Books of 2015 Part One: Preamble and 60-51

So it's that time of year again, when I start a series of posts with the phrase "so it's that time of year again" and then continue to bore my only reader (Hi, Mother!) with "Hi, Mother!" jokes for several posts of dross until we get to the fun parts: my count-up of my worst books of the year (this year it will be a bottom 12, from 61-72) and my countdown of my top ten of the  year.

As a further preamble, let me just say that looking at my list there was little-to-no purpose to a lot of my book selections. There are basically four hashtags I'll categorise these under:

#BaileysPrizeWinners - The Baileys Prize (formerly the Women's Prize for fiction, Orange Prize, Orange Broadband Prize, etc.) formed what remained of a guiding force for some of my selections from my library, but I certainly didn't set myself a challenge. It was more a good way of finding books and authors I'd never read.

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf - There are still lots of books that I've bought in the past that sit around on my shelf like lazy slugs, and books under this hashtag finally had their turn this year. There are still quite a few to get through, including my original French texts of Sartre's Chemins de la Liberté, which will never, ever get read, because I bought them purely for the purpose of being a pretentious twat.

#NewAuthors - This was an unconscious guiding force, and one that really wasn't deliberate at all, but when I look at my list, reading authors for the first time (like "Hmm, never read any of -Blank-") has really been dominant this year. In fact, higher up the list you'll see a huge proportion of authors cracking the list and my reading for the first time, so I had to include this one

#BookGroupReading - There weren't a lot of meetings this year but this still guides my reading.

There are other potential hashtags I might think of later, though, and all of that having being so adroitly and succinctly explained, I'll begin the countdown with...

60) Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin

#NewAuthors

So we start with a deconstruction of porn. Oh, I'm sorry, ‘erotica’.

This is an interesting collection of stories, effectively written as a money-spinner by the exceedingly Bohemian Anaïs Nin: at the time, prose porn was a highly sought-after commodity by anonymous very wealthy patrons.

Nin has a flashy and elaborate writing style, which makes these quite interesting artefacts as they are  in most cases no more substantial than just porn – and highly questionable, fetishistic porn in some cases – but constructed of the same fibre as any more poetic, humorous and ironic short story.

It’s interesting to note that in her preface she talks about trying to write the stories as if a man was writing them, when I feel like there are very feminine touches throughout: the story The Veiled Woman, for instance, contains a delicate story of a man unable to arouse a woman’s excitement, and when the humiliating twist comes at the end there is a parallel delicacy in dealing with his internalised awkwardness, whereas I feel a man writing it would really emphasise the frustration and humiliation of the situation.

From a sociological/historical viewpoint, or from that of a gender investigation, this is an interesting book. It remains porn, though, and porn with which you have to take the effort to read and absorb meaning.

59) The Gormenghast trilogy – Mervyn Peake

#NewAuthors #BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

So technically this should be counted as three separate books, but I read them consecutively, and moreover I think they are more interesting taken as one continuous narrative, even while they are deeply flawed throughout.

The trilogy begins in Titus Groan with all gears and pistons grinding and screaming in pain as a bunch of emotionally detached, unsympathetic and variously monstrous characters tread water in the depths of the outline of a plot, and the whole thing is just a stunted mess. Acceleration doesn't really happen in any way until the second and toweringly superior book of the trilogy, Gormenghast itself.

The characters I was bored to read about in part one (and while I wondered, as a sidenote, what’s the deal with including Peake’s infantile shitty sketches throughout, as if they added anything at all) suddenly come to life and start doing stuff, utilising the gothic setting and partaking in all the wicked machinations that part one just assumed we would know about. It’s still not wholly scintillating, but at least it utilises all the Gothic tropes that were so sputteringly introduced early on.

Then part three, Titus Alone, is a bizarre enigma, effectively an anti-Gothic refutation of everything that came before, after our hero Titus escapes his destiny as lord of the Gormenghast realm and finds himself in an oddly modern world without the constraints of the ancient castle, its lineage, bureaucracy and traditions. It’s frankly quite a schizophrenic way to wrap it all up, but for all its stop-start excitement and eye-rolling weirdness, it really became a singular experience, for better or worse.

58) Falling man – Don DeLillo

#IHaveNoHashtagForThis

It’s really problematic to have to admit this, but the fact is I don’t really care that much for Don DeLillo. I would absolutely count Underworld among my all-time favourite books, but after falling for it hook, line and sinker some seven years ago, every experience I've since had with him has left me lukewarm at best, including his much-beloved White Noise.

Falling Man, DeLillo’s post-9/11 opus (every writer who’s ever touched New York must have one), takes his multilinear narrative style and explores the life of a 9/11 survivor and the various lives around him that he touches.

It has his characteristic post-modern touches, especially underscored by the recurrent image of the performance artist the Falling Man, but didn't really affect me, nor did it strike me as a particularly profound or interesting examination of a city reeling from a traumatic event. The centrifugal arc of the central character certainly has a chaotic element to it, but I found the ‘whole city dealing with stuff’ more emotionally resonant in other similar narratives, such as Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin or E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.

It’s a perfectly fine read, but while Underworld frankly chilled me to the bone in its depiction of the world under the shadow of the cold war and the imminent nuclear threat, I expected so much more from a treatise on a tragedy and its ripple effects, especially given I was very much alive to experience this one.

57) Bliss – Peter Carey

#AustralianAuthorsIGuess

This was an easy acquisition from the library early on in the year, given how well I reacted to Carey’s two Booker winners in my reading last year. You’d think, perhaps, that I reacted less strongly to this one, based on its lowly ranking here, and you’d be right.

It wasn't so much that I didn't react well to it as I was reading, but simply that when it came time to ranking these books, I couldn't really remember anything specific that I reacted to, in spite of being able to remember the general plot and the general vibe I got from the whole thing.

I guess the other trouble was that said ‘general vibe’ was a quite mean-spirited and kind of morally empty one; I didn't like any of the characters and it didn't take long before I stopped caring about what happened to them. I think this is the whole point, and it’s meant to be kind of darkly comical, but at the end of the day and – in particular – the end of the year, my feelings towards it have grown very cold and distant.

Also I can’t forgive this book for giving Vance Joy his stage name – I hate Vance Joy.

56) Literary occasions – V.S.Naipaul

#1DForLife

Yes, you might criticise my inclusion of a collection of essays in my book reading and book ranking, but I think the enjoyment and engagement can still be comparatively assessed, and while I highly doubt a collection of essays (or, for that matter, a collection of short stories and/or porn) would ever top the list, it’s useful for me to look at what sort of things I read and enjoyed.

And these are mostly enjoyable for the most part. There’s a lot of tales and musings on Naipaul’s upbringing and background, particularly in his unique post-colonial situation - being of Indian heritage but raised and acculturated in Trinidad – and adds colour and depth to those same observations which run throughout his novels.

If I had a criticism, and I must do since I've ranked 55 books ahead of this, it’s that the essays collected here do give the impression more of musings, and don’t provide any particularly insightful observations when it comes to the world in general – more about how Naipaul formed his world view and his writing style.

If I contrast this with, for example, Salman Rushdie’s excellent Imaginary Homelands, the latter is a far richer and more didactic look at the world, post-colonialism and how all of this shapes both his works and literature in general. It’s not that Literary Occasions is necessarily inferior, but it just seems more incomplete.

55) Casino Royale – Ian Fleming

#NewAuthors

What a fun little book this was. Seemed like a good idea to read, in my life, at least one of the James Bond novels, so I guess I can tick that off my bucket list now. Hashtag-wise, I don't feel Casino Royale is a book I should read at some point, but certainly "any Bond" is.

It was interesting, but at the same time largely redundant, to read this after watching the 2006 film/franchise reboot, since the broad outline of the plot is largely the same, but at the same time there are some key blandnesses in the book that were reinvigorated and rejuvenated for the film.

What’s most fascinating though is looking at this first effort from Fleming, and look at the genesis of a character that would remain popular for sixty years (and counting) in book and film, raise an eyebrow at his misogyny, certainly, but just generally have fun with him as both hero and questionable anti-hero.

This book is fun, if little else.

54) The Invisible Man – H.G.Wells

#HarryStylesHasAdorableEyelashes

Up to this point, novels with the phrase “Invisible Man” in their title have had a 100% success rate of making it into my year-end top five. So this is really a great let-down, if that stat meant anything, had a sample size of >1, and wasn't just inserted by me being an idiot.

I was fairly into the hint of mystery upfront, as this odd figure swathed in face wrap and gloves fronts up to a hotel and is highly reclusive and generally unpleasant. It then becomes a typical sci-fi/schlock horror fest as he is discovered as invisible and runs amok and continues being generally unpleasant.

I won’t pretend I wasn't a little caught up in the chase, and the impossibility of chasing something you can’t see, but at the same time it seemed a bit silly that, in the final analysis, the point of the story is not that invisibility is both a curse or a blessing, or that experimenting and playing God with body and substance is wrong, it's quite simply “this guy, in particular, was a cunt” and doesn’t really explore any other implications of his experimentations and the power of going unseen.

It’s just, if you’re going to be mad and experiment with things, that hopefully you’re not already a violent asshole.

53) Brennu-Njal's saga

#BooksForTravelling 

It’s been a very long time since I read any Icelandic sagas – so much so that none has ever featured in a year-end list. And in all honesty I picked this one up (finally) to read only because I was about to head to Iceland and so it seemed apt to read through arguably the greatest of the family sagas.

It’s with this reputation in mind that the saga of Brennu-Njal (or “burnt Njal”) finds itself in this lowly place. It certainly has all the hallmarks of a great Icelandic saga, but I didn't really get caught up in the action or intrigue at all for a very long time – not until after (would be a massive, massive spoiler alert if it weren't kind of implied by the title) Njal and his family have been burned alive in his home and the action follows the survivors trying to get retribution and justice. Up until that point, the whole thing is overly disconnected and haphazard – as many of the sagas are.

I just had higher hopes that this would capture my attention the way the rivalry between the brothers in Laxdæla Saga did, given that this has such a strong reputation, but it didn't. It didn't really have much of a fluidity or through-line, and didn't incorporate enough themes of heroism and destiny given how ripe it seemed for them.

It’s an interesting historical artefact for various other reasons, but it disappointed me and was a bit of a struggle to get through.

52) One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich – AlexanderSolzhenitsyn

#NewAuthors #EvenThoughIHadAlreadyReadOneByThisPoint

This was the second of Solzhenitsyn’s books I read this year, and – coincidentally – ever. And it’s the sort of book that really would never really crack my top 50 (on a list of more than 50) in any serious way, unless I got a sudden massive interest in the historiography of Russian political prisoners.

The book certainly delivers what it promises: telling the story of one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a Soviet prisoner working in a labour camp, and what's more it tells it in a classic narrative way that includes a start (the day begins), a middle (the day continues) and an end (the day concludes).

Obviously I'm being facetious (when am I not) but the fact is that the mundanity of it is largely the point – that every day is pretty much the same and that any one day could be arbitrarily chosen and a very similar story would be told.

As such, it’s not the most exhilarating read in spite of its historical interest, and it will inevitably fall in the middle or lower-middle of a list due to its middling emotional resonance.

51) Good Omens – Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

#BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint #NewAuthorsRegardingGaimanButNotPratchett

Well, so far I've felt fairly comfortable that I’ll avoid the flaming torches and pitchforks despite the horrible, horrible things I've said about some of the world’s most respected authors. However, I feel I might be up on the pyre just for the pure ranking of this where it is, particularly as I picked it up just to see why it’s so many of my friends’ absolutely untouchable all-time favourite book or thing ever conceived.

It’s definitely got a good sense of humour to it. Even, at times, to the point of actually being funny. But the fact is that a fair few books I read this year appealed far more completely to my particular humour, and got a few genuine laughs from me, whereas this could generally achieve the odd smirk but little more. It’s possible that any fantasy tropes being parodied aren’t quite familiar – or beloved – enough to me to really draw me in.

I also feel like the writing – and I'm not sure if I've read any other works of fiction with two authors behind it – is a little too smug and pleased with itself, as well as being overly self-conscious with a whole lot of passages akin to “At this point in our story, the author started writing about himself again”. It just felt like it was playing for laughs too much, and I can either go along with them or not.

The only other issue, and it's a big one, is that the characters were all spread too thin – in essence that there were too many characters to keep fully abreast of, and as a result I experienced little or no engagement with them. Again it seems very much in keeping with the genre being parodied, but where fantasy sagas have series upon series of books to extrapolate all variables from all of the side characters, this just felt squashed. Again, maybe I need to be more familiar with conventions to just apply heuristics more readily.

It’s all a bit of silliness, though, and I think ultimately it just wasn't quite hilarious enough for me to get on board.