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!