Books of 2016 Part 1: 50-41

Yes it's that time of year again. The end, where one can make retrospective summaries of said year. To that end, it's time to look back on my year in reading as I do every year. This year I somehow managed to read a total of 66 books, despite having a son right in the middle of the year, and the world ending! For some reason I thought this was more than I did last year, but of course it wasn't, which makes sense. I had no guiding principles to my reading this year beyond hangovers from previous years (award winner lists, authors I've enjoyed in the past) so instead of my usual hashtags for 'reasons read' I'm just going to list my 'source' which is predominantly the local #Library but sometimes my own #BookShelf if I didn't have time to visit the library. 

And I'll be posting one write-up per day until I go back to work. As per usual I'll start by counting down to just outside my top ten, then I'll post my bottom 16 before reverting back to finish with the top ten.

Oh and one final footnote, unfortunately it seems my usual linking destination, qbd.com.au, has downsized their range dramatically, so this year I'll be all conformist, and link to goodreads instead.

So let's kick things off with...

50. The Will to Knowledge (History of SexualityI) – Michel Foucault

#Bookshelf

Oh, what a way to start the write-ups. My main takeout from this is that Foucault writes so painfully academically. You're writing about sex, you could have a bit more fun with it. He really is interested more in ‘sex as discourse’ than ‘sex as act’; maybe I’m just bringing an overly post-Foucauldian perspective on sex to this and before he wrote this, sex was actually something people talked about rather than did. Some of his arguments are more compelling than others, and he becomes most engaging when talking about the medicalisation of sexuality, than actually when he delves into his pet topic of power and control. It almost seems like a shoehorning in of his favourite topic, to be honest. Still, it is what it is, a long essay on sexuality that is basically as sexy as "Freud on Humour" is funny.

49. No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy

#Library

This makes me feel even more strongly (than I already did) that There will be Blood was robbed at the Oscars, mainly because the film version of this is almost a page-by-page recount of this book, and I feel like little to no creative licence was taken in its adaptation (possibly the only creative decision made was Javier Bardem's hairdo). This is naturally symptomatic of McCarthy being such a visual, blood-spattering writer though, so I can see the appeal of adapting him, as well as the temptation to remain hopelessly faithful to the source material. I'm still waiting on the Coen-helmed adaptation of Blood Meridian, incidentally. But coming to read this after seeing the film frankly doesn't add really anything to the story or the mythology of it at all. McCarthy's characters generally don't have interiors, so there's not much on the page that can't be easily translated to the screen. And it was well translated to the screen, to the point where I feel the source material has become kind of redundant.

48. Carry on Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

#Bookshelf

In a similar vein to above, I feel that reading this after Thank you, Jeeves (my number 21 book of 2015) is a less rewarding and kind of redundant experience, because as a collection of short stories it tends to establish and then repeat a tried and true formula of "Jeeves helps Bertie and his useless friends through some kind of clever subterfuge". It's still wryly amusing throughout, but I felt it gets old fairly quickly, and the full story of Thank you, Jeeves is not only the same formula, but it’s a fully-drawn, bigger pandemonium which leads to bigger laughs and entertainment. No surprise that the final story in this collection, written from Jeeves' POV, is a refreshing highlight as it's basically Jeeves playing Bertie for his own shits and giggles, rather than saving one of his useless friends. It would have been a better read overall with more of this kind of variation.

47. A Town like Alice – Nevile Shute

#Library

Probably the most anticipated book of 2016, coming as it did off Shute getting my number 1 spot in 2015 with On the Beach. It’s a bit odd to come to after On the Beach, because they’re utterly different reading experiences, but I feel going the other way would be far odder. This is quite a Dickensian novel; a lot of coincidences, with characters and their pasts intermingling. It’s a good story but I found it at times a bit too twee, a bit over-romantic. It seems to have an overall English-romanticising-Australia vibe to it, which seems in line with Shute's view of the world. Relationships seem to be Shute’s forte, with the people of different worlds finding common ground underneath it all, like Jean and Joe here, or Dwight and Moira in On the Beach. Let’s face it though, I just found myself craving more of that heart rending cynicism of On the Beach and I was never really going to get it here.

46. Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

#BookGroup

I didn’t get around to this before our actual book group meeting, but I decided to pick it up purely because I learnt during that meeting that Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (my number 1 film of… I dunno, 2013 I think?) was based on it. The premise is similar, an expedition into a mysterious and dangerous ‘zone’, but from the premise on is pretty much where the common paths diverge. There is a question of humanity, and humanity's relationship to the universe, common to both, but I feel like Tarkovsky explored both the premise and themes with far more gravity, as well as subtlety. There's a confusion here in sympathies, and it's difficult to know whether I'm supposed to like Redrick, or Noonan, or anyone. It suffers from the same fate, too, as Snow Crash or Neuromancer in that it's often obfuscating, and the science part of sci-fi takes a sideline to some catchy sequences, while character and even plot in this case get muddled in the ensuing chaos.

45. Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord – Louis de Bernières

#Bookshelf

This was a really odd read, and it’s down this low because I’m still trying to wrap my head around what I thought of it. I had a bit of fun with it at first, because it seems like an amusing little satire, with Señor Vivo having a sequence of lucky escapes from death that are riddled with dramatic irony and a certain magical realism that’s quite charming. But then the middle section became very meandering, and way too tied up in meaningless mythology. The middle section does have a payoff in the end, but there was a story bookending it that was happening and quite engaging and these seemed like unrelated subplots. Mainly, though, the really very horrific events of the last few chapters felt like emotional muggings, because the tone of levity from the rest of the book belied the graphic violence that resulted, and while it was effective in jolting me upright, it just felt like such a violent juxtaposition that it was almost a betrayal of the reader-writer relationship. I guess in that sense it was a similar feeling to the penultimate chapter of Rabbit, Run by John Updike – except that this was told so matter-of-factly as if it should have been expected rather than the rude shock it was. It just touched a nerve rather than building and engaging my feelings properly or honestly. It just made me feel empty, in the end, even though the characters from the satirical tone are not that fully formed so I shouldn't have really been invested in them. I don’t think I was, in fact, but rather I was invested in my expectations of a diverting payoff from the parodical tone and instead got stabbed in the guts.

44. The Prince and the Pauper – Mark Twain

#Library

Yeah, it's a harmless bit of fun, this, even though I was completely incensed by the fact that my edition of this completely removed the porpoise from the story. It works for the most part as your typical mistaken identity farce; Twain's writing is jocular in tone but otherwise feels a little dated and clunky at times, as he's writing in the 19^th century style, but taking the voice of the Tudor period. It's ultimately a farcical bit of storytelling and it's light-hearted, so it's likeable but the writing takes a bit of effort to get through, without ultimately having a huge amount of substance.

43. Nocturnes – Kazuo Ishiguro

#Library

This is a very frustrating book. Some of the stories reach a nice rounded conclusion, and I appreciate the thematic links between them all, as they all deal with themes of music, talent and recognition, as well as love and friendship. But then some of them - in particular Malvern Hills and Come Rain or Come Shine - just stop at what I'd consider really crucial points, that leave a storm of ambiguity behind. And then when a later story (Nocturne) features one character from an earlier story (Crooner) - indeed it's sort of a 'what happened after this' in some ways - I'd hoped that there may be a revisit to those unfinished tales or a closing of the loop of all the stories (a la Kiezlowski's Three Colours trilogy) but alas, fuck you reader, puzzle it out for yourself. Because it doesn't do anything clever with them, I also left feeling this is a bit of a shallow offering from a writer of Ishiguro's calibre. There's well-worked humour, even farce, throughout, but it doesn't drill down to the heart of the matter like his best works do. Instead it just leaves the surface a little chipped and dented.

42. Solar – Ian McEwan

#Library

McEwan, you will see, has had a bit of a topsy-turvy year (also my most-read author of the year - yes even more than Iris Murdoch this year), and this was one of his lesser efforts. It’s a bit languorous in the prose, and not deeply engaging as a result – actually gets quite rambly. The protagonist of Michael Beard is unsympathetic, but it’s more his behaviour that’s unsympathetic and we don’t really get a good sense of his psychology and no insight into his motivation. It has McEwan’s trademark misanthropy, but I had anticipated an amusing payoff in the end and I actually didn't really get the ending or what its point was. Maybe if I could get my head around it (or get it explained to me) I’d develop a better appreciation for it, but it just fell a bit flat for me in the end.

41. A Man in Full – Tom Wolfe

#Library

So in one fell swoop, we demolish my top two authors of 2015: obviously I picked this up due to my fondness for Bonfire of the Vanities (number 2 of 2015). Wolfe is again here concerned with masculinity and masculine identity, but more overtly. In Bonfire it's more about established, confident 80s masculinity and what happens when that clashes, or is misguided. Here it's more about people who are uncertain, unconfident about their masculine identity. It's a far more 90s narrative. Wolfe’s own masculinity is also his detriment: he's unapologetically, or at least unconsciously, a shameless misogynist, with his female characters having no voice, identity or consciousness outside of the men in their life. In Bonfire it was an incidental omission because the story was so engaging, but here there are tokenistic female narratives that serve only to add more depth to the male narratives. That's not his concern or his milieu, but I feel the effort could be dispensed with as they don't necessarily add anything new or interesting to the story. Because this is his particular niche/specialty, it's more a conversation about representativeness in literature rather than a concern about Wolfe though, but it helped to underline the relative flimsiness of this story and the characters, and the bloated nature of the narrative which is just overlong.