Books of 2015: Top Ten

So here we are, a Christmas morning wrap-up of the ten books I loved most this year. There's a little variety in here but as usual my tastes lean towards the depressing/cynical/dystopian. So without further Apu...

10) A Man in Love (My Struggle Book 2) – Karl Ove Knausgaard

#NewAuthors

So I presaged this one earlier when I called it far superior to Book One, A Death in the Family. Yes, I enjoyed book two of My Struggle enough for it to crack the top ten.

On the surface this operates in very much the same space as book one – it’s full of humdrum, routine details interwoven with piercing insights. But where A Death in the Family started to become hilariously mundane to me, and vacillated oddly between trivia and reflection, I feel that A Man in Love strikes the right balance as Knausgaard weaves his themes into the everyday experience.

The story, such as it is, in this case, takes us into his life with his wife and daughters, and jumps around a lot in time, detailing his first, failed marriage, and his arrival in Sweden (with lots of little digs at Swedish people which are quite amusing as an outsider) and plenty of literary anecdotes that can be enjoyed on their own merit as well as part of the greater narrative.

Enjoyable as both books are, this one struck a real chord with me as he wrestles with the question of what it means to be a man, and a family man, and struggles to become the best person that he can be. Even while he does this, he is very candid and honest in his warts-and-all self-portrait, and he establishes himself as a compelling anti-hero in his own life. I eagerly anticipate the next translation.

9) The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

#NewAuthors #BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

What is this? A top ten entry for me that isn't dark, brooding, existential and with most or all people dying in the end? Did Sam accidentally get the special “editor’s cut” that ends with Colin going mad and slicing through the secret garden with a chainsaw before turning it on Mary and Dickon? No, not at all. This is, quite simply, a beguiling and charming story that I completely fell for.

I first found appeal in The Secret Garden by looking on it as a kind of anti-Gothic novel: there are lots of Gothic elements to the story: the secret forbidden area, unseen, untended for years; the giant mansion with long corridors and abandoned rooms; disembodied crying and the haunting, but constant presence of the dead Mrs Craven. Oh, and if I didn't mention it, the dude’s name is craven. How Goth.

But the anti-Gothicism manifests itself through the perspective of Mary: she sees it all with her innocent and curious child’s eyes, and as a sheltered, spoiled person is so self-unaware that she simply doesn't know enough to be intimidated in an atmosphere that adults would find so malevolent and haunting. Everything is actually dealt with matter-of-factly: the forbidden area of the ‘secret garden’ is not looked on as a place of awe and worship but rather a mystery that needs to be solved, so Mary sets about finding the entrance and letting herself in.

As a result of all of this, the book becomes a joyous manifesto in which the dead, invalid and umbral are brought back to vivacious, colourful existence, and page after page is full of enlivening wonder. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a little odd that I so readily turn up my nose at optimism in books set in an adult world – like Bel Canto and May We Be Forgiven – as soap opera-esque, but when depicted through the innocent filter of childhood as here, it’s simply joyous and happy.

I just feel that there’s a more perfect marriage here of mood, setting and content: Burnett strikes the right balance throughout to make such a complete redemption and rejuvenation seem both plausible and highly empowering. Basically, from reading this book I learned that there’s a secret garden in all of us. And that Lisa Simpson is guilty!

8) Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand

#BookGroupReading #NewAuthors

Wow, what a segue. From easy, childlike wonder we slip down the super-fun happy slide into the boney, waiting arms of Alan Greenspan and his cohort of the undead.

So this was Bec and my (mostly Bec’s) pick for our Book Group, and although it looked like I was somehow blaming Bec in the previous phrase, I actually think it was an inspired pick. Her rationale was that this is a book you should read to better “know your enemy,” and that this isn't the sort of book we’re likely to pick up and read under our own steam. And all of those reasons are valid.

The other valid reason, and it does hurt my bleeding liberal heart a little to say this, is that this is an utterly spellbinding, singular reading experience (with massive flaws, yes – don’t rush me, I’ll get to them). I likened this to reading an inverse dystopia: the speculative vision is bleak and cynical, but we’re viewing it from the other side, where the big heartless corporations are the good guys trying to save the world from slipping into oblivion.

The fact is, Ayn Rand couldn't half write. And naturally you should assume she could, since her legacy is as strong today as ever, and so many people who may be utterly ignorant jerkoffs but aren't stupid still lionise her. Her characters are well-motivated and intriguing, and the mood she creates of uncertainty, of a productive, harmonious world barrelling towards ruination is palpably tense and disorienting. The mysterious figure of John Galt, the parading extravagance of Francisco, and the hard-headed determination of Hank Reardon and our heroine Dagny Taggart – they’re a cast of fascinating, scintillating characters, but more importantly, characters who never get any kind of focus in the kind of books I otherwise read.

There are, however, problems: on the other side, Rand paints a very one-dimensional portrait of liberal-minded people who are either unable or unwilling to rationalise or reason or to see the bigger picture, reducing everything to a plea for pity and who resort invariably to deliberately stupid-sounding arguments like “Oh, but have a heart” or “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” There is a necessity to have this opposition, but it’s frustrating that Rand could provide such depth on her own hail-corporate side of the fence and only resort to silly clichés for the other. I didn't find this flaw to be problematic, however, as it’s also quite a lot of fun to have arguments with Ayn Rand in your head as you read.

The other major, and in fact, critical flaw, involves the absolutely farcical 120-page monologue that marks the book’s effective climax. Notwithstanding the level of disbelief-suspension required to allow that this monologue would continue unabated, it’s a really lazy way of cramming a philosophy down your throat, when that same philosophy has been otherwise so adroitly demonstrated throughout the remainder of the book.

That monologue is not only an immense slog to get through, but it takes you completely out of what was otherwise such a gripping prognostication of doom up to that point. I call this the critical flaw because, had Rand devised a more realistic and coherent way of bringing the book’s themes to a head, this frankly would have been my number one book of the year. I enjoyed reading it that much.

7) Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton

#NewAuthors

This was another genuine surprise for me – not that I had low expectations, but I just had no idea what I was in for. I also kind of turn my nose up at books with pretentious titles, and although this remains a pretentious title, it fits better than anything else could.

Cry, the Beloved Country is about South Africa – the beautiful country that Paton sees it as and the beautiful people who populate it – but moreover it’s a passionate, angry lament about the fact that in the ‘modern’ age as the plague of urbanisation spreads, the country and its people become infested by corruption.

It shares a lot of common ground, thematically and structurally with Richard Wright’s Native Son, but I also read it as kind of a dystopia: the small village inhabited by our protagonist, the reverend Stephen Kumalo, is a sort of utopia where everybody is self-sustained and community-minded, while the metropolis of Johannesburg is a decaying portrayal of urban progression: technologically and culturally advanced but inevitably succumbing to advanced entropy.

The Reverend Kumalo is therefore the outsider who travels to the dystopian chaos and suffers from it, only to return to his idyllic original setting, despite his ordeal infected with hope in how to rectify and rescue civilisation from the claws of decline.

It’s very poignant reading this book, knowing what Paton would go on and do with his life, effectively giving up a natural gift for writing and choosing instead to focus on politics and become an embodiment of the ideals and passions that he promulgates in this book. It’s reassuring in many ways to know that he believed so strongly in what he preaches through this book, and in some ways it actually saves this book from becoming overly preachy and self-righteous.

It’s a passionate cry for help, but also a hopeful one, steadfastly holding to the fact that people are generally good and can improve their situation through cooperation and holding true to character. It’s possible you can read this and feel lectured to, but I enjoyed a great deal of empathy with the characters and their creator.

6) The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

#NewAuthors #BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

So from a passionate cry for help on behalf of a country to a very personal, introspective cry for help. I’d never read any Plath, as I’d mostly seen her as a poet (and I'm not a poetry guy), but was aware of this as a book I should probably read. So I did. And obviously, I loved it.

This was a fascinating and deeply affecting work for a number of reasons. Not least for its blunt, at times matter-of-fact, depiction of a mind suffering from creeping depression, but also from a feminist point of view.

Our protagonist Esther is a compelling figure, for the most part of the book simply going through the motions that society expects of her: putting on a façade as a functional, submissive female, full of hopes of a good marriage and a career, but ultimately yearning for her own independent agency As she starts suffering from her creeping, debilitating feelings of anxiety and depression she subsequently has any hope of agency rudely stripped away.

There’s a really interesting point on all of this made later in the story: Esther is institutionalised in an asylum, and her former flame and presumed-one-day-husband Buddy says to her: “I wonder who  you’ll marry now.” She responds by inverting it “who will marry me now”. I found it fascinating the way Buddy’s assumption is still that she will marry, while she makes the inversion and the corresponding point about agency, about her position now as an object rather than the author of her own future.

The bell jar itself is also possibly the most vivid and striking metaphor for depression I've come across, speaking as a fortunate non-sufferer, and although the rest of the book is intriguing in itself, that metaphor really helped this book linger in my mind as nothing short of a personal but profound and relatable masterpiece.

5) The Sacred and Profane Love Machine – Iris Murdoch

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf #ReadALLTheMurdoch

We knew this one was coming, right? I’ve been mentioning my undying love for Murdoch (IRIS Murdoch) a lot through these write-ups and it’s only really fitting in the end that she has again managed to crack my top 5 this year.

Truth is, although I absolutely adored this book, it was also a bit of a disappointment – for one reason which I’ll get to – and, like Atlas Shrugged, this was earmarked for a number one spot and a double-whammy for Murdoch until late in the piece.

This is very Murdochean. It’s surreal, it’s bizarrely random, and she writes so brilliantly about randomness. This book contains just as many unlikely and implausible coincidences and happenings as in my bottom book of this year, Bel Canto, but rather than trying to force them into incomprehensible symmetry, Murdoch uses them here to paint textures of the chaos that is humanity.

The book basically just tells the story of a love affair gone horribly awry, of a man who can’t make up his mind between his faithful, reliable wife and his exciting, dangerous mistress; it’s all fairly familiar territory. But the selfishness of the central character is compelling: as I've mentioned many times, nobody writes about the male ego quite like Murdoch, and she elicits an immense amount of pathos about illicit love, about loving people we shouldn't in ways that we shouldn't.

Besides the unsympathetic central character, there’s a full ensemble here of Murdoch genotypes – eccentric and each one solitary in their own way and of course, each one relying on the others in ways that just aren't healthy, whether they know it or not.

I was so drawn up in the surrealism, but the humanism of it all, that it was so tragic when a particular ex machina event towards the end of the story just pushed it a little too much into “far-fetched” and “sudden and unexplained” and jolted me out of the fantasy. The truth is there are very few ways to bring about the conclusion Murdoch clearly wanted that wouldn't seem contrived, but this particular one was very abrupt and just too unlikely, even in the circumstances.

The only real comparison I can draw is with my experience watching the Kubrick-begun Spielberg-finished film AI: Artificial Intelligence, if anyone’s familiar with my thoughts on the film. The fact is that the film, like this book, was so completely in my wheelhouse for so much of my time with it, that it just broke my heart to have to admit that, towards the end, the mechanics of the story are creaky and being forced to move ways that they shouldn't. Basically, AI without some of its last 30 minutes could have been one of my all-time favourite films, and likewise The Sacred and Profane Love Machine could have been my number 1 book of this year without some particular plot points.

4) Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham

#NewAuthors #BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

Speaking of titles , can I just say to everyone who raised an eyebrow at the book's cover, or asked me when they saw me reading this in the lunchroom if it’s “work appropriate,” I just want to tell you – little known fact – that before ‘bondage’ was a sex act, it was a perfectly serviceable word? Used to convey meaning? Meaning beyond being a sex act? Holy shit people, get an education!

Anyway, this was an immensely beautiful, profound book exploring, as its title suggests, the inescapable human experience. Maugham writes with immense fluidity: although this bildungsroman covers a long passage of time in our protagonist’s life, the passage of time occurs so seamlessly throughout. Often in other reading, I’ll feel a sort of jolt and need to readjust as an author skips to the next forward progression, but Maugham simply picks up the flow at the next point forward in time and allows you to catch up as you continue forwards.

One of the quirks of the story that helps with that fluidity is the fact that our protagonist, Philip, often ‘forgets’ the names of acquaintances made earlier in the book and he has to remind himself of who they were, which helped to refresh my own memory even while it also adds to the sense of time passing for me in the same continuum as him.

This book overall has a very nineteenth-century feel, but its themes are compelling and timeless, and Maugham explores them with beauty that is at times angelic and at others savage and cruel. One passage in particular had a savage beauty that compelled me so much I took a photo of the page so I could share it with you, in full, at the end of the year:

“Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty.”

Ouch. And it goes on like this.

There were a couple of minor flaws: at times the narration slipped needlessly into omniscience, whereas it’s mostly just all observant third person from Philip’s perspective. The other minor but inevitable criticism is that, while Philip is a sympathetic character, he is at times so utterly, incomprehensibly naïve and stupid that it kind of damaged the relationship I was developing with the author. It simply befuddled me as to what Philip is trying to accomplish by constantly chasing after the wanton and selfish figure of Mildred. Nevertheless, despite that lapse in sympathy the prose itself remains fluid and gripping, and while I questioned the motivation I was still caught up in the events.

Despite these, this is really an immense achievement: philosophical and poetic, at times upsetting and at others uplifting. It could almost be seen as somewhat ordinary – like the story of Larry in Larry’s Party – except that Maugham just produces so many beautiful and arresting reflections on existence.

3) A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

#NewAuthors #HeOnlyWroteOneBookThough #HowSad

So I’ve been biting my tongue throughout my write-ups, when I talked about the smirks elicited from me by Good Omens and the more voluminous guffaws emerging from Thank You, Jeeves, knowing that this book was still to come: a book that cracked me up more than any other has probably ever done.

The story around this book is quite as fascinating as anything contained within the book itself: completed before Toole took his own life, it only saw the light of day through the persistence of his mother in trying to bring the book to someone’s attention, and that someone turned out to be the great southern writer Walker Percy (see The Moviegoer in my write-ups from two years ago). The story around the book is so important because the book itself revolves around a slothful, misanthropic anti-hero and the chequered relationship with his own helicopter mother. So one can’t help but wonder what parallels there are between the fiction and its creator.

The central figure, Ignatius J Reilly, is one of the more compelling massive jerks you’ll encounter: completely egocentric, pointedly and deliberately lazy, and imbued with an intellectual snobbery that allows him to pour scorn over the entirety of humanity for intrinsically being inferior. He states explicitly his relationship with other people as “I really have had little to do with them, for I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one."

The whole book is effectively just an orgy of misanthropy and self-indulgence, as Ignatius careens from one catastrophe to another, each time motivated solely by self-aggrandisement and vanity. But as with so much great southern literature, the whole cast of characters here are effectively unsympathetic even while their unfortunate circumstances elicit our sympathy, and the whole thing plays out like a classical comedy: the humour of ‘low’ characters.

Although this book is as high as it is largely because it’s just the type of base and cynical humour I love, it’s also a really intelligent piece of storytelling full of dramatic irony and pathos that impishly explores one man’s unlimited capacity for self-indulgence. It’s wonderful.

2) The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe

#NewAuthors

Wow, there really are a lot of books with interesting/pretentious titles in this top ten, aren't there? This was certainly a title that had mystified me in the past, but even more so than with Cry, the Beloved Country, this is actually a wonderful, fitting title but one that only really becomes clear once you’re immersed in it.

So to aid my memory with some of these write-ups (and avoid some of the things that slipped through the cracks, like Greene’s The Tenth Man last year), I've tried to keep notes on books that I've read as the year’s progressed. My note for this book begins “Jesus Fuck, not half a book.” I think I remember reading a list a while ago that talked about the best or most important book of each decade of the twentieth century, and this was posited for the 1980s, and rightly so, because there really isn't a more 80s book out there.

This is a gripping political thriller, about the chaos that ensues when a bunch of 80s guys (dun dun DUN dun dun dun dun DUN DUN) face off in what is effectively judicial Guerrilla combat. Basically it becomes simply what the title suggests, as each personality’s particularly over-inflated ego explodes in an inferno against all the others and it becomes a compelling tussle to see who will come out on top, or even untainted.

It all begins when Sherman McCoy, 80s guy, is involved in a road accident in Harlem where a young black man is run down by his car. The fracas that ensues is fuelled by the inflammatory remarks of the Reverend Bacon, 80s guy, as well as the gunning ambitions of well-meaning but misguided hotshot ADA Larry Kramer, 80s guy, and the dry and alcohol-fuelled media ramblings of British expat journalist Peter Fallow, 80s guy.

In many ways I couldn't help but read this as somewhat of an ancestor of Gone Girl what with all its recent hype, given its commentary about media manipulation and trial by public sentiment. Everybody here is fundamentally unlikeable yet somehow, Wolfe is a talented enough writer to somehow draw my sympathy.

McCoy, the main 80s guy, becomes a sympathetic figure in the same way that Jerry Lundegaard is in Fargo: he does reprehensible things throughout, but because he’s so hapless at times there’s no choice but to feel a bit sorry for him. At the same time, I can picture someone else reading this book and just seething with rage at him, and not just people who think differently from me but someone of the very same mindset could have a polar opposite reaction.

That’s part of the joyful power of this book: it’s not simply a conflagration of egos (although that is where the most enjoyment can be had), but also an ambivalent, multi-faceted tangle of lives as well.

So if my maths are correct, that leaves us with only…

1) On the Beach – Nevil Shute

#NewAuthors

This one was a real surprise for me. For some reason although I’d vaguely heard it was somewhat dystopian and/or post-apocalyptic, I’d always filed it in “Australian literature therefore not my thing”. So picking it up and immersing myself in its exhaustive power was a complete revelation.

At the same time, it should have been really, really obvious that I’d like this book because it’s got all of my favourite things: death and doom and world annihilation. What really blew me away was the unwaveringly steady calm that Shute employs throughout, letting the stunning, slow-burn power of the story just wash over you like nuclear fallout.

Set in Australia about a few weeks after an immense nuclear explosion has wiped out a large portion of the northern hemisphere’s population - and the resultant slow-spreading poisonous radiation cloud has wiped out the rest - we join a group of Australian, British and American citizens and officials gathered in and around Melbourne for the last few weeks of life on earth, which includes the crew of the last-remaining functional nuclear submarine.

Grim as the starting premise is, Shute demonstrates admirably that there are far lower depths of grim that one can reach if one looks: throughout the book is a palpable, menacing doom that serves to highlight and emphasise the crushing futility of all the book’s threads of hope that it places in our path: there’s a remote signal coming from a radio station in north America. There’s a hypothetical medication that can slow or prevent the effects of the radiation. At the very least, there’s the possibility of one last love story before humanity faces oblivion.

The fact is that Shute writes this story in a cold, detached, very procedural manner, but all that does is allow the sapping emotions to burn more slowly and more intensely. It’s clinical, and curiously unsentimental despite the emotional heft and the fact that it’s laden with such a menacing doom. I couldn't help but wonder if I was so profoundly shaken by this simply because I’d been hoping – through the likes of May We Be Forgiven – for a truly mercilessly cynical book, and the unwavering misery here was exactly what I’d hoped for?

But more than simply being the uncompromising offering it is, On the Beach also made me think far more than any other book this year, because – though I think this book dropped out of fashion a bit after the end of the Cold War – what it relates seems so inevitable. Not the specifics so much, but that the world-slash-human race will end not actually through some huge natural disaster but through our own destructive agency.

I also liked, in the end, the fact that this book is Australian, but not just for the sake of setting it in Australia (Straya!). It’s very necessarily set in Australia, as during the time of its publication, Melbourne would have been pretty much the world’s most southerly major city, so an apocalypse travelling south on the winds would complete its destruction of the human race here in our own backyard. You could pretty much do the same thing but transplant it to Invercargill, now, or at least Wellington.

I have to admit that the car racing sequences seemed a little out of place – more of a Shute indulgence rather than a plot necessity – but it was merely the premise that didn't work for me, and the execution added to the overall atmosphere. I know I may have effectively spoiled the book for those who haven’t read it by implying there is no happy ending here, but despite how the book does end up, throughout the whole story there is an unending encroachment of fatalism that it’s difficult to imagine any more positive conclusion. Suffice to say, Shute wields its immense power to the bitter end.

And that's a wrap, Mother, and anyone who got lost looking for the great blog about department store shaving experiences, searsbeard.blogspot.com. I hope you enjoyed not reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it up. I will inevitably do some kind of movies of 2015 post (although I clearly spent far more of my free time this year reading than movie-watching), and a write-up of my top 5 beers of the year, but here is the lion's share of my 2015 experience. Bye!

Books of 2015 Part 6: Bottom 12

Just to confuse you of course, I'm now in countUP mode. Yes, UP to the BOTTOM of my list. That makes sense.

61) Breakfast at Tiffany's – Truman Capote

#NewAuthors #BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

Yes, I’d never actually read any Capote up to this point, and I have to admit that part of the reason is I was put off a little by Gore Vidal’s unflattering portrayal of the man in his memoir Palimpsest (I'm pretty sure Vidal uses the term “absolute fuckstick” to refer to him throughout most of the book), as well as the similarly unflattering portrayal in his namesake film. Nevertheless it seems myopic to prejudice myself against a man’s writing based on his character, so down we went.

This is obviously a fairly iconic work, and the introduction of an iconic character in the form of Holly Golightly. It’s a bite-sized novella as well, really quite glib for all its legacy, and although I don’t recall having seen the Blake Edwards adaptation, I couldn't avoid imagining Audrey Hepburn’s voice coming out of the character throughout.

All this being said, which doesn't seem particularly negative (and believe me, I have an eye for the negative), why is this part of my bottom 12? Firstly, it’s not a big grand experience encountering for the first time such a short piece of writing when the story is already quite familiar. Secondly, although the story is familiar, it’s still irritatingly frustrating reading the hapless blokes fawn over such a flagrantly manipulative and selfish character as Holly.

I felt a similar kind of situation in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust with all the men buzzing around this magnetic figure, but Capote’s characterisation of Holly just seems so transparent that it makes everybody so unsympathetic, to the point where I stopped caring what they did or what happened to them. It’s alright, but I certainly didn't love it.

62) Cujo – Stephen King

#NewAuthors

I remember a few years back, somebody posted on a LibraryThing forum a question: which authors working today would still have a legacy in one hundred years? OP put forward Stephen King as a suggestion because he’s done so many iconic works that have also been turned into so many iconic movies. I was snobbish and sceptical at the time but only finally took the time to do a bit of investigating this year.

Maybe Cujo was the wrong one to start with, but there’s very little in King’s writing that really makes me feel he has legacy-level staying power. What little there is exists solely in his ability to evoke feelings of unease; basically, he does horror well.

The trouble with Cujo is that there’s an attempt to draw out chills by evoking the legend of a serial killer in a small Maine town (King’s bailiwick, as far as I can tell) while telling the unfortunate story of a rabid German Shepherd dog. The attempt is just pure bluster, though, since the actual circumstances of the rabid dog attacks are an unfortunate coincidence, and those characters who explicitly recall the horror of the previous killings while encountering this dog just come across like small-town superstitious types. Basically, the parallels drawn by characters didn't have any manifestation in how I experienced the book.

Moreover, for the most part the writing and story are quite facile, and feel a little trite and clichéd when it comes to evoking suspense. There’s a completely ridiculous moment, towards the climax of the story, where the following happens (really rather large spoiler alert, if you care):

He turned and ran back to the cruiser. The dog chased him but he outran it. He slammed the door, grabbed the mike, and called for help, Code 3, officer needs assistance. Help came. The dog was shot. They were all saved.

            All of this happened in just three seconds, and only in George Bannerman’s mind.

I refer to this bit of silliness as a ‘reverse R.L.Stine moment’: the author’s egregious manipulation of the reader’s emotions by leading us quite clunkily down a garden path towards one outcome only to yank away the deliberately-conjured mirage as soon as we reach it. Inversely, with R.L. Stine it’s the case of “something horrible and terrifying happened! *new chapter* oh it was only a prank by somebody” but in this case I found it less forgiveable, because I should be treated with more respect than Stine’s pre-adolescent readership, and it seemed a laughably pointless event in the greater context of the story.

Anyway, ramblings aside, I think there is merit in King’s writing when it comes to evoking mood, but in this case he really pushes that advantage beyond its most absurd limits.

63) The Wapshot Chronicle – John Cheever

#BooksReadForNoReason #DoesntNeedAHashtag

This was my second real taste of Cheever, after Falconer came out #36 as part of the second half of my TIME reading challenge two years ago, so I guess it’s evident I'm not a huge fan of his stuff. I found out later this year that this was actually a National Book Award winner, and apparently I'm just contrarian when it comes to Cheever.

I should say that, like Roberto Bolaño, I first heard of Cheever as a short-story writer as part of the New Yorker Fiction podcast, and I think that his short story shortcomings become apparent here; sometimes your short story needs a bit of a creative flourish or stylistic innovation to stand out from the pack, and such formal inventiveness is utilised in the earlier parts of this book. However, as they quickly become unnecessary to drive the story forward, they seem kind of abandoned.

The only other reason this book is down so low is because I found it unremarkable, and as such unmemorable. It was a little slow-going, where I wasn't all that engaged with the family saga unfolding. Others, like the National Book Award panel, might react more strongly, but it frankly didn't take me long before I’d lost interest in this story or its characters and I just cruised through the last half of the book.

64) The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf

Wow, how are the mighty fallen. I know I had The Cave at a fairly lowly position last year, but for my dearly adored Saramago to crack a bottom ten? I’d say ‘sacrilege’ if I didn't agree with myself on this account.

This is definitely the weakest piece I've read from Saramago (which frankly isn't hard, since so much of his stuff is phenomenal), first and foremost because it’s just a bit dull, but more specifically because the concept is mostly mundane, whereas his more Kafkaesque work is usually so arrestingly vivid and provocative.

This tells the story of a freelance proofreader who, on a whim while editing a writer’s history of the famous medieval Siege of Lisbon by the Moors, decides to insert the word ‘not’ as a correction to completely alter the facts of history. While it doesn't exactly go in an interesting direction from there, it does go suitably Saramago-esque, as this one naughty ploy gets the interest of his attractive sub-editor, and together they explore how the Siege of Lisbon would have gone had this ‘not’ conveyed a true depiction of the historical facts.

The main trouble is that Saramago’s strength is in writing plot, rather than character, so when his chief interest here is in exploring the protagonist’s psychology in an introspective way, the whole prose takes on a dry, academic tone which, when combined with the ‘revision’ of a history with which I'm unfamiliar, is very much a fruitless exercise in intellectual overanalysis.

In theory this is an interesting take on history and romance, and the notion that we’re constantly writing and rewriting history merely by living, but in its execution I found it sadly uninspiring.

65) Picnic at Hanging Rock – Joan Lindsay

#NewWriters #AustralianAuthorsIGuess

I thought it would be an interesting experiment to pick up this book - after I watched Peter Weir’s film adaptation a couple of years ago - and have a look at the comparison. My primary interest in reading this was in examining the portrayal of Edith, whom I found to be one of the most fundamentally unlikeable characters in film history, and I thought the book might add more dimensions to the character.

What’s remarkable, and really soured my opinion to a large extent, is that Lindsay’s portrayal of Edith is somehow worse than in the film. Every opportunity is seized upon to comment on the fact that Edith is stupid, fat, or fat and stupid. It’s just so much ludicrous bullying of your own fictional creation.

Do I have sympathy for Edith as a result? No; Lindsay allows no room for sympathy because Edith is such an unquestionably noxious presence. I could in theory feel sorry for an ethereal concept that may have been imagined into a laudable character, but when you do that you’re just siding with a non-existent character against the creator, which doesn't even make sense.

The book overall could be read as a ‘man vs nature’ tale but everything is so elusive and enigmatic that it doesn't quite have the grounding. It just doesn't quite have the portrait of the unforgiving bush landscape that the film manages to evoke.

At the same time, there is something unmistakably seductive about the mystery itself because it’s so elusive and ambiguous. So the book and the story’s legacy I can still fathom, even if I didn’t meaningfully connect with it.

66) The Last Tycoon – F Scott Fitzgerald

#ImAMasochistIGuess?

Yeah, I guess it’s that time of year when I again apologise to myself for reading an F Scott Fitzgerald and just consign it to the ash-heap of the bottom ten where he always, always belongs.

Actually in this case that isn't so true. Although Fitzgerald typically belongs in the bottom ten of any list (except for ‘writers that MOST make me want to vomit with rage’), this is a surprisingly enjoyable story while it lasts. Set in the ‘glory days’ of Hollywood, it’s largely a satire or lampoon of the Hollywood machine, of the type that if it were a film it would definitely, definitely win Best Picture at the Oscars.

It’s an unfinished novel, though, so there is a lack of finality to it, and it’s a little hard to get a firm grasp on it. It has some wryly amusing perspectives on Hollywood and the nature of fame, and the main reason it’s down this low is that, being incomplete, it had a fair bit of potential that just gets cut short. Interesting, really, that I was quite engaged with a Fitzgerald work but have had to drop it down the rankings due to its unfulfilled promise, but that’s where we are.

There is a sort of ‘afterword’ in the published edition that runs through “what would have happened next if Fitzgerald had finished it” which basically reads like summarising Gone With the Wind as “Scarlett hates Rhett. Scarlett loves Rhett. Rhett leaves Scarlett”. Ultimately there’s no actual value in this unfinished work unless you’re a big fan of Fitzgerald, in which case you’re a moron anyway and there’s no actual value in your opinion. Hey I'm just kidding, you’re alright. Let’s have a big round of applause for the moron, folks!

67) Heat and Light – Ellen van Neerven

#BookGroupReading

Wow, I keep contradicting myself with how many Book Groups I attended this year. Seems it was actually four instead of my originally thought two.

This one was Catie’s choice, and I can’t really remember what possessed her to choose it – I think it was just the interest in this book as a winner of the David Unaipon award, a literary award given to an unpublished Indigenous writer - so basically this book was unpublished and undiscovered until given the accolade.

But there’s a reason for it being unpublished and undiscovered (and if I remember correctly, those in attendance at this meeting were pretty well on the same page, although naturally I'm far more snarky than anybody). Mainly it’s a structural or thematic issue: a collection of short stories doesn't actually need a coherent through-line to be interesting, but it certainly helps. On the other hand, a collection of wildly diverse and variegated short stories can also be engaging in a different way. The trouble with Heat and Light is it falls into neither.

There’s a very explicit through-line for the first selection of stories, revolving around the fortunes of an Aboriginal family living in the shadow of Pearl Kresinger, the ‘matriarch’ of sorts, but the collection then takes a 90 degree turn and the remainder have nothing to do with it, or each other. There are similar themes covered in many of the stories (Aboriginal and lesbian identity being a key one), which vary from being really quite imaginative and engaging (as in part two, Water, which is just one long short story) to utterly dull and samey.

Basically there are some interesting stories in here but when taken as a collective whole, it’s just a bit of a mess, and nothing that really sticks around in my memory as engaging.

68) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

#YepDefinitelyAMasochist

Perhaps more appropriately than Fitzgerald, here indeed is a writer with a perennial spot in my bottom 10. Bottom 5, even. I guess it’s safe to call James Joyce a bottom 5 writer for me, especially given that Dubliners (#57 of 63 books last year) and this (#68 of 72 books this year) were posited to me on r/books as things to ‘change my mind’ about Joyce given how much I hated Ulysses, and yet here we are yet again.

There is certainly less density, less experimentation with style, generally less ‘fucking with the reader’ in these two works than in Ulysses, so I don’t take issue with Joyce fans recommending I read these to try and change my mind, but for various reasons, Dubliners and this just didn't work for me either.

I guess my major issue with this book involves actually its key strength, which is the third chapter, involving a crisis of, and struggle with, the Catholic faith, full of hellfire imagery and sermonising. It’s all a bit heavy-handed and preachy, but I also found it a good self-contained story of internal struggle. It was interesting, too, that this was put in the middle of the book, as it frankly had the feeling of an ending about it, with the protagonist discovering grace.

I say that that was interesting, but it also seemed odd, and moreover, meant that when the book then moved on from there it basically went downhill. It’s all so much free-flowing introspection that unless there’s an intriguing personal crisis going on it’s just too slippery for me to latch onto.

What’s more, that third chapter underlined to me the fact that Joyce can write, but his vainglorious level of apathy for his reader’s interest or engagement is genuinely astounding.

69) Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels

#BaileysPrizeWinners

Tragically, this isn't even the lowest ranked of the Baileys Prize Winners, although we’re really down in the sub-basement of my list by now. I don’t have anything in particular to say about this book’s awarding of the prize; in fact I think it’s quite possible others might get a lot out of this book.

What I found most off-putting is that in the wake of my bottom book of last year, Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel, I found some echoes in this book, particularly in the way it tries to extrapolate the notion of globalisation from what should really be contained in a personal memoir style. Michaels’ writing style (she’s better known as a poet, and it shows) I found very oppressive, and egocentric, with far too much style clouding any substance. Too, many, commas, as well. I feel like there were more commas in this book than there were prepositions.

In spite of all this, and though it took me until the end of the first part, I had started to get into the story a bit, but then it just leaps through time and space for a second part that despite being explicitly connected, is really only relevant story-wise to the first part through a tenuous thematic thread. Frankly I found the second part completely unnecessary.

This was also the most de Kretser-esque part, as it was a lazy narrative device to introduce a supplementary story without a tight connection (de Kretser’s greatest faux pas was in trying to make a big dramatic link between two tenuously-joined stories). There are big events told throughout but I didn't feel they were earned, as Michaels’ dense writing prevented me from learning enough about the characters.

As I said, it’s possible others might have profoundly the opposite effect if they could get into the writing, but I found it haphazardly written, very stop-start and too technically detailed, almost clinical at times. Michaels is not as wildly pretentious as de Kretser, but the book felt more about her own writing than about the story she was trying to tell. It needed more story-telling, and fewer poetic flourishes.

70) The Secret History – Donna Tartt

#OhYeahTheMasochismIsStrongInThisOne

Speaking of perennial losers…

So I don’t know why I picked up this book. I don’t know why I then took the book to the borrowing desk and signed it out. I don’t know why I then insisted on reading it. Every damn day I was reading it, Bec would see me reading it and say “Why are you reading that,” given that The Goldfinch, Tartt’s even-more-acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winner, achieved such a lowly rank in last year’s reading.

The fact is that despite my ranking, I didn't despise The Goldfinch as much as others in my Book Group did, and furthermore, in the critical reception of The Goldfinch I caught wind a few times of this prevailing opinion that The Secret History was a different sort of book and, in many people’s opinions, actually better. Therefore, I think, I read this just to verify such opinions for myself.

And…they’re wrong.

Not only is it not particularly different in style or substance to The Goldfinch, this is a significantly inferior book: less interesting characters, far more mean-spirited and utterly, utterly heartless and pointless. I put it down and could only rack my brain to think of what was the purpose of writing such a narrative?

Let me explain the plot basically. A no-hope loser with zero personality, quite similar to the protagonist in The Goldfinch (except this kid has no “my mother was killed in a terrorist bomb blast in an art museum that I survived” reason for being so utterly devoid of charisma), gets involved with a clique of elitist Greek scholars at college (which gives Tartt open licence to make as many references to Plato as is physically possible), and then discovers his newfound friends accidentally killed a guy while on a Dionysia binge that more closely resembles a Satanic possession (I wish I was joking), and then when their more obnoxious acquaintance gets wind of this accidental murder, they all conspire to deliberately murder said acquaintance, also because he says things that hurt their feelings occasionally, and then Tartt tries to get all Dostoyevskian and people become alcoholics and shit.

It’s a genuinely awful piece of writing, actually made worse by the fact that Tartt throughout makes numerous intertextual allusions that are – unlike Michelle de Kretser – surprisingly erudite and even witty, demonstrating that she’s not stupid.

But where I felt that the protagonist of The Goldfinch was merely an unfortunately blank slate, onto which the larger and more dynamic personalities of the surrounding characters could be projected, our hero here (all hail the hero!) is just a massive loser. There’s a really weird recurrent plot point where he’ll tell a bald-faced lie about his background or even himself (because he wants his wealthy blue-blooded new friends to be impressed by him), without having any background knowledge or having done any research about the substance of the lie, and that is easily checked and verified, and then he gets shocked, astounded and deeply humiliated when that lie is very simply exposed for the bullshit it is. It will be something very much along the lines of (NOTE this is not an actual quote from the book, but it may as well be):

“Last week at a dinner party I had the most delightful long chat with Haile Selassie”

“Oh, really? I’m pretty sure Haile Selassie died in 1975.”

“Nope.”

“Oh. Well, did he tell you any interesting stories about his time as emperor of Ethiopia?”

“What’s an Ethiopia?”

And yet it’s not ameliorated, like The Goldfinch was, by the fact that there are stimulating personalities on the fringes, either: everybody’s just a stock-standard college cliché: the solitary intellectual, the bi-curious rich boy, the beautiful temptress, and of course the turbulent haunted alcoholic twin brother of the beautiful temptress. And for some reason, Tartt thinks we’re also fascinated by the hundred or so other characters that are incidentally introduced throughout the time at college: so much so that the final chapter gives us an Animal House­-­style rundown of what became of all of the fringe characters I couldn't give a shit about and mostly don’t remember having been mentioned. As seen in the miserable last chapter of The Goldfinch though, Tartt really struggles with conclusions.

It’s probably not worth the effort to spit so much venom on this mediocre book, but the two salient facts here are, firstly, I'm enjoying it, and secondly, I think it’s crucially important to dispel any rumours that The Goldfinch being so overrated was somehow anomalous in Tartt’s oeuvre, or that Tartt is in any way a writer worth bothering with.

The other real tragedy is, as I mentioned above, Tartt demonstrates in both of her books that she’s not stupid, yet her plots are so emotionally vapid, her characters so shallow even while they do zany things, and the books ultimately seem so pointless. I think if she tackled subject matter actually worth something instead of these flights of torrid fancy, she could actually be an interesting writer. But I'm highly unlikely to give her a third chance, now. That would make me the stupid one.

71) The Rainbow – D.H.Lawrence

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf

So what could be worse than Donna Tartt, you ask? Why D H Lawrence of course, that author so bewilderingly beloved by the shadowy forces in charge of the British literary canon and so despised by anybody who actually reads him. Well, obviously I'm in a bad, ranty mood after writing up Donna Tartt, but whatever else Lawrence may be, he’s not a writer capable of holding my attention for more than a sentence or two.

This was my second taste of Lawrence, after my much despised Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and I started to muse while I was slogging through this on the fact that, to me, Lawrence is the anti-Greene. You know how I say that Graham Greene, no matter what genre or content he turns his mind to, is a consummate storyteller? He writes generally with little or no fanfare, efficient but mesmerising at spinning a tale.

Lawrence is the opposite: he can evoke a time and place and themes admirably – possibly better than anybody else, but beyond that doesn't tell memorable stories. I just got hopelessly, irrevocably bogged down in his language, so languorous and turgid. There are some awkward turns of phrase, too, that make every third sentence a garden path that requires re-reading. Basically it’s everything that an English schoolboy should dread.

And there’s the crux of the matter: there is so much fodder in this book for a high school syllabus. While I didn’t care a jot what happened to Tom, Anna or the rest of the Brangwens, you could almost play a drinking game with the ‘colour’ imagery evoked: every page there’ll be several juxtapositions of “colour”, “bright verdant hills”, “shimmery white”, “black”, “shadowy” etc. so while it’s the sort of thing to give schoolboys nightmares, it’s the sort of thing that interrupts scholars’ and semioticians’ sleep for completely different and messier reasons.

There were peaks and troughs of action, don’t get me wrong, but it was the occasional peak followed by passage after passage of monotony, and I found this far more trouble to get through than it could possibly have been worth. What could be worse than such tedium? Well…

72) Bel Canto – Ann Patchett

#BaileysPrizeWinners

Facile soap opera ridiculousness is what’s worse than tedium.

This book, somehow bestowed with the Baileys Prize crown, was the most sappy, flagrantly manipulative drivel I've had to trawl through. As with the A.M. Homes, there’s semblance at its inception that it might be heading into interesting, murky territory, as a private opera recital for a Japanese entrepreneur visiting an unnamed (or fictionally named, I can’t remember) central American country is crashed by a group of terrorists who takes everybody hostage.

From there it progresses to an inexplicably bizarre romance story, as the siege goes on for days, then weeks, and all of the captives and terrorists take the time to really get to know and love each other in meaningful ways. It’s quite convenient that a couple of the child terrorists turn out to be girls, one of whom happens to be stunningly beautiful, while one of the captives is (as part of the premise) a world famous opera singer who makes everybody instantly fall in love with her by singing. Another of the captives happens to be amazingly adroit at playing the piano, which is handy when the soprano’s actual pianist dies in the only real bit of pathos from a diabetes-induced coma.

Firstly, the confined setting which in more adept hands could have been used to create an atmosphere of oppressive claustrophobia is merely used as a contrived capsule device to restrict the scope and allow for a potentially intriguing political thriller to be reduced to a romantic microcosm of people from different backgrounds forced to fall in love through circumstance.

Certainly there is a sense of impending doom for twenty pages or so, but as the siege wears on – and Patchett can’t even write herself out of the ridiculousness – the setting becomes routine so all we do is go through the cast of loveable characters and their relationships, even including some absurd “I love you so much I just want to tell you. Oh it feels so good to tell you. Now I’ll leave you alone forever because I love you so much.”

There’s something so childish and Mills & Boony about twisting a hostage crisis into bifurcating romance plots, and Patchett uses a lot of contrivances to work the story in convenient directions. There’s a Red Cross man, for instance, who is allowed to enter once a day and who becomes the deliveryman for plot devices required to establish the next romantic coincidence.

What’s worse, the writing itself is not sophisticated enough to ameliorate the far-fetched story. I hate to resort to being prescriptivist, but when the author herself uses phrases in diegesis like “they could care less”, it just feels lazy, resorting to colloquial clichés rather than being considered and thoughtful about the way language can evoke a mood. The whole thing is very episodic, and the storytelling progresses in a way that when the hostage crisis becomes routine, so too the book just starts to drag.

When it comes to considering that this was awarded the Baileys Prize (then Orange Prize), I find this all very problematic. As a white, middle-class male, I can’t help but feel that this sort of flowery rose-tinted arrangement of romances and people discovering new inner strength is exactly the sort of piffle that your typical misogynist would imagine when considering a “women’s prize for fiction”. So not only is it not a great book but I also find it’s not a great ambassador for the prize’s own value and merit.

I said to Bec when I was about three quarters through, and I’d just been bombarded to the point of exhaustion with saccharine tripe, that Patchett had better end this with everybody being killed – not just because it would become the only thing bordering on reality that had occurred up until that point, but because I needed some destruction and misery to reaffirm my faith in the intelligence of humanity.

So, spoiler alert (don’t read this book though): it comes too late, but kind of everybody does get killed. Not only did it seem a belated tokenistic gesture to verisimilitude, though, but Patchett simply wasn't satisfied with a book full of contrivances and a bitter ending, and had to throw one last piece of utter stupidity garbage in for the last chapter. Yes, two of the surviving characters may have had their lovers killed and it’s all so unfortunate after such a sweet story, but oh well at least the two of them can get married besides having little to no personal interaction up to that point, and they can live happily ever after hooray! HOORAY FOR JOY AND HAPPINESS!

Fuck off.

Books of 2015 Part 5: 20-11

So I'm going to finish this post with you teetering on the brink of excitement outside my top ten, and then increase the suspense as tomorrow I count UP my bottom 12 from 61-72. Top ten will be posted Christmas Day (hopefully; I'm still writing them up). But for now:

20) Time's Arrow – Martin Amis

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf

So wow, two books in a row that Bec went out and bought, and that I read when I ran out of books this year.

It’s not often (i.e. never) that a Martin Amis of any description would crack my top twenty. And ordinarily this would be no exception, apart from the fact that in this there is very little Amis in it. That’s an interesting point to note, because without being quite so Amis, he’s quite a talented little storyteller.

Of course, you can take the Amis out of the Amis, but you can’t take the Amis…*trails off indistinctly* well, basically his wild pretensions aren't here in any supercilious narrative or his character asssinations of poor people for the crime of being poor, but they are instead here in the hugely ambitious artifice of the narrative structure:  in this story, time runs backwards. It’s not simply a backwards-jumping narrative (like half of my number 5 book of last year, Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing, or the film Memento), it literally tells the story with time running backwards, like it’s undoing itself.

As difficult as this conceit is to wrap your head around, once you get into the flow of it, it’s a perfectly affecting book. What’s more, it uses the construct similarly to Evie Wyld, in that we’re shown a man at the end of his life moving backwards in time, and there’s something not quite right about the life that he’s living, even though he seems a perfectly normal human being. So as time runs backwards, we’re slowly given the clues to unlocking what it was that seemed slightly off at first.

I urge you, if you’re ever likely to read this book, to avoid reading the unfathomably retarded blurb that gives away the entire, complete point of the story in about the first four words but just go along for the ride. It’s an extremely challenging ride but a deeply rewarding one, too. And probably the best (/only) argument you’ll find for Martin Amis’ continued publication.

19) The Godfather – Mario Puzo

#NewAuthors #BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

Oh yes, it’s another one of those books: a beloved film adaptation that I so enjoyed and thought “hmm, might as well pick up the source material”.

You’ll notice this doesn't have quite the status that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (#3) or Gone With the Wind (#1) had two years ago, and the reason for that is not that this is an inferior book to them, but rather that where I got so much more out of them than I did from the films (for different reasons), there’s actually very little in this that the film(s) didn't capture.

So for those who don’t know, this served as the source material for the first Godfather film as well as the Vito parts of the sequel, although the plot structure here is effectively just the plot of the first film, with the Vito flashback sequence inserted as a sort of “let’s look back now at where this character started out” to explain his psychology and his relationships a bit – especially with his wife.

But despite not having anything particularly to add to the film after the fact, it’s still very worthwhile reading this book, just because it’s excellent storytelling, and while the film is an unquestionable masterpiece of pacing, mise en scène, acting, art direction and entirely everything, it’s also a masterpiece because there’s such a compelling story behind it. And here it is, fit to give you a renewed appreciation.

18) For whom the bell tolls – Ernest Hemingway

#WhyDoIThinkINeedAHashtagForEveryBook

I guess I could set myself another yearly custom like Dickens, of one Hemingway a year. The only thing is that there’s only really one more Hemingway I care about reading, and it’s really short, and also it’s just happenstance that I've only read one a year, because I don’t find him a difficult read at all. Nevertheless, after The Sun Also Rises (overrated rubbish) got suitably panned two years ago and A Farewell to Arms (not overrated-rubbish) cracked the medium time last year, Papa’s got a brand new top twenty entry.

There’s little-to-no connection between the themes of the three books, although I think this is probably his most involved and intricate plot. Set in the Spanish civil war, it revolves around a young American (all-l-l-l-l night!) volunteer helping the rebels defeat the fascists by making use of his explosives expertise.

Around the politics of trying to penetrate the existing hierarchy of the rebel camp, Hemingway weaves a tale of high suspense and dips again into the well of mortality for much of the pathos.

I'm sure there are academics out there who have combed through the themes and the language - since that’s one thing academics seem to love doing with Hemingway - so I won’t go into them in too much detail. I found it interesting to read about such a small part of a giant war machine in such detail though, and the tension of the book just made it compelling reading. I feel almost as though this is the sort of narrative that Clouzot’s film Wages of Fear wanted to be (and what everyone else seems to think it is).

17) Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut

#SeriouslySamWhy

This was a later read this year, and kind of unfortunately predictable how high it’s come out, because it is the sort of offbeat, cynical black comedy that I invariably respond well to.

And this is really very dark, and also very offbeat. Some weird otherworldly narrator tells us this story as if we’re also not of this world, and some prolepsis tells us that, before we’re done with the tale, one of our main characters is going to go berserk and attack a bunch of people unprovoked.

Vonnegut’s style is one that’s really hard to pin down, and I think his idiosyncracies are what make him so beloved of the internet, because everything he writes is done so nonchalantly and so candidly that even when he’s writing some quite horrifying things, there’s a curious childlike detachment to it, that allows you to make light of it – much the way people on the internet like to do.

Ultimately everything that’s good about this book lies purely in Vonnegut’s writing, because the story is a bit threadbare and as a result there’s no great vision to it, but even while the author is just traipsing through coincidences and side-roads, he still manages to squeeze out some hilarious and satirical truisms as he’s doing so.

I can’t imagine everybody reacting so positively to it, and there’s certainly more of an interesting vision in Slaughterhouse-Five for instance, but there’s still a great deal to like here.

16) The Trial – Franz Kafka

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf

Frankly it took me until later in the year, and when I’d whittled down a stack of library books and was perusing my shelf, that I remembered I had a copy of this book in a different room and that after all this time I’d still never read it. Which I really should, considering how often I refer to things as Kafka-esque, and how frequently somebody mentions The Trial and I know the essence but no details.

The truth is, if you know the essence of the story, you won’t experience a huge avalanche of new material here, because as with all of Kafka’s work, it does just start with a central premise and explores it centrifugally from there. It’s still an exhilarating and uneasily amusing ride, though.

Like The Castle, what’s really on trial here is the system by which humans order their lives – namely, society. And poor hapless Josef K finds himself beset on all sides by people who either are part of that system or who want him to believe they've got the only solution for how to beat the system.

Although at times it gets a bit bogged down in detail, as any lampoon of bureaucracy will, it’s still quite droll, and yet despairing in its existential crisis. What really hits home is not so much the injustice or even the frustration of it all, but the inevitable question that maybe we should be able to take better control of our lives, even in a system that’s working against us.

15) Watership Down – Richard Adams

#NewAuthors #BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

Oh, what a terrible thing to have to admit, that you’re *insert my age here* and you've never read Watership Down. The fact is, my brother loved this book at a younger age, and of course being younger I couldn't possibly be seen to enjoy anything that he enjoyed. Then later in life, I just started to wonder, it’s really just a book about rabbits, right? Rabbits that talk? Is there more of a point to it than that? I finally bit the bullet this year to find out.

And the truth is that there isn't actually more to it than that, which I guess in many ways is why this book is so beloved, because it really is the consummate story about rabbits and/or rabbits that talk. There simply doesn't need to be another book covering the same subject.

I guess my confusion lay in the fact that I wasn't really sure if it was sort of fantasy as well? And it isn't particularly, just a story of high adventure, as we follow a separatist cell of rabbits escape from their warren under the eerie prognostications of one Fiver, whose brother Hazel begins the breakout aided by a disparate group of rabbits with disparate skill sets.

What’s really curious about it is that Adams never really tries to anthropomorphise the rabbits, besides the fact that they talk and have thoughts beyond “Eat. Mate. Shit. Mate. Sleep. Mate”. Although their thoughts extend beyond those basic rabbit functions, their behaviour doesn't, and yet he manages to extract from this a story of great fun and suspense.

This is certainly something I will try and force on my hypothetical kids until I, like my parents before me, give up and hit the bottle because the kid is such an incorrigible little shit.

14) Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh

#MarryMeHarry

So an interesting sidenote for this book: before I tackled it I read an article – I think in the Guardian – about who are the best ‘Tory’ writers, and Waugh was included in that list. I found this kind of laughable, since Waugh spent nearly his entire career mercilessly sending up the old establishment and bourgeoisie. But then I think the article writer was basing this opinion entirely on Brideshead Revisited which is obviously a nostalgic lovenote to the glory days of the empire. It’s possible also that I don’t quite get what’s meant by ‘Tory’ or also that Tories love witty send-ups of themselves (like Hollywood clearly does).

Anyway, to this book, and alongside A Handful of Dust I’d say this is Waugh’s absolute best satire of the English aristocracy. It’s a saga of inheritance and old-boy networks, as members of the inner group behave invariably in atrocious and supercilious ways, but only ever within a preordained framework of acceptable eccentricity: the only grave offence here is that of non-conformity.

But where A Handful of Dust also took me into weird territory I didn't expect, this plants itself firmly in Waugh’s typical milieu – and yes, that is a very Tory universe – and basically just dissects the culture and its values from there.

It’s very funny, very dry and tongue-in-cheek throughout: the institutions and pre-established relationships are so familiar and timely even today, and while it doesn't necessarily do anything but lampoon, it’s rollicking great fun, what. Also interesting to note that I think this book contains the source of the enigmatic title of Stephen Fry’s first memoir Moab is my Washpot.

13) The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolaño

#NewAuthors

I first discovered Bolaño on a New Yorker podcast, where famous writers would read other famous writers’ short fiction previously published in the magazine. To be honest, I can’t remember if I have any fond recollection of the Bolaño story that was read (by Daniel Alarcon), but ever since I've looked at this monstrous tome The Savage Detectives on my library shelf and wondered about it.

It was an immense reward to finally pick it up, even while it’s a long and convoluted journey.

This tells the story of a clique of Latin American writers and thinkers – founders of a movement called ‘visceral realism’ - who get caught up in some unfortunate gang activity in Mexico, and spend the most part of the rest of their lives fleeing across the globe.

We follow two main characters: the Chilean Belano (who I always thought was probably a stand-in for Bolaño himself) and the Mexican Lima, and their intermingled lives as outlaws and intellectuals searching for a famous poet who influenced their thinking across the vast expanses of North and South America and beyond.

It’s really quite a gripping read. As with other writers who can put together a short story well, I think Bolaño has a great talent for narrative voice, and he very seamlessly slips between different protagonists and stories and settings. The book has such an immense scope to it as well that even while you can just sit down and enjoy the individual sections, the whole thing comes together as a modern bildungsroman and examination of the intellectual experience from a Latin perspective.

I couldn't help but compare the reading experience to that of Infinite Jest: although they are in many ways worlds apart, working my way through the pages felt eerily familiar, and the vision of both is certainly comparable.

12) The Outsider – Albert Camus

#BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

When I read this earlier this year, I went into it knowing that some people regard it as the greatest thing ever written and say of it that it "changed my life" and "I had multiple orgasms throughout" and I couldn't help but bring in a load of scepticism. After I read it, though, I had it earmarked as a potential number one book of the year. The fact that it sits just outside the top ten is testament to how strongly I reacted to a lot of books this year.

This is also a very short, digestible read that nobody should shirk from. It tells the story of Meursault, a French Algerian who commits a revenge killing on behalf of his friend after attending his mother’s funeral (that's unrelated). The ensuing trial becomes less a trial about the facts of the killing (which we as readers are privy to) as it is about establishing and destroying the character of the accused.

Because Meursault is guilty, of that we know. But the question remains as to whether it was a justifiable killing in self-defence or whether he plotted the whole thing coldly, procedurally (thereby warranting the death sentence). Little quirks of his character and behaviour are paraded and postulated before the court to establish the fact that the accused is unemotional, unsympathetic, and therefore psychopathic.

This mystery is never fully resolved by the book’s end, but we’re nevertheless somehow left with a palpable sense of injustice, that a person’s idiosyncracies can so readily be dredged up as evidence of psychotic intent, particularly as that person fails to live up to what society prescribes as ‘normal’.

I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to say this book changed my life, but in a short time it managed to establish in my mind why some people have this response.

11) Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie

#BaileysPrizeWinners

So the tragic thing is that this is the highest ranked of this particular hashtag, and I'm being rather conformist in ranking it top of the Baileys Prize winners, as this year, Half of a Yellow Sun was awarded the 'best of’ the Baileys Prize winners from the past decade', so I'm obviously in agreement there.

This is quite a harrowing and emotionally draining book, set in Nigeria around the time of the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s, when a splinter community attempted to break off and form a new country of ‘Biafra’ – the title takes its name from the proposed flag of the fledgling nation that wasn't to be.

Within that setting, we follow two Nigerian sisters and their respective man-friends as they struggle through the war zone, attempting to maintain their lifestyle and identity while being broken apart and forced to flee from danger.

I think I reacted to this book in no small part due to my more recent fascination with Nigeria, its politics and history, inspired by the brilliant Twitter ramblings of the satirist Elnathan John, and while I don’t believe there is any connection between the two, my piqued interest found an immense fulfilment in this book.

At the end of the day, despite my own interest, it’s a really superb piece of writing: exposing questions of identity and nationhood that still run rife throughout the African continent and constructing an evocative and deeply affecting story of love and family being tested to its limits.

I think it's also fair to say that I think of all the Baileys Prize winners, not only was this the best but it was also the one that most overtly and successfully tackled the issue of female identity.

Books of 2015 Part 4: 30-21

30) The Lacuna – Barbara Kingsolver

#BaileysPrizeWinners

One of the latest books of the year, and I think the last of the Bailey’s Prize Winners to get into my hands.

It’s a slightly odd read this, knowing absolutely nothing about Barbara Kingsolver and her relationship to Mexico, given that she doesn’t exactly sound Mexican, yet the book relies so heavily on the country and on Ameri-Mexi relations. Moreover, it was interesting reading this in light of having earlier in the year read Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a book of similar scope and theme but from a more obviously Latin-American writer.

Nevertheless, this was an enjoyable read. Set in Mexico and the US from the time of the Stalinist purges up to heavy McCarthyism, it follows an aspiring writer of mixed Ameri-Mexi descent from his humble beginnings mixing paint for Diego Rivera, to living and working with Rivera, Frida Kahlo and their friend-in-exile Leon Trotsky. The major events told during this section are similar to those depicted in the film Frida which I've seen, and although it felt a bit odd to verify the book’s historicity by comparing it with a film, it fit in with what I felt I already knew.

Following Trotsky’s assassination (woah, historical spoiler alert!), our protagonist moves to the US where he forges a very successful writing career but is then persistently and mercilessly dogged by the anti-communist witch-hunters and unable to shake off the relationships of his past.

What made the book a bit confusing to me was that it did have a bildungsroman quality to it, but in the second half just shifted gear to be a commentary and indictment of McCarthyism and the ability of the HUAC and their blacklist to besmirch and invalidate a person’s standing. And ultimately I found myself wondering what the point of the book really was? Was it a personal story, a memoir even? Or was it mostly a social commentary? The two halves of the book seemed to complement each other, but at the same time seemed so separate, with distinct agendas.

It was a good book, well-written and full of intrigue, but it didn't fully synthesise into a greater whole for me.

29) The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh

#TheWalrusWasPaul

There seems to be no end to Evelyn Waugh’s bibliography, which is a very good thing for me. There’s more to come on this list as well.

This is called something like “one of the most…significant works of the twentieth century” on its cover (at least of the edition I read), which is going more than a little too far because it’s really quite a silly jaunt, but silly in Evelyn Waugh’s universe transfers to delightfully witty and cynical as well.

This one tells the story of two adjoining cemeteries – one a high-class, all-the-fixings funeral service for the ennobled and wealthy, and the other a thoughtful but necessarily undervalued funeral service for pets – and the love triangle that embroils workers of both establishments.

There’s lots of class satire and humour about Ameri-Anglo relations (what is it with me and the prefix Ameri-?), and your standard Waugh characters committing acts of histrionic farce. Waugh’s strength in particular lies in his understanding of the straight man motif, the need to have a grounding force to underline the humour of the ridiculous, and it’s employed to its best here in the denouement.

It’s a very short, digestible read though, and certainly not one that I would really call ‘significant’ in any particular way.

28) The Three Body Problem – Cixin Liu

#BookGroupReading

I tell a lie: I did attend a third book group meeting this year, and this was it. I believe this was chosen by Darv essentially by looking up “Sci-fi books that are popular” and just closing his eyes and pointing at the screen somewhere.

This was quite a happy accident, really, as this book is really very good. Set in China, it tells the story of a woman who, after witnessing her father being beaten to death in the name of communist party unity, decides to honour and continue his important work in the field of astrophysics. It skips forward a little disjointedly to a more present day and takes on far more dystopic and sinister themes, involving the search for extraterrestrial life and the value of the terrestrial kind.

It’s also interesting that this particular sci-fi is framed through the lens of communist China, not only because it provides a different perspective to what we’re usually given, but also because the values of communism and particularly the questioning of them factor strongly in its broader considerations.

There was one thing in particular that really annoyed me about this book: when I discovered during my reading of it that it was just book one of a trilogy, and I now have to wait for the rest of the series to be translated into English and released. Aside from that, my only other quibble was that a lot of the concepts presented were really very technical, and I found myself eye-skipping at times.

More often though, Liu’s prose is wonderfully descriptive, and at times just plain cinematic, and after I get through the translation of the rest of the trilogy, I sincerely hope someone will take on the challenge of adapting it to the screen.

27) Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin

#NewAuthors

While a lot of these authors who I read for the first time this year have made me likely to seek out more, I kind of feel like one Maupin is probably enough for me. That’s not because I didn't enjoy this, but it just feels like a neatly encapsulated snapshot of what he’s about, and I'm just not sure I need any more.

This is a collection of stories set in and about San Francisco, kind of structured similarly to Joyce’s Dubliners, in that each story connects to the next, although in this the characters pretty much all become entangled, whereas in Joyce each story was connected to the previous and the next but not further.

The characters are all what we might now call typical Frisco ‘types’ but I suspect this book, and Maupin generally, had a fair bit to do with the creation of them. It’s interesting to look at this book as quite pioneering, coming out post Harvey Milk but still feeling very modern and cosmopolitan for the time.

It’s funny and fairly provocative, and I think holds interest in being somewhat of a forerunner to things like Sex and the City and Queer as Folk. But I do feel like any more Maupin now might feel like it’s treading more familiar ground, and this is a nice bite-size portion.

26) May We Be Forgiven – A.M.Homes

#BaileysPrizeWinners

Oh, this one was really a heartbreaker, and appearing as it does just outside the top 25 seems so fittingly miserable a place for it, given that at times I considered this a potential number one book of the year.

The fact is, it starts out so completely brilliantly. Franzenesque (in a good way rather than a Franzsplaining way), only much darker. We are presented with two brothers – one starts an affair with the other’s wife, and the other then catches them in the act, and impulsively, yet calmly, robotically, bashes her head in with a bedside lamp, sending her into a coma.

Delightful, right? It’s really quite horrifying, and yet Homes dances adeptly over the grotesque details with a bizarre, darkly comical and surreal brush that hits all the right notes to have me spellbound.

But then following this brilliant beginning, and actually quite inexplicably, it steadily brightens and humanises to the point of becoming uncomfortably saccharine and soap opera-esque. It has that Paul Auster feeling of being an examination of how many ways people can affect your life, and starts to seem emotionally facile even as it starts to get implausibly convoluted.

It’s still an entertaining read, but it really started to lose track of itself, with pointless literary references: a throwaway to Lolita, and the doctor character who just does doctor things but for no reason is called Faustus. There’s also a recurrent appearance, and I'm not sure why, of Don DeLillo as a character and motivating force in the book. And it’s a small thing, but I feel like Homes’ treatment of DeLillo strikes the wrong note in that I suspect it’s meant to be comical: she can either call him ‘Don’ and make it amusingly over-familiar, or ‘Don DeLillo’ each time and make herself feel comically starstruck. But instead it’s always ‘DeLillo’ and it seems weirdly technical.

The other thing – and here I'm going to start questioning the Baileys Prize principles – is that this was my first taste of Baileys Prize winners, and it’s a book mostly about men, and men raising children. And while my understanding is the Baileys Prize really is quite arbitrarily ‘the best book that happens to have been written by a woman in English’, I feel like there could be more to it than that, that the scope of the award could somehow reward or highlight female writers who take on, rather than perpetuate, the patriarchy in any way.

Having said that, the odd thing about Homes’ first person narration here is it didn’t actually sound like an authentic male voice, it sounded like it was being filtered through another medium. I know not everyone has the capacity of Iris Murdoch to embody the male psyche, but then why not write third-person? This book wouldn’t have lost much.

I sincerely apologise to A.M. Homes for ranting so much within this review. I really wanted to appreciate this book more, and while I enjoyed it a lot, it just left me so unsatisfied and with an excess of critical bile to excrete.

25) My Brilliant Career – Miles Franklin

#NewAuthors #AustralianAuthorsIGuess

This write-up will be considerably shorter than the previous one. The end.

Oh, well since I have more airtime, I might as well write more.

It seemed a suitable follow-up to my enjoyment of The True History of the Kelly Gang last year to try and read more Australian literary icons, and books very much about Australia, and this stood out as a sore blindspot for me.

As Henry Lawson writes in his preface, although the manuscript was sent to him from one ‘Miles Franklin’, the book is quite nakedly coming from a feminine voice, not simply through the fact that the first person narrator is a young female, but also just the particular vocal flourishes and descriptions feel so subtle in a way that a male writer wouldn't bother with – particularly in descriptions of Australian landscapes and rural farmsteads. You know my old description of all Australian literature as ‘paddocks and cattle’, well it’s not out of place here, but in actuality is far more poetically and interestingly rendered.

Franklin’s heroine Sybylla is the real highlight of this piece – headstrong and volatile, she’s both magnetic and strangely uneasy to read, as her fractious nature becomes both an intrigue to those around her and a curse that haunts her life and her ambitions.

I found the book ended a little too soon, and while I really should read the follow-up My Career goes Bung before passing judgement on its abrupt conclusion, I’m aware that the follow-up was written much later in life, so I feel it’s not hasty to think of it just a little incomplete, as so many might have done upon its release. But that little thorn aside, it’s a jaunty and amusing read.

24) The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde

#Ummmm

Speaking of jaunty, wow. What an odd little person Jasper Fforde is.

Starting in a dystopian reality where various special police units investigate crimes too abstract for the regular force, The Eyre Affair takes us through a bizarre terrorist manhunt where time barely exists and the borders between fiction and reality exist even less.

It’s perhaps a little too offbeat and quirky for me to love all that much, but I defy anybody not to have at least a little fun with it (Usually I would add here ‘even me’, but obviously I did have a little fun with it). I feel it would perhaps be most appreciated by those familiar with Jane Eyre, and while I've watched the Michael Fassbender-Mia Wasikowska vehicle, and read Jean Rhys’ argument to it, Wide Sargasso Sea, I’m not familiar enough to fully absorb any of the more parodical references to it.

I must confess as well, I found the romantic denouement a little twee, but at the same time it felt necessary. I shouldn’t really expect anything with any great profundity from such a flighty fantasy.

23) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K Dick

#HarryNeedsAHaircut

Firstly, I want to say that Philip K Dick’s strength really isn't in titles. I've probably said that before, but this title is an absolute trainwreck.

Fortunately, however, the book is not. This was my second foray into Dick (oh, get your head out of the gutter, Mother), and while I didn't enjoy my first taste of Dick (Ubik, which inexplicably made it onto TIME’s top 100 list and was my third- or fourth-lowest of my first book write-up), my second taste of Dick was far more palatable and stimulating.

Obviously, I was coming to this novel from a post-Blade Runner viewpoint, so it’s impossible to examine this entirely on its own merit. However, I found it’s actually beneficial to read this after the movie. It evokes the same sense of questioning reality and consciousness, and holds many of the same opinions about humanity and its future. It actually brought out many of the same emotional responses as I had to Blade Runner and where there were differences, they didn't bother me.

The main difference is that there is explicit engagement here with our actual conception of ourselves as human through the principles of “mercerism”. While in the film, the philosophy of creating humanoid replicas with their own consciousness and memory is explored, the book made me realise how much actual humans are almost sidelines in the film. In the book, what is humanity and a look at what it’s become is provocatively explored and criticised.

The climax of the book and the climax of the film are two very different things, too, but neither is more nor less successful or interesting; there is less 'action' here and it's all dispensed with quickly, but the lingering questions remain. At the same time, if I'd read this before seeing the movie I can imagine being floored by Roy Batty's dying soliloquy, even though it comes from nowhere specific in the book. 

I genuinely enjoyed poring over this particular manifestation of Dick’s, and I'm definitely now interested in more Dick.

22) The Book and the Brotherhood – Iris Murdoch

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf #ReadAllTheMurdoch #IrisIMeanNotRupert

So after snatching the coveted number one spot last year, Iris Murdoch became for me basically my go-to person whenever books were on offer. Basically my philosophy at book sales and second-hand stores this year has been “Buy ALL the Murdoch!” which translates roughly to, I read two this year and have another sitting on my shelf for 2016.

This is one of her later works, and there are touches of a little tiredness in its conceit, about a group of ageing intellectuals coming to terms with their intermingled relationships and lives à la Swift’s Last Orders or Kingsley Amis’ The Old Devils. There are times when this borders on soap opera and a few of the characters seem a little stock and lacking in Murdoch’s surreal brush strokes.

However, Murdoch is at her enigmatic best in depicting the pivotal (if not exactly central) character of Crimond, who has been charged by all the other characters to write his philosophical magnum opus that, due to his undoubted brilliance, they have all agreed to fund no matter how long it takes. Crimond is a polarising, misanthropic figure, to whom others react invariably with either repulsion or overwhelming attraction.

But Crimond also features in the most fascinating exploration here: while the whole thing is a bit chaotic trying to draw out themes of friendship and coming to terms with death. Crimond as the intellectual giant here has the egotistical and solitary world-weariness of one too bored with humanity to care a jot about life. So Murdoch’s most poignant touch is in making Crimond seemingly immortal – while everybody else struggles to come to terms with their own mortality, Crimond yearns, in vain, for nothing more than to shuffle it off.

Not just because all (Iris) Murdoch is worth reading, this is worth reading.

21) Thank you, Jeeves – P.G.Wodehouse

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf #NewAuthors

I hadn’t read this one. That’s the trouble with Wodehouse, isn’t it?

It’s probably no surprise that something that appeals so strongly to Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie that they made a series of it would also appeal to me. And appeal it did.

This is, like apparently a fair few books I've read this year, just a large amount of silly fun. And as with Evelyn Waugh (another great influence on our Mr Fry), Wodehouse employs the straight man technique to great effect here, chiefly in the guise of the unflappable Jeeves who betrays little to no surprise or emotion to all the farcical nonsense going on around him.

And farcical nonsense is all that’s really going on here. It’s nothing earth-shattering by any means, and I can see it not really floating everybody’s boat, but I probably laughed through this book more than at anything else I read this year. This kind of dry humour and absurdity are just my kind of thing.