Books of 2014 Part 1: 50-41

It's the most wonderful time of the year: end of year countdown time. I'm starting this year, as I did last year, with the books I read this year, although my 'cutoff' point for books was really rather arbitrary this year, for the simple reason that I didn't have a set reading challenge this year, so I couldn't start writing once I'd finished any challenge.

In fact, the truth is that since I 'cut off' 2014 reading and started ranking and writing these up I think I've read another two and a half books, which will now come under 2015 reading I guess.

So the other note to point out before I start is that, unlike the previous two years, these books are not all part of a list like the TIME list, and while there were some minor, loose challenges I set myself (most notably reading more Booker Prize winners), the selection here doesn't follow a coherent theme. For the first time, too, I'm writing up EVERYTHING I read this year, not just those that were part of a challenge. Reasons for reading each book will be outlined through everybody's favourite signifier, the hashtag.

Also in terms of countdown order I've decided to do what I usually do with films, start towards the bottom (ie. number 50), work my way up to number 11, then jump back to do my bottom 14 before revealing my top 10. But we'll start here with number 50:

50) The Famished Road – Ben Okri

#BookerPrizeWinners

An odd one with which to start my countdown, this. Odd not only because the book itself is odd but because it’s so odd that I can’t really get my head around it, or what I think of it.

Part of my Booker Prize Winners catch-up, this rambling Nigerian picaresque fable starts off mystical and a bit surreal and keeps running that same line for its entire length. From what I could glean, it seems to be the story of a boy who is in frequent communication with the spirit world, the ghouls of which are always trying to entice him back to their side. Meanwhile, he has issues with his father, who has ambitions to be the world’s most famous boxer, and a local bar-owner, Madame Koto, who may or may not be an evil witch, or a good witch, or something.

To me the book’s strengths lie in its political satire, where the ‘party of the rich’ and the ‘party of the poor’ face off in popularity contests and dirty tricks campaigns but ultimately become indistinguishable from each other. However, the book falls down from its slippery narrative as well as from its length. Both of these weaknesses combined to make it seem like it was frequently building to something and then disappointingly slink off in another direction, and it would do this too often for me to keep caring.

Certainly an interesting book in theory, but in practice it failed to grip me.

49) Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel

#BookerPrizeWinners

Two Booker Prize Winners to start off the countdown, and perhaps a more controversial choice to have down this low.

The truth is I genuinely struggled with this book. Not because of its length but because of the befuddling complexity of its narrative web. It tells the story of King Henry VIII’s reign, mostly in a roughly seven-year period from the deposition of Cardinal Wolsey to Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn.

I thought early on that had I known a lot more about that period in history that I might become more engaged. True as that is, I also think the book shows a fair amount of arrogance in its assumptions about its reader. It could hold up better upon a second reading, but for the first time through I found myself largely sleepwalking.

As one example of Mantel’s density (also nonchalance), it took me the best part of a quarter of the book for me actually to realise that every single scene is written from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view, so she will launch into a longueur about a secondary character’s thoughts and feelings, then start the next paragraph with “He entered the room…” or something, and halfway through the paragraph you’ll realise that “He” has suddenly switched to referring to Cromwell. In the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies (to be mentioned later) Mantel fixes this ambiguity by adding a parenthesis so it would read “He (Cromwell) entered the room…” It may just be editorial prodding but it was a far clearer way to read.

But ultimately, the contrast between this and the sequel makes me sense biggest weakness: namely that I just didn’t find the history all that intriguing, or not intriguing enough, so the plodding narrative just felt interminable.

48) The Cave – José Saramago

#BookshelfCatchUp

This falls firmly in the “Hooray, I have no strict reading challenge regimen this year, I can read whatever the hell I want” category of reading options. Or more appropriately, this falls into the “trying to catch up on books we’ve had sitting in our bookshelf for ages”. (Hashtag invented after I wrote this paragraph)

We’ve had this book on our shelf since late 2011 or early 2012 when we bought it at a book market in Melbourne. Even though the blurb didn’t really grip us, we were at the time in the midst of an obsessive José Saramago fandom, which I guess I’ll have to let you know when it ends. It tells the story of an old potter and his daughter who deliver their hand-crafted pottery to a giant, self-contained ‘mall’ (which I picture in my head as basically the Tyrell corporation from Blade Runner) which one day decides they can no longer accept his wares.

The Cave is somewhat less Kafka-esque in its premise than some of Saramago’s other works, which can usually be summed up in a single “What if…?” question. Despite its inability to be so summarised, in other ways it’s probably the most Kafka-esque, in that the satire of bureaucracy and big business vs small business is very reminiscent of The Castle (Kafka’s, not Sitch’s).

The way the book ends was certainly unexpected, but it didn’t quite have the punch of other Saramago ambivalent endings, and overall it was just a little dull – mainly because I feel the premise wasn’t quite as intriguing. It’s definitely towards the bottom of his oeuvre, but then when you’re dealing with Saramago’s oeuvre, the bottom’s still a decent place to be.

47) The Magic Toyshop – Angela Carter

#BookGroupReading

This is the first of many books that I read for our book group this year which will come under the highly stylish and inventive heading #BookGroupReading (pause to accept accolades). There has been a fair amount of contrast in the selections this year: some good, some not so good. And I assume you’ll put this one in the not-so-good basket based on its ranking.

I’d be tempted to agree with you, but at the same time I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this book at all, it’s just really not my thing.

Basically a gothically-styled fairytale with an orphaned girl and her siblings being forced to live with her creepy aunt and creepier uncle, the latter of whom of course has a toy workshop downstairs where he makes creepily lifelike toys.

All in all I feel like it treads fairly familiar territory, both in terms of the gothic genre and in terms of the whole fractured fairytale thing: I feel there are some archetypal assumptions you’re supposed to bring with you, but otherwise I felt like where it did take twists were somewhat obfuscating. Overall, though, it's reasonably predictable and reasonably satisfying (although some in our book group apparently disagreed on this score; I had to skip this meeting), but it just felt too far removed from myself and what usually piques my interest in literature.

46) Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Another ‘read because freedom’ choice, I came into this book knowing very little about it except that it’s one of the world’s most famous comical novels. So its lowly position owes more to my expectations than any slight on its intrinsic quality.

The main issue is that it’s not all that funny. I don’t know if it’s meant to be by today's standards, or indeed if it’s only meant to be comical in terms of the way it parodies the rural narratives that were popular around the time of its publication. But going into a comical novel and just finding it a bit silly means my expectations were let down a bit.

I should clarify though that I found it enjoyable enough as a narrative. Once I stopped expecting to laugh out loud at the caricatures and distorted exaggerations of country stereotypes, it was a well-constructed story, in terms of the way it drew out the mystery shrouding each of the characters and pulled them all together for an ending that works for everybody.

I’d say the only other thing that irked me – and again, it’s probably due to my ignorance of the source of its parody – was I found the motivations of the main protagonist, Flora, very obscure throughout. I feel like there might be something I was supposed to go in knowing about the ‘typical city girl’ who slums it in the countryside, but her detachment from me left me feeling disenfranchised for much of the book.

45) The Scarlet Pimpernel – Baroness Orczy

#BookshelfCatchUp

Another of the ‘Catch up on books that have been on my bookshelf for years’, I picked this up this year directly after reading Treasure Island, which we’ll hear more about later. It seemed like a fitting way to follow up an adventure story: with another adventure story.

What first drew me into this story is that the first escape that is engineered in the actual narrative (that is to say, not related third hand by a character saying ‘oh have you heard what the Scarlet Pimpernel did two years ago?’) was undoubtedly the inspiration for a bit of Tin Tin subterfuge in, I believe, The Blue Lotus, and it’s a clever ploy, so it had me hooked in terms of adventure early on.

However, there were two things that dropped the book in my estimations: one its fault and one not so. The latter is that age-old issue, that when you are already so familiar with a crucial plot point (in this case ‘who is the Scarlet Pimpernel’) then reading the characters finding out for themselves just has a diminished impact – and in fact, this same issue will be raised again when I discuss Treasure Island.

The second is that, despite the high, life-or-death stakes at play here, the majority of the story is just the drawing out of one big elaborate con, and it feels a bit hyper-stylised to the point of farce. It’s neat and satisfying and enjoyably suspenseful but it just can’t escape its own hyped up self-importance.

44) The Jaguar Smile – Salman Rushdie

#BookshelfCatchUp

It wouldn’t be an end-of-year book write-up without some Salman Rushdie right? Unless of course it was last year’s write-up, which didn’t have any Salman Rushdie. Still, 50% of all write-ups has now inflated to 66% of all write-ups. If these trends continue I can see it almost topping the 75% mark by the end of next year.

So, all stalling aside, The Jaguar Smile is perhaps a bit of an odd one to discuss for someone who’s as big a fan of Rushdie’s fiction as I am, being a shortish work of gonzo (-ish) journalism rather than his usual niche of magic realism. It also displaces his concerns from the Asian subcontinent to Nicaragua, during the time of the Sandinistas’ rule.

Rushdie tells a first person account of his travels and talks with political figures and other intellectuals (this is pre-Satanic Verses but post-Midnight’s Children, so Rushdie is a write of some note but presumably not quite the household name he would soon become) and offers some insightful but somewhat polite critiques of the regime, and the attempted interference by the Carter-led US.

It’s a decent travelogue and piece of political journalism, and I can imagine it being quite informative and useful as a secondary source in studying Nicaragua during the 80s, but unless you actually have an interest or knowledge of Nicaragua in the 80s (which, surprisingly enough, I don’t) it won’t have any gravitas beyond a mild reading interest.

43) Sunset Park – Paul Auster

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

So this is probably the most random reading choice in the lot. I started this because I finished a book on a workday when I hadn’t expected to, and that day Bec had bought this at a used book sale and I needed something for the train trip home.

I have a bit of a chequered history with Paul Auster. I read what is arguably his masterpiece, The New York Trilogy, in 2004 on the recommendation of a friend, and hated it. But hated it in such a pointed way that my admiration couldn’t help but grow at the polarising effect it had on me. It was such an infuriating, frustrating collection of stories that you couldn’t help but get caught up in it, and that’s quite an achievement.

Then a couple of years ago I picked up The Brooklyn Follies, and found it by contrast absurdly lightweight; sappy, even. So much so that the slight about-turn it takes on the very last page began and continued to fester, in the same way that my admiration for The New York Trilogy grew slowly.

So what to make of Sunset Park? It follows very much the same trajectory as The Brooklyn Follies, recounting the stories of a group of damaged people living (or pointedly not living) in New York and their attempts to overcome their demons with a bit of shoulder-leaning from the other damaged people around them. Soap opera stuff, really. But then again it takes this turn down a dark alleyway towards the very end, in a way that doesn’t obviously connect with everything that came before, while still somehow managing to repudiate the same.

The thing is that I find Auster’s prose such easy reading that if he’s trying to make any important statement, it seems easy to skip over, but then that becomes entirely the point. His dark twists – if that’s what they’re meant to be – are a complete blindside attack. Nevertheless, I remember the narrative construction of The New York Trilogy as being infinitely more sophisticated by comparison, so I either need to revisit that earlier work (as I may have been mistaken about its sophistication) or just accept that Auster is an incredibly versatile writer who really understands his craft.

42) Vernon God Little – DBC Pierre

#BookerPrizeWinners

Another of the Booker Prize catch-ups and possibly the most iconoclastic in terms of the Booker being a prize for Commonwealth Literature which, of course, it no longer is for absolutely no worthwhile reason. So that point has become kind of redundant.

Nevertheless, despite being written by a Commonwealth-born writer, Vernon God Little is set in, and very much about, ‘Murica – although it’s about ‘Murica in exactly the same way that the moniker ‘Murica refers to America – with a dripping sense of satirical irony.

It’s probably worth a comparison between this and Gone Girl given the present hype surrounding the film (I haven’t read the book so can’t compare like with like) as Vernon God Little has a similar view on the American media and the way they manipulate their audience to push an agenda. In Vernon’s case there is perhaps less manipulation and entrapment (although there is some) and more a sense that he is a victim of a system to which he doesn’t belong.

There are some excellent darkly comical moments throughout this book – none which made me laugh out loud – but ultimately I felt the book for all its farcical nature took itself way too seriously, and while I was caught up in the Sisyphean conundrum for the most part, the character of Vernon started to irritate me after a while. Frustration at his situation is largely the point, so when I started to lose sympathy and felt more that he was the author of his own misfortune, the frustration at the plot just dimmed my enjoyment.

41) Shades of Grey 1: The Road to High Saffron – JasperFforde

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Another book chosen for no concrete reason, I’d say this one falls under a couple of headings nonetheless, ‘authors I felt I should probably read at some point’ and ‘I like dystopias'.

The sad truth is that there is so many of the familiar and comfortable tropes of dystopian fiction in Shades of Grey (and since this is currently the only existent book of the trilogy I will refer to it in this way rather than calling it The Road to High Saffron) that it almost feels like a (if you’ll pardon the pun, and fuck you if you won’t pardon it) paint-by-numbers piece of dystopian fiction.

Set in a realm called Chromatacia, where social status is determined by your ability to see colours (‘Greys’ are unable to see colour and are therefore low-class while ‘Purples’ are high status), it tells the story of a young ‘Red’ who suspects that his colour-seeing ability is a lot higher than presumed, which will set him on a path to a higher calling. It has huge generic smacks of Brave New World and 1984 with a dash of Logan’s Run thrown in for good measure.

Despite my liking a lot of the elements that make up a genre piece like this, I think where it falls down is the fact that the world of the book is so fantastically removed from reality that it lacks that social commentary that is so piercing in the best dystopias. Even though there’s a temptation to look at the class system of Chromatacia as a critique of real-world social class systems, it really just seems like a world that is completely separate, yet familiar to the point of being unimaginative.

There are some very likeable fantasy elements here – one of which I found myself later in the year remembering as a quirky plot point, and at first couldn’t remember where it was from – but it read just like too much genre fiction and didn’t grip me in its world of speculation. I can come up with other books in a similar generic vein that have completely gripped me this year, but we’ll discuss them in later posts.