Books of 2017 Part 6: My Top Ten

So we come to the end of another long and windy road of nostalgia, looking back at the year that was. I should state that I was pretty pleased overall with my book choices in 2017, so this set of 10 really is the best of an already good bunch.

10) The Color Purple – Alice Walker

#ClassicsIShouldRead

Felt I should read this, as I feel like I've read all the other paragons of black literature at least according to the predominantly-white establishment (so now I’ve done this I guess I can start exploring what else PoCs see as the best examples). I'd avoided this mainly because I've seen the film, but given the film was (really bizarrely, it seems, now, but probably an indictment on the times and of course those times still exist) directed by a white straight Jewish man, it's unsurprising that it's just less effective than the book. Walker has an excellent authorial voice throughout this; southern and uneducated in tone and language, but obviously worldly and knowing, and very personal and heartfelt. Her protagonist Celie is, for all intents and purpose, a black lesbian so it's as many minorities rolled into one as you are likely to get, and she's such an endearing, soulful narrator: both a character of pure goodness, and a spirited fighter who yearns for more. The story is ultimately just about love and spirit, how we can be raised up out of adversity by love and how the spirit can withstand any kind of adversity thrown at it. Curiously the character who becomes the most poignant exemplar is Albert, Celie's forced husband who mistreats her, withholding years of letters from her estranged sister in order to keep her mind and spirit captive, but who ultimately undergoes a broad spiritual recovery and enlightenment. The parts of the story dealing with Nettie, Celie's sister doing mission work in Africa, I found less effective just because they felt familiar, and didn't really have a new or interesting take on the whites' rape of Africa that aren’t covered in similar narratives – like Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible for instance. I'm obviously a bit removed from this book just because of the levels of privilege between me and its characters, but it's undeniably uplifting in its humour, pathos and bittersweet philosophy.

9) Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth

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Between this and Gravity's Rainbow, I can't help but feel that National Book Award panels are a bunch of kinky old pervs. This one took a while to get into, as I often find with Roth, since he writes in such a non-directional, dawdling kind of way. At times this has a very modernist, stream of consciousness style, as our protagonist Mickey Sabbath moves from the present into a series of reminiscences that goes back and forward in his mind. His mind, too, is where we spend most of the narrative, and a very unpleasantly oppressive place it is. In essence here Roth has drawn a portrait of human depravity; Sabbath is as much a sexual obsessive and as much an apotheosis of Jewish sufferance as Portnoy (of his eponymous complaint), but where Portnoy was repentant and self-aware, Sabbath is morbid, amoral and behaves with absolute reckless abandon. The journey, following the death of his mistress, is a Ulysses-style odyssey through past and present as he barrels headlong towards a spectacularly self-serving suicide, and in the process of having nothing to lose, burns all his interpersonal bridges linking him with the rest of humanity. But somehow out of this unsavoury portrait, Roth has also weaved a fascinating tapestry of the dark underside of human consciousness. It's full of dark and sardonic humour, and where another writer like William Somerset Maugham I might describe his wit as sharp, cutting right to the heart, Roth is more of a blunt object, and he'll bludgeon you with this dark wit until you emerge feeling battered. It's not a friendly or welcoming read, but it's unsettlingly captivating nonetheless; it's the novel equivalent of a horrific twisted car crash and I just couldn't look away.

8) Robinson – Muriel Spark

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Another quality bit of obtuse, delightfully unpredictable social commentary from Spark. Starts out in a familiar setting; a few survivors from a plane crash become stranded on an isolated island, but unlike the conventional narrative, this island is inhabited by a hermit of sorts, who takes care of the survivors as well as laying down the ground rules. Similarly, instead of them waiting and watching in vain for a faint hope of a rescue, they simply wait for the annual supply ship that is due on the island in a couple of months, so they know when to expect their reprieve. But when one of the party goes missing, it becomes an intriguing country house murder mystery and far more. The thing I possibly forgot in heading into this is how rarely anything is all that it seems in Spark's storytelling. There's a lot of really strange twists, and as with all of her work, her characters are unpredictable and intractable (in a good way), operating with this wafer-thin veneer of civility but subject to all sorts of dark whims, superstitions and strange impulses. There's certainly a bit of a Lord of the Flies element to this, except there isn't that uncertainty of reprieve, yet due to the nature of confining a group of individual wills together, it still becomes a crucible of human ugliness and conflict. It perhaps leaves a few too many questions unanswered, but it definitely gives plenty of value and reward in pondering them.

7) The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham

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I love the way Maugham writes. He's similar to George Eliot, in the sense that he tends to be fairly verbose and sometimes meandering, but still has a knack for cutting right to the heart of the matter with a couple of efficient phrases. He's also a great observer of humanity; I saw this in Of Human Bondage (My #4 book of 2015) and it's just as astute here. This is kind of a mishmash story, told in first person by a writer who just writes and observes about the people around him (I got accustomed to thinking of it as a fictional first person narrator, but one time in the entire book, about three quarters through, a character addresses him as "Mr Maugham" and I actually found it a bit jarring): the elitist society snob Elliott, the spoiled but discerning beauty Isabel, and above all the lost soul Larry, wandering the world in search of enlightenment. Maugham is a very subtle gonzo character here, gently prodding and influencing the action around him but ultimately serving only as an observer, with his friends the only players in the story he's relating, as they all sit on that "razor's edge" between atheism and strident faith, between love and hate, between hope and despair and ultimately life and death. When Maugham explores spirituality, and philosophy, his verbosity starts to get the better of him, and I do find him far more engaging in his observations of human nature, and explorations of the human condition from an external rather than introspective angle. It's an extremely engaging read, but definitely one that wavers and goes off the tracks occasionally.

6) The Sellout – Paul Beatty

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I have overarching issues with the fact that this, as an American novel, won the Booker prize, and I do feel like it dilutes the identity of one of my favourite awards to open it in such a tacky, cynically commercial way. But having read this I'm actually ok with it now: with this winning, not with the Booker generally being open to American fiction. Firstly, if the Booker is essentially an award for post-colonial literature then this book about racism in a post-racial America is essentially the US equivalent of a post-colonial novel. The second reason I'm fine with this winning is that it's very, very good. It's hilarious, but it's hilarious in a provocative, confronting way. It reminds me a bit of Get Out, that other great improvisation on racism I experienced this year, in that it made me laugh a lot but I was often uncomfortable at the same time as being amused. Beatty really throws racism in the reader's face; he takes the whole "reclaiming" racism and racist slurs and dials it up to a really absurd extreme. The story centres around a small semi-rural suburb on the outskirts of Los Angeles which is officially dissolved into the areas around it, and the two residents who try to put the suburb back on the map (literally) by reintroducing segregation and thus forging their own ‘black’ identity rather than the diluted miscegenation being imposed on them. The slightly absurd concept and all of its absurd characters aside, what makes the book such a delight is the sheer joke density. Every sentence Beatty writes is punchy, witty, soaked in irony and/or sarcasm and is just full of sharply skewed observations about race relations and the position of black people in "post-racial" California. There are some issues with the identity and character of the narrator, who is a little thinly drawn, and the book also reminds me a little of some of the more challenging aspects of Infinite Jest, in that it is a little directionless and largely a patchwork of loosely connected anecdotes. The Infinite Jest comparison (which I don’t make lightly) also seems apt, not just because they're both extremely entertaining, but there is an oblique David Foster Wallace reference in the book as well, plus the crux of both of their plots includes the mad pursuit of a videotape - in this case a collection of "especially racist" episodes of The Little Rascals that one of our protagonists starred in. This is in many ways just a madcap sequence of confronting but amusing jokes, but it's also a sharp and intelligent satire that is very cleverly written.

5) The Dark Forest – Liu Cixin

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I really enjoyed this. Following on from enjoying The Three Body Problem (My #28 book of 2015) – which we read for our book group a few years ago, this was just as rich and fascinating a read but evidently also far more rewarding for me. Picking up from the end of the first book but taking a predominantly new set of characters and a new direction, this tells the story of Earth's struggle to deal with the impending conquest of the Trisolaran race (introduced as the conundrum in the first book), which is complicated by the Trisolarans' ability to block human scientific progress as well as see everything that happened on earth – except, crucially, in our minds; Trisolarans’ thoughts are all transparent. Earth devises a strategy of appointing four individuals, ‘wallfacers’ to work on their own defence strategy, in complete obfuscation and secret – with the proviso that they can do whatever the hell they want and ideally try to lead Trisolaris down the wrong path at every turn. One of these is naturally Chinese , given the author is, too, and it becomes a bit of a global crisis with a key focus on a handful of Chinese characters in that fold. What Liu creates here is a very dark and at times distressingly bleak vision of humanity. Bec read this before me and came away with a more positive view, but to my mind this book is unapologetically critical of humanity and is all the more interesting for it. The idea that our thoughts are secret and that is our key strength, that we have an ingrained belief in ourselves as the strongest force in the universe, but also that we have an inbuilt mistrust of others, are all explored in great depth. It felt like sort of an anti-Watchmen (my #13 book of 2014) story in that, even faced with the impending invasion from outside the planet, old political rivalries and mistrust can't be overcome, and all the UN can do is squabble and waste time. I did find some elements of Liu's writing a bit weak, especially his exposition. Like when our main protagonist Luo Gi is, apropos of nothing, flown overnight to UN headquarters and brought into a session where they just happen to be announcing the four Wallfacers who will be the savior of humanity, and three of them are appointed from the US, UK and South America, and he's wondering who the fourth and last will be and then - oh sweet heavens what a shock- it's him. Like, my one-year-old would have seen that coming. I'm not saying Liu needed to make it somehow more of a twist, but the frequent inner-monologue of guessing and wondering just felt like the narratorial device equivalent of Tantalus having fruit yanked away from him, yet always remaining within his reach, so it's kind of annoying having to reach further out but you still always grasp where it's going. And this is a disappointing prosaic weakness because otherwise Liu’s narrative is wonderfully unpredictable, his cultural commentary from an Eastern perspective, the atheistic explorations, they're all really interesting and engaging, and some minor quibbles maybe held me back from being totally awestruck by the book.

4) Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

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It seemed like a bad move to go from Emma to my annual Dickens - and a Wordsworth Classics edition I bought before I knew better, no less - but this was a greatly enriching read. It took a while to get into, possibly due to the stodginess of the edition, but once it gained momentum especially in the second half I heartily enjoyed it. It's very typically what you'd call ‘Dickensian’, with all its plot twists and all the characters being strangely interconnected, as well as all the characters being decidedly either 'entirely good' or 'entirely bad,' although in this case (unlike Nicholas Nickleby, where every character followed his/her straight line trajectory throughout) there's some ambiguity in some of the players, particularly the eccentric Miss Havisham and the shadowy figure of the convict, who in early behaviour seems a benevolent figure despite the malignance of his recurring presence. It's also an intriguing morality tale, about class politics and loyalty and principles, and it's easy to see its influence. For instance having just read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban it's clear that the lunchtime scene with Harry's aunt is almost a complete transplant of an early scene here with Pip, where his sister's obnoxious friends talk loudly of his ingratitude in his presence. This was ultimately a very moving, at times comedic and strangely uplifting fable, and certainly the best I've read from Dickens.

3) The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea – Yukio Mishima

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I’m generally a sucker for ‘classic’ edition book covers, so whenever I see a Vintage classics or Penguin classics cover in the library, I’m wont to have my eye drawn there, and in this case despite knowing nothing whatsoever about it, I grabbed it and borrowed it. And obviously the gamble paid off. This is a fascinating, surreal book about a thirteen-year old boy, his mother and the sailor who has a love affair with her. There's something very beautiful about Mishima's prose, even in translation, with some odd word choices that come across as quite poetic. This then belies how brutal this story is, with Noboru (the thirteen-year-old boy) being part of a gang who eschew maturity and adulthood as weak, soft and hypocritical, and aspire to a perfect state of what you might call stoic extremism. This creates a schism between the characters but also parts of the story, as it feels at times like a whirlwind romance story but the harsh, sociopathic credo of the gang of boys clashes with and in turn undercuts it, making it multifaceted in tone and unsettlingly ambivalent. The directions these two elements are tugging the story in makes the direction it takes never very clear, which makes the denouement all the more compelling. I can't quite decide if it's savagely beautiful or just savage, but it's an extremely affecting bit of writing.

2) The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot

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This one also took a long time to get into, but once it and I were in sync I realised the import of what is a very long introduction to these characters. Basically the tribulations of the Tullivers and their fall from high standing into poverty is the sort of story that a lesser, or less ambitious writer would consign to 200 words of exposition. Eliot by contrast makes it just the first part of a long bildungsroman of two siblings who are bonded by love and kinship yet infinitely separated by their irreconcilable but mutually well-meaning natures. In this way, while I was questioning the deliberation of the narration through the early parts, it all paid off when the drama intensifies and I’m now so invested in these people. As such I was captivated from halfway through by these incredibly well-wrought characters Eliot has taken the time to bring to life in full living colour - most importantly the sensitive, astute but inexperienced Maggie whose cross to bear is both a heart so over-swelled with feeling and a nature that is so bewitching to others. Eliot stands in a class of her own; she is so skilful with language that she can vacillate quite readily between efficient and elegant description and elusive, enigmatic ambiguity. It often feels like this story is heading in a familiar direction, and at each turn there's yet another twist, with Eliot offering no convenient or symmetrical solutions and leaving us on a very ambivalent foundation on which to build our own meaning. But it's such a strong and powerful narrative that piles on the meaning and the philosophy and the struggles, so it felt like I’d been washed away by the flood that marks the climax of the book. It's profoundly affecting and brilliant, and I can confidently say I enjoyed it far more than the perhaps more esteemed Middlemarch, which was only my #9 book of last year. Slightly funny story too, I didn't choose this to read for myself, but at some point Bec was on her way to the library (I think to get out of the house while I looked after Dylan) and I told her to bring me back a 'surprise book' I hadn't read, and this was the result. She chooses well, except when it comes to husbands. Anyway, lots and lots of rambling afterthought to increase suspense...

1) The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro

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What a year for Kazuo Ishiguro. First the Nobel prize for literature – arguably the finest accolade a writer can achieve – and then he gets my #1 book of the year – actually the finest accolade a writer can achieve. This was only the second book I read in 2017, but from the moment it clicked with me it was always at the front of the pack. Fact is though, this is a really odd read and it’s a bit difficult to convey exactly what it was that so beguiled me. Essentially a surreal, absurdist dreamscape, it has that patented Ishiguro style of just subtly tweaking the edges of reality and believability so you sometimes don't cotton on at first. In fact I think it’s fair to say that Kazuo and I (I call him Kazuo because he’s like an old chum by now) have a very good relationship as writer-reader; I am always ready to suspend my disbelief and let his surreal, other-worldly hand guide me down whatever garden path he chooses to.  This is certainly what happened for me with Never Let Me Go (my #2 book of 2012) - and I’ve read a number of people really not connecting with that book for what seems to me the reason that they’re unwilling to be led, or trying too hard to second-guess his intentions – and it happened here with The Unconsoled. It begins like a straightforward - if slightly odd - story as a musician checks into a hotel a few days before his big performance in town. The first hint that things are not as they seem is dropped fairly soon as the narrator is left in a car while his driver goes into a house to talk to the occupant and without explanation the narrator watches and conveys the whole scene inside the house that he isn't present for. This unexplained omniscience is just the first drop of a meandering journey through an unending dream where corridors and car journeys go on for ever but then opening a door takes you straight back to the place you started from, and while in a crowd of random strangers you take a second look and realise one has suddenly become an old childhood acquaintance. And I have to admit it took me 300+ pages before I finally cottoned on to the fact that it was following dream logic; I was just along for the ride. There's loads of absurdist Beckett-esque dialogue, surreal and nightmarish imagery and the constant flitting from one chance encounter to the next and our narrator's chain from one misadventure or distraction to the next is as frustrating as it is witty and captivating. The story, particularly once I was invested in it as a dream is genuinely high stakes stuff, it feels like after all we've been through with this narrator, you need the concert to come off and be a triumph, and everyone – benevolent, malicious, vengeful – to get their just desserts. But as in a dream, nothing is ever really neatly wrapped up, and the whole thing takes on the feeling of being a thorough, sometimes brutally uncomfortable but enlightening self-examination of some kind of collective unconscious of humanity. It’s also true that there are some threads of this story that frustratingly never got resolved, but it’s all part of the nature of the unconscious, and part of my relationship with my old chum Kazuo that what could be glaring plot holes are just part of the singular journey he’s taken me on. It ends up quite melancholic, bittersweet, darkly comedic but with a beautiful sense of inverted reality that left me feeling strangely serene and sanguine.

Books of 2017 Part 5: Bottom 11

51) Travesties – Tom Stoppard

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I read this as a short, light read because Bec refers to it as one of her favourite plays. I can’t help but feel that her own experience, of seeing it performed live before reading it, enhanced her enjoyment of it. For one thing, Stoppard is incredibly prescriptive about the stage directions and leaves very little in the script to chance or the artistic interpretation of the director, which means that performance-by-performance would be pretty close to Stoppard’s original vision, but in reading alone there’s a great deal of work that you have to do to envision it. I also feel it would be very much more fun in performance than its intrinsic fun here, because it's quite chaotic and haphazard on the page. There are some amusing jokes and some amusing post-modern intertextuality, at the expense of dadaism, Bolshevism and Joycean nonsense, all of which I'm a fan of (the mocking thereof I mean) but ultimately this felt quite abrupt, and I'm unsure what the real point of it was, because the 'story' seemed so threadbare and flimsy.

52) How to Be Both – Ali Smith

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This is a weird read. It's engaging enough, but I really struggle to work out the point of it. For one thing, it's two stories that share a flimsy and ultimately pointless connection, spanning about seven centuries of time. The first part is the story of a preternaturally talented painter in Italian renaissance times, commissioned to paint a fresco by the newly ordained duke, and his dissatisfaction with his pay. It's a rambling and directionless story, not helped by the jumping about in time and the reversion to stream of consciousness. Then it (to me at least) abruptly leaps ahead to the story of a 16-year-old girl in Cambridge, coming to terms with the premature death of her mother (who once took her to Italy to see a painting by the painter in the first part - that's the only tangible link between the two stories). It feels like there's some decent observations here, about grief and family, about doing what's expected or choosing to subvert that, but I find the whole loosely-connected completely-disparate stories thing quite a lazy narrative device, and I'm frequently disappointed by their authors not doing enough to synthesise the parts into a far larger exploration of themes across narrative universes. David Mitchell provided the most overt but even flimsiest use of this device in Cloud Atlas, and Ali Smith disappointed me here too. It seems like a simpler task to do here too, but she creates a tentative thematic connection at best, and ultimately both stories - which end up feeling like two stories rather than two parts of one story - just pulled up short.

53) Excession – Iain M Banks

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I feel that Banks has an astounding imagination but his weakness is character, and I really felt it for most of this book, as we're introduced to so many individual characters and protagonists and the narrative flits quite sporadically between them. With so many in the cast, none of them are particularly well defined except by what they do and how they influence the plot (which is very convoluted anyway). As such I felt a lot of it really passing me by in the way that Gibson’s Neuromancer (My #45 book of 2013) did - which is not what I expect from an engaging writer like Banks, even in full spaceships-with-consciousness sci-fi mode. The last quarter or so of the book, when it reaches its culmination and revelation, I guess is far more engaging, and the characters that have generally just been insubstantial names on a page became more relatable because of how they confront the circumstances. But I do feel a lot of this could have been greatly pared down or characters just better drawn out, because otherwise the construction of the narrative is imaginative and certainly curious if not engaging.

54) The Island of Dr Moreau – H G Wells

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Typical Wells stuff; this possibly might have been more interesting to read if I didn't know most of the premise upfront. The fact that I know the premise means any sense of suspense or surprise is removed. And as with The Invisible Man (My #54 book of 2015), I feel like Wells doesn't fully explicate or explore the philosophical ramifications of what Moreau is doing - besides the disturbing inhumanity of the fact that he’s knowingly inflicting pain on living creatures. I feel like it's a short and somewhat sharp story that could be quite affecting the first time around, but it's a bit of a blip on the emotional radar. The last couple of pages, after Prendick returns to civilisation and reflects on the animal nature of some corners of humanity, is probably the best passage in the book, and really could have been foreshadowed and explored more in the preceding prose.

55) The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut

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This is a very weird read, as well as a frustrating and unsatisfying one. Vonnegut obviously writes in one style, which is irreverent and caustically satirical, and while this is no exception and is quite successful, it also just misses the gravitas that Breakfast of Champions (My #17 of 2015) or Slaughterhouse-Five (My #14 of 2012) has. The main issue is a lack of identification with the characters. The protagonist, Malachi Constant, is not only a very unsympathetic figure (which is entirely the point) but fairly early on, his memory is erased and his personality hitherto becomes irrelevant. More to the point, he effectively has no agency since the whole point of the story is that his life is manipulated and controlled by a second figure, Niles Winston Rumfoord, who by virtue of a cosmic accident, experiences time simultaneously rather than linearly. Therefore we already know everything that will happen to our protagonist, and everything he does is controlled or manipulated by Rumfoord. The trouble is we don't really get any glimpses of Rumfoord's psychology or motivations until the very end of the book, and so I felt very cast adrift throughout as it's not at all clear what the point of it all is. Vonnegut's world building here is very haphazard, and I feel like there's a fair bit of redundant storyline that could have either been dispensed with, or expanded upon quite considerably to flesh out the characters and the universe a lot more, and make the final denouement far more effective than simply tying up a lot of very loose and very convoluted plot strings. There's always a certain fatalism and nihilism to Vonnegut's writing, that nothing matters and there is no higher purpose, but here it's perhaps both its most stark and most blunt iteration, so much so that the machinations of the plot felt like a giant trick, and at the end of it I just felt a bit cheated. Some fine wit throughout but an over-ambitious and unfulfilling read.

56) The Power House – John Buchan

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Thought I might read some John Buchan (beyond seeing Hitchcock’s adaptation of The 39 Steps), but this feels like an odd first choice. What I gleaned from the introduction (which effectively starts with the phrase "congratulations reader, you've chosen Buchan's worst novel") this was sort of a late-career work that's less esteemed. The main thing I got from this is it feels like the sort of thing Conservatives read for escapism. Our hero here is a very upper-crust Barrister, Eton and Oxford-educated (but of course) who wanders around investigating an anarchist spy conspiracy because one of his old chums is caught up in it and in danger. He's the type of character that an old Tory would want to read about - heroic but stoic, with a big touch of that old nostalgic charm and whimsy. It's ultimately a bit of harmless escapist fun, but the narrative did kind of feel a bit comically stodgy and toffee-nosed in the way he just casually drops knowing comments to his readers like "you know those rococo early Georgian rooms of *insert fancy hotel here*" as if he's speaking exclusively to other twits in his set. This felt self-conscious as soon as I noticed it and it ultimately just added a bit of puffery to what's ultimately a bit insubstantial and inconsequential anyway.

57) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – J K Rowling

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I gave up on this, and reading the whole series (though my ambition to do the latter was never high) a long time ago, so it's a slight cheat to count this as one of my books this year when all I did was pick it up from where I’d left it, and finish the latter and more interesting bits. But look, the film adaptation of this is the weakest asset in the entire franchise and universe so it took a lot to pick this up again because I really didn't care. The whole Lockhart subplot and Harry's sophomoric issues just feel tired, so it really needs the last 50 pages, with the mystery unravelling and his encounter with Tom Riddle to save it. I think it's generally regarded as the weakest (and Chris Columbus of course is the weakest of all directors ever) so I'm not saying anything innovative by saying it’s the weakest film or the weakest book in the series, but yeah honestly the series almost felt now like it was already getting a bit tired, and it needed something to light the fire underneath it again. It does too much of repeating the same motifs of the first book without adding nearly enough to the mythology. I think the greatest value this book serves is to underline how reinvigorating the premise and execution of Prisoner of Azkaban is.

58) Youth – J M Coetzee

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Bit of an odd one, this; it feels like the lion’s share of Coetzee's writing here is framing questions that our protagonist is posing, without ever really answering them. In many ways I felt it was possibly semi-autobiographical, but one that's still ongoing, like an unfinished journey of self-discovery. Our protagonist first wants nothing except to escape from South Africa to the mythological metropolis that is London, where he hopes to inspire his poetry. But then his poetry takes a backseat to the necessities of life: work, money, putting food on the table. He makes clumsy attempt after clumsy attempt to follow his poetic idols, questioning whether poverty and misery are necessary for creating art, but ultimately our drab, uninspiring hero fails in art because he's dull and lacking in passion. I think Coetzee writes a bit inefficiently; a lot of his sentences are needlessly long and elaborate, and because we're ultimately left with an inconclusive story and a whole lot of unanswered questions, I found it was in the end quite a dawdling tale. There's some intrigue there in the disconnect between art and the quotidian, but it's not a ground-breaking work on any of its themes.

59) Incompetence – Rob Grant

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This is a bit of harmless fun, with some really funny moments that are typical Rob Grant. It has some real Grant-esque sort of ranting anger at the system (from what I’ve gleaned from all my Red Dwarf fandom, Grant was the angry, bitter part of the Grant Naylor partnership) and it's really more speculative satire about the politics of Europe and the fetishisation of stupidity than it is any sort of sci-fi (even though there's a sort of "novel set in the future" sense to it). There are times when his writing is really lazy though, where he clearly wants to get to the next plot point without having to expend effort so he’ll just glibly jump to the denouement of a convoluted sequence in a sentence or two, and yet there's this interminable 40-odd page action sequence of our protagonist jumping onto a moving train and trying to get into a locked carriage. Amusing non-payoff to it in the end, but it's clear there are things Grant wanted to write about and things he didn't, and the whole thing is quite hit and miss as a result for me, since there are similarly things I care about reading and things I care less about.

60) Emma – Jane Austen

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I felt I needed to read another Austen, as I'd only read one up to this point, and this seemed obvious simply because I hadn't actually gone through the story before in any form, and pretty much all I knew about the story was the plot of Clueless. Also I was warned against reading this by my friend Julz (who studied this/Clueless in year 12), and I can see why it would be hated to study. Basically it's quite a boring book. I know it's effectively a comedy, and the interest in the story comes from so many misunderstandings and mistaken affection and so forth, but it really dragged simply because there's no conflict, and no drama. I think maybe there just aren't any particularly engaging characters, either. I mean there's the loquacious miss Bates, and the supercilious Mrs Elton later, but apart from them everybody is varying amounts of charming and well-mannered and sensible and what it's really missing is an engaging antagonist. Pride & Prejudice has a number of them, including probably one of my favourite characters Miss Bingley, and it's engaging because the conflict and the drama and the stakes feel so high (since it’s not just about love and marriage, but about social disgrace and impending poverty). There are no stakes whatsoever in this book, and I feel it could have been a lot shorter, with a couple of the characters and their trajectories being ultimately unnecessary for the final resolutions. Like Mr/Mrs Elton really don't need to be so prominent, nor do Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. It just seems like a long, long portrait of mild-mannered rich people. Doesn't sound very entertaining when you put it like that, and it's not.

61) The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts – Louis de Bernières

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I didn't realise until I'd almost finished this that it was de Bernières' debut novel, but it shows. Where Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (My #45 book of 2016 – yes apparently I’m not much of a LdB fan) had a good coherence and structure to its storyline even while the author meandered off the main plot quite a lot, this is completely and over-ambitiously haphazard. The title in itself is complete nonsense, as Don Emmanuel's nether parts hardly even figure into the story, and the 'war,' such as it is, is just one part of this large multi-tendrilled splat of different storylines. There are other problems with it but the main thing is that, apart from a black-and-white distinction between very on-the-nose irreproachably good and irredeemably evil people, there's really no discernible protagonists rather than a cast of various people. And de Bernières just loves to draw it out into larger geopolitical narratives and explorations, but in doing so throughout just helps to lose the focus of what could have been a serviceable narrative about the little guys bringing down the corrupt military machine. Instead there’s pointless ornamental diversions into international diplomacy, alchemy experimentation, and of course sex escapades and the fetishisation of violence. And this is where de Bernières loses my sympathy entirely. In Señor Vivo the violence was graphic and deeply unsettling, particularly as it was juxtaposed with this light-hearted, tongue in cheek magical realism. But here it seems relentlessly brutal and pornographic, where you can sense the author enjoying the excruciating detailing of these barbaric acts, all so that he can wreak a similarly barbaric revenge on the perpetrators at the end (well, not including 50 sprawling pages of unnecessary afterthought resolution), which acts are of course understandable and justified because they're done by the 'good guys' against the 'bad guys'. It's just an incoherent and largely amoral stream of waffle that wants to be bigger than it ends up being, where it could have focused more intimately on the psychology of its core characters and made for a lightly cynical satire (which it is, unsuccessfully, as well as a whole bunch of other unrelated unsuccessful things).

Books of 2017 Part 4: 20-11

20) Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis

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Definitely an intriguing book, but I found this a frustrating read, just because I had a hard time working out the ultimate point of its post-modern, convoluted scope. Initially it feels like a toned-down American Psycho: the milieu and zeitgeist is the same, and Ellis obviously feels at home writing about drugged-up young hip types living it up in NYC. But the first part of this book, which takes up about half of it, is ultimately pointless because when it takes a very dark, American Psychotic turn in part two, the first part and a few of its running gags (like a repeated dialogue motif of Person A:"I saw you at *event* last week" Protagonist, Person B: "thanks but I wasn't at *event* last week") take on this sinister satirical meaning, like American Psycho and Patrick's constantly being mistaken for other characters. But it begs the question as to why the first half, which is all yuppie paparazzi glamour and indolence, is so long. I feel a more efficient writer could have got the message across in half the time, but Ellis is so self-indulgent and loves his name-dropping and glamour fantasies where his strange, other-worldly characters intermingle with the glitterati of the 90s. After it takes its dark turn, it's definitely a more interesting read with post-modern layers of meta-narrative and a sinister underbelly. But it's hard to get what point he's trying to make, because it's both too much of and not enough of each thing: it's a satire of the world of glamour and fashion but taken to an absurd extreme that it no longer resembles the reality it’s satirising. It's a harsh morality tale about our protagonist and his selfish naive indulgences, but his punishment to my mind far outweighs his bad behaviour. Then it's some kind of macropolitical commentary too? And how the world of glamour and the world of politics both feed off and destroy each other? Again it's too hyper-real to make any legible statement on either. It's ultimately then I feel just a post-modern fractured narrative about fashion, sex, and violent crime and the ability of the media to be manipulated. But it's done in a too-fractured way that it becomes more about the fictional narrative exercise than it is about the satirical statement and themes. It’s funny, too, because a colleague saw me reading this when I was about halfway through part one, and I had a good conversation with her about our various reactions and repulsions from American Psycho, and me telling her how light this was compared with the themes of American Psycho, and how this was far more readable. Then a few days later I had to approach her again and completely redact everything I’ve said once it got into the gratuitous torturey bits, just in case she decided to pick this up expecting something pleasant.

19) The Forever War – Joe Haldeman

#ClassicsIShouldRead #IGuess? #SciFiNerdsOnTheInternetToldMeToReadThis

This definitely got off on the wrong foot with me, because it fell quite quickly into that trap of man-dudery writing that so much escapist sci-fi does, where female characters are either sexy or kickass or, much worse, kickass enough to be considered sexy despite not being inherently sexy. A lot of the opening training sequence seems to revolve around sex and broism. The first battle takes on a similar approach to Ender’s Game (my #8 book of 2014), too, and becomes quite derivative generally, but then when they get back to Earth and it's all post-apocalyptic dystopia, it gets more intriguing. Not that the dystopia is not familiar too, but it becomes about the whole universe construction that Haldeman has imagined: one foot in earth and humanity, and the other exploring the stars (yes indeed that's a hell of a legspan). It revolves mainly around time dilation and the fact that, through wormhole compression, our hero Mandella lives through the entire centuries-long war and witnesses the cyclical evolution and devolution of humanity, becomes a heterosexual deviant when earth has enforced a homosexual norm in order to control population (which at first is very 70s and politically incorrect but later takes on an amusingly satirical inversion of heteronormative conventions), and becomes an infantry commander due to his relative dilated seniority and despite his mental inexperience. It's just a multidimensional sci-fi caper, with an ultimately very biting commentary on conflict and the 'other'. It's playing in familiar territory but becomes more intriguing, entertaining and even warm and funny as it goes on.

18) Nutshell – Ian McEwan

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I hadn't read any of the thinkpieces or whatever that this book precipitated, but I was aware of its unusual conceit, and got vague wind of some controversial headlines about it. And, sure, it takes a lot of suspension of disbelief. But apart from its strange conceit – for those unaware, it’s told from the first-person point of view of an unborn foetus - it's ultimately just a framing device, and is pretty much the same framing device as Natsume's I am a Cat (My #20 book of 2016): a preternaturally intelligent observer who is present at all of the events of the narrative without the agents necessarily being aware. The worst that I can see this genuinely being accused of is being a pro-life argument, but then that would be absurd but moot anyway since the foetus narrator in question is very late third trimester. The perhaps more intriguing, but at times awkward conceit is that it's effectively a reimagining of Hamlet. Given that the title is taken from a Hamlet epigraph that introduces the book, I must admit it took me far longer than it should have to recognise the significance of the character names ‘Trudy’ and ‘Claude’, but once it becomes obvious, it's a double-edged sword. McEwan plays with the familiar scenario in a modern setting well, and gives a new and interesting exploration of Hamlet's famous impotence by placing him in utero hence physically unable to affect any agency (the scene where he tries to strangle himself with his own umbilical cord, but in shutting off his oxygen supply loses his own will to suicide) is a very dark but witty reinterpretation of the soliloquy. But then it also lends itself to some awfully pointless and on-the-nose self consciousness, such as when Claude, the evening after murdering his brother, decides on a whim to order home-delivered Danish food instead of Indian (because Hamlet’s set in Denmark hahahahaha get it?). Overall I think it's actually a well-constructed postmodern work, very McEwanean in its cynicism and deromanticising of a premise that could be uncannily and unpleasantly sentimentalised in lesser hands.

17) Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose – Flannery O’Connor

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"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." – The Nature and Aim of Fiction, p. 84

It's strange that I've had this on my shelf for so long and not read it. Not just because I love O'Connor, and not just because it's great, but because I feel I've read a lot of bits and pieces from it online, and in my academic reading on her. In fact this book would have assisted me greatly in preparing my mildly ill-fated conference paper in 2007 so it’s a bit of an irony (O’Connor-esque irony) that I bought this specifically for that conference paper, but haven’t read it until now. This is basically a dozen or so papers exploring in great depth O'Connor's approach and philosophy to writing; her Catholicism and the importance of faith and above all answering the mystery as to why she, as a devout Christian, focuses her narrative lens so exclusively on grotesque, violent and downright evil characters. These pieces give a really great insight into her motivation in writing and how she seeks to write not to please people and not to please other Catholics but to shine a light - God's light, as it were - onto a corruptible and atrophying society. The influence of her faith, the deep south, and other writers are all explored and written about with great aplomb and humour, and it helps reinforce why in spite of how alien she is to me, her work so beguiles me nonetheless.

16) The Abbess of Crewe – Muriel Spark

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From a devout Catholic writer trying to exercise grace through portraying its various pitfalls to a witty and biting Catholic satire, about an abbey of nuns that observes very strict dogmatic rituals on one hand, and on the other curates an elaborate electronics room and a telephone line to a wayward missionary sister in various places of the world on the other. What the elaborate electronics room's ultimate purpose is, though, is to bug and survey all parts of the abbey and to keep the newly elected abbess Alexandra informed of all their private conversations. This is all precipitated in flashbacks to the leadup to the election (where Alexandra is ultimately elected) and the dangerous growing popularity of Felicity, a subversive and dubious sister who could challenge Alexandra for the position. It's quite an amusing, Machiavellian tale, wherein Alexandra uses her friends and enemies only in so far as it suits her ambitions. It also feels very timely even now as it explores - maybe superficially - the disconnect between the rule of natural law and the internal rule of ecumenical law. Alexandra's comments about mythology being nothing but garbled history, and history being nothing but garbled mythology - this is the plainest revelation of the way in which this particular abbess manipulates the law - and the media - in order to expunge her own transgressions and deliver those transgressions into others' hands. I did find the nonlinear structure maybe a bit ineffectual, and I think as a linear narrative (i.e. start at the beginning and finish with the election), the story could have had a greater impact at the end. I feel that Spark chopped and mixed the timelines in order to condense the story, so as not to have to lay too much groundwork but plop us in the middle instead, and it's economical stotytelling. But I didn't feel it needed to be, as I'd happily read more deeply and for longer.

15) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J K Rowling

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It was handy reading this straight after I read Chamber of Secrets, because it's so significantly better (yes that’s a spoiler alert for a future post, for those paying attention). What's more, it really relights the fire under the series after it started to feel a little formulaic and familiar in the second book. This is largely due to the fact that it isn't simply "how will Voldemort face Harry this year and come up short through some Deus ex Machina device?", but takes instead the form of a compelling mystery surrounding the figure of Sirius Black, how he escaped from Azkaban, how he keeps getting into Hogwarts and of course what he really wants (even though we supposedly know). It's also really imaginatively realised, with a really compelling and bittersweet unravelling of the narrative parts. There are certainly aspects that are sort of cringily childish to me (like all the quidditch games, and the fact that the narrative is so needlessly partial so that the Slytherin team consistently and reliably cheats. Like can't you just make them generally unlikeable people but have it a tough but fair contest that Gryffindor wins?), but they're sort of necessary evils to deliver a compelling and gripping narrative. It's been 12 years since I saw the film which I regard as the best (mostly because Cuarón), so I couldn't remember all the twists and turns. As such, even though I knew where the main twist was going, the rest was still pretty fresh. Anyway, the biggest compliment I can give it is I came off reading 1.5 Potters and I would have happily picked up the fourth book right after it, had I had it.

14) Boyhood Island – Karl Ove Knausgaard

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This is an interesting part of the overarching memoir, in that it regresses for volume 3 back to childhood and also adds more depth and colour to the hatred Knaausgaard and his brother had for their father, which was adumbrated in volume 1. It has all the great hallmarks from the first two volumes, the humour and pathos, the warts-and-all confessional honesty. He makes the point throughout about memory being unreliable and yet narrates events day by day from when he was six like they happened yesterday. Yet there's no reason to doubt it, as his intellect is obviously towering and his self-portrait is not particularly flattering so you don’t feel like he’s painting things in a more positive light than they happened in. In fact the most engaging thing is how matter of fact he is throughout. It's all completely relatable (although also exotically regional Norwegian) but told without elaboration or philosophising. I've become immune to it a bit, and it takes some reevaluation before I realise how engaging the reflections have been. Knausgaard and his memoir certainly have the same quality as Proust, only he takes an intriguingly non-linear approach to recounting his life story. It’s interesting too, writing/editing these notes for my end of year round-up because I don’t recall a whole lot of details from this, but part of the reason is that this is being muddied with volume 1 and 2; overall I found this particular volume kind of lacked the clear topical focus of the first two because this seemed more like cleaning up boyhood reminiscences, but I’ve enjoyed every volume very much so far.

13) The Power – Naomi Alderman

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This is a really interesting, high-concept feminist sci-fi novel. I feel like it's important that you get past the high concept - essentially, one day young women develop the ability to shoot lightning from their hands - before this book can have any effect at all. But Alderman does a deft job of taking the high concept and running with it, in a real Kafkaesque or Saramagoesque "what if?" kind of way. In actual fact, the book puts me in mind of several other works beyond Saramago's and Kafka's: the first being Brooks' World War Z (My perhaps unfortunately-ranked #56 book of 2016), in that it includes various alternative styles of writing and documentation in order to present itself as a 'history' of events as they occurred in this fictional world. The second, namely the wraparound framing device, that the 'history' has been put together by an aspiring male writer in the 'future' and presented to Alderman to offer her critique, has obvious shades of the epilogue to The Handmaid's Tale, in assessing things after the fact. In terms of the actual story, this is kind of a page-turner. It starts with a number of characters and their personal stories and escalates into a fast-paced thriller that does suck you into the conflicts and the tensions, and wanting to see it reach its logical (and just) conclusion. At the heart of it though, and the wraparound device brings this home - at times a little on the nose maybe, but at other times with great wit and pathos – it is a very provocative thought experiment about what is it that sets men and women apart, and the nature of power. Although a lot of the crucial plot points revolve around men, the acts that they do and the depths they sink to when threatened, as well as the nature of the frail male ego, Alderman also reserves a commentary on the exact shape taken by the turning worm in her created world. When women wield a power that men don't have, what does this do to them? In our world, are women considered more diplomatic, thoughtful, rational than men because they are in a position of inequality so are forced into diplomacy and rationality to overcome the disadvantages? If they held dominance, would things really change for the better? It's not really a question that is answered fully (although the implied answers seem to be "yes" and "no" respectively) but they're very curious questions, explored in engaging depth in what is ultimately a speculative fantasy. I enjoyed this book a lot I should say; it's both gripping while reading, and interesting to ponder after the fact.

12) Immortality – Milan Kundera

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I do love Kundera. He's so witty, insightful and completely European as well. This is an odd narrative, very meta as well, beginning with the author in first person observing a mature woman make "a gesture" at the pool and then taking his image of this woman and spinning a narrative around her. He also dips into history and meta-history, with stories of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's extramarital affair and Peter Paul Rubens' series of love affairs, as well as an imagined dialogue between Goethe and Ernest Hemingway in the afterlife. The most meta part, and also the bit that I struggled with, is when Kundera's own autobiographical reflections interweave with his central figure, the mature woman, and her life. Like all his works, the scope of the novel is very ambitious, but I feel he slightly lost the tread of what he's trying to explore at that point. Narrative hiccups aside though, he's a superbly erudite and intelligent writer, and I feel like there's so much in his philosophical ramblings and investigations of love and life and humanity, and the reflections on mortality. So much to unpack that could probably use some rereading to come to grips with it. Great and entertaining stuff.

11) Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

#ClassicsIShouldRead #IGuess?

It’s kind of funny, my reading this now, because it puts me in mind a lot of Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (My #3 book of 2016), in that it's a love story and a tragedy set incidentally against a backdrop of war. Moreover, it rather makes me feel a bit as if Flanagan owed a bit of a debt to this book. By the same token, this book owes a debt to Brideshead Revisited (Going back a bit now, but my #17 book of 2012) in its sense of nostalgia and of war being a refuge for people searching in vain for meaning and identity. At times this feels like it over-romanticises, yet Faulks has a very pragmatic view of war and when it feels like it develops that exciting, heroic view he's ready with a gruesome depiction of the conflict to bring us back to earth. The prose is also fairly spare, without any real flair but also thereby unpretentious and unostentatious. Despite its unadorned nature, he enunciated far better than I could how I feel about being a father to my son, in this passage which I like so much I'm prepared to recreate it, in full, below:

"...he could not put into words the effect that watching John had on him. He saw him as a creature who had come from another universe, but in Jack's eyes the place from which the boy had come was not just different but a better world. His innocence was not the same thing as ignorance; it was a powerful quality of goodness that was available to all people: it was perhaps what the Prayer book called a means of grace, or a hope of glory.

It seemed to Jack that if an ordinary human being, his own son, no one particular, could have this purity of mind, then perhaps the isolated deeds of virtue at which people marvelled in later life were not really isolated at all; perhaps they were the natural continuation of the innocent goodness that all people brought into the world at their birth." (p. 198)

The subplot of Jack yearning for his son back home and living every day for news is the most affecting and heart-rending part of the book. The overall narrative, about Stephen's more conventional heartbreak and his increasingly callous, unfeeling response to the carnage speaks of the loss of innocence and the atrophy of the soul that war precipitates. It was quite affecting. It's a romantic, and yet depressingly bleak, vision of the world and humanity. Oddly structured but very affecting.


And of course, as I do every year, I'll leave you hanging on the precipice of my top 10 while I take a step back and do the extremely entertaining task of counting up my bottom books of 2017 tomorrow, from 51-61.

Books of 2017 Part 3: 30-21

30) A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing – Eimear McBride

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This is an oddly written book, and I feel it's this weird phenomenon where post-Joyce Irish writers feel the need to push that narrative envelope further and further. However, like Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (My #12 book of 2013), I found this a far more engaging read than I did Ulysses (My number n book of n books I’ve ever read in my life, including Football, it’s a Funny Old Game by Kevin Keegan), despite the fact that it's more avant-garde in its prose than its predecessor from the get-go. Essentially a long distracted stream of consciousness, the prose is all in half-finished sentences, leaping from one idea to a bit of back-and-forth rapid dialogue to a long jolting train of thoughts. It's also unsettling in its subject matter, being the first person account of a young girl's growing up in a devout Irish catholic household and her sexual awakening and subsequent rebellion after she is statutorily raped by her uncle at age thirteen (I use the term statutorily since she consents, in as far as she is able to). The mental anguish that she goes through then and the obsession she has with this same uncle as she reaches adulthood means the stop-start prose, which is stuttering when calm, becomes very tumultuous when it's impassioned. The other part of the story, about her simultaneously reverent and protective attitude towards her older brother, with unspecified mental difficulties, forms the more tender but also more anguished part of the story. It's a little unsatisfying in that her only real revelation is how peripheral she is to her own life, and the conclusion of the story becomes the non-ending that we kind of hoped it wouldn't be - hoping instead for comeuppance for some of the insidious elements in her life. As a Baileys prize winner though, this is definitely one of the most satisfying, really centering around female identity and consciousness and presenting an unrelenting, warts-and-all depiction of the way men exploit it to their own ends while everybody makes allowances or excuses for it. This sits only at #30 because these are ultimately ranked on my subjective enjoyment, and while this is academically quite brilliant, it’s a tough, unpleasant and clumsy read.

29) The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan

#ClassicsIShouldRead

Good book. I enjoyed it particularly as someone married to a Chinese immigrant, in that I recognised a lot of the cultural norms and the philosophy that Tan explores in this east-meets-west, past-meets-present fractured narrative. I found I digested it far more as a collection of loosely-related short stories rather than a novel, and in a similar way to Infinite Jest (nah, it's not as good) I could enjoy them all without needing all the interconnections. Mind you, I found it simply the sum of its parts/stories, without getting a greater synthesis of them all which I felt was available. Late in the book, I realised the reason I wasn't getting more, and wasn't remembering the last part of the previous story/narrative part from each character was basically that they not only didn't start from where the previous part left off (even idea-wise) but they often didn't finish with a narrative event or anything that was memorable, but the final 'event' would be followed by some kind of philosophical musing or reflection. It ultimately isn't necessary but I feel I missed out on something because the parts didn't thread and flow into each other to me. Obviously as a Simpsons obsessive too, I had Lisa’s quote "it really showed me how the mother-daughter bond can triumph over adversity" in my head the whole time, and as with a lot of cultural references in the Simpsons, it – and Tan’s awkward dismissal of this reading - is a genuinely quality joke, because while it's a fairly obvious takeout, it's also a very simplistic reading of the book, and there's enough ambivalence in a lot of the mother-daughter relationships that it genuinely could have been the opposite of Tan's intention if you apply such a reading. It was definitely a rewarding and engaging read, but it wasn't quite as rewarding as it should have been, or seems to be for most people.

28) My Ántonia – Willa Cather

#ClassicsIShouldRead

So two things I kind of knew going into this book: one, Americans worship this book; it's a staple on every US high school reading list, everybody's read it and esteems it and it would be top of mind for many people when asked ‘what is the great American novel’. The other is that people outside the US (eg. Jez) have either never heard of it or never read it. And I can see exactly why both of those are the case. Firstly, it's a very vivid and descriptive novel that takes place largely in regional Nebraska, and if you've never really seen anything romantic about a cornfield, it's unlikely you'll be instantly enraptured by this book. It definitely has a big sense of place, of community and of people, and has a lot to say about the pioneering spirit in early-20C America. So for an outsider from that milieu it definitely feels like a quaint and perhaps over-romantic eulogy for a bygone time and place. It also feels to me very mild and sentimental even while not shying away from heavy themes like suicide, broken dreams, regret and guilt. The culture clash between the European migrants and the American-born characters is washed with this hazy cornfield glow that to my eyes makes America out to be far more prosperous and inviting than reality would really spell out. But I get it, and I get why people appreciate it because it celebrates difference as much as it celebrates togetherness, and the sentimentality that is unavoidable is also enriched by Cather's striking visual language that doesn't seem excessively wordy or florid. It's to me completely understandable that people would reread and cherish this book but can also ignore its efficacy and potency even after reading it. To me I appreciate the feelings it invokes but purely in an academic sense.

27) The Winter of our Discontent – John Steinbeck

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Interesting book. Definitely socially conscious like the Steinbeck classics, but it has a gentle sentimentality to it as well, that feels like a writer reconciling himself with the world later in life (this was written in 1961, a year before he won the Nobel). Ethan Hawley, our central character is a down on his luck grocery clerk who wishes he could provide a greater fortune to his wife and two kids. The story unfolds as he's presented with a variety of means to make that fortune and seems to eschew them all, and it's never fully clear what his motivations are. What's curious about the book is firstly historically: it's Steinbeck in a far more prosperous milieu than his greatest works; here people still struggle, but have so many more opportunities and options available so they’re struggling to make ends meet without being desperate. It's also curious from a moral point-of-view, because although the story ultimately celebrates honesty as a cardinal virtue, it's always very ambivalent as to how honest its characters are. In fact Ethan is often espoused by his fellows as being a model of honesty, and the more he (perhaps facetiously) protests that he isn't honest, the more they believe it. As absurd a comparison as it is, it reminded me a lot of American Psycho, in that Ethan in fact isn't honest, but in telling people forthrightly that he isn't, it somehow proves his honesty even more stridently (read Patrick Bateman trying to convince people that he is, in fact, a psychopath, and people disbelieving him the more he insists). I didn't love Ethan’s facetiousness or his sarcasm and he was perhaps a needlessly enigmatic figure. It's an enjoyable socially conscious story, not as impactful or memorable as Of Mice and Men or The Grapes of Wrath (my #26 book of 2013), but plenty to chew on and feel fairly optimistic about late in Steinbeck's career. It's writing of an America that's fixed itself after a depression and a couple of wars and is facing a brighter future.

26) The Bell – Iris Murdoch

#ReadAllTheMurdoch #AuthorsILikeOrAmIntriguedBy

Murdoch definitely has a way of dropping you right in the middle of the action. This, like The Sea, The Sea (my #1 book of 2014) is less chaotic and less difficult to grasp than some of her other character cornucopias, as this brings us into the action via a single character and her dilemma (running away from her husband, then reluctantly returning to him). The book takes place in a quasi-religious back-to-basics community, similar to the setting of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (my #33 book of 2016). The whole scenario of this religious community retreat is well established, and in typical Murdoch fashion unfolds with a cast of flawed and damaged characters. Here her focus is twofold: the nature of faith and how it manifests in people's psychology, as well as on the inner turmoil of the gay male in England during the early days of homosexuality’s demarginalisation. I feel like there's a bit of glibness in some of the character motivations, and some of them you only really get a sense of them through other's eyes as they are not really given focus. Some appear caricatured, and others seem unnecessarily malevolent - like Nick, who is a deeply troubled character but is seen mostly through Michael's personally skewed lens. I don't think it's her most effective novel, but it's classic stuff. Lots of farce and intrigue, tortured characters, infidelity and capriciousness. I'll never be bored reading Murdoch but I do feel like some of the personalities could have been more fully fleshed out to make it more striking and captivating, especially towards its bittersweet ending.

25) A Fair Maiden – Joyce Carol Oates

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Really quite a bizarre, surreal book from Oates. Something about the framing and the structure, of a chance encounter between a 16-year-old girl and an older man while she works her summer job as a nanny, put me in mind of McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers. This of course meant that the whole thing was for me imbued with this impending menace as the motivations of Marcus Kidder, the sexagenarian who forms a mysterious attachment to the 16-year-old Katya, remain elusive even as his forward advances become more overt and cavalier. This was the third Oates novel I've read (following the afore-mentioned I’ll Take You There at #40, and preceding Them at #48), and the third wildly different narrative style from her while the subject matter remains consistent. Here Katya is a broken, damaged kid from a rough family who wants nothing more than to be loved and treated well, so Oates emphasises her vulnerability more than any predatorial instincts in Kidder, and the menace comes more from seeing how reactive and pathetically subservient Katya becomes. Where the story goes though is a distinctly odd twist that is both dark and strangely reassuring relative to where it could have gone. I'm a bit ambivalent to some of the twists and turns but it's a very interesting read in the very affecting milieu that Oates occupies in the body politic.

24) Significant Others – Armistead Maupin

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After reasonably enjoying the fun but lightweight Tales of the City (my #27 book of 2015), this was another light, witty and personable account of San Francisco and the characters that inhabit it. Not really sure why I picked this up, did I need more Maupin in my life? No, but it's nice to have more. This, as a more expansive and singular narrative than Tales of the City takes on more of a soap operatic quality, various characters of various sexual orientations having a lot of curious and coincidental interconnections (someone asks at one point, referring to San Francisco, "how small is that town?"). The key crux of the story is somewhat Murdochean as three separate trips away - one by an older bloke to a men-only Bohemian retreat, one by a lesbian couple and their kids to a women-only outdoor festival and one between two gay guys and their straight friend just nearby the others - all intermingle in this series of escapades and hijinks. It's fun, it's light, it's surprisingly moving at times and ultimately just good company.

23) The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller

#BaileysPrizeWinners

This was an interesting read, and an interesting reimagining of one of the most legendary stories: the Trojan war, told from the perspective of Patroclus, and focusing on the love affair between him and Achilles. I'm not very familiar with the intricacies of the legend so I consulted my resident expert Bec (whose expertise mainly takes the form of crying “I love Hector so much!!!!!”) throughout, to verify how many liberties Miller was taking with the source material, and from Bec’s takeout it sounds like the love affair was certainly, at least, a thing (sidenote apotropaic charm: I didn’t ask Bec “Hey did Achilles and Patroclus have a love affair?” but rather “Who is Patroclus, in the mythology around the Trojan war?” and she independently brought up the fact that he is at least rumoured to have been Achilles’ lover). Miller's reimagining of the legend slightly modernises the sentiment in a way, focusing on Patroclus as a commoner, and an exile, but through portraying Patroclus and Achilles' love being regarded as inferior or abnormal thereby invoking queer theory, and introducing what becomes a compelling exploration of heroism. The juxtaposition of Achilles - brave, swift, skilled and yet modest, generous, diplomatic, a man apart from others - and say Paris: vain, cowardly and, of course, very heterosexual, is the most interesting exploration in the book. I feel like as Miller labours the love story, and it starts to become more about fulfilment of prophecy, the will of the gods, about Achilles' refusal to engage Hector in combat (since in killing Hector he portends his own death), it becomes a bit over-simplistic. It's based on legend so it's already quite fatalistic and simplistic, but it did seem a trifle glib, especially given how hurriedly things get wrapped up following Patroclus' death. I feel there's a really interesting narrative of heroism that became a bit too liberal and even iconoclastic the more it got stretched, and I feel there were better ways to dovetail this and the legend at its conclusion.

22) Bullet Park – John Cheever

#ClassicsIShouldRead? #IGuess? #AuthorsIReadOnceAndDidntHate?

Wow, what a bonkers book. And what a bonkers way this was to end my year in reading. This felt for 80 per cent of it like a fairly safe, bland Cheever novel - as someone I discovered as a short fiction writer through the New Yorker fiction podcast (and subsequently read, in the form of Falconer, my #36 book of 2013) I do notice traces of the short story writer here. There is an overarching framing narrative of this community in Bullet Park - safe, neighbourly suburban Americana - but otherwise it tends to take the form of isolated but relevant anecdotes for the most part. Edgar Nailles and his amusingly named next-door neighbour Paul Hammer take turns as the focus of the first two parts of the book, Nailles' difficulties with his son's overwhelming depression and the events that led up to it, and Hammer's account of his own fug of cloudy depression and how it led him to Bullet Park. It's all very Americana mid-century stuff. And then, without getting into spoilers, at that 80 per cent or so mark, there's just a sudden sharp left-field yank that turns this both darkly bizarre and bizarrely dark, and this proceeds for what is ultimately a very short epilogue of sorts to the suburban soap opera that preceded it. It made me laugh out loud at the absurd turn it had taken, but to its credit made me reassess or rethink what had come before it - was this underlying darkness always there and I was too dense to detect it? Or, as I suspect, is the whole point that everything feels so safe, community-minded and harmless on the surface but the tidiness conceals the dark side of community living? It makes it a far more fascinating read than I was willing to give it credit for. I think if I’d had more time to reflect on this it probably would have actually been lower-ranked than it is now, but it ends with a bang so it’s left me a bit unsure about how to rank it.

21) The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – Arundhati Roy

#AuthorsILikeOrAmIntriguedBy

This was obviously a hotly anticipated book, and therefore ripe for disappointment. Having adored, like so many others, The God of Small Things, a book I read quite early in my intellectual education and that has stuck with me very deeply, the fact is this book is not nearly as good. What's even more disappointing is that this very much feels like the book that a profoundly talented writer like Roy might write after hesitating, false starting, and finally succumbing to the pressure to write another novel after 20 years of hot anticipation. It's ambitious, fractured and feels very haphazard and gets going in blurts and backfires. This is not to say it's bad at all; her razor-sharp social commentary is well-honed here with a healthy dose of wit and humanity, and her prose is just as fluid and intriguing. But the imagery that was so impactful in TGoST here feels patchy and flimsy, and while the individual narratives are piecemeal quite compelling, it never really synthesises into a compelling whole. And again, it's an unfavourable comparison to her first book, but a big part of what made TGoST such an affecting book is the fact that the atrocities and inhumanity -which is a central part of this, too - are all seen through the eyes of children who transform the violence into a unique and beautifully idiosyncratic language. While much of the action here centres around two babies, they are plot points, rather than characters. All in all my main issue is the fact that there are too many characters and not a particularly coherent theme running through it. It's kind of a book about Kashmir, about unrequited love, about motherhood and female identity, but it's not enough about any of them. It's undeniable that Roy is a supremely talented writer, so I hope she doesn't wait so long before exercising this talent again. This feels like a very strong person flexing their unexercised, tired muscles after a protracted rest.