Books of 2018 Part 6: My Top Ten

10) Something Wicked this Way Comes – Ray Bradbury

#BooksIReadForNoReason #IGuess

I actually really enjoyed this. It’s an odd read, in many ways containing some fairly familiar horror and gothic nightmare tropes but there’s a funny Bradbury-esque pontification throughout; the mundanity of Will’s father’s insomnia and the ruminations on age – his father feeling too old, and the boys, Will and Jim, feeling too young and wanting to experience adulthood. Some of the languages is needlessly ornate (I learned the word ‘sgraffito’ which is used quite randomly in a descriptive passage) but the overall effect is one not of conventional horror or family drama but a very surreal combination of both that makes it all effectively uncanny. Some of the dramas and conflicts are quite familiar and everyday, while the nightmarish ghouls of the carnival invading the town are spooky and unreal. I find this an interesting companion piece to Erin Morgenstern’s beloved The Night Circus because of very similar premises but hers is a romantic, uplifting fantasy adventure whereas this is more of a suspenseful and cynical exploration of the occult. But funnily enough they’re both enjoyable and both end up at the point of saying we should all just care for each other and cherish life. Bradbury also manages to continue his fetishisation of reading here, with Will’s father a library janitor (how conspicuous and naked as a plot device) and he ends up saving the day after spending all night reading and researching phenomena such as they’re encountering. The whole ‘reading is good and must be protected and celebrated’ was something I found quite ham-fisted in Fahrenheit 451 and it is, too, here, with the sequence in the library being a bit protracted and overly wordy. It’s ultimately though an entertaining read with some good subversions of tropes and my expectations.

9) The General of the Dead Army – Ismail Kadare

#BooksIReadForNoReason

This seems like an appropriate opportunity to say, I love the Vintage imprint-branded binding. It’s distinct and eye-catching without being showy, and I owe it a lot because without it I wouldn't have picked up this book I’ve never heard of by some Albanian author I've never heard of. But this was a very rewarding, curious and entertaining read. Telling the story of an expedition from an unmentioned country (strongly hinted that it's Italy) to Albania by an unnamed General, and a similarly unnamed priest, travelling around the country 20 years after the great war in order to recover the remains of their own army's soldiers who were killed in the conflict. They follow intricate maps and diagrams drawn up from anecdotal evidence and national war records and encounter a German expedition undertaking the same task but without the detailed records. What ensues is essentially a series of sketches and meditations on war and death, set against the backdrop of a simmering tension emerging from the war that won’t go dormant. The eponymous general portrays an interesting mix of the morbid, the irreverent, and the hubris as he looks at his fallen soldiers and speculates pompously on how he could have saved them from death and defeat. The farcical meetings with the German expedition also provide some dark satire on nationalistic pride and the administration of government. This is a book about Albania, its people, its history and its landscape and how they're all shaped by each other, but beyond being drily academic or jingoistic Kadare has a strong sense of humour, of irony and of pathos. It's not really pro-Albania but it delivers a strong thread of the need to respect local customs, be aware of historical context and never forget how the past has led inevitably to the present.

8) The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky

#ZeitgeistBooksIShouldRead

I've resisted this book (and the film adaptation) for quite a while, for two reasons: one, the title is complete crap; and two, what I saw as the gushing love poured over this by adolescents and arrested adolescents who read and pretend there's profound depth in quirky humour. I'll admit it, though: I was  wrong. On the latter point, that is, about it being unnecessarily gushing love or that there isn’t profound depth in its quirky humour. Despite me obviously liking this book a lot, the title is still shit: unwieldy, hackneyed and with almost zero salience in the novel itself. It's obvious from the get-go why this is as beloved as it is, even if it does come down to the quirky charisma of its narrator, who feels like a bewildered innocent in a world he can't possibly comprehend. The fact that it immediately treats subjects like suicide, depression and mental illness, with this light-hearted but brutally honest touch, is certainly intriguing. In most ways the coming of age narrative feels quite familiar, and nearly all of the experiences and emotions are also familiar even if a little distorted by Charlie's almost autistic awkwardness and childlike openness. So it feels like his strangeness, his blunt honesty, his misapprehension of social norms, these are what makes this worth reading, and it is an enjoyable ride. But since most people have read this (or seen the film, which I haven’t), I probably don't need to tell you dear reader that there's much more to this book than the coming of age. Chbosky lays out Chekhov's gun in little crumbs here and there throughout, with the key intrigue coming quite late when Charlie starts seeing a psychiatrist again and says that she keeps 'asking him more about his past' while being uninterested in his present life that he prefers to discuss. The revelations as they come hit harder than they otherwise would, because it by and large feels like a conventional awkward misfit teen story (and indeed the blurb helped add to my disdain with its clichéd tone) so when it hits home that there’s more at stake than puberty and comical misadventure it’s quite a drop. So yes, I can see why this is a popular book, and I appreciate how much of a blindside it gave me even though it's not this big tangible twist, but part and parcel of a meticulously crafted character study.

7) The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower I) - Stephen King

#ZeitgeistBooksIShouldRead #AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed #AtLeastSomewhat

This is a very, very entertaining read. It's also the first time that I've really stood up and taken notice of what Stephen King is doing: I've read a couple of his works and it's obvious he can imagine and spin a good yarn, and he has his own brand of horror/fantasy/small town in Maine that he does. But this book is more than just an effective genre exercise and isn’t even set in a small town in Maine. Most obviously it's a sort of blending of two genres, since it is predominantly a western, but there's a covert fantastical element which is adroitly weaved through, not quite supernatural and not quite post-apocalyptic and speculative but a strange blending of the two. It's actually quite Ishiguro-esque in the way he reveals the details slowly, subtly more through what he doesn’t say than what he spells out. That's not to say the prose is anywhere near as elegant or nuanced as Ishiguro, no; the tale of Roland the gunslinger and his relentless pursuit of the man in black is told through five little vignettes that are quite explicit in their violence, their philosophy and their fatalistic mythology, but the mystique King paints over this enigmatic landscape and universe is really rather compelling, so though it may be a somewhat superficial page turner at its heart, it’s one I was more than happy to go all in for. It was irritating in a way because it so clearly sets itself up for a sequel (and then a series of however many books) and doesn’t really resolve a damn thing, but I was heavily intrigued and invested throughout all of this so the open-endedness was more of an effective plot point than just a lack of resolution.

6) Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

This book definitely contains Atwood at her best, even though it’s not the best overall that I’ve read from her. The premise is intriguing, painting a fully fleshed portrait of an enigmatic murderess whose exact role in the crime of which she's convicted is not clear. At its best, the ambiguous characterisation and piece-by-piece peeling off of the layers of mystery shrouding the central figure of Grace are quite compelling. I couldn't help but feel, though, like it was a bit convoluted and preoccupied with other things sometimes beyond the central mystery and unravelling of it. There's an interesting exploration of agency at the centre of this book; mostly just personal agency but a particular focus on sexual agency, and coupled with that is a vast commentary on mythology and how narratives come to be formed, and how we know truth or don't when we see it. So as I foreshadowed in my previous post regarding Fforde’s The Fourth Bear, I feel like the title here is a bit of a spoiler; I certainly saw the direction the narrative was heading in based on the title, but I also don't feel clever or perceptive for getting the hint, as I feel most readers would. And maybe that's part of the intrigue that Atwood spins around the tale: she foreshadows a lot of the fracturing of reality and explores the nature of the mind and psychosis throughout even the early stages before it becomes the key to unlock the mystery. I feel like this, like The Handmaid’s Tale (which I would still call Atwood’s best), is a story that would improve with subsequent and deeper readings, but I also fear that some of the flab in this story, around Dr Jordan and his personal relations, might also feel more tiresome. As it stands though, it's pretty impressive storytelling on first visit.

5) The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower II) - Stephen King

#ContinuingSeries

Yep, my love of The Gunslinger did indeed lead me to pick up volume two pretty quickly thereafter. And my first thought when I finished this one was damn, I've read two Dark Tower books and now I have to read the whole series; it wasn't meant to happen like this. I do think The Gunslinger is probably more interesting than this one, just because I loved King's world building and the merging of the western and fantasy genres into this surreal post-apocalyptic landscape. What this book does is bring that landscape back into a stylised version of our own modern world, as well as introduce some more familiar generic hallmarks, with the opening third (the first of the titular ‘three’ to be drawn into this surreal world) a gangster crime caper, and the final third taking on a more familiar King-esque supernatural mystery thriller kind of flavour. At times I found the dialogue and character intercourse a little awkward, especially with the racially charged language of the character of Detta Walker who feels a bit bloated as a caricature. But I can't deny how engrossed I was in the world of this book, the life and death situations and the ongoing mystery drawing the gunslinger on towards the Dark Tower. It's really just vividly imaginative, tense page-turning stuff, and I'm undeniably entertained and captivated even while noticing the way the story is being constructed using some generic conventions and even some pulp hallmarks. The denouement of this story is exhilarating, cathartic kind of stuff and really draws the individual elements (which, as discussed, are a bit of a generic patchwork) into a coherent, bigger whole that adds to the mythology established in the first novel. I think it's likely that I've ranked this higher than volume I just on the strength of how this made me feel during and after the climax (for those interested in behavioural economics, it's called the Peak-end Rule). I've definitely been drawn into this world the way the characters have and I look forward to reading the next five or six volumes in the future, or at least until a bad one comes along - that definitely hasn't happened yet.

4) We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

#BaileysPrizeWinners

I resisted this book for so long, knowing that I had to read it as a Baileys/Orange prize winner. I also hated the film adaptation which I just found relentlessly dour and miserable but also just cold and unmoving. I knew that the book was meant to be more ambivalent and more successful in its execution but the subject matter kept putting me off, especially in the first year or so of fatherhood (any reader who mentions that I read Jeffrey Dahmer’s father’s book when I’d been a father for three months can piss off). It reached a head this year when I realised I had a handful of Baileys/Orange prizes left to read, and this was one and was available in my library, so bravely or nonchalantly I dived in. And to skip ahead to the end of my story, it devastated me. Why is it that the most horrifying books about parenting are written by people called Lionel? This basically runs the absolute gamut of motherhood trials, from breastfeeding rejection to adolescent withdrawal and rebellion to overwhelming grief and personal guilt. Eva, the mother and narrator, whose story takes the form of letters she's writing to her now-estranged husband Franklin, is both a sympathetic and completely repellant, unsympathetic figure at the same time. Yes, she's an unreliable narrator but she is also a self-aware unreliable narrator as she herself tries to make sense of her own lack of affection for Kevin throughout his childhood and whether she was somewhat to blame for the school killing spree he ends up going on (that's not a spoiler, even if you're unaware of the story it's in the blurb and revealed in the first chapter). I had some issues with the verisimilitude, because the book is obviously structured in a way to have maximum narrative impact rather than how Eva would actually structure these letters to Franklin. For instance: early on she describes a visit to Kevin at his juvenile facility that ends with him telling her he hates her, and she hesitates before saying "often I hate you too, Kevin" which so early in the book seems melodramatic yet cathartic, but later on them saying "I hate you" really pales in comparison to some of the exchanges they had before his rampage and in light of the crimes he may have committed. Basically it's structured and narrated like a fiction novel so it loses a bit of its authenticity in the framing as a personal manifesto. The fact is though that I thought I knew the story and the characters, but I really didn't get a good sense of them in Lynne Ramsay's adaptation; they are far better realised here. The sense of Franklin gaslighting Eva is palpable and really started to grate on me so I found this unpleasant to read not just because of Kevin and what he does or even because of the tough parenting narrative but because of the awkward abrasive dynamic of their marriage, even if Eva was in fact wrong and mistaken and mentally ill. But the ending to the story also just stuck in my gut a lot and I'm months later still trying to process it - even though I know the story and the characters, at least I thought I did. I can't deny that I love and relish books that challenge me, so while this wasn't in any sense an enjoyable experience, it's one that is richly rewarding because of its troubling nature. I also appreciate another Baileys Prize Winner that actually deals with female issues (as they seem to be surprisingly scarce), and so starkly and brutally in this case, even though it also has an unfortunate tendency (maybe unintentional) of conflating lack of motherly attachment/post-natal depression with raising a sociopath. But whatever else it does, it raises these important, taboo questions about motherhood and mental health and wrestles with them in plain sight.

3) Death's End (Three-Body Trilogy III) – Liu Cixin

#FinishingOffSeries #AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

In some ways this is less coherent and impactful than The Dark Forest (my #5 book of last year), simply because The Dark Forest (and part I, The Three Body Problem - my #28 book of 2015) had a more singular focus and vision. But I somehow enjoyed this the most. In some ways the slightly fractured, ‘jump ahead in time’ narrative could be subtitled "tales from the end of the world" with the same cast of characters being consistent across years and in some cases centuries of narrative due to hibernation and time dilation. The vision is fractured but it's also vast and very far-reaching. It's a human focus with a strong cosmic consciousness, and there’s a mind-boggling contrast between the intimate human stories on earth and the cold and cruel nature of the vast universe once we know we're not alone and, of course, not special. Cheng Xin, our main protagonist, is an intriguing and intriguingly flawed individual whose key characteristic is this anthropocentricity that is naive and short-sighted in the complexity of her new universal revelations. Her treatment by Liu is really masterful character-building: she’s mostly defined by her actions and has a certain unwavering nature in her optimistic trust and belief in universal morality, but has a conflicted, dualistic nature as the reality of the universe closes in on her. Where the book goes is basically a million years and a million miles from were it begins (and where the trilogy began) and it’s an expansive and distressingly illuminated universe that Liu depicts. It's a harsh and kind of devastating take on life that is stringently cynical about the nature of humanity and made me think a lot about our prospective future on earth and beyond.

2) Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin

#ClassicsIShouldRead #AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

Man, this was a powerful read. It's funny because I remember liking Go Tell It on the Mountain as part of my TIME reading challenge but I hadn't read any Baldwin since (I read Another Country, my #36 book of this year, on the strength of this one), so it surprised me anew how captivating his prose is. He belongs to that rare class of writers - together with Flannery O'Connor and, to a lesser extent, Margaret Atwood - whose prose is easy to read and doesn't feel dense, but is pregnant with meaning, so it doesn't demand close attention but rewards it; it makes you want to take it slowly and absorb its full effect. This is so thematically different from Go Tell It on the Mountain as well, transplanting from a religious southern Gospel setting to a "young man wandering aimlessly abroad" milieu, and it's probably the most efficient and powerful of those types of stories I've read since Camus’ The Stranger. This tells the story of David, a young American in Paris who is struggling to reconcile himself, his vision of himself as a man, and his homosexual urges. It's told in piecemeal back and forth timelines, with a lot of prolepsis into where the story will wind up but all the detail in the filling-in of back story. At its centre this is the story of a love affair between David and a beautiful young Italian, Giovanni, that is both heartfelt and calamitous. The latter comes about largely as a result of David's mental conflict between his personal desires and what he feels conditioned to believe, or want. He is kind of a blank, empty space on the page (very similar to Meursault in The Stranger) so the conflict is largely ambiguous, but the drama emerges from the various effects his own internal conflict has on others. From an attachment theory perspective David is a fascinating enigma in the ways that people are drawn to him: are they seeking to fix and mend him? Are they inspired by him? Or do they just want to love him? While throughout the story his inaction and indecision is both obtuse and frustrating, it is ultimately the crux and climax of its own story. This is his drama and his challenge, and in a short narrative Baldwin made me both intrigued from an external perspective and empathetically invested with David’s mental torment. It's a profound and electrifying read.

And that leaves us with...

1) Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

#ClassicsIShouldRead

This was quite a revelation. Like We Need to Talk About Kevin, I had seen Hitchcock’s film adaptation, so I recalled the essential plot points but I kind of neglected it as a typical kind of gothic horror plot, but it's so much more than that. Or is it? Actually not really, but it's just gothic horror delivered perfectly. It uses familiar tropes in a curious and surprising way, so the sense of Rebecca 'haunting' Manderley and dogging the presence of the naive unnamed narrator, it's very palpable and gloomy but at the same time it’s delightfully ambiguous. The narrator's character is really well crafted as an untested, uncertain innocent who is immediately relatable despite the fact that we never know her name or much about where she came from. Her uncertainty and trepidation and insecurity in the face of this ethereal presence is exactly ours as a reader, so it's never really clear if the gloomy presence is something tangible, or if it's just her insecurities made manifest. As such the bulk of the book is simply a vibrant and dramatic portrayal of innocence, while the ghostly figure of Rebecca and the dwarfing presence of the sublime in Manderley is the slow chipping away at that innocence. When the book takes on its dark turn (which I knew was coming), it changes from a story about innocence being challenged into innocence being suddenly unveiled and then crumbled as unnecessary. The narrator’s simplistic worldview becomes her greatest weapon, and when the idyll of her newfound prosperity is threatened, she emerges from the shadows to take charge. It becomes a bit of a page-turner by virtue of the pace and tension and all the mysteries unfolding, but because of the investment in character and psychology, I was totally enraptured by it. It's just an engaging, stimulating and strangely relatable tale and my general fondness for the gothic aesthetic really found pleasure in Du Maurier’s bleak, fluid prose. I did hesitate to anoint this my book of the year until I had gone back to read Jane Eyre (my #35 book of this year) because it felt like much of the setting and scenario was at least inspired by Bronte. But if you’ve read my write-up above, in hindsight it was revealed that Rebecca did everything I’d wanted Jane Eyre to do: it kept the exposition scant, revealing details at their most dramatic points and it restricted the narrative to this expansive yet claustrophobic situation. The result is a fascinating meditation on forging an identity while being a prisoner to the past.

And we're done for another year. Don't bother checking this blog until December 2019 because I evidently never add to it except when I need a place to keep all the year-end write-ups. On your way out, don't forget to visit my blog gift shop!

Books of 2018 Part 5: My Bottom 7

Yes, instead of plunging headfirst into the sparkling waters of my top ten books of the year, we're instead plunging headfirst with mouth open into the bubbling sewerage of my bottom 7. These aren't necessarily bad books, or books that I actively disliked; if it was a good year of reading then they're just the ones that didn't make the cut. Not this year, though. It wasn't a good year for reading and these were all terrible. So let's start with the least terrible...

51) Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

#ClassicsIShouldRead

It seems to be characteristic of Dickens' bildungsroman-type works with protagonist titles that they are far more the black-and-white type stories, with characters who are either all bad, or all good. In this novel those shadeless poles seem to be far more teleological, where people's behaviour and attitude are dictated by their circumstances. The purely good people (who are born with the privilege to be good) can rescue people from being bad by plucking them out of ill circumstance, but they can only save so many and then there is a point beyond which people are irredeemable. As a result of this good-bad rich-poor divide the only truly interesting character here is that of Nancy, the repentant and wretched prostitute who feels trapped by her relationship with Bill Sikes on one hand, and drawn to grace on the other while unable to feel worthy of it. She's really the only one who I felt had more character than just her circumstances, or indeed her nature. Oliver himself is of course born into unfortunate circumstances and his defining characteristic seems to be that he's lovely and has rosy cheeks, so he manages to obtain a salvation that is beyond the hope of everyone around him or others in his situation. This is part of what makes the light-hearted finale of the musical adaptation always sit poorly with me. Like, Oliver's got his so fuck the rest of them? Dickens to his credit deals with it a bit more dourly for everyone else, more realistically and more interestingly, while Oliver really doesn't have any kind of agency, and the restoration of his fortune seems to be far more a vindication and reward for Brownlow, Grimwig, Rose and the other ‘good’ characters who save him. It's pretty interesting world narration/creation but the story doesn't do a whole lot for me.

52) Swing Time - Zadie Smith

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed #AtLeastSomewhat

So I didn't enjoy this book that much, hence its position obviously. And I feel a bit silly about the reason why I even chose to read this, which is that I was wandering through the library one day grabbing a bunch of books to borrow and I suddenly noticed that all the books I'd grabbed were written by blokes, and I happened to be near this book, so I grabbed it to even out the gender imbalance. Nothing wrong with doing that, but the fact that I didn’t like this much made it feel quite hollow. I enjoy Zadie Smith well enough, but I also have some issues with the two other books of hers I've read, NW and White Teeth, which is that they're quite hit and miss and I often lack the overarching point it’s making. This, too. The main issue with this though is that it takes the concept of the unreliable narrator who's also unlikeable and really amps it up. I'm not even sure if her narrator is even named in the end or meant to be named: but when it comes right down to it, that's ultimately what I didn't really like, is her: the narrator. She's flaky, unpleasant, and just not a good person. This really only became clear towards the end, but that fact itself is emblematic of the problems with this book, which is another of Smith's narratives that jump all over the place, and I'm never really sure what the point of this is. It's a story about a narrator who never really has a purpose, who latches onto two different women throughout her life and lives on the periphery of the narratives of these other women. The fact that both of these other women - her childhood friend Tracey who is everything she's not, and the Madonna-esque global superstar idol Aimee - are also largely unpleasant, unreliable and unadmirable figures just reinforces the fact that our narrator is a capricious and unlaudable figure herself. She idolises both of these figures in her life in a way that would make Nick Carraway cringe while not having any agency, psychology of her own, except this constant vacillating guilt between the world of glamour and the world of down-to-earth workaday slog, as well as the conflicted identity of her mixed-race upbringing and her mother's political leanings. I'm even confusing myself in this write-up as to what was ever at stake for Smith's narrator and what her journey or story was really about. The fact is I don't know; I'm not convinced Smith does either.

53) One Day - David Nicholls

#BooksIReadForNoReason

So I should qualify the hashtag above, but really this is the dumbest reason for reading a book I’ve ever had: as my readership (Hi, Mother!) will know, we spent a large part of 2018 trying to sell our apartment. As part of this arrangement I had to clear out all my books, so I had nothing on hand to read. Meanwhile, Bec engaged the services of a staging-furniture hire place to get some fancy knickknacks and things to decorate the place. As part of their package, they sent over a couple of random books to lay around the place, one of which was this. So naturally without any other options one day, I picked this up. And it’s kind of a trashy, populist read. For the most part it reads like a bad rom-com in novel form. In particular the character of Emma rubbed me the wrong way, she's such a typical sort of male fantasy female figure: not quite manic pixie dreamgirl but more "girl who tells it like it is which makes her amazingly sexy in contrast to all the other cardboard cut-out female figures who can't think for themselves". The plot device of it all taking place on the one day, a year apart for twenty years, just allows for a lot of skipping ahead whenever the present day's events are sufficiently worn out. And the plot is for the most part just hopelessly formulaic, you know exactly where it's going and that the two protagonists are going to get together and 'save' each other. Naturally Nicholls then gives it an abrupt turn at the end as if to say "see? The whole book was unpredictable the whole time!" (Yes the turn is unexpected but it's also just an incongruous deus ex machina to tug the plot from its most obvious course). The ending is suitably miserable and bittersweet and leaves you with tired and emotionally manipulative (but in all honesty, successfully landed) questions of ‘what ifs’ and missed opportunities. So I can see why the book was popular beyond it following a safe path that people enjoy for the most part. But I found it shallow and a bit uninspired.

54) Difficult Loves and Other Stories - Italo Calvino

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

This seems alright, with some quirky writing. But none of the stories is really amazingly surprising, and ‘amazingly surprising’ is kind of my benchmark for Calvino. It starts on the wrong foot though with a story of a soldier sexually molesting a woman on a train and constantly interpreting her inactivity and silence as consent. Most of the stories in fact are about some kind of twisted masculine sex fantasy so there's a certain sameyness and puffed up European casual misogyny. But it's also just that the stories don't really veer off straightforward trajectories: in only one story did I find there to be much of a twist, and that twist is kind of telegraphed in the title (Adventure of a Short-Sighted Man). There's still some curious observations and a nice ambiguity to most of it, but even in the longer stories, they're very much stories set in the real world so they seem a bit humdrum compared with Calvino at his best. There’s some keen observations on human nature and in particular a certain Italian hot-headed masculinity that seems to be a pet topic of his (even if it's misdirected here), but it just lacks the spark of imagination that makes so much of the rest of his work so compelling.

55) Ape and essence - Aldous Huxley

#WhyTheFuckDoIKeepPickingUpHuxleyBooks

Yeah, I think I'm done with seeing if there's more to Huxley. Good luck to others who can really appreciate what he's doing, which according to the quotes and endorsements all over this book and others, many do, but I'm done. Now don't get me wrong, this isn't an acrimonious farewell, and I reserve the right to reverse my decision next year, the year after, or beyond, and I may seem like I'm completely contradicting myself when that time comes, but right here now, I feel like I don't have much reason to pick up another Huxley and see what else he has to offer, based on this and the others I’ve read. The issues I have with this, and him, are fairly straightforward: here, consistent with all his other works, he is unsubtle, and overly didactic. He doesn't have much taste for allegory, or revealing themes without explicitly showing and telling (as well as what we should think about them). In this case his preoccupation is the unlearned lessons of World War I, as evidenced by the occurrence of World War II. In Huxley's vision here, World War III has also happened and the result is an inevitable regression to sexual paganism and a worship of Satan (or "Belial") as the only logical choice. It's not a million miles removed from the Utopia explored in Island, his final novel which I read in 2016 (it was #64 of the year) or going back to Brave New World either. To return to the opinion I started with, I don't think there's that much more depth, nuance or really new ideas that reading more Huxley will offer, because beyond differences in premises or framing devices (aside: I have many more issues with this particular pointless framing device of a couple of Hollywood producers supposedly coming across a long-neglected and previously rejected film script here, I'm unclear what this adds), this isn't doing much that's different or new.

56) Stranger in a strange land - Robert A Heinlein

#ClassicsIShouldRead

This wasn't a very good book. It is, however, an unusual book so that's to its credit. It starts out fairly conventionally after some back story, with Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars to a couple of Mars-colonists from the first Earth mission, returning to Earth as a sensation, "the man from Mars". It follows a familiar but intriguing, life-or-death type trajectory where the powers that be weigh up whether to exploit or eliminate him, while our heroes make an attempt to save him, all of which time Mike (as he becomes known) has this comically bewildered strangeness to him. But this tension gets quite absurdly resolved about a third of the way through, with his future no longer being bargained with, his fate his own, his life unthreatened. His strangeness and his unworldly powers become this sort of barrier against any future tension, and as such there is none. Basically for most of this, I was very unclear on the point of the story because it was completely unclear where it was going and there was nothing at stake. It became little more than a sort of comic farce about mankind's speculative future and what human nature is, riddled with pseudophilosophy and Heinlein's weird cosmological speculations as well. This could have made for an amusing and entertaining book, but the tension at the start of the book is way too protracted to come suddenly to nothing so early, rather than build up across the book, and the farcical narrative following is also extended well beyond its meaning. It takes on this John Galt-esque blatantness where Heinlein needs to spell everything out in addition to having already amply demonstrated it. There's some other niggling issues; a very dated homophobic vibe wafts through a lot of the discussion of sexuality and sexual liberation (which is ultimately the book’s entire focus), and some typical but unfortunate misogyny in the treatment of its female characters (there's a jarring line about rape at one point that lost all my lingering sympathy for the author). In the end while I get some of the jabs Heinlein is making, this just felt like a pointless and tiresome exercise that could and should have been half its length by trimming all of its exposition and just making the point a lot less clunkily.

57) The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

#BooksIReadForNoReason #OhGodWhyDidIPickThisUp

Yes, bottom of the barrel, exactly where this book should always sit, preferably with the barrel filled with some corrosive substance. Aside from the blurbs and things informing me that this book is so profoundly wise that it plumbs new depths in the Mariana trench, my only real awareness of this book was a line from an episode of the TV series The Book Group where the graduate student Barney describes it as “A New Age fable that’s been taken up as some kind of self-help for Don’t Say Anything”. And while I hate to agree with Barney Glendenning.... well. Where do I begin. For one thing to refute the blurb, it really doesn't have a compelling story as its basis. It has a short and glib story about a boy going on a pilgrimage to find hidden treasure and who has a connection with nature and spirits and shakras and whatnot. Like, be engaged as far as its bland, low stakes mysticism connects with you for sure but it's a very familiar, very simplistic and superficial bit of magic realism (and 'realism' is used very loosely here). The key issue though is the so-called wisdom that apparently changes readers' lives and gives them the courage to open a chain of laundromats... well, yeah: because it’s a 160-page horoscope. Every character talks like a crystalogist imparting aphorisms that are either horrible clichés or such empty ambiguities that you can interpret them any way you like, and are actually just garbled nonsense. So naturally people will read this and go “Oh my god, I too feel like I’m on a magical quest to find treasure but maybe all the time the treasure was waiting at home for me. This book just gets me!” So sure, maybe it does change people's lives, but in the same way that a horoscope predicting that “today you will face a difficult choice” and hey presto, the difficult choice happens like it does every other day but now there’s the opportunity to read supernatural significance into an everyday occurrence. The fact is this is very pastichey, pseudointellectual nonsense; it has a fuzzy feel-good gilded wash over all of it that obviously people swoon over, but Coelho is not a mystic or a poet, he’s just a cribber: he steals and regurgitates a whole lot of hackneyed drivel without writing anything new, or providing engaging reflections on it, just leaves it alone for the credulous reader to project their own insecurities and neuroses. It's basically the paint-by-numbers fable you weren't asking for. Mercifully it was quick to read but it would be even quicker to toss it out.

Books of 2018 Part 4: 20-11

20) Maddaddam - Margaret Atwood

#FinishingOffSeries #AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

This is going to seem an odd way to start this writeup, but I feel like this trilogy conclusion suffers from the main shortcoming I've seen levelled at The Last Jedi: the storyline here is really quite thin and flimsy, and it's really just an excuse and a device to finish off the series and fill in all the gaps in the back story. But, as I was with The Last Jedi, I'm ok with this because it's otherwise very engaging storytelling. I mean, the scope and the reach of this trilogy has had diminishing returns in a big way from the explosive impact of Oryx & Crake; The Year of the Flood felt to me a bit heavy in the narrative detail and light on the philosophy/social commentary. This has less to explore on the philosophical details but it weaves them nicely into the back-filling storyline. I couldn't help but feel though that where the other two books seemed to span decades in time, and even years in their present timelines, this feels like a week passes from start to finish and the only new loose end that gets tied up is the one that was left at the end of the previous book. But I like Atwood's return to ruminating on writing, and the impact that the written word can have on the universe. I like where she takes that rumination too; otherwise this just felt easier to read, possibly because there was less exposition than The Year of the Flood or possibly just it's been less time in between books for me. But this was engaging, a little hollow-feeling yet still meaty and substantial Atwood.

19) The Golden House - Salman Rushdie

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

This is the best I've read from Rushdie in a while, although it's far from perfect. Choosing as his - at times Gonzo - narrator an ambitious and aspiring filmmaker and student of film, this allows him to make all the pastichey similes and allusions that he wants to the high art of cinema, from Satyajit Ray to Hitchcock and Louis Malle. But when Rushdie isn't trying to reframe a story or a mythology, which I found so awkwardly handled in The Enchantress of Florence, his stories flow far more naturally which is what happens here. At the same time his imagery is not particularly clear here and it does seem a bit of a hodgepodge of Roman empire decline, lots of cinematic references, plus Shakespearean/Sophoclean tragedy, plus comic books. While the story and the tragedy unfold very fluently and engagingly, the characters are not fully textured and, in some cases - like the manipulative Vasilisa - a bit shallow and even archetypally clichéd. Likewise the purpose of setting this against the backdrop of the Obama presidency, and the broader tragedy with which it ended in 2016, is unclear in terms of its apposition to the narrative; it feels like an excuse for Rushdie to get out his own hot take on the 2016 US election. Still, whatever flaws the book has, Rushdie is above all an imaginative and entertaining writer and it's worthwhile to get his take on almost anything even though it’s nothing particularly surprising here.

18) Hyperion - Dan Simmons

#ClassicsIShouldRead

I really quite enjoyed this. It's quite nakedly the sort of book a sci-fi writer creates in the process of trying to make sci-fi more respectable, or more superficially, to demonstrate that sci-fi writers can be cognisant of other more canonical literature. And I frame that as an insult just to denigrate his really clumsily shoehorned Beowulf references, first of all, but I mean it also as a compliment. The structure of the narrative is obviously based on the Canterbury Tales, as a group of 7 pilgrims to a far-off space colony (where death is almost certainly assured for most of them, just to raise the stakes) tell their tales of why they are there, one by one. But where Chaucer's work is broadly scattered, and to me frustratingly incomplete, this draws the tales together in a way that's quite scintillating at times, as the tales are never unrelated to each other or the wraparound pilgrimage story. It kind of becomes the complex interwoven text that Canterbury might have been had Chaucer finished it and had a twentieth-century view of the need for stories to contribute to something larger than themselves. It's mildly contrived – in that it's really lucky that the stories are told in this order, as some of them would REALLY spoil or preclude others had they come earlier, but it's a great bit of world-building and then meditating on the themes emerging from that world.

17) All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

I've been trying to get my hands on this book for a long time; I just couldn't bring myself to buy a copy but it was never available in libraries (despite Cities of the Plain, the third book in the trilogy, being available). Was it worth the wait? Yes, yes it was. I find myself wanting to keep McCarthy at arm's length because he is such a blokey writer, but this is a curious book in its oeuvre because it has a blend of his usual lawless brutality with a very romantic and humanistic narrative. Our hero John Brady Cole is an aimless drifter cut off from his family, who decides to travel down to Mexico with his friend. He wanders through a series of adventures and misadventures in fairly typical McCarthyite fashion; corruption, brutality, and murder all rear their ugly heads. But the central misadventure also involves a heartfelt romance, and throughout he retains this integrity and humanity that in other novels would likely lead him into naive exploitation but here just manages to cement his resolve and varyingly direct his otherwise directionless travels. The central theme of the book seems to be where humanity can sit amongst a world of corruption. McCarthy's women are naturally a little shallow; either hardened ice-queens or liberated unusual beauties, but in the context of this manly, desperado world they do work and have identity and agency even if they’re still just plot devices. I don't know, I'm ashamed of how predictable I am for enjoying this work, but it does feel intricately crafted, and optimistic within an engaging and vividly illustrative work.

16) The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

Mishima definitely has a style. It's otherworldly really; beyond just being from an oriental standpoint and then translated, his view of the world seems supernatural and bizarre. He writes with deliberate artistic vision, full of florid and vivid descriptions and has an authorial voice that is unlike anyone else I've read. Where with The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (My #3 book of last year) I was unsure if it was savagely beautiful or just savage, this crystallises it for me a bit. In this case it's just savage, but it's savage in the way that nature can be savage, and that in itself is beautiful. But jeez, there's a nihilistic view propounded here. Set against the backdrop of the end and aftermath of WWII, this takes the form of a first person narrative told by an unnamed apprentice Zen priest in the titular temple who suffers from a stutter. Throughout the book he wanders from misadventure to misadventure, alternately searching either for beauty in the world or cruelty in the world and often conflating the two with the help of his acquaintances. The otherworldliness gives this the air of a parable or metaphor, but for what this is I don't know. At times it reminded me of Kim Ki-duk’s film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring with a hope that we'd find redemption in the end, but knowing it was Mishima, I felt doubtful of such a resolution. I feel like this is perhaps a bit elusive in its meaning and consequently in its overall value so even though I'm as beguiled as I was with The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, the enigma behind that beguilement doesn't intrinsically equate to value. So I feel mystified without the mystification itself being seductive. Fascinating read but also quite baffling.

15) Silas Marner - George Eliot

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

I enjoyed this, but I can't help feeling like it's lightweight Eliot. I mean, it's short first of all but that shortness also results in me not feeling like I know enough about these characters. What made The Mill on the Floss (My #2 book of last year) so captivating to me was that Eliot spent such a huge amount of time and effort sketching the characters in fine detail so by the time I noticed the plot machinations moving I was deeply and irrevocably invested. In Silas Marner the whole thing works well as a digestible parable about the value of honesty as well as a social commentary on the privilege of the idle rich vs the ethic of the working class, but there are elements of the narrative I felt I could get to know better. The psychology of the title character, the shrewd but wretched dishonesty of Godfrey Cass are all a bit sketchily drawn, and the character of Nancy Lammeter I feel was particularly undercooked as a well-mannered, beautiful rich girl and little else. It isn't by any stretch a bad book, but the point is that Eliot is one of those writers who I give free licence to just keep on writing and writing and writing and draw out the experience to an absurd extent, because she's so adept at it. As satisfying and neatly wrapped up (and of course, skilfully crafted) this fable is, it also left me wanting more.

14) The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead

#Ummmm... #ZeitgeistBooksIShouldRead?

I don’t usually read books in their own milieu and time, so this is a bit unusual. I came to this after the hype had plateaued a bit, but it was still fresh, and yeah it's worth the hype. I can definitely see why it's struck such a chord; not just because it gets to the heart of the issue of race and the shadow of slavery that still hangs over the states, but because - despite its uncomfortable subject matter - it is really compulsively readable. The anachronistic/quasi sci-fi element of it is used basically as a vehicle (no pun intended) to drive home the immense achievement of the underground movement but is also a very successful metaphor for how restrictive but intricate is the network of slave reprieve. Regardless, it helps make it readable and digestible because the ‘vehicle’ is a familiar and conveniently understood bit of machinery to act as a conduit into a bygone era. I also feel there's been enough conventional narratives of people smuggling/hiding/emancipating set in this era, so this post-modern take on it is quite refreshing. Am I saying that what sets this apart is that it's very accessible and even populist? That's certainly part of it, yes. But Whitehead doesn't shy away from discussing death and racism and property even though he doesn't get pornographic about the details. It also - despite being written by a PoC - almost trod the line of being about good heroic white people saving black slaves from torment, but the people who arguably suffer the most in this book are the good, moral white people doing the right thing. At least they suffer, in most cases, similar fates. This is both a worthwhile book and a strangely enjoyable one that delivers some necessary catharsis.

13) Troubles - J G Farrell

#BookerPrizeWinners

This is an enjoyable read. Set in and around a crumbling, fading hotel in Ireland after the end of World War I, it focuses on the character of Major Brendan Archer, who finds himself entangled in the family who own the Hotel Majestic by having ‘accidentally’ gotten engaged to the eldest daughter. When his fiancée dies early in the book (minor spoiler yes, but really it’s just the inciting incident), he sticks around the hotel in a way that acts as a metaphor for both dispossessed armed forces after war but predominantly the lingering stages of British colonialism sticking around where it no longer serves a purpose. The whole book and the Hotel Majestic are a metaphor for the fading British empire; a metaphor that is really so explicit that any criticism of its lack of subtlety is misguided, because Farrell as much as tells us "the hotel is a metaphor" by peppering the narrative action with little (fabricated or otherwise) parallel vox pops and newspaper clippings dispatched from all corners of the empire about growing troubles in India, South Africa and, of course, Ireland. I'm not sure that this has the sharpness of wit or pathos that Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall or Brideshead Revisited have, but it's definitely in the same category: nostalgically celebrating British unity while at the same time savagely lampooning the British hubris and ambition to make the world its servant. The Major and Edward, the owner of the hotel, play off each other in this sort of byplay between two different British sides, the pomp and ceremony and tradition side (Edward) and the reasonable but impassioned side (the Major). While the metaphor is unsubtle, it's rich with plenty of depths and branches to explore, from the fiery Irish Catholic figure of Sarah (with whom our two protagonists are in love) to the upstart Cambridge students touring Ireland in order to study British imperialism, and the old lady residents of the hotel who simply don't know how to let go of the old days. My favourite joke is the fact – alluded to twice in the book – that in the face of all this strife and upheaval, what really gets the characters riled up is the news that England is losing the cricket in Australia. Just that whole bubble of English tradition and rule being popped in such a trivial way, it's really marvellous, enjoyable stuff.

12) The Fourth Bear - Jasper Fforde

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed #AtLeastSomewhat

I feel like this is the first time I've properly 'got' a Jasper Fforde book. I've enjoyed everything I've read from him in the past, but I've always been at a bit of a distance because of how chaotic and convoluted his narratives are and wanting all the plot points to be tied up at the end (which they never are to my satisfaction). You do kind of need to go with the flow though and allow all the abrupt left turns and absurdities to just happen rather than expecting them to make sense straight away. In this case I feel I went in with my disbelief suspended enough in advance that I could do that, properly. It also maybe helps that I'm more familiar with the source material he's lampooning here, namely nursery rhymes and kid’s tales, than I was with Jane Eyre as a critical plot device in the two Thursday Next novels I've read (I’ve now, as you know from my 40-31 post, read Jane Eyre finally). This book, regardless of my mindset, was just completely whack, with a dozen absurd over-the-top plot threads involving giant cucumbers, self-repairing cars, a community of bears with sanctioned porridge rationing, and a psychopathic gingerbread man. Within the chaos there was a lot of Fforde's very dry ironic humour and a surprising amount of heart as well. I feel like all the previous works of his I've read had all these things as well but this is the first time I've fully embraced them all and as such it's my favourite. One sidenote: this was the second book I read this year, and the second in a row in fact (more on the other still to come) where the title is kind of a spoiler. The concept of a fourth bear isn't even introduced until about page 300 of a 370-page novel and becomes the crucial figure in solving the mystery. So while he could have called this about a hundred different things given all the plot machinations, this one felt irrelevant for most of the book but I was unconsciously asking “what’s the fourth bear?” throughout so it was obviously the big twist when finally introduced.

11) The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

This feels bizarrely to be one of McEwan’s more disturbing novels, and yet nobody gets horribly betrayed, tortured or murdered in it. The fact that it’s a first person narrative is largely part of its unsettling nature, since the narrator has an uncomfortably warped and distorted view of the way the world works. This is necessary due to his age but also the circumstances he finds himself in. Beyond the unusual eyes through which we view these events, the disturbing nature of the narrative is due also to the strangeness that the narrator layers into his tale in such a nonchalant way. There’s an uncanny sense to this being trotted out as normal, as routine; like there’s nothing wrong with what’s going on and it almost pulls a con off in making me feel that it was normal, or at least that there was nothing especially sinister happening. That is indeed the point though, and the subtle ‘resistance against the establishment’ attitude, too, helps to deliver the creepy underdog vibes that help the subterfuge of the narrative. Ultimately I’m a bit unclear at what was really at stake beyond McEwan delivering this intriguing thought exercise and unsettling provocation and in spite of being detached by necessity from the strangeness, it haunted me for a while. And yes I’m being obtuse and elusive with spoilers, because frankly to reveal any plot points – as the blurb of the book does – is to spoil the impact.

So just on the verge of entering my top ten, I am of course now going to take a backwards leap for tomorrow's post and write up my bottom 7 books of the year, to leave you hanging an extra day for the top ten.

Books of 2018 Part 3: 30-21

30) Juliet, Naked - Nick Hornby

#AuthorsIShouldReadMore

This was my first taste of Nick Hornby (in original form at least). I liked it well enough; he definitely has a kind of populist tone to a lot of his work, the way he taps into both the nature of obsession here while also dealing with ordinary people, their everyday neuroses and hang-ups. There's a distinct cynicism in this book in its treatment of the nature of fandom, and the construction and deconstruction of artistic expression. Tucker Crowe, the elusive genius and creator of the eponymous stripped-back rock album, I feel is kind of the weak point in this narrative because he feels like a cookie cutter rock star character who's humbled himself with years of self-neglect and effacement. He's really just a plot point in this narrative about obsessive fan and self-proclaimed expert Duncan and his long-suffering sidelined paramour Annie. There's definitely a good sense of humour on display here, and Hornby does have some interesting observations about art, music and the devolution of criticism to a democratized form. I found the funniest parts of this though to be kind of peripheral to the story, and almost tacked-on: namely the sessions Annie has with her neurotic and haplessly prudish 'therapist' Malcolm. It feels like an odd narrative device to frame parts around her recapping the misadventures to this therapist who hasn't the foggiest clue how to help her, but Malcolm and his conservative, gormlessly disapproving clucks were hilarious. This was fairly light fare in many ways with some clunky passages and characters that don't necessarily get resolved completely, but plenty of enjoyment along the way.

29) The Plot Against America - Philip Roth

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

"Every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I'd think I was having a hallucination."

This was an interesting read. It's strange to think of Roth’s historical context, this being written during the Bush (jr.) era when there was a certain level of 'criticism = sedition' but reading it now, it seems far more chillingly prescient. Set in an alternative history, the anti-Semitic aviator Charles Lindbergh challenges FDR on a ‘non-war’ platform at the 1940 election, and wins. It's told from the POV of a (fictionalised) 8-year-old Roth and his fearful Jewish family watching events unfold as Lindbergh strikes a peaceful accord with Hitler's Germany and remains bewilderingly neutral in light of the rampage of the Nazis across Europe (which of course is more rampant given the US non-involvement). It's an interesting historical/memoir hybrid style, as it zooms the focus in and out of the family to then give a rundown of the broader global, cultural and geopolitical shifts that happen to precipitate the fears and traumas inflicted on the family. Lindbergh, with his aviation publicity stunts, flying to particular strongholds to rally support, with his empty rhetoric and emboldening the far-right movement, he reminds me of... someone...who wasn’t yet in this picture yet when Roth wrote the book. It's an interesting thought experiment that I feel Roth kind of hurries to wrap up at the end, and I feel there's a gripping insidiousness to the platitudes and spin that Lindbergh and his cronies dish out, seemingly friendly and reasonable but really sinister and scurrilous. And in the end it kind of goes a bit off the deep end too quickly, with the 'plot' suddenly unravelling. I feel it's a fascinating read but it would have been more impactful and powerful if it continued its slow burn to its conclusion rather than quickly burning out.

28) See You at Breakfast? - Guillermo Fadanelli

#BooksIReadForNoReason

This reads somewhat similarly to an Iñarritu film - at least the early ones before his sole purpose was manufacturing Oscars - because it has a kind of ordinary everyday people in Mexico City narrative where all the protagonists are tangentially related to a central violent incident. It's difficult really to sink my teeth into this, because it felt like it was trying to draw a purpose from the story but in the end it felt largely descriptive and slightly inconsequential, despite the slight overtones of irony - the irony of coincidence, and of pious platitudes - throughout. There's a distinct cynicism in most of the protagonists' world and yet the denouements of the various parts of the story seem to suggest Fadanelli has an optimistic view of justice and relationships. He has a fairly voyeuristic and blunt interest in sex, particularly sex as transaction, which felt a bit overboard at times. I appreciated that this was short and fairly easy reading (it was one of a handful of books I picked up purely to up my reading quota) but didn't really find I was able to love it.

27) Mao II - Don DeLillo

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

This is an intriguing book, but one of the intriguing things is that it ends very ambiguously and enigmatically, and the way it ends made me doubt and question all that came before - not really in a good way. It just feels like DeLillo is maybe trying to achieve one thing, but the book doesn't tie it all up, and it ends up being just another example of DeLillo’s narrative directionlessness. For the most part the philosophy is all centred around his surreal observations of society set in an almost parallel universe that is New York and London in the 60s but not New York and London at the same time. For the most part I had trouble discerning if the narrative actually took place in the real world, or some inverted version of it, but in the end I think it's just DeLillo skewing reality slightly to make it seem uncanny and weird. So ultimately that's what I thought of it: it's uncannily weird, and the ambiguity of the story about the writer, the power of words and the political intrigue that writers carry with them – for the populace and the politburo as it were – is all weird surreal satire. It’s actually quite enthralling while reading but it needs an overarching point, and I felt the overall message was missing or lacking here.

26) The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein

#ClassicsIShouldRead

I had this on my to-read list for a long time after some online listicle made it sound interesting. I think the concept is interesting but it had diminishing returns in reading. It's a good twist on some familiar sci-fi tropes: the outsider syndrome, the alienation of extraterrestrial travel, the supercomputer ally/friend etc. The plot, revolving around an off-shore penal colony established on the moon and an organised revolution against Earth's authority over them, is engaging and the fact that it's told from the moon inhabitant's POV allows Heinlein to make some sharp satirical points about humanity's general hubris. Where it falls down is that it's written as a historical document, and the tone feels quite plodding at times. I was engaged with most of the characters, especially and inevitably Mike, the intelligent computer who longs to understand humans' sense of humour. The female characters are inevitably very male-written but without being overly sexified, not that Heinlein deserves that much credit for creating female characters that have more than sexuality to offer (as a sidenote, though: the blurb, which describes one of the key protagonists as our narrator's "luscious blonde girlfriend", is fucking unconscionable, especially as she isn't even his fucking girlfriend at any point in the story. Editors: don't let your 14-year-old coffee boy write blurbs when they haven't even read the book). Mainly the prose just felt administrative, systematic and dull through too much of its exposition, whereas a different narrative style could have made it simply more entertaining. My own enjoyment aside it's an interesting exercise in satire and exploration of political history through a sci-fi lens.

25) Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

#ClassicsIShouldRead

Grabbed this off my bookshelf early in the year (before I had to clear it out) as I felt it'd been enough time since watching the Ang Lee film adaptation so it might feel relatively fresh, whereas I'd seen Mansfield Park more recently, along with Persuasion which were my other options. This is not bad; it suffers from a similar syndrome as Emma in that the stakes don't feel particularly high here, given that it's established early on that our protagonist family are in fairly lowly circumstances, so there's not much to lose and everything to gain in potentially marrying the daughters well. Therefore it largely comes down to a tale of love and disappointment, which is more worthy than whatever was at stake in Emma - entertainment and diversion for the heroine, I think - but less engaging than Pride & Prejudice where there is this sense of ambition, of heightened expectation as well as love, and filial loyalty and duty (which this also has). It doesn't have a whole lot in the way of plot though; most of it is elaboration, inner monologues, social observation, and the plot can be summarised very easily in three sentences: two sisters like men then discover they are engaged to others. One man deals with it honourably, the other doesn't. The first man gets cheated on and returns to claim the eldest sister and oh yeah there's also an old guy who likes the younger sister but he's like totes old. Anyway, my comparisons and ranking this in the middle tell nothing; it's wordy and a bit convoluted in the prose at times while some of the social mishaps and misunderstandings are a bit clumsy at times. But otherwise the characters - especially Elinor - are engaging and laudable, and the book overall is a decent read.

24) My Brother Jack - George Johnston

#ClassicsIShouldRead

This is alright; one thing I enjoyed about this when comparing it with typical Australio literature that I've previously disdained, is the setting. Suburban Melbourne between the wars seems so much more relevant and contemporary to me, but also an interesting historical document because while far removed from me, I recognise the locales as they exist now and can feel the vibe of the places Johnston is describing. This is even more so than Cloudstreet, which may have had a similar effect if I were as familiar with Perth as I am with Melbourne, but didn't for the reason that I'm not. One of the shortfalls for me here is that it is a little undirected in what its point is. The fact that it's called My Brother Jack feels a little glib because there's so much of this narrative that isn't about Jack in any way, and it almost feels like it's one memoir that the writer then went back to revise, and in the process inserted a whole bunch more deference and invocation of Jack to make Jack's influence on the story more palpable than it was. That being pivotal, even autobiographically it seems a bit front-heavy with all the juicy parts of David, our narrator, becoming Australia's key war correspondent and a primary figure in the propaganda effort, kind of squeezed into a small part at the back of the book and so much more emphasis given to his childhood and home life that really just sets the scene for where it all goes. I was engaged though, and intrigued by David's character as not so much the blank slate as so many other narrators of this sort are, but more of a chameleon who through his apparent guilelessness manages to fit into any situation where he finds himself.  As a sidenote, his war journalism makes him seem very canny and guileful indeed, but then I look back on the sequence where he is questioned by police over the rape and murder of an acquaintance with his friend standing accused, and his utter awkward ineptness in answering their questions is kind of pathetic). I struggle to see ultimately what the point of some of this book is and particularly what point he's making about Jack, but otherwise it's an engaging and tough look at Australia and suburbia in a tumultuous period of history.

23) An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

It seems odd that I'd never seen or even really paid attention to this book before; maybe I felt it was like Rushdie's Grimus, in that it's just an inchoate basis of what Ishiguro would grow into, and in some ways it is. It has all his trademarks: the bittersweet sense of nostalgia, the introspection and above all the unreliable, enigmatic narration that lets us in bit by bit on what the heart of the matter is. In this case the enigma is made quite explicit by our unreliable first-person narrator Ono, a renowned artist who reminisces about his life before, during and after WWII while trying to navigate marriage negotiations for his younger daughter. Ono frequently uses qualifications throughout, that such and such a person may not have said these exact words, and the rest of the exposition of his fallibility taking the form of arguments he has with his daughters or other characters where he's gotten one impression and they have another. In the end it's left pretty ambiguous, as is his character and the validity of any guilt, or shame, he feels over Japan's surrender in the war and any part he may have played in influencing the wartime culture of the country. I feel like the periodic reveals were more effectively and impactfully done in The Remains of the Day and most masterfully in Never Let Me Go, although in all three cases the reason for the unreliable narration tends to be because the narrator assumes a prior understanding and knowledge of the world being described in the reader. I just feel like here it ends up feeling like I didn't get a big revelation but rather just questioning doubt about who I'd just spent the novel with, listening to, and only a bittersweet feeling of post-war Japan and everything the people had lost. It's just an ambivalent feeling where in Ishiguro's later works the feeling was more cathartic - whether that catharsis be devastating (Never Let Me Go), redemptive (The Remains of the Day) or just magical (as in my #1 book of last year, The Unconsoled).

22) The Third Reich - Roberto Bolaño

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

No doubt Bolaño writes engagingly; so much so that I found this very gripping despite being a bit confused at the plot and the characters. Udo Berger is the German national champion at war games, and the story finds him keeping a holiday journal at a seaside tourist town in Spain with his girlfriend ahead of the big international war game convention. Early on it takes the form of a typical youth-travelling-abroad narrative as they throw in with fellow countrymen and mingle late in clubs with a couple of the locals. Then one of their friends goes missing while windsurfing and the coherent narrative goes a bit AWOL at the same time. Well not fully; it takes a radically different tack though, and our narrator in particular starts to lose his grip. He begins a game of his pet hobby, the titular Third Reich (a realistic WWII simulation where he plays as his native Germany) against a local character known as El Hermado (the burn victim) and tries repeatedly to seduce the beautiful German manager of his hotel. He also becomes inexplicably unhinged and the story, being told through his eyes, does likewise. It never becomes dull or incoherently written but I found it quite difficult to grasp onto the sentiment of the characters and engage with them properly. It actually becomes quite interesting through its obfuscation, and while I enjoyed Bolaño's The Savage Detectives as well, it's undeniably a dense and convoluted narrative in the same way. So maybe it's a translation thing or possibly his strength is in his imagining of situations, his exploration of interpersonal politics and psychology so while I found this a bit intractable, there’s definitely substance here to sink your teeth into.

21) Small Island - Andrea Levy

#BaileysPrizeWinners

This is an engaging and in some ways eye-opening book. It seems odd to say this, but the prevalent theme here of racial relations and turbulence in post-war England doesn't seem like a topic that has had much coverage. In fact when I think of racism and its exploration in literature, it's almost exclusively American, or just colonial or post-colonial literature that happens to reflect the pervasive racism of its historical context. So this book and its depiction of Jamaican ex-pats trying to make their way both through WWII as British colonial subjects fighting for the mother country, and following the war in a fractured and broken Britain, it's a fresh and interesting perspective on history that I'd never really encountered before. Does that make it a great book? Not necessarily, of course. The main shortcoming of this basically is that the narrative feels quite fragmented; it seems more like a series of skits from the lives of these characters and I don't think Levy formed them into a holistic narrative that delivered any punchy themes. The 'before' sections (basically, each character's back story) take on this kind of pseudo-Dickensian quality when you consider all the coincidences and contrivances that end up taking place later on. As a result the 'before' sections seem mostly unrelated to the central, present-day narrative except insofar as each tangential character converges in the present from their own origin point. The weakness of the thread tying it all together though shouldn't detract from Levy's writing, which delivers a lot of thoughtful social commentary with a lovely tongue-in-cheek sense of humour which is present throughout but only becomes overt late in the book around the denouement. Above all and in spite of its flaws this is most definitely a page-turner in the best sense, and offers an important and hitherto underrepresented snapshot of English colonialism.

Books of 2018 Part 2: 40-31

40) Solaris - Stanislaw Lem

#ClassicsIShouldRead

This was very much a mixed bag for me. Like most people these days discovering this book, I picked it up purely because of my fondness for one or the other film adaptation (in my case, the Tarkovsky; I haven’t seen Soderbergh’s version), so there wasn’t a huge amount of novelty to reading this. The premise, the philosophical intrigue and the questions it raises about the nature of consciousness and memory – they’re all explored in vivid detail in Tarkovsky’s film and were therefore not new to me. Being a Tarkovsky film, too, it’s not like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest where the studio somewhat bowdlerised the source material to make it a star vehicle: not only is it fully conscious of the questions and all their implications but Tarkovsky shapes the content himself in order to raise even further questions. This is still a very intriguing bit of world-building and introspection, and the present-tense dialogues and narrative were deeply engaging and unsettling, but where this fell down was in the long didactic passages explaining the history of Solarian philosophy and scientific inquiry. It’s not that they’re scant in their detail or poorly written, but rather the intriguing part of this book is in the fantastical elements and the inward-looking questions of humanity (such as "Am I responsible for my unconscious?  No one else is, if not myself"), whereas the long academic explanations turn it into dry science-fiction which doesn’t help build the world but makes incomplete attempts to explain it. The trouble is that they’re the bulk of the prose, so whenever it jumped back to the present predicament of the expedition it felt like a welcome relief that didn’t last long enough.

39) Dr Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party - Graham Greene

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

This is a curious little book. I'm intrigued foremost by the dedication "to my daughter, at whose Christmas table this story first came to me" given that it's the story of an embittered old millionaire who invites his rich friends around to dinner regularly to insult and humiliate them for his own amusement. How would you feel if you therefore got this dedication? What kind of Christmas party was his daughter throwing? It's a short, snappy kind of story that may have served as some kind of allegory but it seems too nihilistic, while the references to greed, rich vs poor, the Catholic conceptions of a soul, are frankly too on the nose to serve any allegorical value. What it ends up being is a slightly surreal sketch on bitterness and regret. It has the feel of a short McEwan novel, but it doesn't deliver the sucker punch that McEwan would (not helped by the fact that the 'big twist' is literally the alternate title of the book – it’s like calling the second Star Wars film "The Empire Strikes Back, or Luke Discovers the Bad Guy is his Father") and the dialogue all reads like lessons from a clumsily written morality tale. I feel like a more drawn-out version with greatly enhanced obliqueness in its fable and less caricatured players could be quite an interesting meditation, but Greene makes his point quickly, he makes it bluntly, and he also makes it repeatedly. Curious but not that effective.

38) Stardust - Neil Gaiman

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed #AtLeastSomewhat

This is a mostly harmless bit of fun, a foray into the world of fantasy and fairytales where I don't spend a lot of time. Since I don't spend a lot of time in this realm, I don't really recognise a lot of trope subversions if they're going on here, and to my eyes it actually felt fairly conventional. Some elements, like the querulous character of the fallen star, felt somewhat modern, but the picaresque narrative, the kind of shallow psychology of the characters as either good or bad (our main protagonist has one quest and that tends to guide all his actions, although his general 'goodness' is revealed by his flexibility in this regard), and the particular mystical elements just feel like typical fairytale stuff. It's not to say I didn't enjoy it, but a lot of the drama and conflict seemed quite glibly and easily dealt with and I never really got swept up or invested enough in it, so of course it's enjoyable since it's never particularly challenging.

37) Ball Lightning - Liu Cixin

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

I enjoy Liu's writing generally, but this is a very different kind of book to the Trisolaris trilogy (more on part three of that trilogy to come). I was on board for a while here, and then I just paused and asked what was really the point of this story? It starts with an inciting incident involving the ball lightning phenomenon, and then develops into a portrait of a man's obsession with trying to unlock the mystery of ball lightning, how it forms and manifests. Like Solaris, it becomes extremely didactic at points with these extended explanations and explorations of theories and experiments into the nature of the phenomenon, so I found it bereft of conflict and understanding of what was really at stake here - would the story basically end when ball lightning was understood? Was that the crux of this story? In one sense it is, but more importantly the issue is that the story stops becoming that of the narrator and becomes more focused on his friend, colleague and sort of romantic interest in this book and her own conflict with the world, which became a bit disjointed in terms of where our sympathies lie. There are also some strange jumpy plot points where it’s reached a point in the didactic exploration where we can't progress further through pure theory, so suddenly something geopolitically larger happens and we're plunged into wartime to hurry along the theory into its practical application. I think the highlight for this is actually Liu's brief afterword where he explains that the Trisolaris trilogy was pretty much finished when he wrote this but published this one first as it's more traditional Chinese sci-fi (all theory/science with no exploration of moral or philosophical ramification) and that makes sense here. There's also a hint of this as a prequel as there's a foreshadowing of the existence of the Trisolaran race and their observation of Earth right at the end of this book. So I appreciated it more in that context than I really appreciated the story itself.

36) Another Country – James Baldwin

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

I don’t think this is as engaging as Baldwin's previous efforts that I've read. There's just a disconnected nature to a lot of the characters who don't seem fully fleshed out. Baldwin's purpose/focus here seems to be on exploring race relations, and so the characters all seem to be kind of cardboard cut-outs with their distinguishing factor being their race and gender/sexual identity. Beyond that I don't really get much depth from them, as the depth comes from Baldwin's philosophising about them. But it also means a lot of liberties are taken with them and with the plot. (Spoilers ahead, like in the next sentence) For instance, when the character of Ida calls her and her brother Rufus’ mutual acquaintance Cass, coincidentally the night after Rufus reappears after six weeks missing, but also coincidentally the night that Rufus kills himself. Like, why would she wait six weeks to call? And then just happen to call the night they've seen him? It just seems unnecessarily serendipitous by Baldwin, and could have easily been avoided by having Ida have called at least once previously, and then the SECOND time be when he's reappeared and then later that night kills himself. Or Cass could even have called her to inform her they've now seen him. There's also another kind of clumsy narrative moment late in the book, where a character who's at the mercy of an injustice goes to another character for solace, but we only know this because 'other character' relates the scene to somebody else. And that's fine in a normal narrative, but multiple times in this novel we are taken inside that scene despite it not being the narrative focus, and here we only get the interpretation rather than the mimesis. These seem like quibbles, but the fact is they're symptoms of a real sense of disjointedness: I feel like Baldwin set out to write one thing and didn't have a clear plan so it ends up being a hodgepodge of racial, gender and identity politics that tries to service a grand vision but gets lost in all its details and unnecessary machinations. With a clearer focal point and less left-handed character introduction and exposition, this could have been that grander vision.

35) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

#ClassicsIShouldRead

I've encountered so much about this book without having read it. But I felt the need to read it after reading Rebecca (more on that later) and feeling like I needed to read the 'original' first wife-haunted big house romance novel. And look, when you know most of the machinations of the plot in this case, it still has some power to it. But honestly for the most part I wasn't really engaged with this. I think it's mainly down to the character of Jane, who feels like a fairly dull plain canvas, a safe vessel on which to project the image you want. She's moral but not pious, decent but not radiantly lovely, she's plain (of course), has a mind of her own... I just didn't find her a particularly compelling companion for most of this. When she moves to Thornfield and Rochester comes into the picture it feels like a very different book from the earlier one telling of her childhood and growing from unjustly rejected brat to worthy, humble servant. But the Rochester story is really very far-fetched and fairytale-esque (in a grim dour kind of way) so I couldn't parse the verisimilitude here. Jean Rhys did the Bertha part of the story, I feel, more credit than it maybe deserves in her imagined prequel Wide Sargasso Sea. I was into this a bit more when Jane moved away from Thornfield and discovered more about her roots: I found I was invested in her and the choices she would make, but I honestly don't feel like I needed her childhood to understand her, and I think the narrative would be more compelling if it were just about her and Rochester rather than about all of her own trials and tribulations. I'm iconoclastic for feeling that, I know, but there's some things that despite centuries and miles and swathes of cultural separation from me they can still cut through, and the nature of this narrative didn’t do that.

34) The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd

#BooksIReadForNoReason

This was kind of a middling read. On the surface it's quite populist kind of Dickensian reading where effectively-orphaned character finds meaning, redemption and identity through a series of unlikely coincidences. There's also very much the Dickensian simplicity of characters either being wholly good (including the problematic June, who starts out an antagonist but of course has a heart of gold) or wholly bad (in this case, racist and/or violent). And for all its kind of structural predictability, there's definitely a readable and likeable quality to the story, which at times feels manipulative in the way it draws us towards an uplifting conclusion even in the face of themes of racial violence and prejudice, child abuse and suicide. I think for its easy-reading nature, the biggest issue is that the race issue is dealt with in ultimately childish and facile ways. There isn't a character in here who struggles with inherent prejudice and biases and has to make a difficult decision: characters are all either colour-blind and dismissive of differences, or they're bigoted and unpleasant. I felt like the character of June was likely to be the conduit for this sort of thematic exploration, being prejudiced against and suspicious of Lily by virtue of her being white, but it turns out her initial mistrust is based purely on personal trust issues and past history which has nothing to do with race. Ultimately it felt a little like a "hooray for nice white people for fixing racism, am I right, fellow white people?" kind of story that doesn't shy away from black under-privilege or racial violence, but just mentions it tokenistically in an outsider's celebration of community and family values. It just feels like a friendly, sanitised read of what could have been more weighty subject matter.

33) Tenth of December - George Saunders

#AuthorsIShouldReadMore

People seem to go crazy over George Saunders. I read an interview with him where he came across as a pretty sharp, but thoughtful, guy, but after reading this I don't really get the hype around his writing. Sure there's inventiveness in his use of language and voice, and some of the satirical elements here are very witty and engaging, but it just didn't have much wow factor for me. It just felt like fairly standard short story writing, and maybe some of the satire is just too subtle for me or something but I was hoping for more of the stories here to have more of a point. Some of them raise interesting points but then kind of fade out rather than bringing them to a provocative conclusion. Probably the best story here, the Semplica Girl Diaries (which I enjoyed mainly because of the obvious thematic and stylistic resonance with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go), finishes quite abruptly as well, which is precisely the point of it, but it just left me a little unsatisfied after investing the time and feeling into it. I think maybe Saunders is more of a cult of personality so maybe I need to read more of his stuff before I can pass judgement on him or understand the buzz. There's certainly great world-building and writing here but it feels like a lot of potential that is never finished.

32) The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

This felt like a book I should have read a long time ago and that provides context for a whole lot of other things I’ve read and seen. A piece of journalism on the hippy movement, a cultural artifact, a day in the life of the 60s; it just brought home so many cultural references and bits of history that I've known about for years without really understanding where they came from (most notably of course, the idiom "drinking the kool-aid" to refer to people going mindlessly along with what one person says). Wolfe's writing here seems a bit more formative and unstructured than it did in his later novels that I’ve read, but part of that is his focus here on trying to recreate the mental experience of the long LSD parties he's describing. It's not enough to write that Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters tripped out for two days and did this and that; Wolfe devolves into long stream of consciousness patterns with intrusive thoughts and disconnected sentences to give this immersive, almost gonzo, effect. It does get a little tiresome after a while though, since despite the varying scale and audiences of Kesey’s parties, one trip starts to feel like the next, and Wolfe's purpose is documenting the experience rather than extrapolate any ultimate point. While I got a far greater understanding of Kesey, his movement and ideals, the overarching point seemed to be delivered incidentally and possibly accidentally. The book did make me wonder what Kesey could have done though, if he'd focussed on his writing following the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, rather than focussing on expanding his mind and exploring ‘other dimensions’ with his friends. Ultimately it feels like a protracted phase of mental masturbation, with immense hedonistic pleasure but no furtherance of personal or societal circumstances. At the same time Wolfe pulls us into the moment and makes it feel like a cultural revolution and a wave of people who gain a new perspective on life and its possibilities beyond the humdrum. Obviously I'm the epitome of the square to them on the outside looking in, but it did seem to be more of a cult based on traditional power structures than some new utopian society or even just 'way of being' as they may have felt (and isn't that how any cult would see themselves). What I gained was a far more in-depth understanding of freakout culture, and a fascinating, if longwinded, look at the dichotomy between the countercultural acidheads and the rigid pillars of society. It feels like a necessary read but it's in many ways just bemusing rather than enlightening.

31) Nemesis - Philip Roth

#AuthorsIvePreviouslyEnjoyed

This ended up being a pleasingly short, easy read at a point where I was getting worried about my ability to get a good quota of books read this year (and yes, I failed anyway. I mean only 57 books…). Now I say easy read; of course it's anything but. But when you're dealing with the writer of Portnoy's Complaint and Sabbath's Theater, this book is definitely not his most obtusely-written or even his most unsettling in subject matter, despite dealing with a polio epidemic among the youth and people’s struggle with faith that goes along with it. In many ways this feels like a rehashing of a lot of the themes of American Pastoral: the central figure of Eugene "Bucky" Cantor is a similar figure to Theodore "The Swede" from his earlier work, in being this larger-than-life All-American hero figure, and his fall from idolized grace is a very similar trajectory. In some ways that makes this fairly familiar territory, and there were parts of this book that I felt drag for that reason. In particular, there was a drag in the section of the narrative where Cantor uproots himself from the infected area of Newark and moves to the idyllic surrounds of Indian Hill to be with his fiancée. The bucolic surroundings just felt on the nose, in that you know that some calamity is about to befall him, but the descriptions of the new perfect setting didn't seem to be quite as emphatic and contrasting as Roth made them. In the end though this is quite a moving and affecting exploration of the nature of guilt and the profound attrition of heroism in the face of uncontrollable forces of epidemiology, similar to Camus' The Plague.