Reading Challenge 2013: My Top Ten

Ooh, the excitement is overwhelming... What has made my top ten of the year? Let's start with...

10) A House for Mr Biswas – V S Naipaul

So we start the top ten with a book whose spot here was actually quite a surprise for me. This was my third of Naipaul’s substantial oeuvre, and I’ve gotten a pretty good idea that he always writes about roughly the same things: people in former colonies trying to make a place (and a life) for themselves in a post-colonial world; split identities, and so forth.

The reason I think this book finds itself in my top 10 is less to do with any particular love I had for it, and more to do with the fact that there’s really nothing bad I can say about it.

Although it treads similar ground to the other Naipaul books I’ve read, it does so more comprehensively (it helps that this is five times the length of the others I've read), with more narrative direction and a lot more pathos.

We’re told very early on in the book that the eponymous Mr Biswas will build himself a house before his story comes to an end, and he will live in that house for a few weeks (or months, I forget which) before he dies. That poignant prolepsis foreshadows all that comes after, as Mr Biswas deals with the frustrations of work, money, familial obligations and multiple disasters, trying to find himself a place to call his own and forge out a life for himself, rather than one dictated on someone else's terms. All the time though we know that eventually he will realise that dream of a place of his own.

It’s also a deeply personal tale I feel, what with Naipaul himself being an Indian brought up in Trinidad like Mr Biswas, and I feel it explores, in a quite cynical yet very humane way, the full tale of postcolonial existentialism. It moreover was a very unobtrusive read, and one that was strangely uplifting.

9) Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov

Well, we’ve reached almost the last of TIME’s two-book authors – Pynchon made my top ten twice last year, Phillip Roth made both years’ top 20 and Saul Bellow was a bit all over the place – but Nabokov I think has to take the prize for the greatest disparity between books. As I explained in last year’s countdown, I hated Lolita for practically every reason, which may have stood Pale Fire in decent stead, given that my expectations were so low going in. It helps that it’s such a completely different book.

An odd literary experiment in many ways, Pale Fire somehow falls under the definition of a ‘novel’ despite the fact that it consists of three parts: one, an introduction to a fictional poem, written by a fictional friend of the fictional poet; two, the fictional poem Pale Fire itself; and three, the afore-mentioned friend’s explanatory notes and glosses to the poem itself.

*minor spoiler alert* Somehow in all of the envelope-pushing layers of meaning and reality, Nabokov manages to spin a captivating tale about an Eastern-European king hiding out in the USA from a network of revolutionary assassins, and the poet he befriends who agrees to ‘tell his story’.

I say ‘somehow’ but the truth is the experiment is not always successful, as the ‘notes’ section increasingly loses its verisimilitude and becomes more a sequence of unrelated narrations by the fictional poet’s friend. I don’t think there’s really any other way that Nabokov could wrap it all up within the structure, but it does become quite self-conscious as the notes-writer repeatedly drops the pretense that he’s writing about the poem and starts overtly writing about himself instead.

But what makes Pale Fire work is for how long that pretense is kept up, and in spite of the very academic structure, keeps you reading. It’s a really profound achievement, as well as a book of singular intrigue.

8) Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson

In a similar vein to Pale Fire, I went into Housekeeping with fairly low expectations, with me not being a particular fan of Robinson’s more recent works Home or Gilead.

And while this does verge on similar territory of home and family in small-town America, it is a far more moving and rewarding experience, to me at least.

I mentioned a while ago, when discussing Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart that there was a book that dealt much better with themes of coming-of-age and finding-your-place, and this is it. The strange relationship between Ruth and her vagrant, quite distant aunt Sylvie is at first one that seems to be heading towards disaster and discord, but gradually evolves to a bizarre yet deeply satisfying understanding.

Meanwhile, Ruth’s sister Lucille takes on the voice of ‘reason’, one might say, or at least ‘normalcy’ as she sees her sister stepping more and more completely through the looking-glass of social deviance and isolation. Lucille seems to take on the role of conventional femininity, and remains a sympathetic and endearing character even while our narrator finds she can no longer be dictated to on such terms and becomes more and more estranged from civilisation.

This book is at once heartbreaking and uplifting. As I hinted at while discussing Bowen, Housekeeping manages to explore issues of societal expectations on a young, malleable personality, but keeps its conclusion both compassionate and bittersweet, with a very optimistic sense of redemption.

7) Deliverance – James Dickey

Explanatory note, first: for those who don’t know how my brother’s sorting program works, basically it presents you with a series of “A vs B” choices where you have to pick the (in this case, book) that you like better than the other, and then sorts the list based on all your preferences. The reason I’m explaining this is because the hardest choice I got in the whole process of sorting this list was this, Deliverance, vs the previous book, Housekeeping. I sat there feeling myself leaning one way, then the other before finally coming down on this side of the fence.

The reason I hesitated so long over the choice was that, although they are pretty much polar opposites in every way, the more I thought about it the more it became clear that Housekeeping could be read as a book about 'femininity' and what’s expected from a young lady, while Deliverance is a book about 'masculinity' and what’s expected from a young man. The more I pondered that two-sided coin the more difficult my choice became until, eventually, I guess I chose the one that I can more obviously relate to. But, for the record, on another day, these two books could easily be in reverse order.

So this book, already. Notch up another run on the ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ with this one, and I think this is really the first one I’m doing (there are more, on this very post) where the book managed to surprise me in a big way, particularly vis-à-vis my enjoyment of reading it. I went in, as would practically anyone having seen the film first, with little more than duelling banjos and the unfortunately synonymous ‘squeal piggy, squeal’ line running through my head.

What Deliverance the book delivers, though, is the same thrill-ride of the film but also a fascinating, Heart of Darkness-esque fable about man’s incessant desire to overcome the elements, and the inevitable and tragic consequences when men find themselves (literally and figuratively) in over their heads.

There is a really beautiful fatalism to this story, taking on many dark overtones as we are reminded throughout that the four guys on this traumatising journey beyond the civilised world are just ordinary guys working office jobs day-to-day. As their baser and more animalistic instincts are brought to the fore, the darker side of humanity is revealed.

Deliverance is a really powerful work, and deserving of far more recognition than simply being the source material for the line “squeal piggy, squeal” which, by the way, isn’t even in the book. Knowing that James Dickey also wrote the screen adaptation, I’d say it was either a misstep on his part to add that bit, or possibly an actor improvisation. Either way, the book has a great deal more depth and intrigue than the film, and in particular the mythology around the film, might have you believe.

6) A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh

So, as indicated by my italicised ‘almost’ in the introduction to Pale Fire earlier in this post, we weren’t yet at the end of TIME’s two-book authors. But Evelyn Waugh makes himself not only the final contender for that title but also one of the highest aggregate scorers of that esteemed company (outside of the obvious winner Mr Pynchon).

So while Brideshead Revisited made my top twenty last year for its graceful, nostalgic and melancholic rendering of a grander England between the wars, A Handful of Dust cracks my top ten this year for its delightfully acidic satire of the very same society that Brideshead seemed to revere.

As I said when discussing Brideshead, it seems apparent to me that Stephen Fry owes more of his mannerisms and language to Waugh than to Oscar Wilde (whom I’d always just presumed to be his greatest influence), and the Waugh that I read in A Handful of Dust is the absolute best in terms of that searing British wit, and that irreverence for British manners and an outdated class system.

I could describe the plot of this book basically as ‘rich people behaving badly’, although the reason it works so well here is that it adheres so closely to the societal norms that we see so often in more serious dramatic works, just stretched slightly beyond logic into the absurd. So we recognise everything we are reading as perfectly acceptable in the society of the time, yet see it in a fresh new light that makes me wonder why it couldn’t, in fact, be possible.

The ending of this book, though, is definitely a funny one. There was a moment or two where I really questioned where Waugh was taking this. While the final chapter maintains its satirical examination of the upper classes, it can't be denied I felt like it was straying too far, for a while. By the end, though, it became clear the satire is not just on the society but also the literature around that society; I was smiling and enjoying the almost dada-esque comedic elements again, and Waugh had most certainly won me over to his way of seeing things.

5) Native Son – Richard Wright

OK, so… I believe at the very start of this countdown, or rather when I was discussing my bottom-ranked An American Tragedy, I mentioned that this book was coming later in the list. Four-and-a-half posts later and here it is.

For some reason I’d read most of the ‘plight of black people in society’ books last year, and as far as I can tell, this was the only one remaining for me this year to read. But holy cow, what a book to finish on.

Native Son starts out innocuously enough: we have a young underprivileged black youth, with an unfortunate home situation and a similarly unfortunate proneness to aggression, who goes to work as a driver for a wealthy white family who are proud of their history of helping those less fortunate.

The sudden turn that this story takes is one that I can’t really discuss without spoiling the plot, but suffice to say it happens so suddenly, and with such heart-thumping impact that it made me (Bec can maybe attest to this) sit up in bed while I was reading and just shake my head.

From that initial turn, the book covers all sorts of territory, including a Dostoyevskian morality tale, a chase thriller and finally a legal courtroom drama. In its final phase it basically takes on the guise of a longform essay, unmasking the genuine plight of underprivileged black youth and exposing wherein the real guilt and shame should lie.

I learned while listening to Studio 360’s excellent ‘American Icons’ piece on Native Son that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (my number four book of last year, you will recall) was written as a sort of reaction to this: a similarly angry, but somehow less morally ambivalent and confrontational piece exposing the same furious injustices. I’m not going to give myself a Sophie’s choice of favouring one or the other, though, because both books are absolutely supreme renditions of a marginalised people ‘acting out’. Invisible Man’s strength is in its subtlety, though, while Native Son’s is in the complete opposite.

4) I, Claudius – Robert Graves

This book was a real revelation to me, although there’s no reason it should have been. Given my love of medieval Icelandic sagas it should have stood to reason that a semi-fictionalised account of a tumultuous and fascinating period of history would definitely float my boat. But having never really developed an interest in Roman – or any ancient – history, it didn’t occur to me how well this fell into my wheelhouse.

Besides the style being one that I’m pretty comfortable with, what made Graves’ narrative come to life so much was what memorable characters he made of the historical figures. I mean, obviously he didn’t need much help with Caligula (basically one can just go "here's Caligula and some shit he did" and everyone's all like "Whoooa, are you kidding? What a ridiculously absurd character"), but the character of Livia in particular is one of the most delightfully malevolent, scheming characters – smart, cunning, all-powerful. While there was obviously political intrigue going on around Tiberius and Germanicus, it was Livia that kept me reading and kept me spellbound throughout this book.

What also makes the book perhaps more interesting than I’d expected was the position of Claudius as the narrator. Being thought of as a simple idiot, his family’s negligence and ignorance of his own intellect leaves him virtually unnoticed as he retells the goings-on in the corridors of power – he has no need to safeguard his own ambitions, but just watches events unfold from the fringes. This serves to give the reader the impression of unprecedented and intimate access, and oddly becomes an interesting parallel with the next book in my countdown.

I guess there’s nothing really more to say about I, Claudius: it’s simply a book that really fascinated and really entertained me.

3) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

I haven’t been keeping score with the ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ tally, but I imagine we’re up to about five or six now – could this be the highest-ranked as well?

Firstly, I’ve always loved the movie of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, so it was with a little trepidation, or at least, anticipated tedium, that I approached this book earlier in the year. It took me about a paragraph for those fears to dissipate, since what Kesey presents in this book is a radically different story to what Milos Forman delivered in the adaptation.

As mentioned in the previous discussion, there’s an interesting parallel with I, Claudius here, in that both books are narrated by silent observers, whose presumed stupidity leads to unfettered access to the internal goings-on. In the case of this book, our narrator is the big, silent ‘chief’ Bromden.

This fact seems remarkable, coming from the film first, since Bromden is such a side – albeit omnipresent – character in the film. But like the filmmakers behind To Kill a Mockingbird changed it from being Scout’s story to being all about Atticus, so too did the filmmakers behind Cuckoo’s Nest remove the Chief’s narratorial status and made it all about McMurphy.

McMurphy is still the hero here, but he is the hero of a very different story. Kesey was very concerned – obsessed, even, by the sounds of things – by the plight of the Native American, and the Chief as our protagonist here is a victim of that marginalisation, feeling always estranged from his home, his family and his heritage, to the point where he tends to hide inside himself – a place free from what he calls ‘the fog’.

The fog is a very powerful image which the film dispensed with, standing essentially for the chaotic and intimidating maelstrom of modern civilisation, but at the same time growing thickest when the chief wants to retreat, so in a sense he finds himself then surrounded by it. But it's something I’m sure most of us have wanted to retreat from at one stage or another, and more than anything else the Chief just wants to be free. All of these themes were more or less retained in the film, but Kesey’s impassioned narration reveals them in their most raw and powerful beauty.

I’m not meaning to downplay the film: for one thing the film gives us a most memorable scene (And one of my all-time favourite film moments) in the ‘juicy fruit’ sequence where the Chief reveals to McMurphy for the first time that he can hear everything said to him, and can speak back as well. In the book there’s a similar scene but it’s less an enormous revelation (to us, obviously) and more about McMurphy confirming for himself what he already suspected.

So, unlike Atonement, I actually think watching the film first is a good way to go about this one. The book adds so much more texture and meaning to the dramatic caper of the film, while going in reverse order I think would just anger me, and I’d more likely see it as a desecration of a beautiful book.

2) The Painted Bird – Jerzy Kosinsky

Now I have to admit off the bat that, while I knew this book would be pretty high on my list, I didn’t anticipate it peaking at number two. It certainly doesn’t disappoint me, but the episodic structure of this book bears a striking resemblance to similar works that I’ve ultimately disliked, or certainly at least not liked enough to consider the second-best read I’ve had in a year.

Kosinsky, for those playing along at home, was best known for me as the writer behind the absolutely brilliant 1979 Peter Sellers vehicle Being There (and the novel from which he adapted it himself, although I haven’t read that), so I may have gone into this book with slightly mistaken notions of what I was in for – light-hearted comedy? Possibly with a dark edge? Errrm… no.

From the moment I read a farmer gouging out the eye of a farmhand with a spoon at the dinner table, I knew I was in for a harrowing time. And I wasn’t wrong, because immediately afterwards, the other eye follows.

This is just the beginning of, as I said, an episodic journey through a war-torn landscape that both is and isn’t Russia, and a tangle of diversely unpleasant, cruel, frightened and misguided characters. Our guide through the journey is a young boy whose dark features allow everyone he meets to paint him instantly as a gypsy come to curse their lot in life. This unfortunate physical difference is drawn out by the narrator in the analogy of the painted bird, where one brown bird is painted with bright rainbow colours and sent back instinctively to his flock, who of course immediately tear him to pieces, thinking him an outsider while the painted bird remains unknowing of the reasons for the sudden attack.

Although this book is above all harrowing, it is also a deeply moving fable about war and the hatred that can be kindled between people when the world stops making sense. Every page of this book is compelling, and contains a multitude of new, uncomfortable surprises with a ring of truth.

Would I recommend this book? Probably not, to most people. But it remains one of the more haunting and captivating reads I’ve ever experienced.



And with that, we are down to that big revealing moment… Have you done the checklist? Do you know what’s coming? Well, anyway, here is my traditional GIF of Barrack Obama laughing to increase the suspense:

http://i.imgur.com/5NKvN.gif

1) Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell

A surprising choice for number one? Not to me. It shouldn’t be news to anybody who’s spoken to me about books at all this year that I adored this book, but what might be news is that there is miles of daylight between this and The Painted Bird. While I was doing the sort, I needed to be reminded of some of the other books I’d really enjoyed but I knew this was always going to be pushing that number one choice and in the end there was no competition.

Where do I start? For one thing, as I ever-so-subtly hinted at when discussing Cuckoo’s Nest, this is both the last and highest-ranked of the ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ scorecard, and it’s sort of a funny one because, while I enjoyed the film adaptation well enough, it really didn’t speak much to me beyond being a well-crafted epic.

The book evidently spoke to me a great deal more. Even though, as we’ve discussed a fair bit on this countdown, I knew everything that was going to happen, it was every bit as gripping as if I were discovering it for the first time. I can put that solely down to the wonderful, effortless writing style of Margaret Mitchell.

The first compelling spell she weaves, of course, is with her characters. Although I couldn’t avoid having Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in my head, and perhaps because of the more descriptively expansive nature of the ‘book as medium’, Mitchell paints a far more colourful and lively cast of characters, one that alone had me engrossed and completely emotionally invested.

Rhett Butler is the ultimate scoundrel: for the first third, or maybe half, of the book, his antics are the requisite tonic to everybody’s anachronistic notions of southern charm and manners, and I caught myself smiling with glee at a number of his more cutting aphorisms. But as the civil war ravages on and the book takes on more gravitas, Rhett’s character becomes more enigmatic and morally ambiguous – is he deep down an OK guy or is he really just a selfish cad?

Speaking of selfish, Scarlett. O, Scarlett. From page one she is the epitome of the selfish, spoiled brat: strong-willed, hot-tempered and never willing to compromise on having things her own way. What Mitchell created in Scarlett O’Hara is one of the most rare things in literature (or with full disclosure, in the books I usually read): an anti-heroine. For although we root for her throughout the story, she is rarely a laudable character, and her motives are always questionable. When she takes it on herself to steal the affections of Frank from her own sister, she becomes more than just a questionable character and every bit the cad that Rhett ever was.

Besides the characters, though, the novel tells the story of the south, in one story, as completely and as beautifully as Faulkner or O'Connor ever did. From the quaint charms of southern manners and hospitality at the start to the stubbornness of the fighting man during the war and the proud resilience after the downturn. It's a story of a place but also the story of a people, and if there's ever a book that could get bleeding-heart liberals like me rooting for Confederates, this is it. Although it does tip its hand into the same sort of casual racism for which D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation gets condemned, it all has an internal narrative logic that satisfied me even while the language was making me squirm a little.

The fact that the novel is such an epic helps create that completeness in terms of its scope, but certain passages nevertheless stand out in my memory as particularly brilliant – for example when the Yankees are on the verge of storming Atlanta while Melanie’s baby is due, so Scarlett has to scour the deserted town trying to find Dr Meade: it’s gripping, edge-of-your-seat stuff, as scintillating as literature gets. A real ‘keep reading and knowingly miss your bus stop’ kind of sequence.

Striking a similar bell to last year's number one Infinite Jest, when I reached the end of this book, I was genuinely heartbroken and deflated (even though, I hasten to reiterate, I knew it was coming). Not just because of the disappointment in concluding a book I'd loved reading, but because I just felt like I’d been through a war with these characters, and to watch them emerge the other side so strong and vivacious… it was touching, and inspiring. So Melanie's death, then Scarlett's sense of loss, her sudden clarity and regret and then Rhett's departure (he doesn't say precisely "frankly my dear, I don't give a damn' in the book) were actually a bit overwhelming.

Of course, I’m well aware that all of the high points I’m describing could very easily be said of the film adaptation as well. Characters… epic scale… heartbreaking… inspiring, etc. But they’re all obviously hallmarks of what is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. I can’t say for certain why the book spoke to me so deeply when the film didn’t, but it certainly has all the hallmarks of one of the greatest books of all time.


So that's my reading challenge countdown. Hope you've enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed writing it up and editing it to remove my crustier comments. Coming up soon, if I can be bothered, is a run-down of the movies I watched this year. With less faffing about, perhaps.

Reading Challenge 2013 Part 4: 20-11

With ever-growing excitement, I'm plunging into my top 20, starting with...

20) A Death in the Family – James Agee

So, if you read these posts in order, you will step from a book (Death of the Heart) that could well have cracked my top 20 to a book (This one, read the title) that could well have been left out of my top 20, and with very good reason.

I think it unlikely there’s a book out there that deals more comprehensively with the shock, grief and pragmatism following a sudden and unexpected death, and the completeness of its narrative is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

It’s a little like Derek Cianfrance’s film from this year, The Place Beyond the Pines, in a sense, because this book has two sections that in any other context could be amazing, and one that just... isn't. In this case it’s the middle section that cools one’s enthusiasm (read: cooled my enthusiasm) towards it.

At the same time, I feel like the middle section was Agee’s most important section, as it deals both painfully and painstakingly with every detail of the minutes and hours following the discovery and announcement of the death. It could, in fact, be the most heart-wrenching experience if the death of a loved one is currently on your mind, or at least fresh, but coming at it detached it plods along interminably.

More than that, I feel Agee really could have explored the philosophy of death a bit more, particularly as it relates to the two children in the book, and I could have read the sections written from their point of view for three, four hundred more pages; they were captivating. As it happened, there was just a bit too much emphasis on the middle section, and less extrapolation on the first and last sections, which were by far the strongest. If the middle section had even been a little truncated – just a bit – this could have been much higher in my list.

19) The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John LeCarré

So we move from a moving meditation on life and death to a bit of good old-fashioned genre fiction fun.

I was lucky enough (or manipulative enough, I can’t remember which) to be able to read this as part of our book group meetings, which were the only excuse I gave myself this year not to be reading something for my challenge. This was a little bit of guilty double-dipping, reading something for my book group that doubled as ticking one off my challenge.

The truth is I thought this was actually less of a good choice for a book group book, because it lacked ambiguity and actually sort of shoved the plot and its editorial point of view down your throat a bit, so there wasn’t all that much to discuss, but at the same time as a book itself I really have to admit to enjoying it, a lot.

This is regarded by many, including I would assume the aggregators of TIME’s list, as the greatest espionage book of the twentieth century, possibly ever, and I would be inclined to agree. Yes, it’s a page turner; one that does so by keeping you invested and enthralled in the intrigue and suspense that is being unravelled.

But more than just being a suspenseful thriller, this book has a deeply imbued sense of moral ambivalence towards the whole espionage world in general; one to which our current world leaders might benefit from paying heed. There are no effective victories in this game, just points that serve to prolong the game itself.

This book is a remarkably cynical one, but as with A Passage to India it’s cynical about a subject that I welcome wholeheartedly.

18) Portnoy’s Complaint – Phillip Roth

Now we move from a page-turning piece of genre fiction to about as genre-free, and structure-free, as you can get.

Those who have been paying attention (hi, Mother) will remember that Phillip Roth’s other entry on TIME’s list, American Pastoral, cracked my top 20 last year as well – possibly even my top 10? Obviously I haven’t been paying attention – so he makes it again with this stream-of-consciousness-cum-bildungsroman-cum-confession of sorts?

It actually surprised me how high this was on the list, because its freewheeling style lets you cruise along – if you want - without really having to absorb all of the messages along the way. But apparently something about it did hit home for me, because here it is.

I think what I enjoyed most was just the blunt, warts-and-all confessional  style of the narrative, taking us deep into the heart and mind of a troubled Jewish man as he confronts all of the demons of his past and present. Dark as it all sounds, Roth imbues it with a profound sense of humour, and an even more profound sense of humanity.

It’s most definitely one that could do with a revisit at some point, as I know I didn't get the full experience from one run through, but there was still plenty to enjoy.

17) Call it Sleep – Henry Roth

And from one Roth we move onto the other Roth, and a far more conventional narrative that still managed to hit home.

Henry Roth’s novel is the story of a young Jewish boy’s experiences growing up around the lower east side of New York, presumably stuffing his face with Katz’s Delicatessen pastrami-on-rye sandwiches, although Roth doesn't include a great deal of that as it’s obviously just presumed that everyone on the lower east side spends most of their days doing that.

The most effective part of this book is how effectively Roth evokes the experience of childhood. Not only the tentative feeling-out to make friends and fit in, but the uncertainty and abject terror that can associate itself with unknown corners of familiar places and the impending wrath of authority figures.

In Call it Sleep the most terrifying, as well as the most intriguing, character, is that of the boy’s father Albert, whose quick temper and disdain for his son’s weaknesses is obviously a beard for problems more troubling and personal to him, and the build-up of the story is effective in drawing out his most sympathetic side.

It’s a fairly conventional read, but one that’s always presenting something new to ponder.

16) Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett

Another one that surprised me a little how high it was, this. Given that The Big Sleep suffered so languidly down in the bottom half of this list, it seems a little unusual that the only other hard-boiled fiction on TIME’s list would crack the top twenty. But, again, here it is.

Aside from the fact that The Big Sleep was harmed, as I said, by my prior familiarity with the plot – a problem that Red Harvest didn't encounter – what sets this above its noir cousin is how daringly, and even absurdly, it stretches the generic conventions to their absolute breaking point.

Basically if The Big Sleep is ‘hard-boiled’ I’d describe Red Harvest as metamorphic. We have here at the centre a detective who is, as conventions dictate, a tough, street-smart and slightly grizzled veteran, but one who finds himself so wrapped up in the toxic atmosphere of the city of Personville (or ‘Poisonville’ as it becomes known) that he turns from anti-hero into active villain of his own plot.

Hammett’s prose, I have to admit, is not as strong as Chandler’s, but the story he weaves is both captivating and hugely entertaining. The suspense that is such a staple of the genre begins to turn about halfway through from ‘will the bad guys be brought to justice’ more into a sense of how many ‘good guys’ will be caught up in the conflagration of sinister corruption that pervades everything.

The moral ambivalence almost becomes a moral apathy, and it’s really rather a lot of fun.

15) Naked Lunch – William S Burroughs

Before I start, I'd like to state that I can think of at least two things wrong with this title. 

As for the book, well I always knew after having read it that it would be up towards the top of my list, but at the same time I knew I would have a hard time justifying its spot. So here goes nothing.

Burroughs’ book has all the elements I generally hate, in anything. There’s no narrative structure or permanence to it in terms of character, setting, or plot. It’s free-wheeling, aimless, and has nothing whatsoever to latch onto and remember after you've finished.

But for all that, it’s a deeply absorbing read. Basically nothing more than a typed up manifesto of a sequence of hallucinogenic nightmare trips, it becomes a sort of dystopian vision that is completely uncaged. I couldn’t tell you the name of one character, one place, mentioned in the book, and would be hard-pressed even to describe in detail one of the scenes or visions that Burroughs relates. But that’s not really important.

People who read this blog (hi, mother) probably know that I’m not hugely into mind-altering substances of any description beyond the occasional over-indulgence in alcohol, so while Naked Lunch may not be analogous to everybody’s trips, they certainly painted a vivid and colourful picture to my sober mind.

Incidentally, this is also one on the scoreboard of ‘I saw the film adaptation first’, but David Cronenberg’s vision of this book and the book itself bear about as much similarity between them as would a Rob Zombie-directed adaptation of a Beatrix Potter book. Although for different reasons: you just can’t tie this book down to any singular vision. 

14) The Assistant – Bernard Malamud

Now this book would, if I were giving out such a thing, have to take the title for the biggest leap up the rankings compared to how I would have ordered this list with all books sight unseen. As with most books, I went in knowing nothing about it, but having never heard of the book or its author (apparently Malamud also wrote the baseball book The Natural – TIL), and frankly with a title like The Assistant, I really didn’t expect much at all.

What I got, though, was a simply told tale (like Call it Sleep in that sense) that became both a melancholic exploration into the notions of family, hard work and devotion and a very interesting meditation on transgression, guilt and redemption.

There were a couple of times in this story that I really wondered where it was heading, because it had a number of different thematic threads that it followed, but the overall conclusion to them and the story was such that left me satisfied, but also really quite curious.

I’ve spoken a couple of times in these write-ups about final lines. An American Tragedy dropped to dead-last place by virtue of its shithouse last couple of lines, while Under the Volcano was lifted a lot higher on the strength of its brilliant last line. The Assistant’s last line is actually one of the  more noteworthy ones because it struck me as quite odd. It seemed quite a turn from where I thought it was going, but at the same time didn’t trouble me in that it didn’t actually fit in. It simply gave me something else to ponder in a book that had already kept me thinking and guessing. So it was a very pleasant surprise overall.

13) Atonement – Ian McEwan

Chalk up another one on the ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ scoreboard with this one. While I can definitively claim that seeing the film adaptation first is not the way to go around Atonement, I can thankfully say that it certainly doesn’t suffer from doing it the wrong way around. The only reason I say that is that I think the book would be far more evocative and galling if you didn’t know what was coming, while I don’t think the film will ever be as evocative and galling as the book could be. If that makes sense.

This was my second McEwan novel, the first being the charmingly upbeat The Comfort of Strangers (this phrase is at least 99% sarcastic, incidentally), and it was fairly clear to me quite early on in this book that Ian McEwan hates everything and everyone, possibly even more so than his friend Martin Amis.

Atonement is, to me at least, a howl of frustration at the notion of entitlement. Although there is far more to the novel than just that, what came through most clearly to me was McEwan declaring an unspoken class warfare on British society’s upper echelons, not just for their more obvious sense of entitlement but also the way they calculate and scheme with things they do to better the lot of those less fortunate. (You understand I’m not saying this is what they do, but how I see McEwan seeing them)

While knowing the plot in advance did spoil some of the more visceral reactions I may have had, it certainly didn't dampen the cynicism inherent in the work, or the sense of gloomy hollowness one can’t help but feel. In fact in some senses it kind of sharpened that, because rather than the ending being one cutting blow (I remember describing reading The Comfort of Strangers as ‘like a sucker-punch to the soul'), the whole book was a bitter foreshadowing of the inevitable disappointment of life.

As a sidenote, the experience of reading Atonement also alleviates one of the movie’s greatest weaknesses by not having Keira Knightley in it.

12) At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien

Now this was probably the biggest surprise of all. Not just the fact that I enjoyed it as much as I did, but also when sorting that it came out just outside the top ten. Even twenty or so pages into reading it I wouldn't have predicted that.

Especially - and I have to emphasise this - given my utter disdain for Ulysses, this shouldn't really be where it is, because aside from being considerably shorter and considerably less interested in itself, it’s very much in the same mode of writing.

This one, though, has a couple of elements that I feel elevate the material from the pretentious drudgery of Joyce’s work. Firstly there is the flitting between the ‘real world’ and the fictional world being spun by our narrator, which draws a more obvious line between narrative events and authorial exploration, which in Ulysses feels very forced and self-conscious to me, particularly towards the end.

Then there’s also the fantastical meta-ness to this, where in the fictional world, the characters created to become villains or antagonists break free from their moulds and hold the author accountable for the short lots in life he granted them.

I think the absurdism, and the silly humour of this, is of the same ilk that other people respond so well to in Joyce, but for whatever reason it worked far better for me in this book, and despite my initial misgivings it was one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I had this year.

11) Ragtime – E L Doctorow

So landing just outside my top ten is this somewhat strange work from E L Doctorow, and I think it’s a fitting place for it, too.

Kind of an ensemble story, it tells the disparate but intermingling tales of about six or seven characters, largely in and around New York state at the turn of the twentieth century, and including in its mix such real life figures as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford and J P Morgan. The overall effect of the multi-thread narrative is to evoke a time and place, rather than necessarily concern itself with just the people.

Therein also lies its biggest weakness, however: namely that there is sort of a big story at the centre of this book, but it feels almost like an afterthought that floats to the surface in the course of Doctorow telling us all about these various characters going about their daily activities.

That’s not to say the story isn’t well set up by the multiple threads, and isn’t in itself an affecting and thought-provoking narrative, but there is an authorial detachment inherent in having such a bold narrative device levering the story into place, and I found that detachment quite distracting in this instance. That’s why this otherwise captivating and heartfelt novel finds itself just outside my top ten.

Basically what I’m saying is that if all of the different characters had had as evocative experiences as that of the principal actor, Coalhouse Walker, or if less attention had been paid to setting up the multilinear device and just centred around Coalhouse’s story instead, this altogether excellent work could have been pushing my top five, even. I’m pretty happy with it where it is.

So with the next post we finally count down my top ten books of this year.

Something funny occurred to me the other day, namely that since I'm counting down a list already freely available to peruse, and have posted my 88 other choices and two exceptions on this very blog, you have all the material necessary to compile my top ten yourself. The only thing you don't have (if you can be bothered going to all that effort anyway) is the order in which they placed. That, together with justifications, will all be revealed in the next exciting installment...

Reading Challenge 2013 Part 3: 30-21

And into the top 30 we go (as if that's a thing)...

30) The Confessions of Nat Turner – William Styron

One of the things I’ve tended to do with this reading challenge, particularly this year, is go into these books with a complete blank slate. With some books that’s obviously impossible since I’ve seen the films, and with most of them it was a really good way to go in (there’s a book coming up later in this post that was totally ruined for me, we’ll get to that).

With The Confessions of Nat Turner, though, I feel like maybe some prior knowledge going in would have been a good thing, because it’s a book with quite troubling subject matter, dealt with fairly unflinchingly and with a certain amount of bloodthirstiness.

Of course, not knowing going in can be extremely effective, if the book is written in a way to shock and provoke (as other books later to come most definitely are). But there’s something clinical and detached, written as it is in the form of a ‘confession’ or at least a ‘memoir’ of someone who’s already committed atrocious deeds, and wants to set the record straight.

The deeds in question here involve the organised uprising by a group of black slaves in the deep south and the systematic slaughter of white families – women, children, just indiscriminate murder. The thing that kept it a little hollow for me was that there’s this whole mystery all the way through surrounding the fact that Nat himself, although the brains and driving force behind the uprising, only confessed to one actual murder, and the revelation of why ‘only one’ doesn’t really also cover why ‘that one in particular’, and I had really hoped for more closure on that subject.

It’s undoubtedly a powerful book nonetheless, but I feel in this case had I gone in with some prior knowledge I may have appreciated Styron’s writing a bit more rather than being so swept up with the ambivalent storyline which is not resolved to my great satisfaction.

29) Under the Net – Iris Murdoch

So… what’s that now, scorekeeper? Yep, it’s up to four on the ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ tally. Although I’m a little more hesitant to apply that label to this book – primarily because it doesn’t really apply, but also because I tended to object to so many of these type of books because they took themselves so damn seriously.

Not so with Murdoch’s debut novel, which suffers from the directionless of other works in this genre I made up, but overall is an amusingly chaotic, even anarchic, romp through London, over a couple of days’ shenanigoats.

The fact is that nobody is trying to ‘find themselves’ here, although perhaps there are certain revelations brought about through the aimless wandering. This cuts both ways, because I questioned throughout my reading, and since my reading, what profound impact such a light and ridiculous story had on the literary world that would merit its spot on TIME’s list.

While questioning that is a mutually exclusive issue with ‘did I enjoy it?’, the two things can still go hand in hand, because while I did enjoy this – and with no qualifications, either, I just enjoyed it – I couldn’t help but find it just a bit silly, undisciplined at times and, ultimately, aimless. The harsh truth is if I’d been reading this because a friend told me it was ‘rollicking good fun, old sport”, firstly I’d ask why I was suddenly friends with a British public school student from the 20s, and secondly I’d probably put in far higher on the ‘rollicking good fun, old sport’ pedestal than I do on the ‘greatest 100 novels since 1925’ pedestal.

28) Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe

This is a difficult one to write about, to be honest. Primarily because it was one of the first (if not the first) book I read this year, and in all honesty nothing overly dramatic or shocking happens, nothing which would make it really glare out in your memory.

The other difficulty is that I have some mixed feelings about a book of this nature making it onto the top 100 books published in English. There’s just something very post-colonial about an African writer writing about Africa, but in English. Don’t get me wrong, Achebe spins a very good yarn and, as I sit in a computer chair in my suburban home in twenty-first century Sydney, gives an interesting portrayal of life in an African village, particularly one faced with the threat of colonialism and modernisation.

But I can’t help being left, after reading it, feeling that if this is the best book written in English about the African ‘experience’ then surely we must just be missing a shitload of books just as good if not better written in Swahili? It’s not fair or logical in any way, I know, to judge this book by its relative prominence among other hypothetical books that may or may not exist and that I didn't bother finding out if they did or did not exist, but ultimately I can’t help but think thoughts like that, and they leave me feeling a little cold.

Whatever this book may not be, it is a solidly written fable that gives English readers an interesting perspective on the merits of globalisation, one that I enjoyed well enough. But I remain unconvinced about its inherent greatness.

27) Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates

So here we have another of these ‘film adaptations I actually haven’t seen yet’ novels, because in spite of my love for Sam Mendes (and Kate Winslet, of course) I haven’t yet subjected myself to this particular adaptation. In fact, I considered borrowing this book during last year’s challenge, but decided against it on account of my being unsure how my delicate frame of mind at the time would handle it.

As it turns out, my fears were completely ungrounded. This riotous, rip-roaring rib-tickler of a romp…why does every clichéd word about entertaining capers start with ‘r’… uhhh yes, it’s depressing. It’s a bored, yet plaintive, kind of depressing, that laments the mid-life crisis even as it lampoons it.

There’s a lot in this book that obviously hits close to home for me, as I sit in my lounge chair in the suburbs while my wife dreams of emigrating overseas for a while, and yet it finds itself rather in the middle of my list by the rather odd virtue of its not being quite as soul-wrenching as I’d anticipated.

While there is much to this book in terms of exploring themes of depression and suburban restlessness, I think the arc of the narrative, in terms of building up tension to the point of implosion, driving towards that “oh my God” reveal is such that it can only be read as intentionally soul-destroying.

And yet I could find myself still at arm’s length from the pathos, and appreciated its writing more than I was haunted by its drama. The obvious comparison with last year’s list is Updike’s Rabbit, Run, a book which is still yet to defog my mind, but its big climax – and its aftermath - was far more soul-crushing than this. I don’t know, maybe I just have no soul left to destroy.

26) The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

So here we are, and it’s number 2 on the ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ scoreboard, slowly catching up on the ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’. Although now I’m at it, chalk up one, with this, on the ‘mix of old and young people wandering around desperately trying to find a job/money/dignity’ scoreboard.

I’m looking at the DVD case of the film adaptation as I write this (yes I can type without looking at the keyboard, how unoewaaucw!) and, in spite of the fact that I love everything Henry Fonda ever made (except Peter and Jane), I can’t admit to being a huge fan of the movie.

I think that did hinder my subsequent enjoyment of this book to some extent, since not only was I aware of plot points coming up, but those same plot points didn’t really do much for me the first time around.

Having said that, the book does help you appreciate certain things a lot better than the film adaptation: for instance, as with A Clockwork Orange, what the sweet fuck does the title mean? But together with that, Steinbeck’s commentary on the plight of the poor and the angry, subversive mood, is far more evocative - to me, at least - than any of the talky action.

I still didn’t adore it, but I did get significantly more out of this than the film.

25) A Passage to India – E M Forster

So here’s a protip to anyone who’s ever thought about writing the blurb of a book, a film, or basically anything whose suspense and ultimate impact might be based on an episodic and temporal unravelling of facts: don’t ruin the entire fucking plot in your blurb. It seems like a fairly simple premise, but whoever wrote the blurb for the Popular Penguins edition (yes, I’m not above naming and shaming) of A Passage to India or, while we’re on the topic, the blurb for the Paramount Collection DVD edition of Sunset Boulevard (incidentally, I’m actually still confused as to why the revelation that – SUNSET BOULEVARD SPOILER ALERT - Norma’s butler is her first husband is actually such a dramatic moment, since the blurb had ruined it for me in such a matter-of-fact way) seem to have aced the class in blurb writing at the University of Utter Stupidity.

So, rant aside (I’m still mouth-foamingly furious, though), A Passage to India was a very cynical read, but a cynical read in a lot of good ways, because it’s largely a critical indictment of the British settlement in India, and there are only a smattering of things about which I would happily be more cynical.

It is, however, really very cynical, beginning as it does in a light-hearted and well-mannered mood of British civility and then turning on a head (or does it? No spoilers here, of course) to a sense of howling injustice (or does it?), and ending with a dreadfully hopeless sense of lack of achievement (or does it?).

I’ve never really engaged with any of Forster’s writing, and this was actually no exception, although the story and corollary social critique of A Passage to India endeared and ameliorated it greatly in my eyes. It could even have been higher on my list, if huge amounts of the plot weren’t prematurely jizzed down my throat by the worst blurb writer since Henry “he bakes them into a pie!” Carey. Wow, what an arch joke to finish on. Good luck researching/decoding that.

24) The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Well I think this is actually the last one, but notch up number 5 on that by-now infamous scoreboard that we’ve all grown to loath. Being the last one of course makes this the highest-ranked of the lot, and it’s funny that it is.

Firstly, what this lacks that all the other YPWAATTFT stories has is a sense of location. On The Road takes us back and forth across America, while The Sun Also Rises has its Spanish trattorias and bullfighting arenas. I can’t remember where The Moviegoer is set, but wherever it is it’s fairly non-descript and unmemorable.

And I can’t help but feel that that’s not a bad thing, because it means the emphasis is instead on the people, and their sense of directionless wandering through life is explored more prosaically than incidentally. Having said that, I can’t remember that much about the characters either, but there was an interestingly ambiguous and somewhat cagey relational byplay amongst them. It dealt very subtly, but deftly, with depression and mental illness, as well as touching upon that sense of restlessness that everyone else tried to capture in these meandering narratives, but somehow failed to evoke for me.

The other odd thing is that this book didn’t do a great deal to me while I was reading it, but when I’d finished and I looked back on it, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d enjoyed it. And unlike all the other YPWAATTFT stories it made me think, and my thoughts didn’t inevitably lead to “Eh…”

23) Dog Soldiers – Robert Stone

I’m not sure what genre you would fit Dog Soldiers into, and yet it feels more than any other on this list like genre fiction.

I guess ultimately it’s a kind of post-war psychodrama, but it has most of the hallmarks of a Coen brothers thriller – a hapless hero in way over his head, scheming and plotting around a big ‘score’, and the naïve simple folk who get caught up in the maelstrom. Oh and (spoiler alert) practically everyone in the book dies.

But more than just the fitting it into ‘types’ of stories, what makes me think of this as very genre fiction-y is the fact that it’s a real page-turner: not because it ends each page with “And then something terrible happened! Turn the page to find out what it was…” but because the story and its cast of characters are so vividly written. However sophisticated a writer Robert Stone is – I haven’t read any of his other stuff but there’s a pulp fiction sense to his bibliography – he certainly has a very clear vision of what he’s trying to convey, so he constructs the post-Vietnam time and place and sense of corruption very nicely.

In the end though, I can only get so much out of a book like this, so it was an enjoyable read while it lasted.

22) The Recognitions – William Gaddis

This book was a little bit of a disappointment to me, to be honest. For much of this year I’d been avoiding reading or buying it, knowing that as a big fat bastard of a post-modern book from one of the most notoriously difficult writers of the twentieth century, that it would be a big bang finish if I saved it until last. As it happened, the copy of this that I ordered arrived when I accidentally finished my previous book on the train into work, so I started it on the way home and hence didn’t save it to last.

It most certainly is a difficult read, but not as difficult as I’d thought. It has a great number of interesting and thought-provoking things to say about what is art, the value we place on provenance and authenticity, and how seductive imitations can be. But beyond having some interesting thoughts on this occasionally, it wasn’t really worked into any particularly grand, sweeping story, which it certainly had the scope to do.

In fact, I think its greatest shortcoming is that it was actually too easy a read. Ultimately it felt like just an extremely long story, with lots of diverse characters who, in post-modern fashion, were different and yet all the same. The dialogue was witty, the New York social critique mostly biting, the parody of the art world bemusing.

There were also a number of interesting questions that it left me with, which I won't go into here, but that make it sort of ripe for a reread sometime, to resolve them.

But it nevertheless felt surprisingly a bit shallow: it didn’t have Infinite Jest’s or Gravity’s Rainbow’s epic vision of life’s chaotic mystery that makes you ponder humanity even as you just read the story. Artistic critique with a few big highlights, yes, but it just left my expectations disappointed.

21) The Death of the Heart – Elizabeth Bowen

Just outside the top 20, and a book that could very easily have cracked it. This book could almost be thought of as Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret for grown-ups, without all the chatter about periods and basically a completely different book in every way. Except that it deals with a young girl, unsure of her place in the world, coming to terms with love and life. Mostly love, in this case, or more importantly, the fact that love is a disease worse and more painful than syphilis.

It’s kind of funny in a sense, because it feels like a heartfelt, bittersweet but tender story, and yet there feels to be infinitely more cynicism in here than in your average David Lynch film. It was actually quite an angry, embittered read in some ways, but told in a delicate and somewhat poetic way.

I guess what made me angry about the book was how deftly it manages to fuse the concepts of ‘simplicity’ and ‘credulous naïveté’, so that the innocent and trusting Portia is so frequently made to drink long and hard from the bitter cup of betrayal, thinking she’s instead going to be imbibing some of that sweet, sweet love juice.

Ummm…

So anyway, I think Death of the Heart drops out of my top 20 of this year purely because it felt quite mean-spirited, and I felt there could have been more of a sense of redemption at the end of it, rather than making one feel quite so ill-at-ease with humanity. There is a book still to come that I feel deals with many of the same themes, yet manages to redeem one’s world view without being overly saccharine, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I think Death of the Heart is very good, but weirdly unsatisfying.

So I'll leave you now until the next thrilling instalment of this countdown, in which we careen into the exciting world of my top 20 books of this year's challenge.

Reading Challenge 2013 Part 2: 40-31

Rather than giving you so much preamble this time, let's just launch into the next ten shall we?

40) All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren

No, this isn’t the first of many ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ novels that I hinted at in my last post, although since reading this I have seen the Best Picture-winning film adaptation. So in answer to your next question, no this isn’t down as low as it is because it paled in comparison with the film with which I was already acquainted.

Actually there was very little for me not to like in this book. It’s an undoubtedly compelling story – dramatic, darkly comic at times, with a piercingly sharp eye turned on small-town American society that can also sweep the whole vista of the American political scene. So why number 40 then?

I actually wasn’t sure what it was about this book that didn’t sit right with me, until I saw the film adaptation. The fact is that although the story and the vision of this book are very good, I felt the writing let it down. It just didn’t actually seem all that interested in itself. A fact not helped by the first-person narration from another of those sort of ‘blank-slate’ type narrators whose lack of personality allows the bigger characters at the heart of the story shine brighter while at the same time becoming somewhat tiresome themselves.

For this and other reasons (which I’m coming to), I think this sort of story works better in cinematic form. Broderick Crawford’s larger-than-life performance as the honest rube turned crooked shyster Willie Stark among other things come to the fore without the distracting filter of narrator Jack Burden’s lack of gravitas. It also just seems to move along at a faster pace, bringing out the little ironies and the rapier-like social critique along the way.

That’s not to say that cinema is a higher art form of course, but in this sense it just served to highlight to me how unfortunately slow and unemotive the book felt to me, when it really needn’t have.

39) The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles

And no, this isn’t the first of those ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ novels either. Stop jumping the gun on me, you impatient lot. In fact I haven’t seen the film adaptation of this at all… so how do you feel now?

I’m not quite sure even how they could properly adapt this critical dissection of Victorian society into a film – that is, without just chopping up huge portions of the book and putting the flatline romance story straight up on screen. Because Fowles, or at least, the persona of the narrator that he takes on through these pages, is essentially the main character here, and in many ways the main agent.

At its heart it’s a tragedy of star-crossed lovers, fated to meet but destined to break apart, but also an examination - a defence, even - of Victorian society, of the mythology surrounding both it and its reputation for repressive prudery. At times it’s also a deconstruction of the storytelling process itself, and how we weave our own meanings and perceptions into the fabric of reality.

All of which would go a long way to making this a really great book, if only those things were of any great interest to me, and particularly if Fowles didn’t perform it all with so much sweeping gusto and pomposity. It’s not a bad book, truly, but you really have to be into this sort of thing for it to leave any greatly favourable impression.

38) The Berlin Stories – Christopher Isherwood

This is a damned funny one to write-up, I have to say. For one thing, it’s kind of not really ‘a novel’ but one that’s presented by TIME as ‘two novels in one because fuck logic’ (I’m excluding Lord of the Rings from this same indictment as it’s one story told across three books, whereas this is two novels set in the same time and place and featuring many of the same characters… eh, it’s tenuous is what I’m saying)

But moreover, I only read the first of the two, Mr Norris Changes Trains, this year, whereas the second, Goodbye to Berlin, I read nine years ago in preparation for an English course at uni that I didn’t even end up taking. So there’s really a huge interval in between me reading the two, and out of sequence.

Both, though, do follow many of the same kind of threads. It’s a somewhat journalistic approach to storytelling – detached, observant but narrowly focused, while taking in the social-political happenings of Berlin in the 1930s in its peripheral vision.

I can’t say I adore the way Isherwood writes, nor did I find either book particularly mind-blowing. I feel I enjoyed Mr Norris a touch more, if only because the story was a bit more engaging (but possibly because it was read most recently), but ultimately the staid, journalistic feel of both books just left me a little unamused. Again, perfectly good books, just not really my thing.

37) Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather

I have very mixed feelings about this book. Knowing very little about Willa Cather going in, beyond the fact that she’s one of America’s most beloved writers, but also having heard about her more in connection with My Antonia, I was surprised to discover that this is considered her ‘masterpiece’.

And, having read it, I still am.

For one thing, it’s a very readable book. Readable not just because the prose is not very challenging, but readable because the story chugs along pretty steadily without a whole lot of reflection or introspection, and also because frankly everyone in the book is really quite polite and likeable.

There’s a funny sense while you’re reading it that the book’s title is kind of foreshadowing doom - wondering ‘when’ and ‘in what form’ this death will come - and yet for all the occasions when the archbishop is entering hostile territory in New Mexico occupied by vengeful natives not wanting to be converted, or traversing across hostile terrain with inadequate supplies, and catching illness, and encountering spirit life, death doesn’t actually come for him. Death, in fact, doesn’t come to him, until *spoiler alert* the end, when he’s old, and he dies and whatever. So I think a better title for this book would actually be “Life happens for the Archbishop”.

As with Hemingway though, there’s definitely something I’m missing here. There’s certainly some spiritual exploration, themes of native mythology, territorialism and companionship. But it’s so easy to skim through this book and take the most superficial view of it as a story about a guy who does stuff.

I didn’t dislike this at all, but I found very little to love.

36) Falconer – John Cheever

This book was actually the last that I read in the challenge, so I’m prepared for accusations from Cheever die-hards that I’m being a little unfair to it, with the least possible time given to absorb and reflect on it before ranking (basically a day after I finished it, I ranked all the books).

Now let me tell you this, Ms. Cheever die-hard (yes, Cheever die-hards are all women of ambiguous marital status): I didn’t find there to be that much to reflect on in this book. Similarly to Death Comes for the Archbishop, this prison-set drama reads quite easily, as stuff keeps happening, and rather than getting bogged down in deeper explorations of guilt or indictments of a broken justice system, it keeps travelling down the plotline.

More so than the Cather though, I felt there was potential for this to be something more, if it had wanted to be. I’m not sure if I’m just being influenced by so many movies/HBO series set in prisons, where there is a less ambiguous line drawn between pro- and antagonists. There’s shading here and there in Falconer that the prisoners are sort of treated badly, but there’s also shades of prisoners helping each other to cope on the inside as well as prisoner subterfuge, basically all the hallmarks of any prison movie/HBO series, without actually focusing on one and giving it a proper examination.

So ultimately I found this a little confusing. Like I said, it’s an easy read, and it would be a long bow to suggest that its melange of themes makes it a bad book, but I’ve just found prison more effectively evoked in other fictional works.

35) The Sot-Weed Factor – John Barth

This book was a real challenge. For some reason it was right at the top of my ‘want to read’ list (which dictated a lot of my choices last year, when I could just pick and choose), and then when I bought it from a second-hand book store in Newtown and read the blurb, I couldn’t for the life of me remember why.

Essentially a satirical historical novel, it tells what could only be described as a tawdry alternative to US settlement history, where a great deal of prostitution, incest and sex slavery forms the backdrop of the development of modern-day Maryland.

It’s also an epic slog of a read, with a great many interwoven storylines, all centring around our utterly hapless (unsympathetically hapless and naïve, would be my harsher assessment) protagonist Ebeneezer Cooke and his dastardly childhood mentor Henry Burlingame who acts as Pangloss to Ebeneezer’s Candide, always showing up at opportune times and in a myriad of different disguises.

Aside from being long, and at times quite troublesome, The Sot-Weed Factor is at times also very amusing, but its tawdriness (and its liberal use of a word I never knew existed, ‘beshit’) becomes tiresome at times. I do, though, have to make special mention of a line, possibly the greatest and most classily delivered sexual innuendo. It comes when they’re telling the story of a missionary priest who is captured and stripped naked by a tribe of natives and goes like this:

“The good man struggles, but the maid hath strength, and besides, his foot is tethered. She lays hands upon the candle of the Carnal Mass, and mirabile, the more she trims it, the greater doth it wax!”

“The greater doth it wax!” How good is that? Recommended in some senses, but only if you can manage to sit through it. Also I just told you the best line from the whole book.

34) Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller

Well, that scoreboard’s been idle for a while – in fact, throughout this whole post so far – but notch up another on the ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ tally.

And if John Barth lost a point or two for his overly liberal use of the word ‘beshit’ then Henry Miller loses a tonne of points for his frankly cartoonist use of the word ‘cunt’ in this effort. And not just the fact that he uses it so often, but that he uses it so often synechdocically, as a charming way of referring to the women of Paris (prostitutes, yes but anyway, charming).

Not that I’m a prude or anything, but I get the point, Henry. Move on.

I was inclined to hate this book for large parts of it, if only because I read it quite recently and I’d grown weary of the ‘YPWAATTFT’ style of writing [there has to be a better acronym for this], but at the same time there were a number of high points to this. For one thing, it felt a little bit more like it went somewhere – certainly more than Augie March or The Sun Also Rises did – but it also scored points for just a number of interesting one-liners that it would just casually drop in here and there. Nothing earth-shattering, but just enough to make you stop and think occasionally. One that I enjoyed was something along the lines of “money is the one thing the French mass-produce”.

I’m also hinting at the other thing that endeared this book to me, which was that I felt it gave quite an idiosyncratic dissection of the seamy underbelly of Parisian life, which was particularly interesting to read in light of the recent legislation against prostitution in France. So while it did have some meaningful things to say, it suffered greatly from its otherwise shameless misogyny and the inevitable lack of direction that comes from this type of story.

33) The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

Aha! Finally, we come across the first of my ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ selection. The funny thing you’ll notice is that I’ve called this the first of many in this situation, and as the bottom-ranked one, it’s really somewhat high. So foreshadowing what I’ll say later is it really doesn’t harm a book to see the film adaptation first – as long, that is, as the film doesn’t stick too closely to its source material.

Which is basically the problem with The Big Sleep, and why it finds itself the lowest-ranked of the book-to-film pairings. Having studied the film for my HSC Extension English class, I’m really quite familiar with the storyline – convoluted and multi-faceted though it is – and essentially the whole point of genre fiction like this is that it’s very heavily plot-centric. So if you’re following the same storyline and the missing element is you don’t have Humphrey Bogart’s presence, the book is going to be outmatched in the fight to the death.

There are a couple of points, too, where the film diverges from the plot that Chandler laid out, but in those couple of cases I think it did them for the better - or at least it gave it extra dimensions which worked perfectly well, like the added emphasis on Vivian and Marlowe’s relationship (particularly at the end) and the downplaying of Carmen’s character, who plays a pivotal role in an extra ‘twist’ ending which feels a little tacked on, and which the filmmakers prudently dispensed with.

Anyway, that’s more than enough book-film comparison I think. I liked both, but like All the King’s Men I think the film actually handles the material better, which is funny because in so many ways it’s just a shot-by-shot realisation of the book’s story. I’m a fickle one really, aren’t I?

32) Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry

I’d heard so many good things about this book, so I went in with pretty high expectations. Expectations that were soon deflated, somewhat, when I realised this was a Ulysses-esque ‘all in one day’ stream of consciousness narrative.

So obviously I found it a somewhat difficult read, but compared with my experience with Ulysses there were more rewarding parts to this.

Primarily its portrayal of alcoholic stupor, which it largely centres around, given that it is the story of a drunken wretch in Mexico, whose estranged wife returns in a last-ditch effort at reconciliation, only to find that he’s far worse gone than anybody, including himself, realised. It’s sometimes harrowing, but it deftly captures that increasing sense of unreality.

At various times I was inclined to hate it, but strangely enough, it was the very last line of the book that managed to convince me otherwise, and that resurfaced in my memory while doing the sort. I won’t ruin it here obviously, and telling you the last line out of context of the rest of the book would have no effect, but suffice to say it is absolutely brilliant in all of my favourite ways. Darkly comic and absurd is all I will say. It was the high saving grace of a reading struggle.

31) Money – Martin Amis

Yes, sound your alarm bells, there’s another Amis on my list, and it’s not right at the bottom! The truth is that while Amis remains for me the epitome of curmudgeonly cynicism (basically, hatred of everything), I did enjoy this book a lot more than others of his that I’ve read.

And enjoy is the critical word here, because the truth is I didn’t get a whole lot of deep meaning out of this story. It’s oddly detached and more than a little disjointed as it chronicles the overpaid exploits of a yuppie flitting between the UK and the US trying to get some trumped-up trashy film made.

But although, as with the other Amis works I’ve read, there’s a real mean-spirited edge to this, not just cynical but almost cruel, I found that OK here because the exploits were told in an entertaining way that was at times really very amusing.

There’s also the added mystery element to this book, which is never satisfactorily resolved, but does keep you guessing as to who/what/why the hidden menace to our protagonist is. While everything else could almost read like another aimless wandering story, it’s that sword of Damocles-style threat that kept me intrigued even while I was inclined to hate the story and all of its characters.

It’s not the most charming of reads, but it’s nevertheless engaging.
 

In the next exciting installment of this countdown, we careen headfirst down the landslide of the top 30, towards the even more troublesome incline of the top 20. Yes, as they say, it’s all downhill from here.

Reading Challenge 2013 Part 1: Preamble + 48-41

So it’s that time of year again, when I indulge in that hopelessly self-aggrandising exercise of spouting off my opinions on the various hobbies in which I engaged myself throughout the year. In other words, it’s ‘end of year list’ time. And, true to form, I will be continuing my long tradition of writing up my end of year lists not in chronological or any other arbitrary form but, in my favourite of all forms, the epic countdown.

Which brings me to the subject of our first end of year list: my reading challenge 2013. As you know, because since you’re reading this, you’re either me or my mother, my reading challenge for 2012 was to ‘get myself through’ half of TIME Magazine’s Top 100 books published in English since 1925 list:

http://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/

On New Year’s Eve, 2013, I set myself what I thought was a far more ambitious challenge (since I gave myself a head-start of about 18 books last year): read the remainder of the list. I allowed myself two exceptions: Alan Moore (et al)’s graphic novel Watchmen, for reasons unclear to me now but too late to retract, and Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, simply because reading that particular twelve-volume Proustian reminiscence could be a year-long reading challenge in itself.

So last week I found myself having made my way through the 48 books I’d set myself this year, almost a month ahead of schedule. The idea of reading practically a book a week had seemed at the start of the year a ridiculous notion, but with 70 minutes’ commuting time every day and the fact that a sufficient number of the list aren’t 900 pages of stream-of-consciousness gibberish, it actually became very manageable.

Without much further ado then, let’s move on to my countdown. Three more pieces of housekeeping before I begin, however:

- I will not be merging this list with last year’s at this stage, simply because I might want to rejig some of the rankings and hence rewrite some of my assessments of last year’s books, which I’m too lazy to do;

- This year I will be writing these up (or down) in order, from 48 to number 1, and none of that fancy ‘in the order that makes it increasingly interesting to me’ stuff I did last year. I’m hoping to rely largely on discipline to get me through this write-up.

- Most importantly, for anyone who has read anything on this list at all: remember that I rank and assess these works purely from a personal perspective: there are many books of undoubted quality that just didn’t do anything for me, and just as many works of questionable quality that I just jolly well enjoyed. So it’s OK that we disagree, and there’s no need to take offense. You’re just wrong.

So we start with:

48) An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser

And right away I’m faced with a bit of explaining to do. Not that I think this book is particularly well-read or well-liked by my blog audience (hi, Mother), but its spot at the bottom of this list is not really due to an inherent lack of quality and far more to do with a strong, personal negative reaction I had to it.

To begin with, this book is long. But not long in the sense that Gravity’s Rainbow or Infinite Jest (astute readers will recognise these as, respectively, #3 and #1 on last year’s list) are long, with eclectic casts of characters and sweeping, convoluted plots that absorb and dictate the human experience, this is really quite a small-scale story told in episodic form, which after a while began to feel rather plodding.

It’s split into three parts in the life of young Clyde Griffiths, son of a poor, puritanical religious mother & father and aspirant to the higher echelons of wealthy society. The events that take place across the second and third parts of the book are the meat of this book and, as I thought to myself only about halfway through part 2, only on a basic level related to the events that unfold in part one. So I quite frankly found it unnecessarily long, and in particular part one could happily have been dispensed with altogether and/or condensed into a couple of chapters explaining the boy’s background and character.

But, dubious narrative choices aside, this book still wouldn’t warrant the bottom ranking. What gave it this honour (and, to be honest, I was quite surprised that this came out bottom; when I ran the sorting program it just fared worse in every single match-up) is its utter sanctimonious falsehood.

In the first instance, I found the character of Clyde to be, in the worst possible sense, pathetic. He was a ridiculous excuse for a human being: a youth of naïve guilelessness at the best of times and a contemptible moral coward at the worst. Part three of this book, in particular, had reminiscences of similar ‘crime and retribution’ type stories like Richard Wright’s Native Son (which will come up later) or, if you will, the Sean Penn  film Dead Man Walking, in which the principal character(s) are brought to some higher level of understanding, or empathy, towards themselves and their victims. Clyde showed nothing of the sort.

Again, which might have been forgiven, if not for the last page or two of this book, which in a one line summary, proclaims its message thusly: “If you stray from the puritanical religious path, you will murder people.”

Of course I’m over-simplifying here (or am I?) but Dreiser’s “wrap-up” of his epic story in the final few pages felt, to me, at once preachy and preposterous. It also drenched the rest of the novel with a wash of high-minded puritanical dogma which in all honesty I hadn’t noticed was there. And that feeling of having been cheated into thinking there was an intriguing moral ambiguity to the story when, in fact, nothing of the sort was intended, ate away at me, to the point where this book emerged as my most detested of the whole year.

47) The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow

So we emerge from the mire of Sam trying to defend his trashing of a beloved book to… the mire of Sam trying to defend his trashing of a beloved book.

OK, I have less of a polarised reaction to Augie March than to the previous entry, and the main reason for its lowly place on this list is far more simple, and far less fair: disappointment.

Those who read my write-up of last year’s reading challenge (hi, Mother*) will know that I quite enjoyed Bellow’s other entry on TIME’s list, Herzog (it was #23 of last year). The trouble with reading the two in this order is that Augie March is a very different style of story, it takes place in a very different ‘life stage’ and consists of far more dense prose.

I would say the themes of Herzog are perhaps more difficult and obtuse, but I think I handle (and enjoy) dense themes far more than dense prose, so the fact is I found Augie March a real hard slog. Further to this – and we will see the following phrase crop up time and time and time again through this countdown – I’m not quite sure what the obsession is with ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ stories. I mean, they can be compelling stories but the fact is there are SO MANY on the TIME list, and so many in particular in the selection of TIME’s list that I read this year.

And as far as ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ I found this one the most directionless, and I didn’t get a strong sense of what it all meant. The Picaresque style didn’t really come through to me – in the way that it did in Candide, for example – as especially witty or satirical, and with the difficulty I had navigating through the prose, I just found myself growing increasingly bored with the characters.

At the end of the day though, I didn’t hate this book that much. But given my enjoyment of Herzog, the greater reputation than Herzog I felt that this book enjoyed, and the fact that people I know have adored this particular book, I really was quite crushingly disappointed by the experience, and hence it finds itself in 47^th place.

46) The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead

Ah, a book whose position I don’t feel the need to ‘defend’.

OK, so this quirky little novel relates the story of the atrociously dysfunctional Pollitt family, ineptly ‘led’ by the childish simpleton Sam, and consisting of about a million children and Henny, an irredeemable shrew of a wife who basically spends the entire book doped up on painkillers and yelling loudly about how lovely it would be to slaughter the children in their sleep.

That’s not… exactly… how the book goes, although it’s also not entirely off the mark. The pure and simple reason why this book finds itself in the bottom echelon of this list is because I just disliked all of the characters so much.

I got the sense that Louise, Sam’s eldest daughter from his previous marriage, is meant to be the moral compass of the book. This might work for me if I could relate to that sense of being a young woman trying to make a place for yourself in the world, but even then I just couldn’t even penetrate what it was Louise was supposed to be feeling, towards her father and mother in particular. It was sort of this sense of filial obligation heavily tinged with shame/embarrassment with a dab of loneliness and teenage angst thrown in, but I found her behaviour and reactions made her actually the most confusing to me. Sam and Henny were the least likeable but they were somewhat more fathomable – or at least explicitly handled.

At the same time, as I said it’s a quirky book at least in terms of tone, and that added to my indifference, because the tone seemed to clash a bit with some of the serious human drama that seemed to be going on. I mean Henny is little short of a dangerous sociopath as far as I can see, but the book treads lightly, matter-of-factly, around her blatant mental illness, coyly skirts the fact that here are two people tearing each other apart in front of a captive audience of vulnerable children, and not once manages to explain (satisfactorily) just what Sam and Henny were ever really supposed to have seen in each other.

I was mostly just perplexed by this book, but also a little repulsed, so while a reread may clear some stuff up, I really don’t feel the inclination to pick it up again anytime soon.

45) Neuromancer – William Gibson

Before I begin defensive mode for this one, I just want to say I find it really sad that so much sci-fi finds its way into my bottom ranks come the end of the year. I probably said something similar last year, but given that I love sci-fi in movies, I love speculative dystopias, and moreover I feel like I’ve read some sci-fi that would quite happily rank far more highly than all of the representatives on TIME’s list, it is sad that, following in the footsteps of Snow Crash and Ubik comes this, William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic.

The funny thing is that while Phillip K Dick’s Ubik found itself in the shitty position it did last year (#46 or so I think), it found itself there for the opposite reason that Neuromancer finds itself here, now. Where Ubik suffered from overexposition that slowed it to a tawdry pace, nobody could ever accuse Neuromancer of pausing too often to stop and have a look around. It’s classic, rollicking fast-paced entertainment from start to finish.

The problem, though, is that for 90% of reading it, I had virtually [pun intended] no idea what was going on. Obviously a reread could bump this up the rankings a bit, if I managed to grasp a little more of the imagined world or get my head round its 1980s future shock critique, but it’s on the same playing field as everything else on this list, so if one read through is obfuscating then obfuscating its status will remain.

What’s more, there is a little of that ‘man jizzing into his story’ sense that I reacted badly to in Snow Crash here, where William Gibson is just writing out his fantasies of hot kickass ninja girls and alternative realities where every feat of strength and endurance is possible, so there is also that counting against it. However, Gibson strikes me through the pages as more clever than Neal Stephenson, and a lot less on-the-nose with his fantasising elements, so I think he earned the right to dream a little.

He didn’t earn the right, however, not to explain a little more clearly. One of the things I like in sci-fi is the "sci" aspect, grounding the "fi" in some semblance of reality. I felt this book just took a lot of prior understanding for granted.

44) Are you there, God? It’s Me, Margaret – Judy Blume

So this book, in all honesty, I think is the least deserving of its spot in the bottom 8. It’s a very solid example of what it purports to be – a coming-of-age tale, aimed at coming-of-age people.

The sad truth is, though, that I feel this book can really only really be deep and meaningful to those who read it when they were 13-year-old girls, or can remember back to when they were 13-year-old girls, so unless there’s a time in my future when I’m likely to be a 13-year-old girl, I don’t think it will ever really speak to me.

It was, however, enlightening to learn what a joyous and momentous occasion having your first period is, and I understand now that my wife gets all shitty once a month simply because she’s impatient for this joyous and momentous occasion, so reading this was an educational experience.

Sarcasm aside though, it’s easy reading, it’s well written – as are all Judy Blume books – and it’s not aimed at me. It’s aimed at people so far from me I could launch a Voyager spacecraft at them and die before it reached them. So then, why are you arguing with its spot on this list?

You’re not, I am. The truth is for intrinsic quality as a children’s/young adult book about coming to terms with who you are as a young girl, this could be the best book ever written. But beyond “Hmmm, so that’s what a book about coming to terms with who you are as a young girl is like”, there is no message in this book for me at all.

43) On the Road – Jack Kerouac

OK, folks keeping score, what are we up to now on the ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ tally? Two only, including this one? Oh, dear me, there is plenty more to go on that particular scoreboard.

So while I found the density of The Adventures of Augie March its greatest shortcoming, On The Road is by no means a difficult read. What I found most distasteful in this one was its sheer lack of direction. Yes, I know that’s entirely the point, but its lack of narrative discipline started to get to me, particularly later in the book. Is this going anywhere? Is it building to anything? Oh, no, it’s not. It is genuinely just ‘My friends and I drove around the place, having sex and getting into shenanigoats.”

The funny thing is I went into this book really not expecting to like it, so I wondered throughout if I was perhaps being unfairly prejudiced. But I can name a number of books I went in with similarly low expectations, and the trouble with this book is it turned out to be exactly what I’d expected.

I know there are many people who adore this book for its unbridled look at Americana, and I can appreciate the ‘beat generation’ free-flowing nature of the book, but obviously I just didn’t like it. It was also the point in my challenge where I really became conscious of the inordinately high proportion of ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ in TIME’s list.

42) The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

And straight away tally up number 3 on the ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ scoreboard. If I found On The Road directionless, I’d say the best word to describe this one would be pointless.

I was hugely disappointed with this effort which, incidentally, was my first Hemingway novel. To encounter one of the giants of literature for the first time and find this messy narrative about some tenuously-connected guys who I don’t know and don’t care about wandering around Spain… I don’t know, there seems to be an unrequited love story in there somewhere as well? I just didn’t get anything out of this book.

In truth I probably disliked this just a little bit more than On the Road, but apparently people find some great truth or meaning in this when they revisit, so in doing my sort I was inclined to be a little bit more forgiving of this. OK I got absolutely nothing out of it, but it’s still Hemingway, right? There simply must be more to it than there seems to be (Kerouac’s themes, by contrast, I found relatable through the narrative, but it didn’t connect with me).

This was easy enough to read and there were times when I felt myself starting to care about some of the characters, but it didn’t seem to go anywhere and by the time it didn’t go anywhere I’d given up caring. I’m still a bit confused by this book’s reputation, as I actually felt it to be quite superficial. But that’s the thing: is it? Or did I just not get Hemingway’s elusive brilliance?

One final editorial-related note about this book: it was originally published under the title it now possesses – The Sun Also Rises, although it was also published in an early edition under the far less-poetic title Fiesta. So for some reason the geniuses at Vintage Books are now peddling it under the clumsy double-barrelled title “Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises” which sounds like an advertising slogan for a passionfruit-flavoured soft drink. I hated that far more than the book itself.

41) The Sportswriter – Richard Ford

This one doesn’t really fit into the ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ niche, as it’s more of a ‘middle-aged person wandering around a bit having already lost himself’ story.

I may not have done this book full justice, as I read it in e-book form on my phone. I’d bought four reading-challenge books and finished them all far more quickly than I’d anticipated, so I found myself desperate, with nothing to read in book form, and grasped at the only method at my disposal to read this on the train.

At the same time, I found this book in all honesty to be probably the least-deserving of a spot on TIME’s list. I feel it could only possibly make a top 100 list made in America, because its social critique, its exploration of grief and the mid-life crisis all have a distinctly ‘American’ lens on them, and it doesn’t have a lot of depth beyond exploring notions of the American dream.

I did find it an interesting-enough read, but it was also a very easy read, in the bad sense, that it sort of kept chugging along its storyline without ever really producing anything surprising or challenging. There are some downplayed explorations of faith, as well, but ultimately it got absorbed far more easily than it maybe should have, given what it seemed to be attempting. I started to wonder if I wasn’t ‘getting’ this book because there was some sort of implication from the term ‘sportswriter’ that I wasn’t getting – similarly to the whole mythologised notion of the ‘postman’ in David Brin’s novel of the same name.

Anyway, it’s a decent enough read, but I think it would struggle to make even a top 200 list anywhere outside the US.

So the shortest (hence easiest) ‘chunk’ of my countdown 50 is done. In the next exciting instalment, I contend with the first of many “I’d already seen the movie adaptation” books, I get into an awkward situation with a goat and some handcuffs, and I lie about at least one thing that will happen in the next instalment.

*. Incidentally, I’m making a lot of “hi, mother” jokes this year. I’d just like to point out the fact that my mother is, in fact, not one of the people who reads my blog as far as I know.