Books of 2014: Top Ten

So finally, we count down my top 10 books of the year. The good news is that they’re from a variety of sources and were read for a variety of reasons – some, in fact, for no apparent reason. With no further Apu, I’ll kick off with my number 10…

10) On Such a Full Sea – Chang-Rae Lee

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Yep, this one I can’t really remember the reason. I believe it came up on a list of environmental dystopian fiction and it sounded interesting, so it went on my radar.

What a gorgeous book it is. I’m not sure what it is about English-language writers of Asian heritage (I’m drawing the comparison here with Ishiguro), but they really have a gift for exposing the beauty of our language.

Lee had me hooked from page one, writing of a missing young woman who, before her disappearance, occupied herself as a diver for multi-coloured fish in a speculative future version of Baltimore, where an unspecified global disaster (yes, familiar territory) has depleted resources and forced people to live in gated communities. An elite few youngsters are chosen each year to venture into the higher-status communities, and until her disappearance, our protagonist Fan was touted to be such a chosen one.

Lee plays quite an inventive game with the narrative voice here: the unidentified narrator is a member of the community left heartbroken and frightened by Fan’s disappearance, while simultaneously having the omniscience of hindsight to be able to narrate Fan’s own adventures.

Apart from the voice, the genre is also inventively hard to pin down: while it’s set in a dystopian world, the plot follows more of a picaresque structure, as Fan encounters strange characters and creatures living in a variety of hardships in this unhinged universe.

Throughout the book I had in my head that the title is taken from The Tempest. It’s actually from Julius Caesar, but it's almost disappointing to learn that, because the book conjures up a similar vision to The Tempest of nature’s chaos and man’s impotence in the face of its raw elements. This is a theme that, without realising, I seem to respond to very strongly (think Deliverance and its high position last year), but above all this book is just exquisitely written even in the face of its own dark cynicism.

9) Inherent Vice – Thomas Pynchon

#BookGroupReading

So I’m using the hashtag #BookGroupReading here, but I think the implication of that particular hashtag is that somebody else is responsible for my choices – thereby distancing myself from really poor examples of literature like, say, Michelle De Kretser. But Inherent Vice was, naturally, my own choice for the group, and so it might technically be more fitted to #BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason except that Pynchon is a very, very good reason to read anything.

So you might think I’m trying to justify inflicting Pynchon on my friends by placing it in such an exalted position in the top 10, but I did genuinely enjoy this book.

It’s got all of the Pynchon hallmarks: a convoluted plot that gets increasingly more convoluted as we go on; stoners and hippies; a 1960s/70s backdrop; and a large cast of idiosyncratic misfits caught in a web of post-modern silliness.

Although this is regarded by some as Pynchon’s first foray into genre fiction (and the soon-to-be-released film adaptation being coincidentally regarded as PT Anderson’s first foray into the same), there are many echoes of his previous work throughout: the relationship between Doc  Sportello and the LAPD’s Bigfoot Bjornsen is reminiscent of the relationship between Zoyd and Brock in Vineland, while Doc’s own noirish investigation into the underworld conjures up Tyrone’s search for the rocket and his nemesis in Gravity’s Rainbow.

But despite featuring all the Pynchon inaccessibility, this is probably his most readable work. Complex though it is, it makes no attempt to philosophise or even particularly satirise. It’s just the entertaining rollercoaster of a Pynchon plot, stripped back to just the action. Great fun.

8) Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

For whatever reason, I seem to have gotten myself a reputation that I don’t like sci-fi. It may just be me projecting these days (especially given the savaging I’ve given things like Ubik on this blog), but while I tend to steer clear of the sci-fi section in most bookshops – which don’t exist anymore anyway – there are certainly some fantastic examples of the sci-fi canon that really engage me. This is one of them.

I think what makes books such as this more than just pulp genre fiction is when they are able to ground their speculations in a relatable experience. Therefore cyberpunk fantasies like Snow Crash and Neuromancer do nothing for me, because their worlds are so far removed from my own and the kinetic action so intrinsic that the reading experience seems inadequate and I find myself just wishing to see it in cinematic form.

What Ender’s Game brings us is an elite, but otherwise ordinary boy protagonist who is touted as the saviour of human existence. High stakes, yes? But being still in his formative years, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is forced to undergo a process of rigorous conditioning to prepare himself for earth’s final battle against the combative enemy, the “buggers”.

What ensues is a very complex psychological game whereby the commanders of the training school isolate Ender from his compatriots before slowly building him up as a resilient troop and, following this, a leader. The struggles that he is forced to endure are what drives the story forward, while his separation from his sister and the tumultuous relationship with his older brother form the emotional core of the story.

Beyond just having a relatable heart, though, Ender’s Game is also strikingly inventive, relating a nightmarish universe of territorial, life-or-death conflict with plenty of entertaining action that is both conceivable and intriguing. Card’s skill as a writer is a big part of the stimulating nature of this story, and he does the world of genre fiction a huge service with this masterpiece.

7) Amsterdam – Ian McEwan

#BookerPrizeWinners

Like Pynchon, Ian McEwan has gained himself a comfortable little camping ground near the top of my lists. With this, his 1998 Booker Prize winner, he has actually stepped closer to the summit than he got with Atonement last year.

Amsterdam is really a fascinating read – fascinating because it is deceptively light in tone, but also because it presents us with a mind-bending moral dilemma. While the story at its centre is of a tumultuous friendship between the composer Clive and the newspaper editor Vernon, the ambivalence of Clive’s story seems to be at the crux of the narrative.

While Clive is walking in the Lake District struggling to find inspiration for an upcoming commission, he overhears a violent argument between a man and a woman at the very time when he is struck by his musical epiphany, and rather than intervene he chooses to hide and commit the musical theme to writing.

The opposition between action and inaction, high art and human experience, is what dwells at the bottom of this particular powder keg, and as it’s a McEwan novel, you know that shit’s ‘bout to explode with devastating ferocity.

However, the big surprise here is that McEwan - despite his obvious violent hatred and disdain for all of humanity – doesn’t take us in the dark directions that other works of his have, but lets the action play out in the form of a farcical, actually amusing, manner. But this is all done without any uncharacteristic levity; hiding behind it all is a classically unsettling rant about the dark side of human nature and our bottomless capacity for anger.

6) The True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey

#BookerPrizeWinners #AustralianBooks

Boy, talk about defiance of expectations. For a long time – i.e. pretty much since it came out – I looked on The True History of the Kelly Gang as the embodiment of everything that was wrong with Australian literature. It was a contrived attempt at making something bigger out of our very short and otherwise uninteresting history, which bored me at school. Also, fuck Peter Carey. That was my well-formed, rational opinion without reading a single word. And it was with an immense shoulder-slumped reluctance that I picked this book off the library shelf knowing that, if I were to make any concerted effort at reading all the Booker winners, I’d have to succumb to this at some point.

Reader, I loved it. Honestly, I was shocked about a hundred pages in to find that not only was I engrossed in the story but that I was heavily anticipating picking it up again each time I put it down. Even knowing the basic direction the story was going, I was captivated by Ned Kelly’s character, his voice, and above all, his mythology.

That is what Peter Carey is doing in this book: he’s taking an item of Australian folklore and singing new life into it, but at the same time he’s making the short and otherwise uninteresting history of Australia suddenly interesting.

Naturally, being a fan of the western genre, there’s a certain appeal to me in stories like this: frontiersman struggling to control the land and its elements in unfamiliar territory, while a frontier law – whose authority in practice is questionable - is in operation to the detriment of those renegades who try to forge their own identity.

Singlehandedly, with one fell, heartfelt swoop of a novel, Carey managed to reignite my flagging interest in Australian folklore, literature and even to some extent, culture. I don’t think I would have picked up the excellent The Secret River if not for my enjoyment of this book, so for that and whatever else is out there, I thank him.

5) All the Birds, Singing – Evie Wyld

#BookGroupReading

It’s probably a surprise to see this book up so high, for those in the know. Not only did I deplore this book’s forerunner for the Miles Franklin award, but this book has actual sheep shearing scenes in it. Given all my ranting about how Australian literature is nothing but cattle and paddocks, I wouldn't have expected myself that a sheep-shearing book would crack my top 5.

The fact is this book, chosen by Catie for our book group reading halfway through the year, was an incredibly satisfying and inventive read.

It’s devious, in the way Wyld weaves the story in two different threads: the present tense moves forward, while the flashbacks into the past leap backwards each time - a la Memento - to arrive progressively back at the origin of the story. It took me a long time to realise that was happening as each flashback brought us eventually back to the beginning of the previous one.

The writing is also beautifully haunting, but the winner here is purely the ingenuity of the story, and the way in which it cloaks everything in intriguing mystery before slowly but flamboyantly revealing the dark secret.

It raises the question as to whether I would have thought so highly of this book if not for the way it was structured. I would have to say probably not, but if it weren’t for the structure this would be a completely different book, and as it stands it’s a thoroughly gripping, clever read.

4) The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

#BookerPrizeWinners

So we return to another real mainstay of the top ten, yanking Ishiguro back from the disappointment of When we were Orphans and back where he belongs.

This doesn’t have the devious power of Never Let Me Go: in many ways it’s a fairly staid and flat narrative, but it is a heart-rendingly beautiful one, dripping throughout with Ishiguro’s pure prosaic charm and bursting with flashes of humour and irony.

Telling the below-stairs story of an English country house in the period leading up to World War II, The Remains of the Day channels the nostalgia of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited while also introducing the captivating and unheard voice of the butler of the household, Stevens. It's a very interesting device to tell the whole story through his eyes as he is intimately acquainted with his gentry employer but also far enough removed to dissect it all with a critical eye.

Similarly to Never Let Me Go, while the story and the characters were interesting, deep and well-painted, the real winner of the reading experience is just the fluid and languid tones of Ishiguro’s prose. As I said with Chang-Rae Lee, Ishiguro has a gift for unlocking the hidden beauty of the English language and it’s an utter joy to experience.

One additional note: I mentioned in my write-up of Graham Swift’s Last Orders of how the casting of the film adaptation seemed fine, with the film unseen. I also haven’t seen the Merchant Ivory film adaptation of this novel, but it didn’t take me very long in reading this book to recognise that the character of the housekeeper Miss Kenton could be played by none other than the inimitable Emma Thompson. Frankly if there has ever been a character more perfectly written for an actor, or an actor more perfectly suited to a character than Miss Kenton and Emma Thompson, I haven’t found them. Everything about her character in the book – the stiff-upper-lip, well-mannered, charming and devilishly cheeky voice and speech – it’s Emma Thompson to a T. I was relieved to look it up and ascertain that they had indeed made the only sensible casting decision, and while I’m disappointed to realise that Thompson lost the Oscar that year to Holly Hunter, it’s perhaps not so much a stretch for her to play such a charming character.

3) Villa Incognito – Tom Robbins

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Yes, this book was foreshadowed in my 20-11 post when I discussed Robbins’ other book, Still Life with Woodpecker, and I mentioned how much more I enjoyed this first taste of his work.

It is what it is. You are what you it. There are no mistakes.

Thus goes the mantra of this book and of the line of half-badgerish creature princesses that this story narrates. It’s a very typical bit of Robbins nonsense, whose slight divergence from coherence excites my imagination and again, celebrates the same spirit that I have always engendered in my own writing.

There’s not a great deal more that I can add to what I wrote about Robbins earlier, specific to this book. As I said in that review, I found this book an utter, silly delight. Robbins manages to slip in some subtly wrought digs at the post-Vietnam war era and America’s transition to modern politics in the shadow of 9/11. The writing is inventive and surprising at every turn, the story is offbeat and exciting, yet also surprisingly moving.

At its surface though, Villa Incognito worked for me because I found it very, very funny. While I think there’s an extremely laddish quality to his writing, I find his flights of fancy and esoteric style hit their mark in this book every time. Of all the books on this list that I would consider re-reading, this is the one I believe I would enjoy revisiting the most.

2) The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton

#BookGroupReading #BookerPrizeWinners

So I’m stretching to use the #BookerPrizeWinners hashtag here because, although this is a Booker winner, I read it purely because it was selected as our first book group option this year, and if anything my enjoyment of this book probably inspired my opting for Booker winners as a potential reading challenge for the year.

There’s naturally been a lot written and talked about this book throughout this year, and many people I know have actually struggled with it, in particular the seemingly endless first chapter that takes up nearly (equal to? More than?) half the entire book and skips confusingly through a monstrous cast of characters.

The only thing I can say is: use the list of characters at the front of the book unabashedly, and keep going with it, because my god does it pay off. Catton is a master of Chekhov’s gun, with every single character and every single line of dialogue being deliberately employed to the attainment of a final goal, and by the time you’re able to wrap your head around the incredibly complex plot, everything starts to make sense.

The second chapter of the book, that consists of a courtroom trial sequence, is the most immersive and transporting bit of writing that I’ve experienced since the final chapter of Infinite Jest (high praise from me indeed). I found myself almost missing my train stop for the days when I was reading it because from the moment I sat down I was completely lost in the action.

I have to admit this book did have a weakness for me (and this provided the only disagreement in the circlejerk of admiration that our book group meeting turned into), which is that the chapters getting progressively shorter towards the end (in a rhythm supposed to mimic a waning moon) brought me a little out of the immersive story, and I couldn’t help but feel the author’s unnecessary interference in the world I was enjoying. It’s a clever device well used, but it just lifted the veil uncomfortably from my eyes, and let this otherwise unparalleled masterpiece fall shy of the completely engrossing…

1) The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch

#BookerPrizeWinners

I don’t think anybody would have been able to predict what my number one book was this year. And, to be honest, despite my feeling during and after my reading of this book that it was a firm contender for the top spot, the race this year was a lot tighter than in previous years where Infinite Jest and Gone with the Wind were miles ahead of their competitors.

So why does Iris Murdoch’s 1978 Booker Winner find itself above so much other mastery?

As I hinted to just then, I just found the story utterly compelling from start to finish. It also strikes me, looking at it and the list as a whole, that this features a pastiche of elements that I enjoyed in other works. The central character of retired theatre director Charles Arrowby occupies a seaside hermitage similar to Kerewin in The Bone People, and as I said in my discussion of the 2005 winner The Sea, has a similar feeling of longing nostalgia to Banville’s. But there are a couple of elements that raise this well above the standard fare.

Firstly, this is delightfully cynical, but also cynical in a really unsettling way. The story it tells of nostalgic love and uncompromising obsession has this strange evocation of so many other lovesick stories, but it’s actually very dark in the way it plays out. There is tragic death, an attempted murder, an effective kidnapping, and yet it’s all just a simple story about a man re-encountering his first unrequited love.

Secondly - and this really seems to be an absurd thing for me to admire – this book captures purely and unequivocally the male sphere of existence. That paradoxical lone-wolf longing for both solitude and gratifying companionship, and that single-minded focus on control, both of self and of the situation around you. It’s not like males need any external help to have our voice heard in literature, but it was still remarkable and fascinating to see how Murdoch as a woman so neatly and yet curiously captured it.

Thirdly, there's a very haunting and ethereal quality all over this. Again there's that futility of trying to control the elements which I respond to, and there's a lot of exploration of the notion of nostalgia, of what an empty, pointless pursuit it is to grasp onto the past like it can control the present.

But to really capture the essence of my enjoyment, we have to look back at my previous two years of reading challenges, and note that TIME and TIME again, I felt that the TIME list made questionable – if not utterly wrong – choices in some of their books. If they need a Don DeLillo, Underworld should have been the clear choice over White Noise. Margaret Atwood should be a shoe-in for the list, but The Handmaid’s Tale is infinitely superior to The Blind Assassin. So when I read the Murdoch inclusion in the list, Under the Net, I couldn’t help but wonder why such a lightweight offering was chosen –was it simply that as her debut, it heralded the arrival of a unique voice? Quite possibly.

But when I read this, and found it retaining the irreverently humourous tone and peculiar characterisation of Under the Net, and yet discovering it to be possessed of significantly more gravity and profundity, asking questions about life and love that Under the Net wouldn’t bother with, it gave me a wonderful sense of vindication. Again, what I’d thought unseen would be the obvious choice, would indeed have been the better one.

And that feeling of self-righteousness really can’t be undervalued.

So there you have it. I hope you have enjoyed my self-indulgence while I take a little bit of a break before starting it all over again with movies.

Books of 2014 Part 5: Bottom 13

So as much as the idea of doing a post of 13 books plays havoc with my love of neatness, so too does the idea of cutting off my year's reading at 63, so I'll just have to get used to it. Also, for whatever reason I kept thinking I'd read 64 books this year and so may have referred to this elsewhere as my 'bottom 14' but I was mistaken. These are the books that didn't make the cut for my top 50, counting up from the least disliked to the most. And bear in mind again this is all my personal responses, so the books on this list are not necessarily bad (with some exceptions), just disappointing...

51) Lionel Asbo, State of England – Martin Amis

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Originally this was the book with which I was to kick off these write-ups, until of course The Name of the Rose was slotted in higher up. And this one definitely does fall in the ‘absolutely no reason’ category, as it was picked up from the library very early on this year, before I’d formulated any kind of plan of attack for my reading.

Firstly, I’d like to say that I didn’t dislike this book nearly as much as most actual, paid critics have. But then most actual, paid critics have sort of slammed this book relative to Amis’ other work, whereas for me it’s all part of one big, brown, pile of Amisy sludge.

Lionel Asbo presents some mildly amusing lampooning of modern Britain and the post-reality TV celebrity culture, where the most vile creatures can be revered in certain quarters. Amis undoubtedly has Wayne Rooney and, to a lesser extent, the likes of Jade Goody in his sights. Otherwise, the story is actually more accessible than some of his earlier work, and in all honesty I feel like our two actual protagonists here – Lionel’s nephew Des and Des’ girlfriend Dawn – are far more sympathetic than any of the characters from his other books.

But even in the presence of sympathetic characters, Amis can’t help being Amis, and there remains a supercilious, holier-than-thou attitude in the writing, which dulls the effect of any potential satire because it’s clear that Amis just hates everybody. Actually I would recommend avoiding this book less than others on this bottom 13, but perhaps only because everybody else seems to be heartily recommending avoision at all costs. I don’t say evasion, I say avoision.

52) When we were Orphans – Kazuo Ishiguro

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

A bit of a disappointment, this. Having not touched Ishiguro since I fell head over heels for Never Let Me Go two years ago, I grabbed this one from the library early on this year.

While Ishiguro’s effortless prose is striking throughout, the narrative overall felt confused and quite muddled to me. From the outset this seems like kind of a detective story, as our narrator travels back to the international settlement in Shanghai determined to find out what happened to his parents, but it seems to get too caught up in attempted social commentary and political intrigue.

Its main weakness is its inconsistency of tone. Ishiguro’s prose works best when it deftly and subtly tweaks at the fringes of the expectation of reality – as he does so subversively in Never Let Me Go – but here at times the tone of his writing gets eerily dark and unsettling at times and seems remarkably heavy-handed given the otherwise playfulness of his words.

Looking at the Wikipedia article on this book though, it seems I’m not alone in being underwhelmed by this work. Ishiguro himself is quoted as saying “It’s not my best book,” which seems stupidly understated from a creator of at least two masterpieces. It still had its merits but it was at times clunky and clumsy in equal measure, and left me more perplexed than simply disappointed.

53) Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon.Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. – Rob Delaney

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

So those who follow me on Twitter probably don’t know that I retweet Rob Delaney a lot, mainly because you almost certainly already follow Rob Delaney as well, since practically everybody does. So when he was spruiking his short memoir earlier this year, it seemed inevitable that I would want to get my hands on a copy, because he’s somewhat amusing.

It makes me sad, actually, that this book has ended up as low as it has, but I feel it just comes down to my utter pretension, and needing books to have heavyweight philosophical significance to even warrant consideration.

Because, heartfelt and even, at times, heartbreaking though this memoir is, it still feels bantamweight, because it’s told throughout with Delaney’s trademark irreverent humour and – its biggest shortcoming – is very, very short.

Naturally length of a book is not equivalent with quality, but the truth is I found this book raised a whole bunch of questions and then finished very abruptly without making any attempt at answering them. While I don’t have a desperate desire to delve into Delaney’s home life, he is certainly not shy about tweeting jokes about it, so I found the fact that he quantum leaps from a very personal recollection in his time in rehab to an ending where he’s already married with kids a bit abrupt, and I wondered more about how he met his wife and wanted at least an overview of the ways in which their relationship has matured since his lowest moments.

Of course, despite his irreverence in his jokes and his openness in this memoir, I have no doubt that he is actually deeply protective of his wife, which is actually quite touching. But the book still felt a little incomplete to me, and I would have liked to read a bit more.

54) Absalom! Absalom! – William Faulkner

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Those who haven’t read my blog before (Hi, not Mother!) will probably be unaware of my relationship with modernism, so let me state it here. I hate modernism. I hate bloated, self-satisfied and directionless narratives far more interested in being deliberately obtuse in an obnoxious attempt to ‘subvert’ the status quo than in saying anything even remotely meaningful or interesting. Sorry, that was the same sentence said in two different ways: I hate modernism.

Having stated my position though, I have to admit my relationship with William Faulkner is a bit more complicated: while I struggled with The Sound and the Fury I ultimately gleaned a great deal of intelligence and meaning from it, and while I struggled a bit with the ultimate message of Light in August last year, the style was readable and easily digested.

So with Absalom! Absalom! Faulkner’s true modernist colours shine through a lot more vividly. Not that he’s doing the Joycean thing of “Fuck you reader because I will fuck with you fuck with you Fuck”, but the stodgy, dense stream of consciousness here, the haphazard leaping backwards and forwards in time, the intractability of most of the events as they whoosh past, is all far more effort than it feels worth.

There is a brutal and critically important tale of the cruelty of the Deep South and its history hidden behind the narrative’s self-importance, however, and I feel this book would increase in my estimation with a second reading. But there’s a point where my fondness for being challenged is overtaken by my need for coherence, and the streaming along here just dwindled my enjoyment. I’m still OK on Faulkner, though; he’s the best of a bad bunch. Like Herman Goehring.

55) How Late it was, How Late – James Kelman

#BookerPrizeWinners

Speaking of intractable stream of consciousness novels, here we are back with the Booker Prize Winners and a very dense, reader-unfriendly piece of Glaswegian drivel.

Is that harsh? Yes, it is. There’s actually a fair bit to like in this book: the evocative nature of the characters and the surreal and tragic events that befall our narrator as he finds himself suddenly blinded and persecuted by the police as he just tries to get on with his downtrodden, miserable existence.

At the same time, as implied by my above hatred of modernism, I don’t really care for stream of consciousness writing at the best of times, and this consists of an entire book’s worth couched in lots of Glaswegian jargon and working class bitterness.

Ultimately there was very little for me to grab onto in this story. It’s dourly cynical, densely written, and introduces a number of loose ends of which only some are tied up by the end. I don’t think I out and out hated this, but certainly didn’t find a lot to love.

56) Men at Arms – Evelyn Waugh

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Okay, so now we’re into interesting territory.  A book, nothing particularly wrong with it, by a writer whom I very much admire and have enjoyed reading in the past, that finds itself not only in my bottom 13 of the year but in fact my bottom 10. Why?

Quite simply, I just don’t remember it. I recall about halfway through this year looking through the list of books I’d read so far, seeing the title “Men at Arms” and trying to remember who it was by or what it was about, and having to look it up to find out. What's more, looking up "Men at Arms" yields a million different Terry Pratchett-related hits and nothing on this.

The best thing I can remember is that there is an amusing sequence involving a ‘thunderbox’, a portable latrine that becomes quite a valued commodity in the military, and a number of soldiers who try to commandeer it for their personal use. I remember the thunderbox sequence, and being mildly amused by it, but apart from that I’d be hard pressed to give you details of the story or characters.

I don’t think anybody would argue that this is high in Waugh’s oeuvre, but still it makes me somewhat sad that a book about which I had no complaints has just been filtered down through the cracks because not much of it stuck in my mind after reading it. But then we can’t be too sad about it, because there’s plenty more of that syndrome to come.

57) Dubliners – James Joyce

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

A little while ago, I contributed to a discussion on the subreddit r/books about ‘authors everyone else loves and you hate’ with the only-too-obvious choice of James Joyce, who is utter shit despite what you or anybody else erroneously thinks. Nonetheless, being as I am an open-minded guy I was willing to take on board suggestions from other contributors to that discussion that maybe reading just Ulysses wasn’t a fair way to judge this titan of overratedness.

So Dubliners certainly doesn’t have the deliberate obfuscation of Ulysses, or the cancer-inducing stupidity of Finnegan’s Wake - which I haven’t been suicidal enough even to open - but what it also doesn’t really have is a great deal of substance.

Short stories generally aren’t my thing, anyway, so I’m maybe a bit prejudiced, but the format can still leave a profound impact when done extremely well. And in Dubliners, some of the stories are wryly entertaining, and overall the book gives a satisfying look at the city and its people that Joyce so ‘revered’. Others of the stories, though, didn’t leave a mark at all.

And ultimately this book doesn’t have nearly enough gravitas to change my extremely wounded opinion of the man. OK, he can write mild amusement, and it’s possible that reading this before Ulysses would ameliorate one’s suffering through that drivel, but that is not enough to make him a great writer, or the morons who respect him not morons.

58) The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt

#BookGroupReading

I think it’s fair to say that this book divided our book group this year. There were those who absolutely loved it, and then there was a majority of us who didn’t care for it at all. Evidently from the placement on this list, I fell into the latter category.

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-prize winner and recipient of a bunch of GoodReads accolades, is utterly undeserving of all of its praise. Yes, I know I’m not the first person to proffer such an opinion, nor am I in any way the most qualified person to do so, but I’ll give a very simple reason why: it’s empty.

People have written at length, and far more eloquently than I’m about to (Google it, I can’t be bothered linking), about the literary merit of this book, and have found it wanting. I’m inclined to agree, not because it’s poorly written, ill-structured, or uninteresting (despite everything else I thought about it, it is none of these things), but because it can’t live up to its own self-importance.

I’m going to raise the issue of book length again here, and while Rob Delaney’s book was disappointingly short, this is pointlessly long. A book of this length would typically have some kind of larger scope or be trying to make a bigger statement about the world or the human condition. Tartt gallantly tries, in only the final 20 pages or so, to wrap up everything that’s happened into a higher meaning, but its mixed success is itself only an afterthought.

What this is – and I made this point very emphatically at the Book Group meeting, oh if you could have seen me – is a prolonged soap opera. There are needlessly long passages that seem interminably extended so Tartt can fit in more 'fun melodrama' that happened. Moreover, it hints at ideas that have been substantially explored elsewhere: its pivotal point of a priceless artwork thoughtlessly purloined never really becomes more than a plot device, whereas Gaddis’ The Recognitions delves far more interestingly and provocatively into the idea of art.

I wasn’t put off by the ineffectiveness of the central character, Theo, as much as others around me were, but he doesn’t strike me as a fully-rounded character, either. He’s simply something to whom things happen, and yet so much of the book wallows in his psychology of self-pity. He, like the book itself, seems self-indulgent and utterly middling.

So, all ranting aside, I feel the best point raised elsewhere about this book channels a debate that was had by the Australian craft beer community when the mediocre McLaren Vale Ale manufactured itself a surprise win in the Hottest 100 Craft Beers poll: if people who don’t usually drink beer [read] pick up Vale Ale [The Goldfinch] as a paragon of Australian Craft Beer [modern literature], will they really be inspired to continue exploring? Or will they shrug and think “If that’s the best they’ve got to offer, I may as well stick to the VB [videogames, reality TV, etc.] I’m at least familiar with.”

59) Life of Pi – Yann Martel

#BookerPrizeWinners

Astoundingly enough, this is not the bottom-ranked of the Booker Prize winners, perhaps unfortunately for itself, but otherwise defying expectations. Fittingly, defying expectations of my ranking system is the only defying of expectations this book managed. I went in expecting to dislike and be bored by it, and disliked and bored by it I did and was.

Perhaps it may have helped a little if, like the entire Baby Boomer generation, I’d succumbed to the hype and read this when it first came out, rather than after seeing the Ang Lee film adaptation. At the same time, though, I don’t think the power of this story lies so much in providing shocks or surprises. For one thing, although knowing in advance that he’s about to find a fully-grown Bengal tiger in his lifeboat lessens the surprise, there is otherwise no suspense as far as the life-or-death struggle between Piscine Molitor and Richard Parker the tiger: we know Pi survives because he’s telling the story.

Actually the more I think about it though, the more I’m actually convincing myself - despite everything I’ve said so far - that seeing the film beforehand ruined my enjoyment of this book. I think that’s actually substantially true, but it’s largely because Lee’s film is visually impeccable, in a way that great film adaptations should be. It’s otherwise fairly true to the book (someone remind me though, does that bit about Pi going blind and encountering another lost, blind sailor who’s eaten by the tiger happen in the film? Because I don’t remember), so reading it after the fact is just recounting things that I’ve already seen strikingly brought to life before my eyes.

Having said that, Martel’s writing is not inventive enough to bring any additional surprises to the table, and despite the inherent difficulty in filming such an unusual story, it lends itself very easily to straight translation from page-to-screen. What’s more, all of the pretensions that I reacted against in the film are here in the book in spades, and the heavy-handed religious ‘sub’text is just as noxious.

60) Heat and Dust – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

#BookerPrizeWinners

Yes, here we are at the bottom of the Booker barrel. And it’s most definitely an unfortunate choice to fall down this low. Because I’m afraid we’re following on from Men at Arms to another book that has fallen through the cracks for the simple reason that it hasn’t stuck in my memory at all.

In this case as well, though, unlike Banville’s The Sea, I could feel it washing over me with complete indifference as I read, and in all honesty I suspected that it would end up down the bottom of my list for the reason of its being unmemorable.

We’re back in India here, and if I recall correctly it had the feeling of not semi-autobiography but certainly Jhabvala writing of her experiences as an Englishwoman living for some years in India. I remember the writing being somewhat objective and clinical, and while I wasn’t bored during it, it failed to have any big impact by the end. Obviously.

While I would be a hypocrite if I recommended this book, I also hasten to add that I don’t recommend complete evasion. If you’re in the mood for a postcolonial read, you’ll probably flip out over this. I don’t think I was in a contrary mood, but obviously the book didn’t settle.

61) Kim – Rudyard Kipling

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Speak about your disappointments. Similarly to A Tale of Two Cities, I’d read a couple score pages of this classic a little while ago. I think when I had a free lunch break while working in retail, I would head up to Borders and flip through this. So with freedom of choice on my side I grabbed a copy from the library and decided to finish it off.

Kipling’s a funny one. His name seems to carry hallowed sanctity among certain intellectual circles but, at the same time, he seems completely absent from most at least populist discussions about the literary canon. So I can’t quite tell if my putting this down this low is likely to rile feathers or pass unnoticed, as does Kipling’s work.

My reading of Kim was a great struggle. I tend to struggle a little with books such as this – your bildungsromans with a touch of the picaresque – but while there are interesting questions being asked here about postcolonial identity, and spirituality in an increasingly modernised world, I found the story intractably vague.

About halfway through, I felt the way I used to when I was trying to read a syllabus-assigned novel of great complexity: like the words were no longer holding the same meaning, and I’d find myself having to read and re-read passages to fully absorb the content.

That may not be the fault of the book or of Kipling, but as I rank these books on my own personal experience with them, it’s the most egregious of problems. Truth is I found myself at its conclusion not only none the richer for having endured it but actually befuddled as to its purpose. It feels very sad to have to say it but my first experience with Kipling was not a pleasant one.

62) The Tenth Man – Graham Greene

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Again, me, why do you insist on putting hashtags even though there is always a reason to read Graham Greene? Well, there’s always a reason to read Graham Greene, but in all honesty this isn’t Graham Greene.

The Tenth Man is a novella that Greene originally conceived as a film script for MGM (while he was working for them on the unrelated Carol Reed-directed The Third Man), but was then forgotten and neglected for decades, before being revised and published late in Greene’s life.

I actually feel that the world would have been no richer for this work having been rediscovered. While it’s an interesting concept – one in ten prisoners is chosen to be executed, and one of the chosen offers a substantial fortune for anybody willing to die in his place – the intrigue and suspense that one would expect from Greene is lacking. In short, it feels half-baked, and practically incomplete.

Maybe I’m just averse to the shorter story format, but I just feel that with such a classic Greene scenario, he could have taken it in far more interesting directions than the one he chooses. It has ended up being just a minor thriller with minimal resonance, and there is so much more interesting fare in Greene’s portfolio.

And with that, we arrive at...

63) Questions of Travel – Michelle De Kretser

#BookGroupReading

And here we are at the very bottom of the barrel. And a turgid, fetid place it is too. An ill-conceived thought process by a member of our book group let this highly questionable Miles Franklin-winner slip through the cracks into our officially sanctified pile of reading and all I can say is that if I could have inserted a couple of ‘dummy’ ranks between Graham Greene and this, I happily would have done so as this is last by a long, long way.

Why did I react so poorly to it? Well let’s enumerate them:

Number 1: it’s emotionally vapid. Largely I think that is the point – if it has a point, and that’s debatable – as the characters are portrayed as sleepwalking through their meaningless lives, never fully confronting the horrors that are going on either in their lives, or the world in general. But there are no personality here to grasp onto; the prose is also a complete sleepwalk, and there was zero resonance for me at all. I was glad when it was over.

Number 2: it’s badly structured. It’s written as a parallel narrative between two characters in different parts of the world who eventually meet, but unlike others that have done it far better – see Oscar and Lucinda, discussed earlier – there is no particular point to their meeting. While the circumstances of their meeting are supposed to be somewhat random, in a globalised world, the story is no more complete or richer for having brought them together. It feels like it’s borrowing clichés in an attempt to make a larger point, but the point is that there is no point.

Number 3: it is utterly, utterly pretentious. Now you know that when I’m calling you pretentious, you’re in trouble. This is absolutely the worst kind of bombastic pomposity imaginable. The prose is bloated, directionless and just puffed up with reeking hot air in the form of unnecessarily long words and name-dropping of philosophers whom faux-academics think makes them sound smart. Little tip for all aspiring writers out there: if the whim ever takes you to mention Lacan for any reason at all, stop writing now, get a job in McDonald’s and probably kill yourself as well, because there is no hope for you either as a writer or a human being. That is, unless the reason is a rant against the idea of mentioning Lacan, like I just did.

These enumerated reasons aside, there is no heart and no story here. This is just a block of impenetrable intellectualist garbage, ostensibly exploring ideas of nomadic wanderlust in a fully-globalised world, but it is unable to do any of the travelling it aspires to portray, because it finds itself wedged so firmly up its own arse.

What really, really irked me about this book though, and while it’s not the fault of the book itself, I’m more inclined to blame it because fuck you book, is that I wasn’t even able to attend the Book Group meeting and join in the circlejerk savaging of Ms. De Kretser because I was involved in a two-day brewathon. So again, fuck you, book, for not giving me the outlet to rant at the time.

All I can say is that if The Goldfinch is likely to underwhelm the uninitiated regarding the world of literary fiction, this will plainly repel them. Whatever the Miles Franklin committee were smoking when they awarded this gibberish the prize, I want some.

in true Christmas spirit, tomorrow I will celebrate the holiday spirit by getting out of angry mode and into celebratory mode as I reveal my top 10 books I read this year.

Books of 2014 Part 4: 20-11

Another write-up, where we plunge into my top 20 for a while.

20) Still Life with Woodpecker – Tom Robbins

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

So again this hashtag is being misused, because like the Colum McCann in the previous post, Tom Robbins was someone recommended to me by our New York host Davis. This was the second Robbins that I read this year: the first being Villa Incognito, which is still to come, and this was one of two that Davis actually properly recommended (the other being the still-unread Jitterbug Perfume).

Now the thing about Tom Robbins is that he writes the same way I write. Not in the same way that Dave Eggers stole my idea and published it, but in the sense that Robbins writes the same wacky, off-beat joke-riddled prose as the sort of nowhere-bound rants that I would punch out in school when I was bored. Only, unlike mine, Robbins has actually written and published his gibberish, several times and they don't just end after one page when the main character for no reason "eats his own head". Although I’ve seen criticism of Robbins as being ‘masturbatory’, it shouldn't astound you to discover that this doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of, or my identification with, his books.

Still Life with Woodpecker, however, seemed to take itself a little too seriously for my liking. Although Robbins always tends to ground his wackiness in some kind of social commentary, I preferred his work in Villa Incognito where it just seemed completely off-the-wall, whereas the story here - a love affair between a whimsical princess who fancies herself an environmental activist and a fugitive redhead terrorist named Bernard ‘the Woodpecker’ – seemed a bit caught up in its own attempt at gravitas, and felt less jokey and more heavy-handed than Villa.

It’s quite possible though that it’s all down to expectations. Having my first taste of Robbins with Villa was an absolute delight, so then being told by Davis that this book was even better meant that I was set up for disappointment. And that’s not to say this book is disappointing – far from it – but I think wherever it is superior it’s also just less whimsical and silly, demanding to be taken seriously even in its playfulness.

So it gets a top 20 berth, but it will have to settle for the bottom bunk.

19) Bring Up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel

#BookerPrizeWinners

So here we are, thirty books after Wolf Hall, and we come across the sequel. Following on pretty much directly after the first book, Bring Up the Bodies relates the tumultuous years of Anne Boleyn’s reign as queen of England, again all through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell.

There are a number of reasons why I enjoyed this book more than Wolf Hall (I won’t be drawn on which one is superior, but I clearly enjoyed this far more): the first I alluded to earlier, namely that some of the more confusing authorial mannerisms that Mantel employs were tidied up here, so the action was clearer.

The second seems quite arbitrary, but the history related in Bring Up the Bodies is vastly more interesting to me. Wolf Hall seemed to be a lot of Hamlet-level indecision: will he? Won’t he? Whereas if I were to draw out the Shakespeare comparison, this is more Titus Andronicus, something’s always happening and it’s a big cloud of chaos and political instability.

Perhaps, though, the reason is simpler: that Mantel’s particular method of recasting history takes a lot of time to getting used to; perhaps the length of an entire book. Therefore going into Bring Up the Bodies I had steeled myself for a challenge and instead got a fascinating story. The other more obvious thing is that, while I didn’t exactly have very high expectations for Wolf Hall, those expectations were far lower for this, and I was happy to be pleasantly surprised.

18) Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson

#BookshelfCatchUp

I think I mentioned this book in my write-up of The Scarlet Pimpernel, as I read them one after the other. This is another book that’s been sitting on my bookshelf unread for years. In fact my history with this story goes back even further: to when I was about six years old (possibly older), and my Dad made an ill-fated attempt to read this book out loud to me and my brother and, being the culture-loving and sophisticated little shite I was, decided I was bored and went outside to eat my own poo or whatever it was I liked to do at the time.

So unlike most readers who greatly enjoy this book, I didn’t come to it as a kid, but the good news is that you don’t need to, because it remains a thrilling adventure at any age.

In this case, the little spoiler plot point is not such a dampener as it was for The Scarlet Pimpernel; namely that when Jim Hawkins is narrating the chance encounter with this ‘great seafaring man’ Long John Silver and how he seems to be the finest fellow and the saviour of their haphazard voyage, it takes on a tone of dramatic irony to us in the know, rather than diminishing the great revelation. Part of that is that it doesn’t take Jim very long to learn the truth about Silver.

Moreover, what is left out by the well-known fact in popular culture that Silver is a pirate and a scoundrel is that he is also a scintillating character of great moral ambivalence. He is charming, highly intelligent and full of cunning wit, and it is the development of his character that keeps you reading more than anything else. The other characters are somewhat stock types, and the story itself is quite familiar and clichéd now, despite it being entirely the origin of such clichés.

It’s just a bit of escapism really, but it’s extremely well-crafted and entertaining escapism. It’s been a while since I told my six-year-old self how much he sucked, but he really did.

17) A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Well the reason behind this book is fairly straightforward: although It wasn’t on my bookshelf, it’s been too many years in my life for me to have read only one Hemingway, the incomprehensibly overrated The Sun Also Rises. So naturally I picked this one up from the library.

So my second taste of Hemingway had a very similar vibe to my first: there’s a mumbling and detached style of writing here, where even though it’s first person and is based on Hemingway’s own wartime experiences, everything just feels like it’s happening to someone else. His narrator is lacking agency, shall we say, for the most part. At the same time, it’s a deceptively easy read (like others say The Sun Also Rises is, overlooking the fact that it’s simply bollocks) and has the ability to catch you by surprise.

Unlike in The Sun Also Rises, what’s happening here is interesting, and emotionally striking. It’s wartime, he’s making friends, and then he’s losing friends. There are life-or-death struggles all around him, both on behalf of the enemy and on behalf of friendly fire.

At the heart of it as well, it’s a love story – a wartime love story full of suspense and bittersweet regret. I have to say the emotional detachment on the part of the author made the essence of the romance pass by over my head – that is, I was never quite sure of the nature of his feelings – but the denouement is cathartic and emotionally gratifying.

16) The Bone People – Keri Hulme

#BookerPrizeWinners

So it’s back to Booker Prize Winners and the 1984 laureate from our friends across the Tasman. 

The Bone People is a story about an unusual friendship that arises between a mysterious hermit woman, a mute and violently unstable young boy and the boy’s adoptive father, a Maori with a broken heart and a violent temper of his own.

While at times this book had a somewhat directionless narrative arc - which made it feel a lot longer than it needed to - the heart of the story is never far away, and when it comes down to it it’s a really beautiful story, for all its brutal honesty.

What did annoy me, although it’s entirely my fault, is that it wasn’t until I’d finished the book that I bothered looking in the back and noticing that there was an index containing English translations of all the Maori phrases peppered throughout the book. I may have actually gotten a greater comprehension if I’d known about this, because otherwise I assumed I could get the gist without knowing these (if you’re wondering, Google Translate hasn’t yet added a Maori option, and I did look).

Even without it though, it’s a wonderful read, full of deep, fascinating characters and a simmering emotional core. As we'll see later in this countdown as well, those Kiwi women sure can write.

15) The Secret River – Kate Grenville

#AustralianBooks

Yep it’s been a while since I returned to this particular hashtag, and while this book could definitely come under #BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason, there’s no way I would have picked this up if not for the esteem in which it’s held by the Australian intelligentsia.

And all I can say now is that I, not a member of the Australian intelligentsia, also hold it in very high esteem.

In many ways I can’t help but think of this as a fairly typical Australian story. Englishman gets transported to Sydney, gets freed, takes some land, discovers Aborigines live on the land, muscles them out because it’s goddamn his, now. Basically it’s a story about Australia.

This is not, however, a typical book. Grenville’s prose is not fancy but it makes its point, and while I wouldn’t say she managed to excite my imagination, she has a piercing, unforgiving vision of what went on in the fledgling days of this country. William Thornhill’s early history frames everything that comes next: as a poor, disenfranchised outcast all he yearns for is a place to call his own. Then with what seems to be a huge, predominantly empty and uninhabited country surrounding him, he sees his chance to settle himself down.

In that sense it channels the postcolonial viewpoint of a VS Naipaul, for example. But more than just the yearning of the dislocated colonial, Grenville embraces the fear and the mistrust on the part of the dispossessed native owners of the land. What she brings to the table lastly though is a bitter sense of humour about the narrative that Australia spins about itself, asking with pointed venom at what cost we obtained the meaning of our national identity.

14) The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson

#BookerPrizeWinners

I’d say this is the first of a few books that rank highly largely through their defiance of my low expectations. Admittedly I went into this book knowing absolutely nothing about its content, but I felt it was one of those books that won acclaim upon release and then quickly faded from everybody’s consciousness.

Where it really worked for me was in Jacobson’s wry humour which is littered throughout. Frankly this was the funniest book I read all year and there were quite a few occasions when I was having to stifle giggles on the train.

In tone and story it reminded me a lot of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, only instead of dealing with Indians and Afro-Caribbeans in London, this deals with Jews. There’s a kind of surreal quality to the exploration of characters and themes, as well as musings on the titular ‘Finkler question’, whose own surreality is typified by the fact that I’m still not sure exactly what the question is. The surrealism augments the comedy, as well, because the ostensible depths of the characters’ personal and emotional journeys are belied by a clinical eye for existentialism. That is, the characters seem to believe they’re searching for the meaning of life, while Jacobson points out they’re looking in all the wrong places, and questions whether such meaning is even to be found.

As with a lot of films that I’ve loved that include surrealist elements, though, I’m not sure if this book wholly lives up to its own ambition. I enjoyed it a lot provided I didn’t take it too seriously. But I can’t be certain that it doesn’t want to be taken more seriously, and once you do I fear the book might reveal itself to be ultimately shallow.

13) Watchmen – Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, John Higgins

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

OK so this is probably the biggest stretch of that hashtag, because those who have read all my previous book write-ups (Hi, Mother!) will know that this book is part of TIME’s Top 100 list that dictated my reading challenges for the past two years, and that this book was skipped by me for the most arbitrary reason possible – namely, fuck off I can do what I want, you’re not my real Dad.

Realistically though, I had never tackled a graphic novel and it was easy to ostracise this one for being different. But having the freedom to choose this year, I thought I should give it a go and find out what the fuss was about. Good idea.

A friend of mine tried to downplay this to me, talking about how its impact is lessened these days because it was the progenitor of the whole ‘flawed superhero’ idea that has since become a cliché, but I didn’t find that at all. Watchmen was tense, gripping, and the heightened moral ambivalence throughout was challenging and thought-provoking.

I can’t admit to being a convert to the graphic novel style: it still felt a little over-stimulated and a little lightweight in the way it gets its themes across. Those themes, however, are as relevant today as ever, and even if they’ve been done a million times in other books and series and franchises, I can’t imagine they’ll be explored more completely and interestingly than here.

Most of the credit must of course go to everybody’s favourite Writer/Wizard/Mall Santa/Rasputin Impersonator Alan Moore, whose structure and vision are compelling enough themselves, even if I don’t geek out about the colours and blood-spattered drawings like others might.

12) The Inheritance of Loss – Kiran Desai

#BookerPrizeWinners

Let’s take a step back into the wonderful world of India and the rich canvas it offers for intriguing drama. The Inheritance of Loss could well qualify for the #BookshelfCatchUp hashtag as well, because we’ve had a copy on our shelf for a good many years, but obviously the reason this was picked was more because of its Booker-winning credentials.

This book was engrossing, and put me in mind largely of Arundhati Roy’s 1997 winner The God of Small Things, in the way that Desai interweaves her themes and her critical assessment of India into a story about heartbreak and betrayal.

In many ways it covers similar territory to The White Tiger, only from a completely different tack. The territory being that people born in India, particularly of a certain caste, are fated to enjoy the same perils and misfortunes of the generation before them, and it seems impossible to break the cycle.

Perhaps the reason I responded to this so much more strongly than The White Tiger is that Desai doesn’t offer any solutions or answers – even problematic as Adiga’s are – but just allows her somewhat mournful voice to flow through the characters, to tell their story and their problems.

It was also just an easy read, which can’t be overestimated as a selling point unless it’s simply easy by virtue of being lightweight. Lightweight this certainly isn’t.

11) Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage – Haruki Murakami

#BookGroupReading

Wow. It’s been almost 40 books since my first and, so far only, use of this particular hashtag, which I guess demonstrates how polarising some of the book group choices have been this year. There are definitely more to come: some in the bottom 14 and others cracking the top 10. But yeah, they seem to sit only at the fringes, no middle-ground available.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage (for convenience sake henceforth known as ‘the book in question’ or ‘this book’ or ‘it’) was the book chosen for the last Book Group meeting of this year and the one that I read with the most ease, polishing it off in two days thanks largely to my reading it during Sydney Craft Beer Week when I was off work. It was also my third of Murakami’s works and, so far, my favourite.

Tsukuru Tazaki is a character very much after my own heart, in a heightened and fictional way. Being cut off apparently arbitrarily by his group of four close friends after high school, he finds himself a hollowed-out husk of the adult he thought he would grow up to be. To that end, a prospective romantic partner charges him with the task of investigating the cruel severance in order to achieve closure and move on.

I think this book – the book in question – it is perhaps also the most Murakami-esque of his works that I’ve tackled. Norwegian Wood I felt lacked the surrealism for which he’s renowned, whereas After Dark was surrealism incarnate but seemed more of an exercise and lacked emotional depth. So in spite of the mixed reaction this book – the book in question – has received, it made me feel like I was finally starting to understand Murakami as an author.

But what I liked most about this book was just how raw and emotional it felt to me. Despite the subdued Japanese-ness of its characters and the writing in general, it felt like a cry of anguish, but one that was ultimately tinged with an uneasy optimism. It seems impossible to peg down 

Murakami’s intentions but I nevertheless felt a very strong cohesion throughout all of the disparate parts and along the entire fractured timeline.

With that we are stopped just outside my top 10, so just to infuriate you, the next post will be an extra-long count-up of my bottom 13 books of the year before I finally unveil my 10 favourite reads of 2014.

Books of 2014 Part 3: 30-21

Yes having a day out of the house yesterday means I'm a bit late with posting this one. Relax, Mother. 

30) Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey

#BookerPrizeWinners #AustralianBooks

So finally, our first double hashtag, but also despite the break in between, this makes six Booker Prize winners in a row. Will this trend continue? No. No it won’t. Sorry for the spoiler.

This was my first taste of Peter Carey, and a very odd tale to start. It’s effectively a first person narrative, although the story our narrator tells is basically “How my Grandfather met my Grandmother”, or otherwise the story of two colonial settlers, predictably named Oscar and Lucinda, who meet in Sydney and have a bet about transporting an entire glass church 400 kilometres up the coast. Yep, that’s pretty much it.

The strangeness of the story, though, is not where the strangeness ends, because Carey plays around a great deal with our expectations of narrative direction and style, and while the story felt plodding at places, it all pays off with a big bang.

I hadn’t really noticed how depressing a book this is - about overcoming a gambling addiction, struggles with unemployment and poverty – until the final depressing blow, details of which would basically be the worst spoiler possible, in the sense that it would completely rob this book of its power. Basically let’s just say this book definitely worked for me, and it has a great hold on my memory as a result.

29) War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

#BookshelfCatchUp

Not a Booker Prize Winner? Great, let’s take a nice, relaxing breather. No, fuck it, let’s discuss War & Peace.

Sitting on my bookshelf for the best part of 15 years, this felt like it would fall into my ‘too difficult ever to read’ pile, but with a great No-fuck-it determination I picked it up and spent a month saying No-fuck-it-I’ll-keep-going.

No, in truth it’s not that difficult a read, although it is epic in its scale and at times interminable in its persistence of “At this point let’s just take a few hundred pages to discuss historiography and in what ways historians have gotten it wrong so far”.

Yes, like Hugo’s description of the Paris sewer system in Les Misérables, I could have done without all of Tolstoy’s editorialising, because the story it otherwise tells, in its brief commercial breaks from proselytising, of Russian society and the effect of the Napoleonic wars on the ordinary Russian people as well as the Russian national consciousness, is rather compelling.

I was particularly drawn to the character of Pierre, whose everyman buffoonish, but well-meaning demeanour, makes him as much of a ‘hero’ as this book can muster. I was really quite swept up in his story arc, and overjoyed when it came to a satisfying conclusion (the fact that the book was also concluding may have contributed to my joy). Andrei Bolkonsky and Nikolai Rostov are the other two major protagonists, and although they strike more classically heroic figures I didn’t find them as compelling as I did the wonderful Pierre.

At the end of the day though, the book is a monumental achievement and well deserving of its place in the canon. I don’t think it has the resonance for the modern world as, say, Crime and Punishment whose themes about the tragedy of the human condition are universal, but it’s still a masterful work of fiction and a remarkable bit of history as well.

28) Let the Great World Spin – Colum McCann

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Well actually I’m stretching this hashtag for inclusion here, just because I feel I need a hashtag for everything, because it’s Blogspot, and Blogspot totally uses hashtags. I actually had a very fine reason for reading this book, namely that it was recommended to me by Davis, our erudite and charming AirBnB host from New York last year.

This is one of those collage-type narratives, telling the story of a city (namely, New York) through a diverse cast of characters and, like Don DeLillo’s Underworld and its home run, all the stories center on a pivotal event that has all eyes on it. In this case the event is Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the World Trade Center towers.

So firstly, is this as good a book as Man on Wire is a film? Well that’s a stupid comparison and a stupid question. I hope you feel ridiculous for having asked. The fact is I found the book a little confusing at first, because the whole prologue/first act tells of a pair of (presumably Irish) Catholic brothers, and feels like the book will become their story. It’s quite a fair chunk of the way in that other characters and plotlines are introduced.

After my initial confusion though, the storylines are engaging, and well intermingled – arguably more so than in Underworld or, another similarly-structured book discussed on this blog before, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime – but at the same time it didn’t quite deliver the knockout emotional punch of these other two books. Perhaps too much happens at the start, and it plateaus out a bit towards the end. Still a great read, but not one I immediately started to rhapsodize over.

27) A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

#BookshelfCatchUp

So from Leo Tolstory via Colum McCann we come to another canonical writer whom I had never read. I was, as most people are, already very familiar with the first line – "It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times" – but otherwise hadn’t properly sat down to churn through any of Dickens’ work. I hope I’m not contradicting myself, though, to say that I had tried and failed to read this very book at one time in my life, and I can tell you in fact exactly when it was because the bookmark I used was still in it and reminded me that I had an orthodontist appointment on the 5^th of May, 2002.

As with my first attempt to read this book (admittedly it lasted about ten pages, max) I found the opening exposition a little tedious, but it was very much in keeping with nineteenth century tradition of having an opening exposition that’s a little tedious. Persistence pays off because this really is a very fine book indeed.

Without meaning to spoil anything (but you know, like you actually read this anyway, mother), I noticed Chekhov’s gun very early on in this story – in particular the deftly woven little detail that Carton and Darnay bear a striking resemblance to one another – and spent the rest of the book enjoying the fact that, despite its shoehorning in of all the different elements, it was all done very deftly and subtly.

Early on in the piece I was drawn to the character of Carton who, like Pierre in War and Peace had a downtrodden, relatable quality, and the dramatic build-up to his great sacrifice was compelling. I have to admit it did feel a little Bill Pullman in Sleepless in Seattle-esque in its contrivance (anyone who’s followed my brother and me on Twitter in the past month will know this is a great bugbear of mine), but the ensuing suspense and resultant conclusion were still deeply enjoyable.

A tad loquacious at times, Dickens otherwise really weaves a fine fable, and I can look forward to reading more of his work for future write-ups.

26) Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

#BookshelfCatchUp

Apart from being able to tick off another book that has sat on my bookshelf for upwards of 15 years, there was another very good reason for finally catching up with Conrad’s masterwork, namely that I decided this year that Apocalypse Now is my all-time favourite movie. It only seemed fitting then that I acquaint myself with its loose source material.

And I was delighted on two accounts: firstly, that it delivers an evocative and eerie tale of doom; and secondly, that it didn’t deliver as evocative and eerie a tale of doom as Apocalypse Now, cementing the fact that the film is a masterpiece on its own rather than simply borrowing the vibe.

So I’m sure you all know the story – Martin Sheen has to track down and kill Marlon Brando who’s gone mad oh whoops that’s the film again – so I’ll say instead that this second foray into Conrad for me held a similar sense of detachment from my first, Lord Jim. I don’t know if it’s a criticism or just an observation of his style that doesn’t quite work for me, but his way of having his fictional characters narrate to others - as if spinning yarns around the campfire - has a self-conscious filtering quality to it. In this case it doesn’t dampen the ultimate effect, but it still takes me a bit out of it, like I have to think twice as hard to picture the scene.

The story, though, of the unrelenting exoticism of the jungle, and the power that nature has to subjugate the best of us, is timelessly fascinating, and while I couldn’t stop wondering when Robert Duvall was going to wander in and set his boombox to play Flight of the Valkyries, it still held me in its thrall throughout.

25) Brighton Rock – Graham Greene

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Absolutely no reason, me? Of course not. I love Graham Greene, so what better reason to read something than because it was written by him? Stupid me and my stupid hashtags.

This is actually a really weird book, and in all honesty it further befuddles my understanding of Greene’s work, although it pleases me that it’s so hard to pigeonhole him. Although I said in my last post that I’ve never read any gangster novels, I think it’s fair to call this a gangster novel.

It tells the story of Pinkie Brown, a young upstart who aspires to be the kingpin of the Brighton underworld. He’s an intriguing character, in the way that his ambition far outstrips his competence, and the way he tries to effect threats on those around him comes across as mere teenage impudence, lacking any real menace.

And that’s what’s weird about the story. It feels in tone and style like a sort of wry comedy, which completely belies the brutality that lies within the story. It’s a fish-out-of-water story, about a young bloke who gets in way over his head (and yes I’m aware I’ve just drowned that metaphor) but is ultimately and deservedly the architect of his own destruction. Yes, I’m also aware that architects usually don’t destroy things, I’m having a shocker.

Despite its weirdness though, Greene’s sheer luminescence as a storyteller shines through as usual here, and I think this book could only grow in my esteem upon a second reading.

24) Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee

#BookerPrizeWinners

Ah, so all the Booker Winners weren’t just clumped right in the middle of my list, here’s another one.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely sure why this book is quite so high up by comparison with some of the others in that clump of six. The best reason I can figure is that there’s certainly nothing wrong with it, at least.

Having said that, it’s a very depressing read. The story of a university lecturer who has an affair with one of his students and then finds himself isolated and publicly disgraced. It’s an interesting exploration of themes, taking us through the protagonist’s emotional journey into the sickness unto death (something for all you Kierkegaard fans out there, whooo! Represent!).

At the heart of this story lies the question, though,  of what exactly did the protagonist do wrong? Certainly he took advantage of a vulnerable younger woman, but it remains an encounter between two consenting adults. It’s drawn out into strokes of racial inequality in a still-divided South Africa, but becomes far more about simple loneliness and desolation as an inadequate man approaches his autumnal years.

Bleak and morose, there’s no fault to this book, but I’m not sure I would necessarily nominate it unprompted as my 24th favourite read this year. Call it a quirk in sorting.

23) Whit – Iain Banks

#BookshelfCatchUp

So a few years ago, my brother was in the midst of an obsessive Iain Banks-fandom and so showered me with a selection of his finest works. It’s exactly what I’d do with him and Saramago, if he still read books. So in the spirit of getting through more of the books that have sat unread on my bookshelf, I picked this one up, knowing absolutely nothing about it except that Jez recommended it.

This is the imaginative story of a religious cult, and a young woman raised in its embrace venturing out into the real world to try and rescue her cousin, who seems to have turned away from the light.

Isis, our first person narrator, is an interesting and quirky character: pious and self-righteous on the one hand, but with a devilish cunning and wit on the other. Whit has the vague feel of a piece of critical utopian fiction, as Isis begins to uncover cracks in her cult’s rock-solid foundations, but as with other Banks books, the obvious path is always the opposite direction from the narrative.

While I didn’t embrace this nearly as closely as I did Banks’ The Bridge, this is nevertheless a very worthwhile and intelligent satire, with his trademark sense of humour stamped all over it.

22) The Circle – Dave Eggers

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

I went into this book ready to hate it. Not hate it because it was going to be bad, but because it was going to be good. More specifically, that it has the same germ of an idea for a novel that I had been planning for years, but fuckin’ Dave Eggers had snuck in ahead of me, already finished and published it and won universal acclaim for it.

My hypothetical novel that will probably now never be written and Eggers’ already written and universally acclaimed novel share a similar premise: namely a satirical dystopia based on Google, current social media trends and the principle of complete unrestricted access to information, but apart from that our approaches (again, mine only hypothetical, Eggers’ actual) are completely different.

Eggers focuses largely on the more social aspect of the information age, the sharing of all our personal information and the gradual erosion of the private sphere. And while Eggers is clearly lampooning companies like Google and Facebook, his ‘The Circle’ is not a satirical stand-in but rather a separate company in a speculative future. The only way we really know this is because there’s a single, really clumsy bit of exposition early on when he talks about The Circle pushing ‘Google, Facebook, etc.’ out of the market. Oh well now that’s conveniently out of the way let’s continue with what really would have been handled better if it were a satirical stand-in.

He certainly has some very interesting thoughts about the direction in which our current age is taking us.  While he expounds them for the most part interestingly as well, there’s a point in this book where it feels like a catalogue of different aspects of this constant over-sharing, and the frequent company town-hall meetings announcing a new innovation or initiative give the narrative arc a stop-start feel.

I’m not saying that I could have done better than Eggers. I’m saying that he does a lot of things very well; just differently. Moreover, I’m saying that I still can do better, and maybe one day I will. 

Unfortunately, I’m bitter about the inevitable comparisons between my magnum opus and this, and the fact that most of them will presumably be unfavourable. Because this is still a very fine book, and deserving of the accolades it's received.

21) The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

This is the last of the books I read this year (obviously not counting the two and a half books I’ve read since starting these write-ups), and in fact I had already ranked all my books while I was in the middle of this, so I just slotted it in where I felt it fit best.

For some reason, I’d avoided this book for years. And for some reason, I keep using the phrase ‘for some reason’ to describe things for which I’m completely and consciously aware of the reasons. The reason was this: I loathed, and gave up on, and was willing to set fire to, the only other Eco I’d tried to read, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loarna, because I just found it utterly, interminably tedious.

What’s more, every other smaller bit of Eco I’d read seemed obnoxious, full of argumentum ab auctoritate, and just generally a list of items rather than a clearly argued thesis. However, the merit of Eco remains a prickly subject between me and my friend Catie, who had read and loved The Name of the Rose many years ago, and continued to hold its author in high esteem. So why not finally give it a chance.

It’s certainly of far more merit than Queen Loarna – at least as much of that as I could stomach – and also far more accessible. Perhaps it’s simply that the framing device of a murder mystery and investigation is more engaging, but I just feel Eco’s self-puffery is more subdued here.

Having said that, there remains a lot of long expeditions into theory and theology, frequently resorting to ab auctoritate citations, and I found that some of its more interesting suppositions may have benefited from a more Socratic approach. This is, however, an argument more against some of the characters’ exchanges rather than Eco’s narrative interventions, and overall the ideas are all intriguing and thought-provoking.

At the end of the day, I’m not entirely convinced that the murder mystery and the theological-slash-philosophical treatises throughout are successfully enmeshed, but both are enjoyable enough on their own to warrant attention. In short, Eco can be a good writer, provided he keeps his own ego in check.