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.