. As an objective sidenote I think there’s quite a lot of social commentary Schweblin is injecting here that I’m not familiar enough with Argentine eco-politics to fully understand, but it’s just worth noting that I feel there’s likely a lot to this book beyond the fact that I loved it. I'm not sure if I recommend reading this in the quickfire, breakneck method that I did which felt a bit breathless in the end - but the fact is that if you're drawn in like I was it'll be hard to avoid it. It's quite a relentlessly dramatic read.

2) Breasts and Eggs - Mieko Kawakami

I remember reading a Mieko Kawakami book I picked up randomly at my local library a couple of years ago, but mainly I remember the jacket of that book was full of praise and hype for this book, Kawakami's debut, so when I found this in my not-quite-local library I snapped this one up. And in a word, this was far the superior of the two Kawakami books I've read although I enjoyed the other quite a bit too. But if I'm honest it's kind of hard to convey precisely what makes this book so compelling and brilliant to read because the setting is somewhat mundane, and also there's no doubt in my mind that there's a fair bit lost to me in translating this from the original Japanese. The translation is brilliantly rendered but it feels like there would be quite a lot of poetic language and turns of phrase that really gets to the heart of what our narrator is experiencing which just doesn't fully come across in English. This tells the story of Natsuke, an aspiring writer when we first meet her (and it's never made explicit or clear whether she's a semiautobiographical stand-in for Kawakami herself, although I suspect she is) as she awaits a visit from her older sister and niece. At first the book feels like it's going to be exclusively about the conflict between Natsuke's sister and niece, the latter of whom is at the time not speaking to her mother at all. But part one concludes with the visit and then the book jumps ten years into the future where Natsuke continues to live in Tokyo, continues to stay in touch with her sister and niece, but is now a published author and her mind is turning to other things that are commonplace for a woman entering her thirties. Essentially that's a summary of the book, but what makes it compelling is how rich a portrait Kawakami paints of the interior life of a woman in modern-day Japan. She takes us through both the day-to-day life and her encounters with friends, long drinking binges and deep and meaningful conversations, and her research into projects that she's set her mind to. It's a thorough and comprehensive interiority and psychology, at times with the whimsicality and surrealism of a Murakami heroine (Murakami himself provides a recommendation for this book, calling it "breathtaking" on the front cover) but always with a fascinating perspective on the expected role of a woman and how she and others find themselves intermittently both compelled to and repulsed by traditional roles of femininity. But this is also contrasted by Natsuke's encounters with men in her life and how she finds herself often incompatible with what men expect of her in relationships and unable to conform generally to what everybody expects of her. She's a fascinating narrator in other words, and her story comes to an emotional head when she confronts some of the demons of her past with her tortured and frustrated desires for her future life and plans. I found myself quite profoundly moved by where she ends up, and even though the journey that she'd taken me on to that point was essentially just her living her normal life, it felt like a strangely wild ride that exposed a number of profound and important truths about female identity and societal expectations.

1) Fun Home - Alison Bechdel

I had this uneasy feeling that I may have read this before, and I think it's for that reason that I had left it alone on previous visits to the Graphic Novels section of my library. But I realised in reading it that I'd just listened to an interview with Alison Bechdel on the now-defunct but missed Studio 360 podcast where she talked about this, including explaining the meaning behind the title. And I remember really enjoying that interview, but still this book was a huge revelation and was generally a complete delight from start to finish. It certainly isn't consistently upbeat by any means, as it largely centres around Bechdel trying to make sense of her father's possible suicide but officially accidental death, but nevertheless she imbues the sadness of the story with a huge number of thoroughly engaging and charming anecdotes and plenty of wry and at times sardonic humour. What I found most enthralling about this narrative was how Bechdel relates the story of her life and her relationship with her late father in parallel with and in dialogue with dissections of a number of literary works that she and her father had discussed, including Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time. And the truth is that kind of personal and critical reflection is absolutely my literary catnip. Bechdel's central thesis - or at least concern - throughout the book seems to revolve around her own coming out, and how her sexuality manifested in ostensible personality 'quirks' throughout her childhood and then into adulthood where she was able to put a name to her feelings. Which then becomes a deeply personal engagement with her father who it is revealed early in the story had multiple affairs with younger men throughout his marriage to Bechdel's long-suffering mother. The parallel Bechdel draws with Proust throughout the chapter on In Search of Lost Time I found the most profoundly affecting, as she finds a great number of parallels between her father's struggle and Proust's, and how Proust effectively disguised his own homosexuality in a memoir narrative about a young man's fixation on pretty young girls while manifesting them in such florid prose about botany that, in Bechdel's view, demonstrates that he was quite obviously a gay man in some kind of repression. But more than just dedicating a chapter of this book to Proust, I feel that Bechdel conducts a personal reflection on her childhood that is every bit as profound and insightful as the amount of Proust that I've managed to get through (three out of the six volumes, I've been stalled in acquiring the remainder and hence finishing them). The fact that this memoir is told in graphic novel form is, apart from being Bechdel's medium of choice, actually immaterial to me as most of the story is told through her narration anyway and I was enthralled throughout by her turns of phrase and at times bemusing and poignant reflections on life and its vicissitudes. But this medium allowed for a number of side observations that no prose novel would be capable of and that are often light-hearted notes of humour that help to puncture how deep into the collective consciousness we're delving. It really makes the best use of the graphic medium while at the same time I found the words alone an exhilarating dissertation on internal struggle, family dynamics and the modern American experience.

Books of 2025 Part 3: 31-38

 Yes, I should have posted this several days ago to keep up my post-a-day rate. And really I just forgot, in fact this whole thing slipped my mind completely for several days, acting like I was done since the writeups are all done, formatted ready for blog posting. But in fact, there are two posts to go.

As is my tradition, I disrupt the order a bit when I have more than 30 or so books, by stopping just outside the top 10 to now count backwards up my least favourite books of the year. Something was missing from these books: let's call it 'heart'.

31) Chosen Family - Madeleine Grey

Another book group choice, I have to bash out this writeup quickly before we go to the meetup and my thoughts become tainted by others’ (eeeww, other people’s thoughts). So I enjoyed, or at least was entertained by this book for the most part. However I do feel like it’s like a drawn-out and dramatic version of a classic sitcom episode where people are trying to communicate only by subtext and allusion, and are being heard by misunderstanding the subtext, and if people could only communicate honestly and directly, then the whole premise of the story falls apart. It tells the story of Eve and Nell, best friends in high school who, apparently as told by proleptic narrative at the start and by two parallel timelines, are later co-parents of a young girl called Lake, and their tumultuous relationship over the years. It’s primarily framed from Eve’s perspective but Grey tends to throw in the interiors of other characters haphazardly, if and when it suits her. Which brings me to what I think is her greatest weakness, which is taking narrative shortcuts. There are a few key incidents throughout the book; a falling out between the girls in high school, and a reunion of the two during uni, that are told as big inciting incidents while also being played for great dramatic effect. These do work for me and I could feel the emotion required, but Grey has a tendency to just skip ahead in the timeline; in one case she actually writes something like “now somehow two years have past” which is all well and good if it’s what’s required, but given the gravity of what came before, it’s hard for me to believe that life has just gone on as ‘normal’ for two years with absolutely nothing like the dramatic events before it. Except, of course, that it conveniently avoids having to explain this by just skipping forward. I found my suspension of disbelief challenged, to say the least, at the ostensible obliviousness of one of the characters, which means the situation in which they find themselves later in the book feels like completely their fault, and I couldn’t help but find them a malevolent and selfish character instead of the sympathetic figure they’re supposed to cut. There are a few sections and parts that I just found myself not really buying. When Eve first starts uni for instance, I found this section interminable and actually kind of cringey at the lubricated ease with which she suddenly makes best friends for life and fits in with the queer community, like she goes from the awkwardness of being a lesbian in high school to suddenly being the queen lesbian of her own little kingdom. Now it’s possible - not my milieu - that it really is as simple as that and the gay community really is that tight-knit and welcoming, but the dialogue read to me like a cheap Queer as Folk fanfic: everybody is just such a perfectly witty bitch and everybody’s banter is so quick and immediately formed, and it just didn’t strike me as especially relatable. Which isn’t a huge problem because the point of the narrative is to emphasise the contrast between the emotionally stunted world she comes from and the liberating utopia she now finds herself in. But it feels like there are moments of great emotional gravity in this book juxtaposed with moments that feel too easy and convenient that they end up feeling very shallow. I did appreciate some of the open-ended parts of this book too, but it also felt like Grey made irredeemable villains out of a couple of her characters who I felt had very believable reasons to act the way they did, and in both cases there’s no resolution and not even any comeuppance for these characters. In both cases I feel like the scenes of reckoning would have made for interesting and nuanced character elements but again, it feels like Grey goes the convenient route of just writing them out of the rest of the story. Which again is a device better suited to a sitcom farce as per all of the miscommunications that drive the emotional heart of this story, instead of the complex narrative about modern sexuality and friendship that she purports to be writing. It probably doesn’t help that I loved the in-depth autobiographical and intellectual narrative of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel a short while before this, because by contrast this does feel like a somewhat superficial - and very horny - coming out and coming of age tale cut from similar cloth. But nevertheless this book simply frustrated me in its characterisation, and it could have been far stronger with a more mature and reflective outlook rather than the insecure narrative of the high school section and the idealised utopia of what ‘coming out’ entails.

32) The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 - Lionel Shriver

I always look at the Lionel Shriver books in my local library because there's quite a lot of them, but I never really know where to start with them. Obviously having 'enjoyed' (huge, huge scare quotes there) We Need to Talk About Kevin, I've been curious about reading something else from her so I finally just picked one blindly and this was it. My general view on Lionel Shriver from having read two of her books is that she is probably the most stressful writer out there. Because this book, too, has an unrelenting quality to it where we are made to feel uncomfortable from the get-go largely just by all the characters being kind of unsympathetic, but then it gets progressively worse and worse as the book goes on. It reminded me a bit of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections in that sense, but there's also something a bit lacking here as far as humour and irony go whereas Franzen's book sort of pushed the family foibles to comical exaggeration. In Shriver's case here she imagines an 'alternate' future where in 2027, the USA effectively defaults on their national debt or rather simply refuses to pay any of it back and moves forward with a blank slate. This gets called the "great renunciation" but the bulk of the book then plays out what happens next in this imagined future. The Mandibles, the titular family, are one of those most keenly affected since prior to this renunciation they numbered themselves among the more wealthy people in society, but the Great Renunciation has a number of flow-on affects that devalue currency, mandate seizure of precious assets by the state, and the flow-on effects deprioritise law and order plus most employment opportunities, which dries up what assets the family held. What this book is, besides a Kafkaesque imagined nightmare scenario, is effectively an economic dystopia. I wouldn't call it a 'critical' dystopia in the strict definition of the word in that Shriver is not necessarily offering a critique of modern society (this was published I believe in 2016 before the USA committed to becoming a parody of itself), but she is offering this up as a kind of worst-case scenario, and there are a few cheeky nods to potential events (there's a reference at some point to the "Chelsea Clinton administration" and one of the early events is told to have been precipitated by an Arnold Schwarzenegger run at the presidency which eventuated in a repeal of the 'native born' requirement) but oddly, nothing at all said about the cheeto-faced shitgibbon himself, possibly because that reality is far less believable and stupider than anything Shriver could imagine at the time. But as interesting as I found the concept of this book, it does feel like the stakes of the story are always bigger than the individual stakes affecting the family and as such, the family is merely our conduit into this world. In one sense this helps as none of the characters are particularly likeable as I mentioned, so as stressful as their situation becomes, I wasn't feeling especially drawn into their individual struggles as something worth being anxious about. But on the other hand, I do feel the impact of the book is blunted, and it becomes mostly a thought exercise rather than the searing critique of what we might be doing to society and how this will play out across the generations that I feel Shriver was aiming for. The fact is that at the end of the day, as much as I don't want to live in the future she envisions here, I also don't really care about any of the people in it enough to set about correcting any potential movement in this direction.

 33) Autumn - Ali Smith

This was another pickup from the library; they had a couple of these books titles '[SEASON]' so I looked them up and found that this was the first written or chronologically first or something, but from what vague things I do know I imagine they're not super-connected anyway. But I also chose this as one of our books for Book Group discussion mainly because I already had it out from the library and this seemed like the best one for book group discussion of my haul at the time, so I just cheated in that sense. Anyway, this book: I'd read one Ali Smith before this, her Women's Prize for Fiction-winner How To Be Both and I can see a lot of parallels with this book even though I honestly don't remember it that well. Part of the reason for me not remembering it that well is simply that Ali Smith is a fairly enigmatic writer who adopts a stream of consciousness style not so much for her prose but her overall book structures. The main thing I remember about How To Be Both is that it had two parts that were only vaguely, tangentially related, and that it had a lot to say about the nature of art and the artist. Which brings me (finally) to this book, as it also has a fairly loose structure and an even looser timeline, and also has a fair bit to say about the nature of art and the artist. I did try googling Ali Smith to find out what her connection is to the art world but google didn't show up anything explicit, so I assume it's merely an interest of hers. This story is about Elisabeth Demand, at the novel's contemporary setting a lecturer in art history, and her friendship with her much older neighbour, Daniel Gluck. The contemporary setting sees Daniel, now 101, in a comatose state in his care home where Elisabeth regularly visits him, and the novel intersperses this with various flashbacks showing the inception of their friendship and how it developed over the years, to the growing chagrin and alarm of Elisabeth's mother who disapproved of the friendship and attempts at various times to sever the connection. The loose structure of the book means that I didn't really feel like it wrapped things up fully and a number of questions lingered in my mind at its conclusion. But nevertheless it does have a nice development to the story, and I was mostly engaged with the friendship and how it developed, as well as seeing how Daniel directly influenced the character of Elisabeth in the present day. I note in the Wikipedia article on this book (which I had to look up just to remind myself of Elisabeth's surname as I don't have the book at hand) that they call it the first "post-Brexit novel" which is an odd thing, because while there are a number of references to the Brexit vote and its aftermath in the novel's contemporary setting, but that felt very much like a sidenote to the main action, or at best a thematic connection to the unlikely friendship between the two people and how Daniel generally preaches to Elisabeth about open-mindedness and embracing other ways of thinking. He does this largely with reference to art, and his own connection to the art world is hinted at but never made explicit (much like my hopes for a similar connection for Ali Smith), but it does draw the major connection to Elisabeth in the present day. The other thing that I'm honestly unclear about at the book's conclusion is exactly why it's called "Autumn" which may only become clear if I read all four books - like Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy perhaps - although because of the book's title I was very conscious throughout of Smith's frequent references to the season and weather, although it didn't really seem to me to hinge or focus heavily on Autumn. Regardless of the enigmatic and maybe inconclusive feeling I had at its end, I found it a warm and occasionally funny story about friendship and connection, and I feel it could very well have benefited from a less experimental approach to the timeline or storytelling just to make everything a bit starker and less elusive especially to the casual reader (and these days I definitely am one even if my English degree suggests otherwise).

34) The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England - Brandon Sanderson

I went looking in my local library for something by Brandon Sanderson to see what all the fuss and hype online is about. I don't pay close attention but I know his name comes up quite frequently in online literary discourse, so knowing nothing else I found his books in my library and picked this one for the simple reason that it's the only one that wasn't book 3 or 4 or book 5 - appendix B of one of his built worlds/series. It's quite possible - just to skip to the end of this review - that that was a mistake, because I still don't really see what the hype is about based on this book. In its favour, the fact is that this book has a lot of different layers going on. It's essentially a futuristic sci-fi book but set in a parallel dimension Medieval England, whose resemblances to our own Medieval England are uncannily close, but different. The 'modern' characters are a group of people from our earth who enjoy futuristic 'enhancements' such as in-built body armour plating, microbes called 'nanites' who self-repair the body as well as monitor vital systems and circadian rhythms, and of course a variety of different gadgets and weapons. But the dimension-crossing part of the world-building is told to us in parts by excerpts from a marketing handbook from the company who sells a kind of 'trans-dimensional tourism' where people can go to parallel versions of Medieval England and immerse themselves in that world. The handbook is also the property of our main protagonist Johnny, who finds himself at the start of the book stranded in one of these dimensions with no memory of who he is or how he got there. The story then takes the form of him slowly piecing together his identity and his past while also trying to survive and help some of the villagers he encounters. So all of these layers going on, I feel like Sanderson does a good job of maintaining the enigma, weaving a coherent storyline through all these different layers, while also through the 'marketing' materials injecting a good deal of humour into the proceedings. Where I'm kind of unenthused about it is the fact that I found the story strangely dull. There's something a little uninspiring to me about the stark contrast between the primitive traditions and setting that we find ourselves in and the futuristic technologies that Johnny has access to, and the vastness of the gap between the two makes the stakes of the story feel a bit contrived and not relatable enough to really immerse myself in. And while Sanderson does have a good comic edge to him and a self-awareness that lends itself to a lot of dramatic irony, what I found a bit lacking was in his character-building. The fact is that the medieval characters in this story feel a bit cookie-cutter to me, like they're defined by their courage and loyalty and little else, while the more we find out about Johnny as he learns it about himself, the less we (and he, to his credit) like him. I think Sanderson sets this own trap for himself, really, because the beginning of the story is centred around this mystery and the blank slate that Johnny finds himself with, but the pace of the story moved a bit too fast for me at first to latch onto a keen desire to know more, without any understanding of who this guy is or why I should care. The fact is that the story is all very high concept - in terms of technology and world-building, in terms of narrative layers and mythology, and in terms of unravelling the mystery that we're presented with at the start - so I think Sanderson struggles in this setting to get deep into the characters' minds and give them real, breathing personalities beyond some occasional repartee and curious misunderstandings in dialogue. It's quite possible that this is a weakness of his writing in general, but I would need to read more of Sanderson and maybe more deeply into those worlds he's built to fully diagnose this. This book is certainly surface-level entertaining, but I found it fairly lacking in humanity and insight.

35) Gigi - Colette

This feels like a bit of a cheat to consider this as a whole novel as it's only 50-odd pages long, but who am I to argue with the rules that I laid down myself? I picked this up expecting it to be a short but otherwise worthwhile read but then discovered as I was approaching the end of this particular story that the book I'd picked up actually consisted of Gigi together with another of Colette's shorter works The Cat which I then went on to read as well. So I can't really consider them together as one 'book' I'd read, while The Cat is twice the length of Gigi and therefore this feels like a pretty lightweight consideration. It is of course the basis of the 1959 Best Picture winner starring Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier, but without this being a musical the plot is fairly lightweight. It all takes place in the space of a few weeks surrounding the near-sixteen-year-old Gilberte and her interactions with her grandmother Madame Alvarez and a frequent male visitor to their house in the form of Gaston Lachaille, known as a bit of a ladies' man around town. It has some short but piquant observations about social etiquette and norms around the turn of the century, and Gilberte ('Gigi') cuts an interesting figure of young impetuousness and represents a youthful ebullience wanting to break free of societal conventions and strictures. The only real issue with this story, which is well written and sharp and to the point, is simply that it isn't very long. I feel like I could have spent more time in the company of Gigi and her grandmother and great aunt as they fuss and stress over her, and more time spent drawing out the conflict that occurs when Gaston develops more than a platonic fondness for this young girl. It feels like there's potential there to really draw out the elements of gossip and scandal that the book fixates on, and provide some curious and more satirical points about the place of women - and young women in particular - in this society and how they relate to and serve the men in their life. But it makes the point it needs to very quickly and moves on with little to no fanfare. So it is ultimately a short and uneventful, if frothy and enjoyable, stop on the way to my reading life in 2025.

36) When Things Are Alive, They Hum - Hannah Bent

It really gives me no pleasure to have disliked this book, so let me preface the following string of furious criticisms with the fact that this book is very sweet-natured, and I feel Hannah Bent's heart was definitely in the right place when she wrote this. But nevertheless I found myself growing increasingly irritated by it and its main character as I read to the point where its bittersweet and melancholic story ended up leaving me cold. It's about two sisters, Marlowe and Harper, who grew up in Hong Kong to a white father and Chinese mother (as did Hannah Bent herself, as far as I can tell) who has since passed on but appears frequently in the story in the form of flashbacks. Harper, the younger of the sisters, has Down's syndrome (which she calls the 'Up' syndrome; I don't think it's ever made clear where she got this terminology from) as well as a congenitally weak heart for which she frequently needs to be hospitalised, while the older sister Marlowe at the start of the story has moved away from Hong Kong and is a successful PhD candidate studying lepidoptera in London. Marlowe flies back to Hong Kong on receiving the news that Harper is not doing well, and sets about trying to take charge of obtaining a necessary heart and lung transplant for her. Obviously the story has a certain level of emotional manipulation to it, like it plucks at the heartstrings and wants you to feel very strongly for the innocent but constantly suffering Harper, and feel a certain level of pathos for her well-meaning but sometimes hyper-fixated sister. But the character of Marlowe really is the big weak point for me here because she's such a wilful ignoramus of all the important things that are going on around her. She turns up to the house in Hong Kong virtually unannounced and is shocked that her father's new paramour Irene has dared to bring her own things into their house, while also noticing that her later mother's piano is missing. But rather than sit down and have a proper conversation with her Dad about this, Marlowe moves straight to hostility against Irene, while the story is contrived in such a way that they have a very important appointment for Harper at the hospital in like ten minutes after Marlowe touches down so of course there's no time for such conversations. As with Chosen Family a few books ago, it felt like one of those farcical sitcom tropes where if the characters sat down and talked and listened properly to each other for five seconds, the whole story wouldn't happen but instead they make assumptions and misunderstand meanings and go off in their own little worlds to escalate the situation. Only here, it isn't played for laughs and I found it gratingly irritating. Frequently Marlowe's first-person narration parts say something like "the emotion was so overwhelming that I had to leave the room" or "I was so irritated by what was just said that I had to leave the room" or " an important character motivation was about to be explained so I just had to leave the room and also cover my ears and go LALALALALALA loudly to myself". And ultimately it just felt like a whole lot of contrived narrative roadblocks were put up to lead Marlowe down the weird alternative road she goes down whereas if she just listened to people (especially her goddamn sister herself whom she treats as a mission to be saved rather than a person), she would see the clearer path - but in doing so, the story wouldn't happen. Ultimately though I'm aware as a modestly acceptable reader of fiction that this is largely the point: Marlowe is still suffering in a repressed way from the early death of her mother when she (Marlowe) was nine, and hasn't properly processed her grief. A lot of the events of the story revolve around a promise her dying mother extracted from her to "look after Harper" which the grown-up Marlowe interprets for herself as "keep Harper alive perpetually and through any unscrupulous and unfeasible means necessary" rather than the far more level-headed "make sure Harper, who will definitely, incontrovertibly die young, is content and understands bad things will happen". So the story concludes in a suitably sweet and sentimental way as it was inevitably going to do, but I feel it took a really roundabout route to get there through a number of narratorial artifices that struck me as unnecessarily obtuse. As part of the sweet conclusion, I should also say that Harper's own first-person narratives (the story alternates between Marlowe's and Harper's viewpoint) feel a bit too perfect and profound like she sees the truth in a way that able-bodied people can't. I don't have a lot of close experience with Down's syndrome and it feels like it rings true enough in terms of the simplicity of her outlook but it also helps shape and even directly affect the story for the emotional journey it needs to take us on rather than being incidental or parallel to the other characters' own revelations which I think could work better. In short: if you can buy into the emotional investment this story needs, I can see it being profoundly affecting, but I found myself far too conscious of the strings the author was pulling while also finding too many of those strings to be flimsy in their structure; as such important parts of the story ended up ringing completely false and undermining the emotional connection I needed.

37) Grand Union - Zadie Smith

I have written up a few Zadie Smith books over the years, and I have never particularly cared for a single one. So when I saw this, her 'first' collection (of how many, unknown) of short stories in my library, I picked it up as a kind of ultimatum. Since I've enjoyed Haruki Murakami's short stories and earlier this year Jeffrey Eugenides' short stories - as two other authors I'm mixed/ambivalent on - I thought this would be a good final test to see whether I can enjoy Zadie Smith or not. In short: no. What this experience did bring back was my experience reading White Teeth and how much I felt my mild intrigue at the opening sections of that book just evaporated when the story went in a completely different direction in the "FutureMouse" section and how little I began caring about any of the characters once that had taken over. It's a frustration I feel reading some Pynchon as well, especially Against the Day, and while I wouldn't have thought such authorial quirks would afflict a collection of short stories, the truth is it happens time and time again in this collection. But moreover, there really isn't a coherent theme or a consistent approach to short story telling evident in this collection. It's stylistically all over the place, with some stories feeling more like stream of consciousness writing exercises than any attempt at storytelling, while the varied length of these provides some stories with meat and others just feel like airy blurts of prose with very little to sink your teeth into. But more importantly, everything that I've always just pondered quizzically about in Smith's writing is evident even in the longer and more developed stories here. The one or two I could recommend reading as the only properly engaging stories - Sentimental Education and Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets - still have an annoying ambivalence towards their characters, whereby a character will read a situation in a particular way and the other characters contradict that reading and nothing is ever resolved by the story's end. I feel like Smith delights in ambiguity but also in introducing subtext only to subvert her own subtext by the end of the story. It's certainly an issue I found with the meandering plot in White Teeth and in the questionable morals of the universally horrible characters in On Beauty. In this form it can make for some mildly amusing subversion of expectations as in the two example stories I gave, but mostly it just leads to confusion and a lack of engagement with the characters whose motivations are muddy at best and mostly antithetical to themselves. I also just coincidentally learned in the middle of this that Smith has moved from London to New York, which explains why most of these stories use New York as their setting, and honestly I find her writing about New York just far less engaging than someone like Colson Whitehead, while when she does set the occasional story back in London I found it a far more fully realised city-character than when she tried to evoke the same sense of New York. In the end I'm happy to let Zadie Smith go as an author I simply have no connection with and I don't think I ever will.

38) Mother Land - Paul Theroux

I've enjoyed a couple of Paul Theroux books, so despite the length of this one, I borrowed it from the library and gave it a go. What did appeal to me about reading the blurb here was that the concept of a malevolent, self-serving matriarchal figurehead put me in mind of one of my favourite literary characters from reading memory - Livia, as portrayed in Robert Graves' I, Claudius. But the long and the short of it was: I found this book very disillusioning, an immense struggle to read and ultimately a badly written story. The main trouble with it, overarching as the trouble is, is that there is no redeeming or even remotely sympathetic characters in here. The mother of the title is portrayed as shrewdly calculating, self-serving, and malevolent - all of which can make for compelling reading - except that most of her manipulations consist of effectively just being utterly contrary in each of her interactions with her children where she'll say one thing to her eldest son and completely contradict it when speaking to Jay, our protagonist and narrator. That could also be quite interesting except that her contradictions make little sense, and only exist in the contrived environment Jay (potentially as unreliable narrator) conjures for us where her sole purpose in life is to keep herself on top of the hierarchy by having all of her children antagonised and divided against each other. Which then brings me to the fact that all of the children in this story (who are all middle-aged to further advanced throughout most of the book) are all such pathetic, self-serving losers themselves, and I couldn't once imagine a situation where I would be dealing with this insufferable old woman and feel that I needed to stay by her or retain any kind of contact with her. Jay himself frequently through the book travels abroad (as a travel writer; one wonders how autobiographical he's meant to be as a character and hence where the antagonistic mother comes from) and each time he does, he remarks on the liberating feeling he gets from being separated from his mother, only to return back to his mother's vicinity for reasons that he himself struggles to articulate except that for some reason the negativity seems to have a centripetal effect on all of the siblings. But the thing is, this character portrait of a family who somehow stays together through the sheer force of antipathy between them all could have still been somewhat interesting as a read, except that this book is so long and so monotonous. Every single chapter seems to be just another iteration of the same kind of interaction between mother and son, mother and daughter. There are some life-changing events that happen in the book: the eldest son Fred has a stroke, Jay has a couple of relationships that fail, some long-lost relatives re-emerge, Jay and his other literary brother Floyd have a long falling out and then a reconciliation, Floyd gets married; but they're all just incidental set against the main action of "Jay's mother antagonises him again by being contrary". So it was a tedious, repetitive read for 800 or so pages where no character development took place, no revelations happened and certainly no emotional catharsis ever happened. It was simply a struggle even to pick this up knowing that I had already read a version of the same events a dozen times already in this same book and that ultimately I didn't care half an ounce for any one of these horrible people but nor did I even feel enough animosity towards any of them to be willing them to fail. They were just uneventful losers, and the book is as uneventful a loser of a read as I can imagine. I will say that Paul Theroux - despite me liking the books I've read previously - always strikes me as very self-indulgent as a writer where he draws things out too long or too fancifully, but this seems to be him with no filter and no restraints at all and it's significantly worse as a result.

So negativity done, tomorrow (maybe; maybe two days' hence; maybe never?) I will flip the tables and count down my ten favourite books I read in 2025.

Books of 2025 Part 2: 20-11

 20) Wyrd Sisters - Terry Pratchett

I'm still following that Discworld reading order suggested on a Reddit thread that I always go back to, which says it's Small Gods, then any two of Guards Guards/Mort/Wyrd Sisters, so after Small Gods then Guards Guards last year, I arrived at this mainly because it was in my local library. So I guess I'll get to Mort at some point? But I loved Guards Guards last year, so this one had some big shoes to fill. For the most part I did very much enjoy this. I didn't find it quite as consistently hilarious as Guards Guards, although I was laughing frequently throughout it. I think I found the plot of this one less consistently amusing so I was more laughing at Pratchett's ironical tone and frequent wry jokes throughout. Mainly I did find that sometimes Pratchett can get a bit ahead of himself, so I feel like he had a lot of the plot points laid out for this book, and a lot of the time it's less clear in reading it how we got there or where we were going to go next, and the book therefore seemed to jump a bit erratically from some plot points. Or alternatively, the opposite happens, where the book almost felt like it got stagnated so a plot contrivance occurs to jump fifteen years into the future (without just saying "oh now it's fifteen years into the future") which felt like a step too far for me to really get caught up in the story and its machinations. Truth is I was caught up far more in the intertextual references - obviously to Macbeth, with a touch of Hamlet thrown in particularly with the plot device of 'the play' getting the truth out of the usurper to the throne in the end - than I was in the plot itself. But the characters of the Wyrd sisters and the coven that they create are amusing with their repartee and frequent little arguments, and through them I could enjoy the world-building here. But it just didn't quite land with the satirical points Pratchett was making simply because I wasn't able to follow the plot points in the way that he had them planned out and executed; but as part of getting someone (i.e. me) into the Discworld series which this reading order is meant to do, I think this was a successful enough stepping stone to draw me further into the world.

19) Harlem Shuffle - Colson Whitehead

I'm not sure what point I am with Colson Whitehead now. I enjoyed The Underground Railroad in no small part just because of the high concept of it, then I loved The Nickel Boys way more than I was expecting but I'm still not convinced I loved it, or if again it just had a good conceit. And then Zone One that I read last year I really didn't care for much at all and felt like Whitehead was out of his depth in that kind of genre. So this book could be read as almost an exact analogue to Zone One in that again he's playing very much in genre fiction space here, but instead of post-apocalyptic horror this time he's doing a pretty typical hard-boiled crime fiction. But like Zone One, the city of New York is the ever-present protagonist of the story, and Harlem Shuffle acts as a kind of underground tour of Harlem across a span of many years. Our ostensible protagonist is Ray Carney, the proprietor of a high-class (at least relatively speaking) furniture showroom in Harlem; father to two kids and - as we learn soon enough - son of an organised crime figure who he's determined to differentiate himself from by keeping to the straight and narrow and running a legitimate business. The thorn in his side is his cousin Freddie who, ever since they were kids, has always been a bit of a troublemaker but as the events of this story play out, Freddie's petty larceny starts to escalate and he inevitably gets Ray caught up in his spiral into the underworld of organised crime and ever-grander larceny. On its surface this book has the hallmarks of what little modern crime fiction I've read, and Elmore Leonard tends to be my go-to comparison for things like this. As far as the crime fiction elements go, the tension, the thrills and the moral ambivalence goes, this is fairly pedestrian - and for that reason I start to compare it to Zone One as I just don't think Colson Whitehead has a distinctive enough voice to put a personal stamp on genre work like this. What does make this a bit more interesting though is how it functions as a tribute to Harlem the district and New York the larger city. It's a seedy kind of tour, as a lot of the premise of the story hinges on everybody having a grimey underbelly, where innocent-seeming shops are always a front for some numbers or drug-running business, where every person on the street could be a hired goon for some high-up crime boss, and naturally, of course, ACAB. But Carney is our main conduit to this world, and the story is as much about the situations he finds himself caught up in as much as it is about his own conscience and will being torn between wanting to do the right thing and remain a law-abiding citizen to protect his family, and the temptation to go for the big score and try to cash in and move to easy street. What I think Whitehead is ultimately doing with the two sides of the story is showing that, in this time and place, it has always been necessary to have a certain aspect of crookedness in order to get ahead in the world, and it's impossible to escape that underbelly without losing some friends, or some property or standing, along the way. I'm not sure the book is fully successful simply because I didn't find myself caught up enough in the thrill of the chase or the crime, and nor did I find the tone of the narrative gritty enough to really sell the inevitable oppressiveness of Ray's lifestyle. But as incomplete as the story might be, it remains an enjoyable read because of the mutable likeability of Ray himself and how much Whitehead is able to sell his frequent calculation and wavering decision-making.

18) Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit - P G Wodehouse

The more Wodehouse I read, the more I relate to that unnamed character in the first episode of Black Books who says "hang on. I've read this one. That's the trouble with Wodehouse, isn't it?" and the repetitions are so palpable that I in fact completely forgot that this was the second Wodehouse book I’d read this year, and I’d written it up with the same beginning and making many of the same points that I’m about to make. That’s the trouble with Fletcher, isn’t it? At a few points in reading this book I actually had to double-check myself whether I'd actually read this one or not, even though this one has a distinctive enough title from "[Common everyday expression], Jeeves" that I knew I hadn't. The fact is that Wooster as narrator often tends to refer to the same series of events in all of these books, and all of the hijinks tend to stem from the same kind of conflict and end up developing and resolving in much the same way, so there is certainly a similarity between Wodehouse books that tends towards formulaic. It does of course lend itself to much entertainment and a lot of laughs; I read this one frequently in the presence of Dylan and he kept questioning why I was laughing because to his 9yo mind, this doesn't appear to be a funny book from the outside. But really this doesn't have quite the joke ratio nor the sheer absurdism as other Wodehouse I've read that had me fairly cackling. The intertextual references mount in this book to make it feel like this is one of the later works (I wish, in retrospect, I'd consulted some kind of Wodehouse reading order to try and adhere to) and it doesn't feel quite as fresh and vibrant as I've found in other books. Really there's nothing seemingly original in this book, and the plot machinations fall much in the same way as they have in other books: Bertie is a reluctant guest among disagreeable company, his wellbeing or livelihood is threatened by some menace either matrimonial or physical, there are misfortunes and pratfalls and all delivered with a deadpan humour and flair for language. Ultimately there's only a middling place for something like this in my year-end rankings because of course it was entertaining while I was reading it, but there's no great impact for this to create unless it has a particularly high or low level of humour, and really this just delivered what I expected in terms of plot, jokes, and character development (nil, naturally, in the latter case).

17) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling

I feel like a huge weight is off my shoulders, not just to have finished reading the biggest literary phenomenon of the twenty-first century, but just more importantly and immediately: I know how the story finishes now. As I mentioned last year when I wrote up The Half-Blood Prince, I stopped watching the films at Order of the Phoenix so the last two books and their plots were largely unknown to me. As it turns out, if you spend any time on the interwebs, people will spoil these for you even if you don't quite register that they've been spoiled for you. In particular here, I knew one of the prominent deaths in the Battle of Hogwarts because of an off-hand joke someone made on Reddit, and I also knew what the last horcrux was that remains a mystery for most of the book, from various sources I've come across that just lists the horcruxes. But anyway, this was a largely very enjoyable read. I did find it had the negative qualities that I've found throughout this series though, largely through some narratorial tics and habits that Rowling simply can't avoid. Some of it I think of as hallmarks of young adult literature though: for instance when Harry and his friends are captured by Greyback and taken to Malfoy manor, it was all very tense and quite riveting, but I kind of had this unconscious feeling that whatever happened next, the following chapter would be some breathing space to reflect and, sure enough, when the deus ex machina happens, they then transport themselves to a place of peace and quiet to patiently plan out their next move. I remember thinking that I could use that breathing space myself, so it felt like something the author would introduce to help it be an accessible and continually enjoyable book rather than feeling like the reader is in a vice grip the whole time. But the issue I've had with most of the books - especially Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix - is that inevitable moment in the penultimate chapter or at the very moment of climax where the narrative takes a side-track to catch everybody up with one of the characters giving a monologue to explain everything that's happened so far, and fill in all the gaps. Or indeed, in this case, two of the characters having a dialogue. It's all part of the 'tell don't show' mentality that Rowling has - again which may be part of what YA audiences want, but it does just feel a bit weak and self-conscious to me when it happens. Regardless, I've come to expect things like that as the series has gone on and while some of this book, especially at the beginning, felt a little tedious as I was waiting for 'action' to happen, it becomes a very intriguing mystery and chase, and much better than the Hunger Games series, ties up all the narrative threads in a satisfying way (well apart from the fact that time travel is introduced in the third book and never mentioned again) to draw the series into a cathartic ending.

16) Ripeness - Sarah Moss

This was a book group choice, and I started reading it on holiday in Queensland and then my progress slowed a bit once I got back to the humdrum. Still, I enjoyed this read well enough, but I'd say I liked it less than the other book of Moss' that I've finished (Ghost Wall). The main reason for it is that I found myself a little bit - frustrated isn't the right word, but it'll do for want of anything better - by the parallel narratives here. It tells the story of Edith, at two different times of her life: in third person when she is retired, divorced and living in rural Ireland in the present day; and a first person account of how she travelled to rural Italy to keep her sister company during the latter stages of an unwanted pregnancy. I don't think it's spoiling too much to say that her sister Lydia, a professional ballerina, is not just not wanting the baby for career reasons but because it was unexpected, and part of Edith's role in keeping her company is to make the arrangements to have the baby adopted by a charitable organisation based nearby in Italy. What did lead to my dissatisfaction (maybe that's a better word) with the present-day narrative is that it - and the very fact of having parallel timelines and stories - felt a little bit self-conscious and even contrived at times, but more importantly the present-day narrative I felt didn't add a whole lot to the first-person confession-style narrative. In fact, what it did add was largely just in terms of metaphors and themes: for example there is a lot of reflection in the present day about what it means to be a 'local' where Edith's friend Maebh is against the idea of refugees fleeing their homeland to settle in their local community, while Edith herself wonders if she'll ever feel like a local herself. But that concept of 'unwanted' outsiders is clearly meant to be a mirror to the 'unwanted' baby that Edith's sister had in the 60s, where Lydia's refusal to hold or look at the baby is supposed to be a reflection of anti-immigration sentiment being about turning a blind eye to others' suffering and only looking at your own circumstances and how it might affect you. But really my displeasure (another word) with the present-day narrative was minor; I think I was kind of hoping for the two stories to have more obvious links, or for them to dovetail more neatly, while at the same time it was just slightly jolting to switch between first and third-person with no real reason when the present-day narrative could have very easily also been in first person (or vice-versa). Nevertheless, the characters we meet throughout are well-drawn and there is a very detailed sense of the characters - such as Lydia and Edith's mother, 'Maman' - who are conspicuously absent; it does make a lot of the narrative come to life even while I found parts of it self-conscious. Moss writes with a really nice sense of perspective throughout, and a lot of the passages of Edith's first-person 'confession' of sorts are quite heartbreaking and tender, while at the same time the whole book offers a sense of cautious optimism for the future at least while - and as a condition of - offering an argument for living one's life with empathy and humanity.

15) Something to Answer For - P.H. Newby

For those who haven't scrutinized the historical list of Booker Prize winners and shortlists like I have in looking for books to read, this title may be unfamiliar to you, but it's noteworthy for being the first ever book awarded the Booker Prize, in 1969. It tells the story of Townrow (whose name I found oddly disconcerting as I frequently eye-skipped it as "tomorrow" and this created many a garden path sentence), a former British army officer who returns to the Egyptian town of Port Said at the request of a friend's widow who believes her husband was murdered. The setting, the character, situation and the writing all reminded me at first of Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter and I thought that I was in for a kind of post-colonial Africa-set thriller-romance of some description. That impression was completely mistaken as I soon ascertained in reading some of the dialogue and exchanges that Townrow has on his way to Port Said and in his early days there. What this book starts to feel like after that is like a Graham Greene novel if Greene was fucked out of his brain on acid while writing. But as an overall effect, it reminded me more of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano in the sense that there's this constantly shifting feeling of reality vs unreality, while our central character seems to be under constant threat of death and often due to his own actions. What's different though is that, unlike Lowry's (a novel I appreciated more than liking), Newby doesn't write in an incomprehensible stream of consciousness style, but instead the writing is quite mannered and measured, which makes the shifts - between fever dream and drunken stupor that Townrow experiences with frequent blackouts of memory and a twisted sense of his own consciousness - all the more arresting and confronting. It's perhaps more keenly felt as well because Townrow is an unpleasant yet extremely self-righteous and self-assured person while also being a kind of 'unreliable protagonist'; he's not a first-person narrator but everything is told with him at the centre, so as his own reality starts to bend, we're not exactly sure what is happening and what is real. Townrow frequently asserts that he is an Irish citizen and therefore 'neutral' in the impending conflict between English and Egyptian forces (while also having a sympathy with the colonized nations), he flits between investigating his friend's murder and wholeheartedly believing his friend is still alive and faked his own death for some unknown reason, while also carrying on a sometimes-requited love affair with the beautiful daughter of his late friend's lawyer in Port Said. I will say that the whole concept here ends up sounding a bit more fascinating than the reading experience is, largely because the intransigence of Townrow was grating as he suffers from these lapses in memory as well as personality, and it felt frustrating that I didn't have instead a protagonist with whom I could both sympathise and also relate to. While it's clear that he is somewhat conscious of his slipping reality, he never seems to act in a way that a normal person would, forever barrelling through life determined to see things through to their improbable ends as if the whole of British civilisation depended on it. It's definitely a darkly comic read though, but the main issue I had overall is that the fragmented nature of the narrative would have been more effective if the story overall were shorter, because it does end up feeling quite aimless as one misadventure leads to another and yet another, and there's not quite enough coherence to link the passages together and get a grander vision or theme from the action. Interesting mostly for its historical significance, but certainly worth a read if you like a bit of articulate discombobulation.

14) Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie

A strange part of my experience in reading this book is that when I sat down to write it up, I was reminded of the first part of this story and realised that the first part seems completely separated from the rest of it once you've experienced the whole thing. The thing about this is that its ostensible purpose as a book is to be a modern retelling of the story of Antigone, which I'm only vaguely familiar with both from hours spent being an absurdly (to me, now - I don't think I ever got anything in return for this) obsequious little brother helping Jez learn his lines for Creon back in high school and also from reading the speculative fiction retelling Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth, a book I had to search high and wide for the title because somehow I managed to completely miss it in posting the books I read last year (I did write it up but somehow I didn't post it to my blog, so my searching my blog for "Antigone" showed up nothing). Anyway, the point of this preamble is that part one of this book tells the story of Isha (a stand-in for the character of Ismene), a Pakistani-British woman who is studying abroad in the USA when she meets Eamonn (AKA Haemon in the original story), the son of a prominent Pakistan-born Tory politician back home, and they form a friendship. The reason why this part of the story seems so separate from the rest to me is because I'm not that familiar with the background and setting of the original story and only know the parts specifically about Antigone wanting to bury Polynices, which Shamsie concerns herself with reimagining in the subsequent parts. In her modern reimagining, Polynices is Parvais, twin brother to Aneeka (obviously Antigone) both nine years younger than Isha, and Parvais' "betrayal" is manifested in him leaving Britain to fight with ISIS. During the course of this 'betrayal' he expresses to Aneeka a desire to return home to Britain but this is naturally blocked by Eamonn's father - now Home Secretary - as part of his crackdown on traitors to Britain (which is all part of posturing and rhetoric to help him earn credence and respect in the Conservative party and nationalistic Britain as their token Pakistani MP). Anyway, I don't believe that I'm spoiling the story egregiously since "this book is a retelling of Antigone" which is all over the blurb and cover is as much of a spoiler to people who know the basics of the plot. I felt that the reimagining of the plot and its update into the modern day nightmare of - well, I want to say post-Brexit Britain but really post-911 and 7/7 Britain more generally - was affecting and quite poignant, but I think the key shortcoming of this story lies in either a lack of narrative skill, a lack of empathy or a lack of courage on Shamsie's part. To be clear: I'm not claiming she is any of these generally, but where I felt the story was lacking was specifically regarding Parvais' motivation in leaving Britain to join ISIS. I simply didn't relate at all to his anguish, his feelings of inadequacy at never having met his father, and therefore his desire to meet with fellow Jihadis who would have known his father. I felt that Shamsie introduced his character and his perspective too late in the piece due to a fair bit of jumping around in the timeline, and his conflict and dilemma were introduced in a fairly glib manner. It stands as a bit of a contrast to something like my #1 book of 2016, Elnathan John's Born on a Tuesday which provided such an empathetic lens on those who get caught up in extremism, and more specifically why. As I mentioned, I'm not sure why Shamsie's perspective here feels so lacking - whether she couldn't find herself empathising enough with 'terrorists' to be able to provide their perspective, or whether she didn't dare to, but her writing elsewhere is skilful and evocative enough for me to feel she is a good enough writer to provide this perspective and give it reality and depth if not for whatever held her back. It's a key shortcoming of this otherwise very fine novel, full of pointed satire and dramatic upheaval, when I simply couldn't sympathise or care at all about Parvais and what happened to him. Since the other characters are far more nuanced and interesting (especially the more minor characters of the drama, Isha and Eamonn, as well as Eamonn's father - the Creon standin) but the crux of the drama hinges on Parvais' reasons for betrayal being relatable and Aneeka's heartbreak feeling keen and immediate. Otherwise except from a universal justice perspective, his story just seems like an idiot boy doing stupid things and ultimately bringing his own destruction on himself. And I feel in the original play we're meant to feel that exact pathos towards Creon, not Polynices.

13) Fresh Complaint - Jeffrey Eugenides

I think I've found this at the library before but have forgone it mainly because I don't love Jeffrey Eugenides that much, and short stories tend to be a bit of a hurdle with the best writers. But nevertheless, having read this I am now a Jeffrey Eugenides completist, and I honestly do probably reference him more than I reference anyone else simply because The Virgin Suicides has the most inventive use of narrative voice I've ever read, so whenever any other author employs an unusual narratorial voice, I compare it to The Virgin Suicides. And I bring that up here because one of the stories here does exactly that, as if to reinforce to me that Eugenides is an author keenly aware of how narrative voice - especially when employed askew - can impact the reading of a story. In the case of this story, it's told from a very conventional third person perspective, until partway through the story the narrator suddenly introduces themselves in the first person, and it's specifically someone who has been part of the story up to that point but it's a very unusual perspective to then gain, given the treatment of that character up to that point. Apart from that one instance, there are some clever stories in here; it doesn't really feel like it has much of a thematic flow, and really the thing I enjoyed about this the most was simply that each story stands on its own merits; as much as I enjoyed Murakami's short story collection last year, I felt that each story needed each other story to gain its power and value, whereas these all follow their own twists and turns, and in this form it helps that Eugenides is a more conventional story-teller (hence why I'm not overly warm on him otherwise) because they all tend to have a straightforward structure with a clearly delineated ending. There are certainly some themes that are particular bailiwicks for him, and they cross over into his novels that I've read, in particular communication issues in relationships; there's one story that deals with the biological implications of intersex organs in what is obviously a precursor to Middlesex (dated three years prior to Middlesex's publication), and generally his focus seems to be on everyday conflict between people as they try to get on in life. I feel like my tone through this writeup has been fairly lukewarm but the truth is, while these stories aren't masterpieces, they're very entertaining and some are quite thought-provoking as well. There's three particular favourites I had: the title story Fresh Complaint that concludes this book and provides an ambivalent sense of modern cultural cringe, and two great examples of interpersonal relationships going awry: Baster and in particular Capricious Gardens which follows a kind of sex farce plotline (it reminds me a lot of the Frasier episode The Ski Lodge) with a kind of compelling heightened drama as the character misunderstandings and misleadings escalate. So on the whole, I'm very glad I picked this up if only just to call myself a Eugenides completist but more because this had some really good reads in it.

12) Eclipse - Stephenie Meyer

It's as much of a surprise to me that this book is where it is as it will be to anyone else. But the big surprise for me has already happened, which is that I honestly, and unironically, enjoyed reading this book a lot. Possibly it has something to do with how blown away by some of the idiotic inanities of the previous book (New Moon, my bottom book of last year) but related to that and in sharp contrast to that, this book really felt like Meyer had dealt with the prosaic details of her world-building through the previous books and moreover this book feels like she's hit her stride as a storyteller. The main reason I say that is because there's less need for her here to convince us that werewolves and vampires exist since we're willingly reading the third book, and there's also less need for her to emphasise how beautiful Edward Cullen is nor about how desirable Bella Swan is despite her clumsiness and the fact that bad luck seems to follow her around. There are certainly still some awkward elements of both of these in the book, and Bella remains a slightly blank slate character onto whom teenage girls are meant to imprint their own wants and needs and fantasies, but by this book I'm willing to suspend disbelief a bit and as such I found this a really entertaining page-turning experience. For the main part, it's worth remembering that this is a romance series, not a horror series, and I think the dread of the vampire world ended up being a little bit shoehorned into the previous two books, and while the horror elements here still feel a bit tacked on (as a foundation of this story, Bella is willing to become a vampire herself, so any thought about 'ooh what if the vampires bite her and turn her into one of them?' seems no longer resonant) the dread of this story is far more centred around Bella's indecision between Edward and Jacob. And as much as I found myself staunchly, firmly, on team Jacob at the end of the second book in spite of my own incredulous feelings about the whole thing, this book fleshes out Edward's and Jacob's characters far better through their actions in relation to Bella and in relation to each other. The downside of that is that this book introduces some negative sides of Jacob's character, but I found them more real than just "Jacob is clearly a better match but oh my god Edward is just so beautiful". And ultimately the stakes of the story are about that romance and where Bella's own feelings will manifest and what it will ultimately cost her. There is an external threat to physical safety that Meyer uses as a central plot-framing device as well, but that's also more sophisticated than in previous stories largely by using it as a kind of central mystery throughout the story - there are mysterious happenings going on and the Cullen family and various others are wondering who or what could be behind it - and that adds to the page-turning ability of this book. I do think it drags on a little more than it needs to largely because it's geared to a young-adult audience and my general criticism of such books tends to be around how much they need to explain everything rather than letting the audience fill in the gaps themselves. So it's not as thrilling and tight a narrative as it maybe could have been (and yes I really mean that, it could have been a really exciting book), but I do feel that rather than being an empty vessel narrative for unimaginative readers to fulfill their fantasies, Eclipse as the third book showcases Stephenie Meyer as a storyteller who can weave some engaging events and plot twists into a well-established fantasy world.

 11) My Sister, the Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite

This was another pick for book group that was paired with Ripeness by Sarah Moss and it seems to be an accidentally well-made pairing just because both books centre around the relationship between two sisters, one of whom is sensual and beautiful and tactile and the other of whom is practical and sensible (and, in this case at least, tragically plain). But this one is far more of a ride and less of a meditation. As a sidenote I should mention that I think I ended up liking this one more than others in the book group, including Bec – while I was more dissatisfied with parts of Ripeness which seemed to hit the mark for everybody else. Obviously the title here kind of reveals the plot in a lot of ways but what surprised me about this was that the book is far less comical than the upfrontness of the title suggests. The narrator Korede tells us from the first page that her sister Ayoola has killed a man in the opening pages, and reveals that this is not the first time. But Ayoola is not an indiscriminate murderer, and as the book goes on it becomes apparent that the deaths at her hands are ambiguously motivated, and could well be all in self-defence at the hands of the men in Ayoola's life. I thought that I had a good sense for where this book was going based on Korede's no-nonsense practicalities as a nurse and Ayoola's wayward, carefree hedonism. As such I found the middle section of the book quite stressful, as Ayoola unknowingly invades Korede's work life where she is besotted with the handsome young doctor at her work, while at the same time a police investigation is underway relating to Ayoola's most recent killing. But Braithwaite is less concerned with making this an adrenaline rush or a suspense thriller; rather it takes a turn where its focus draws more sharply on that sibling relationship, on Korede being the responsible older sister and needing to rein in Ayoola's impulsive and unpredictable behaviour, while it raises the question of how far Korede should feel responsible for her sister, and what is ultimately the responsible thing to do? Parallel to the story of this relationship Braithwaite paints a fascinating portrayal of modern power dynamics between men and women - as far as I can tell, probably accurate to its Nigerian setting - and raises the question on whether Ayoola is a radical iconoclast standing up for herself, or an impulsive brat who creates dangerous situations and can find only one way out of them. Or, alternatively, is she a calculating sociopath? As seen through the eyes of her older, more sensible sister, it's an interesting question that Braithwaite explores with a good sense of dark humour but also an effective amount of pathos.