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.