Books of 2019 Part 5: The Top Ten

10) Where'd You Go, Bernadette? - Maria Semple
I read this straight after Goodbye, Vitamin, and obviously I enjoyed this more, but they both felt like they're from young up and coming female writers, written in unconventional formats, and dealing humorously with issues of mental health. The key point of differentiation, and ultimately the key selling point for me with this book is that it's at times laugh out loud funny. The opening section in particular is quite delightful as the characters - from the enigmatic and almost sociopathically antisocial Bernadette to her effortlessly brilliant daughter Bee (who also takes on the elusive role of narrator), and the gossipy social-climbing mums Soo-Lin and Audrey (who takes on the antagonist role) - all pit their neuroses against each other. The cast that Semple writes about here are all seemingly defined by those hang-ups, and the reason why Bernadette seems to emerge with our sympathies is that - unlike her workaholic husband Elgin or the scheming Audrey - she is aware of her own shortcomings, and just wants to be left alone to deal with them. As much of an enigma as she is, she feels the most 'normal' and more defined by who she is than by what she wants to be. Her daughter, helped by her role as narrator, also evokes that same level of sympathy but mainly because she seems to be left behind, but out of the way of the bonfire of the grown-ups' vanities. Where I felt this book lost me a bit was in trying to do too much in the latter stages, where it ties up all the loose ends without really offering a large quantity of catharsis or resolution. It offers them, but quite quickly and in the same kind of detached documentary style as the opening stages where it was piecing together the mystery of the title. It's clever, unique, moving and funny, but I feel it could have amplified all of those things by adding a bit more of a climax and a bit more of a coda. Instead it left me a little bit hungry for more, despite the fact that it neatly (and possibly too conveniently/) wrapped everything up.

9) The Age of Reason - Jean-Paul Sartre
I've had this book on my shelf for almost two decades but in French. In the senior years of high school I got it into my fat brain with its bloated sense of its own ability that at some point I'd have the French language skills to actually piece it all together. I did try to read/translate it as I went, in French, and got as far as the second page. So this year I finally bit the bullet and decided, having not practised or studied French in nearly two decades (apart from visiting France at one point and being able to order a beer and a three-course soufflé meal in French, oh and ask for directions from a security guard who told me in response to my first question that il "parle pas d'Anglais"), that it was time to try it in English. For the record, my translation of the first page in French was largely accurate. But it was worth just taking the easy route, because this is a very rewarding and engaging read. I don't think Sartre writes with any special flourishes or anything but he gets his point across clearly and efficiently while delivering an interesting story at the same time, which probably means if I ever do actually learn to read French, this would actually not be the worst book in the world to try and read. The trials of Mathieu, our philosophy teacher protagonist  who prides himself on being a 'free' entity, as he attempts to extricate himself from a quandary that will cost him that freedom, are at times thought-provoking and amusingly pathetic. There's lots of reflections on the concept of freedom and the nature of interpersonal attachments from the surrounding characters who either admire, are admired by, or resent, Mathieu and who all represent and demonstrate varying degrees of personal freedom. The character of Daniel is the catalyst to the biggest catharsis of the book and has the most fascinating personal arc. Imprisoned in a secret and invisible personal cage he makes malevolent but also compassionate decisions that ultimately lead to revelations and questions of the most profound nature of liberty. I think this can be enjoyed on its surface as an entertaining interpersonal drama, but the questions it raises about life and free will are likely to stick with me for quite a while yet.

8) The Call of the Wild - Jack London
The key thing that struck me about this whole short work - especially reading it, as I did, straight after A Place of Greater Safety (my #53 book of the year, as you all know from paying attention) - was how efficient the writing here is. Of course, I'd go on to revise my assessment of London's writing in the books that followed this in the anthology, but here he doesn't write with a great deal of embellishment, or psychology: his muse here is a simple creature of instinct, habit and nature so there isn't any need to peer into the inner workings of Buck's mind. But more than just being trimmed back, London manages to imbue the straightforward action with great meaning and feeling and I was heavily invested in the story from start to finish. Yes it's mostly a survival story in the harsh wilderness and of animal against man (or against animal) in different guises and with different levels of competence at looking after the animals. So it's literally life or death for most of this and naturally I was drawn into that. But Buck's character arc is also completely compelling and captivating from domesticated house dog to wild instinct-driven beast. Like Buck, this prose is all muscle with no wasted flab, and every sentence is precise and worth reading. Singular in its purpose but very effective.

7) The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
This is one of those books I see everywhere in bookshops and so forth that's obviously hugely popular, but I strangely don't hear that much about elsewhere. I finally decided to pick it up and, well, I really enjoyed it. There is certainly a crowd-pleasing page turner element to it, because it's just gripping in the way Zafón weaves intrigue around the narrative of a young boy's fixation on a book and its mysterious author. At first it struck me as a less-academically minded Name of the Rose (my #21 book of 2014), but there's a far more overt literary parallel - to Les Misérables - that's adumbrated by one particular plot point of an antique fountain pen once ostensibly owned by Victor Hugo. The parallels between Zafón's villain Fumero and Hugo's Javert become more and more obvious as Fumero continues his relentless pursuit of Carax, but Zafón blends this redemptive tale with elements of medieval romance and hard-boiled detective fiction to make a deeply involving and surprisingly beguiling work about the nature of obsession set against the backdrop of - not the French revolution - the Spanish civil war. There is a lot of commentary and criticism of the class divide, with all of the rich people in this book being basically possessive, grand-standing and power-hungry arseholes (you know, rich people right). My main criticism is that Zafón tries to give his female characters agency at odds with the medieval romance conventions here, but ultimately reduces them to a patchwork combination of beautiful objects of male desire and hopeless devotees of tortured male genius. It works as a narrative about male lust and obsession leading to ruin but also has unfortunate misogynistic overtones at its most well-meaning and heartfelt. But still I really loved the experience of reading this book, and was gripped by the mystery the way I was with The Luminaries (my #2 book of 2014).

6) An Untamed State - Roxane Gay
This was a very difficult read, but necessarily so. We know we're in for a rough time in the first few pages as our narrator is kidnapped by a group of men and imprisoned in a bunker waiting for her wealthy Haitian father to come up with the ransom money. The whole first section of the book felt a bit heavy-handed, largely because I've read similar kind of things before (the horrifying torture scene in Louis de Bernieres' Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (my #45 book of 2016) is the most starkly graphic in my memory) and I knew it was going to be unpleasant, and vivid, and viscerally affecting so I sort of had to brace for that and grit teeth and keep going. But what makes this book interesting and necessary is the second half, after our narrator is freed (not a spoiler, it's revealed in early prolepsis that she will be) and the suffering she goes through to try and return to a normal state of existence. This is also where Gay's feminist exploration comes to the fore, as the men in her narrative are figures of such comic absurdity as they fumble around trying to hasten things to normalcy while also attempting to portray themselves as the victims of the whole saga following the graphic sexual violence we've just had to live through with our narrator. As a male I found it a very challenging and confronting piece of writing that made me think hard about the role I play in my marriage and - as my wife was heavily pregnant while I read this - how completely peripheral and superfluous I am to everything she was going through, yet how completely essential every small kindness I can perform is. This is first and foremost an unpleasant book to suffer through, but it's a powerhouse piece of provocative thinking and writing.

5) The Only Problem - Muriel Spark
Yep this is definitely Spark at her unpredictable best. Ostensibly this is an allegory of the story of Job (made quite explicit by the fact that the central figure is a scholar of the book of Job and his driving motivation is writing the ultimate critical essay dissecting the book), but in true Sparkian fashion it takes on a number of sudden left turns where things are never as they seem. There are lots of hilarious cynical moments throughout this, indicting the media, the authorities, but in particular the central characters and their own neurotic self-serving natures. It's also become apparent now - this is my eighth Spark novel - that I never have a good sense of which character voice is that of Spark herself. And that's a good thing. To compare her with someone like Jonathan Franzen who also writes social satires, I find it difficult to believe any of his characters' voices as belonging to them rather than him. Here Spark is in different chameleonic territory all the time, and this was a delightful way to conclude the three-book volume with this so utterly different from all her other writing. It's constantly surprising and very entertaining, with plenty of thought-provoking philosophising along the way about the nature of suffering and coping with adversity.

4) Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie
This was a very engaging and entertaining read based on what is just an excellent premise: a two-year old closed murder case is reopened when a stranger arrives and provides definitive evidence that the now-dead convicted killer was innocent. As such not only is everybody's closure on the case disrupted and their reconciliation with the fact of the murder upset, but it raises the fact that the murderer is still unknown and at large. It's ultimately just a classic country house crime fiction in that the list of suspects are limited by their presence or proximity at the time of the murder, but the upheaval of the presumption of everybody being innocent makes this an intricate psychological drama. Each member of the family suspects another and their diverse personalities and way of reckoning with the newfound suspicion makes this not only a gripping read but a curious philosophical exploration of human nature and the darker forces that drive our decision making. I hate to say that I was disappointed with any of this excellently-crafted story, but the one thing that deflated me a bit was just how conventional the denouement was. Given the ambiguity and the supposed hopelessness of dredging up evidence two years after the fact, I had hoped it would end a bit more inconclusively, maybe with a guide in one direction but otherwise providing no satisfying closure. But it ends as a typical "who dunnit? That's who" and that person confessing. I know I'm applying a post-structural lens to what is not only a piece of genre fiction but part of the definition of its generic conventions (and therefore a pretty big structuralist archetype) but the drama was so compelling that I didn't want it to end so neatly. I definitely enjoyed this more than Murder on the Orient Express (My #16 book of 2016 and the last Christie I read before this; the ABC Murders was read after this), which is an elegantly crafted story with an unconventional conclusion; this felt far more real and explored the questions that crime fiction can raise so much more deeply.

3) The Siege of Krishnapur - J.G. Farrell
I bought this originally in a double volume with Troubles, Farrell's other Booker winner, and which I read last year (in fact it was my #13 book of last year). I would have read this last year too, except it accidentally got put into a box of books and kept in a storage garage for eight months. Finally unearthed it, and what a treat this was. It has exactly the same tongue-in-cheek wit and irony of Troubles as Farrell simultaneously lampoons, laments and celebrates British colonialism in its dying days. The characters here, as they find themselves in an increasingly desperate situation besieged in their small township by a rather dehumanised crowd of mutinying Indian sepoys, all have their particular quirks, comforts and agendas, borne of their particular upbringing and all with a large dash of colonial hubris. The collector Hopkins, our key protagonist, is obsessed with all his trinkets and fineries; the magistrate is fixated on phrenology and analysing the natives and his compadres in this light; the padre is dominated by a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture and won't abide any modern sensibilities being brought to bear. But besides the engaging character 'types' what really makes this book so delightful (in spite of some pretty nasty and harrowing situations) is the way Farrell weaves these, and a certain British arrogance and rigour of aesthetic, into the action and narrative. The collector at one point is considering his strategy by way of consulting Machiavelli and realises that his position is different since Machiavelli was writing of Italians, not Englishmen. At one point the young recent arrival Fleury is composing a poem for a fallen comrade, blending battle imagery with floral aesthetics and Farrell pauses to add parenthetically "(it was not a good poem)". I found myself chuckling throughout, and have to say Farrell is more than a match for the satirical heft of Evelyn Waugh. It feels a shame that he's so little mentioned outside of having won the Booker twice, because he really is a discerning observer of human nature and a razor-sharp chronicler of post-colonialism.

2) The Gingerbread House - Kate Beaufoy
There aren't a lot of books out there that make me actually shed a tear, but this one got me. A middle-aged woman, after being made redundant from her advertising agency at the age when women no longer become valuable to the industry, tries a stint as live-in carer for her mother-in-law who is suffering from dementia, accompanied by her mute teenage daughter. The subject matter is not unfamiliar to me either from art or from looking from afar at my own (now late) grandmothers who had similar afflictions, but what really brings the emotional resonance out here is Beaufoy's framing it all through the eyes of the teenage daughter. Katia, our narrator, evokes a lot of fairytale and storybook imagery - including the titular house, and the view of her grandmother as a kindly-seeming witch who can turn nasty on a dime - to communicate and reconcile herself to the situation she and her mother find themselves in. She self-reflects by holding imaginary conversations with Charlotte, of Charlotte's Web, and also invokes the Little Mermaid a lot, as a keen scuba-diver but also to draw out imagery of clashes between realities and ways of looking at the living world. Predominantly the story here is a warts-and-all (a phrase borrowed directly from the book) portrait of the carer-patient relationship relating to dementia: the unpleasant visceral details, the endless repetitions and miscommunication, the need for outlets and brief escapes for reprieve. Beaufoy's narrator has a very pure, well-meaning and strangely ethereal view of the gritty corporeal and tragic circumstances, and its bittersweet culmination is incredibly well-drawn and moving. It's a confronting read but deeply humanistic one that has a strange reassurance about how normal the feelings of anxiety and frustration and helplessness are.

1) The Fish Can Sing - Halldór Laxness
It has been a while since I read any Halldór Laxness - long enough that I don't have references to other book write-ups for the two that I've read. Interestingly this was also my second attempt at reading this and I can't remember why my previous attempt was aborted, but I think it was a long time ago when old-old job didn't allow for a lot of reading time. Regardless, I'm happy I picked it up again because this really is a completely wonderful read. It reminded me quite a lot of that oft-mentioned book, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (my #1 book of 2017) - in that it centres around a world-famous Icelandic opera singer, Gardar Holm, and a sequence of aborted attempts to have him sing for the Icelandic public. The minor characters that populate the story are all awestruck by Gardar and talk obsessively about the celebrity he's found abroad, singing for the Pope and other notable figures. The frustrations of this are so similar to Ishiguro's piano player and his failed attempts to sleep, rest or practice ahead of his concert that I almost feel Ishiguro might have been influenced by this earlier work, if not for how culturally discrete these two books are (and how much of an innovator Ishiguro is). But this book is also quintessentially Halldór in that there's such Icelandic lore throughout, with an atmosphere of fantasy magic that ultimately - when the curtain is pulled down - is just part and parcel of the landscape and lifestyle, very down-to-earth and simple. There's a delightful irony employed throughout as our young narrator Alfgrimur sees everything through his innocent and unassuming eyes and the disparity between his simplicity and the affectations and aspirations of others takes on a surreal tone that also serves as remote contrast between the innocence of basic Icelandic workaday humility and the pretensions of other countries (Denmark in particular gets a typical Laxness prodding here). It seems that I love stories about musicians not being able to play concerts since these have topped my reading twice in three years, but I couldn't help but be utterly beguiled by the wit, the surrealism and the simply humanity here. It's a very amusing and deeply charming narrative about the power of music and the even stranger power of fame.

So that wraps up another year of reading, both punctuated and hampered by the birth of my daughter and the switching of jobs. I will see you all (Hi, Mother!) when this blog again becomes active in December 2020.

Books of 2019 Part 4: Bottom 14

41) The World Jones Made - Philip K Dick
Despite kicking off the bottom end of my list, this was a pretty interesting read. Mostly historically, though as it's very early Dick and introduces and explores a number of concepts that would become more central to his later work. The eponymous Jones is afflicted with a disorder whereby he sees exactly a year into the future, while the "Fedgov" authority struggles to maintain order in an uncertain world that is being apparently colonised by an amorphous alien life form. So Jones is actually called a "precog" in prolepsis to a concept that Dick - and the film adapters - would explore in far greater depth in Minority Report. But the intrigue in that there are primitive forms of lots of Dick concepts here is also its biggest weakness, in that there's quite a lot of interesting sci-fi questions being raised but none of them is really explored in great depth. There's questions of cult worship, intergalactic exploration and colonisation, alien invasion and of course predeterminism. It's obvious that the writer is a sharp observer of humanity and the limits of our capacity on earth, but he spreads his ideas pretty thinly here across a handful of fairly glib characters and haphazard plot jumping. It's still an interesting read though, and not just because of its place in early Dick lore, just not very polished.

42) Adam, One Afternoon - Italo Calvino
This was another collection of good, engaging stories from Calvino, and it felt a bit better curated than some of the other more haphazard collections I've read in recent memory. There's a thematic resemblance between a lot of these with common threads being woven, like class consciousness and the cognitive and habitual disconnect between the "haves" and the "have nots" as well as struggles between the poorer classes and the authorities charged with the task of maintaining the status quo. The best tales are in the middle here, replete with Calvino's signature irony and a great deal of surrealism as well. The best ones - Animal Wood, and Going to Headquarters - have traces of my favourite Calvino short story from the Cosmicomics (The Chase) without quite reaching its heights of sheer imagination and lateral reality. It's not a flawless read with a lot of the stories falling a bit flat and glib, but the explorations of his pet themes are heartfelt and amusing and at their best these are excellent entertainment.

43) The Fallen Idol - Graham Greene
I don't know if I can really count this as a book either, since it's a forty-odd page short story appended in the same volume as The Third Man, as another example of Greene's work having been written for/adapted to the big screen. Still, this was a meaty and enjoyable short experience. The main character of Phillip is an intriguingly constructed portrait of naivety (what is it with naive protagonists called Phillip this year), mostly disguising itself in innocence for the purposes of the story, but unravelling later as completely guileless, ruining the pragmatism otherwise apparent in the situation. Greene introduces through this vehicle of naivety his usual moral concerns about the 'right thing' to do and how moral and legal justice should be served, but doesn't really qqqq (sorry, those four letters courtesy of my three-year-old) wrestle with them here. There's no time for that in the story, he just puts the ambivalence in plain sight and allows us to draw from it what we will, or simply be amused or bemused by the way it all pans out. I was largely amused, but that's just the cynic in me.

44) The Age of Magic - Ben Okri
I read this only in a couple of days because it's a pretty quickfire set of prose bursts that doesn't go deep into description or reflection, mainly because the whole thing is just description/reflection through strange plot points. It reminds me a bit of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (my #1 book of 2017) in that it's essentially a long dreamscape flitting in and out of reality and different colours and textures of fantasy and surrealism. There are two reasons it falls well short of Ishiguro's benchmark: beyond the fact that Okri writes a little more clunkily than Ishiguro (no offence intended; in my opinion almost everybody in the history of the world writes clunkily compared with Ishiguro), this is a shorter and therefore more shallow book, that doesn't explore the fantasy spaces it created to their full potential. But also it didn't quite have the grounding in reality: this whole thing is a bit of a magical realist landscape with the focus on magical rather than real, and as such it wasn't quite as immersive an experience. It ends up being an engaging and diverting read, but I find it less memorable because I can't hang any of my real life experiences or feelings onto it. So while I was moved while reading, it hasn't really stuck around in my memory or thoughts that long.

45) The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
This was my first book of the year. I picked this up knowing the basic premise of the story from reading plot descriptions of the film adaptation: young girl dies and spends the story watching over the people she left behind. For some reason I wasn't actually prepared for the fairly graphic rape and murder in the first chapter, despite this. And it's a little weirdly structured as a book because of this, because as the inciting incident it's also very much the climax of the book's action: everything that precipitates from it becomes a 'coping with grief' melodrama. The sister Lindsey and her budding romance with the motorcycle-riding boy with a heart of gold and zero personality; the father and his fragile and unstable obsession with his dead daughter; the younger brother, the boy who the dead girl loved, the strange poet-artist waif girl who loved the dead girl. The story takes a number of different circuitous routes as the dead girl watches from the afterlife, and it largely just circles around itself without landing on a point. The fact that the mother leaves the family and moves across the other side of the country as her way of liberating herself both from her grief and the repression she felt in the life she was living... it becomes the ultimate crisis at the heart of this story, so the fact that it resolves by her coming back and resuming life with the family, well it just feels like a long, arduous, albeit interesting journey to wind up where you started and realise you hadn't actually gone that far. The whole death thing is an interesting framing device but I just don't really feel Sebold provoked all that much thought or really explored the themes in any immense depth. Just used it as a little thought experiment that isn't actually that novel anyway.

46) The ABC Murders - Agatha Christie
I picked this up as part of a redress to feeling like I was reading a lot of male authors, forgetting momentarily that I'd already read another Agatha Christie earlier in the year. This was kind of an interesting later-seeming Christie, in that it goes quite big in conception, and explores some deconstruction of crime fiction genre conventions. In particular, this crime is certainly not a contained, isolated one but a big series of attention-seeking murders that also follow a bizarrely arbitrary order (alphabetical). In terms of the classic "did you guess whodunnit", this subverts that or makes it bigger in the sense of it's not just whodunnit but also why and a bit of how (although the murder methods themselves are clear-cut, it's more about selection of victim). I certainly realised early on that at least one of the murders was not arbitrarily chosen although I, like many of the characters, guessed that it might be the B murder (as it feels different from the others) that was the deliberate one. Ultimately this book didn't quite click entirely for me because the scheme of the murderer is really quite excessively intricate and well-plotted. The dates, names, methods, times, to kill four separate people; but also not get seen and also have a fall-guy planned and manipulated and a whole back story for said fall-guy, it all ends up a bit too far-fetched in the end, especially combined with the fairly contrived premise of Poirot being sent taunting letters announcing the murders in advance. It's an enjoyable bit of farcical escapism, but little more than quite convoluted entertainment in the end.

47) Les Enfants Terribles - Jean Cocteau
I know nothing about Cocteau the novelist (nor even that he wrote novels), and for that matter not much about Cocteau the filmmaker. But this novel reads precisely as I'd expect coming from Cocteau the filmmaker. For someone whose films are so obviously laden with imagery, where there's little subtlety and not much room for character development beyond their plot arcs, this novel is exactly that kind of output. There's a small cast of characters here - Paul the supposedly invalid boy and his sister Elisabeth are orphaned and left with a seemingly endless pot of money when their mother passes, and various friends latch onto their obscene wealth and get caught up in a web of romantic intent and selfish jealousy. It's all in a restricted setting, mostly in one house, and the various characters all have their own wants and desires and motivations. But none of them has a voice; the dominant and ultimately solo voice here is that of Cocteau, with all of the narrative effort put into this rhapsodic eulogising of the human condition, all very poetic and flamboyant with a necessary touch of cynicism. The book itself and the machinations of the plot are not poorly handled but there's little in the way of subtlety or unspoken themes or character psychology. Whatever else Cocteau may have written, this feels exactly like the novel written by a heavy-handed filmmaker who is concerned about making visual poetry and art more than telling a story.

48) Foundation - Isaac Asimov
When I got this from the library, I didn't realise that it’s at least part three in a chronology (although unsure of publication dates) but knowing vaguely of Asimov’s “Foundation” series and feeling like it could be a leaping off point. I feel like it is, but partially because this isn’t really a standalone story but more a series of vignettes set centuries apart but all tied to the origin story that starts this book. Because of the unconnectedness, this has mixed success, with the stories being well constructed but some just taking longer to draw in my sympathies to the right characters and get caught up in their struggle. It also conspicuously stands as part of a broader narrative with no actual conclusion here, and feels like a writer with a few story ideas jotting them all down and then publishing them rather than giving me the suspense and immediacy to want to go and read more. It’s more an “if you really feel like reading more of these unconnected stories, maybe pick another up, but no pressure”. It’s otherwise got interesting things to say about humanity, politics, and the historical narrative we construct, but it touches on them mostly without a great deal of elaboration.

49) The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
#ADickensAYear
This was a fairly long slog, to be honest. It's Dickens for a start, so the language is always a bit of a florid barrier. But the main issue here is that it's all a bit haphazard in the multiple short story narratives it tells and there's not a whole lot at stake. What makes Dickens his best is when he can use his florid language and archetypal character construction to elevate the drama at the right moments - so the sacrifice at the end of A Tale of Two Cities (my #27 book of 2014 and the first Dickens I ever read to kick off this yearly custom) for instance, or the revelation of Pip's benefactor in Great Expectations (my #4 book of 2017), those are some sublime moments of narrative pathos that have been earned with all the hard work from author (and frankly, reader too) upfront. There's no intent to make something like this here, as it's established as a series of light-hearted comic skits and doesn't attempt anything more than that. I'm conscious that as Dickens' first novel, there's a great deal of adept writing skill evident here from the outset; he still has some marvellous turns of phrase scattered throughout. But it's light, entertaining fare, broadly comedic and even farcical at times. It feels quite influential too, in that a number of the subplots here - particularly the Bardle Pickwick affair and trial - that would go on to become staples of 80s and 90s sitcoms: those awkward infuriating episodes of comedy where the whole plot would fall over if the two protagonists would just have an honest conversations without projecting so much subtext into each others' dialogue that isn't actually there. So it's admirable in the sense that it feels like early modern comedy, and there are definitely some amusing, entertaining parts that actually gave me a chuckle. But there are lots of side characters I don't care about at all, not to mention the fact that the main figures are not particularly drawn out to be fully-fleshed and sympathetic either (and we rely on Dickens' constant assurance of their being worthy, or likeable, rather than their actions and words doing the work for us). And ultimately there's just a lot to get through in this with only mixed success and no grand through-line to keep me interested. So while some episodes are more entertaining, as a whole work it felt long and hard work.

50) Goodbye, Vitamin - Rachel Khong
As with The ABC Murders, this was part of my little haul of female writers to redress a stretch of male-only reads, but the other reason I was drawn to this is because it was fairly short. And look, it's OK. But for a book about a daughter's year dealing with her Dad's progressing Alzheimer's, it ends up falling short on delivering the pathos I'd hoped for. It's told with this sort of relatable humour, but it also falls short on really being comedic. The style is a sort of jumping around diary of personal reflection and memories, which feels very trendy and 'now' but it doesn't really deliver much in the way of consistent themes, and doesn't manage to weave a larger more complex patchwork out of these smaller bits and pieces, so it ends up just feeling like a series of disconnected sketches. Moreover it feels a bit lazy that rather than drawing out interesting passages of our narrator's life in detail, it just offers short pithy observations and then moves on. The key failing is that it feels like it should be quite personal, almost like it's semi-autobiographical or a fictionalised version of a struggle that Khong has dealt with (especially as it's as much about her dealing with her relationship breakup as it is about her father's Alzheimers) but she never gives her protagonist much of a psychology; she has that annoying blank slate mentality in that she's mostly reactive to her circumstances and doesn't explore her own feelings in depth. It's an easy book to read, in that her voice is personable and pleasant but beyond being easy it's not very insightful or particularly humorous. I feel like there's potential in Khong as a writer, but in this book she never manages to bring it to its fullest.

51) The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells
I honestly feel like I can copy and paste my thoughts for every H G Wells book into each new one, because although I keep reading them, they all have the same positives and negatives, and it’s in pretty stark contrast in this example. What he excels in is the speculative thinking, and the relating of that to interesting philosophical questions about humanity and the future. He’s also got a close attention to detail, so the descriptions here of the invading martians, their war machines and the red weed they propagate the earth with, they’re all quite vivid. But what he struggles with, to my mind, is storytelling. So the care he takes in describing the invaders, that’s good in a sense that it leaves nothing to the imagination, but it’s bad precisely because it leaves nothing to the imagination. He can’t show an invading force and allow the reader’s judgement to fill in the blanks, without telling us everything he needs us to know and which only some of it we actually need to. His narrative descriptions as well follow a line of telling us what everybody’s feeling, rather than painting a picture of the scene and letting us feel that ourselves. At least, that was my experience, like I was reading a technical journal throughout rather than a dramatic portrayal of an alien invasion. And as such, I didn’t feel very much emotional resonance at all despite my interest in the questions being posed. And that, ladies and gents, is pretty much word for word my review of every Wells books I’ve read, too. I'll see if you notice next time when I literally just copy and paste this.

52) Mama Tandoori - Ernest van der Kwast
This was another book I read mainly because it was short, but also because the blurbs and endorsements made it sound funny. I guess it’s a particular type of humour that doesn’t particularly appeal to me, because I can certainly see why people would be amused, but I just found van der Kwast’s abusive, incorrigible mother completely unpleasant to read. But the main question I was left with, in the end, was why was he writing this? The larger than life but also unsuited for living characters that populate his life remind me of Jeanette Walls' The Glass Castle parents a bit, but Walls’ narrative had far more of a reconciling, cathartic tone as she grew up trying to come to terms with her parents. There is a slight realisation/catharsis later in this book later where Ernest discovers a kind of “what if” scenario that helps him sympathise further with his mother and father, but just structurally there wasn’t any foreshadowing of that direction, it just felt like a disconnected series of vignettes about his eccentric family with no guiding narrative. The pathos and humour was a bit distant because I wasn’t sure how Ernest felt about it all and therefore where he was taking his feelings by telling this story.

53) A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
This was a bit of a mistake to read, as I picked it up to see what else Mantel has written beyond her Thomas Cromwell chronicles of history brought to life. Unfortunately I didn't really look at what this was (in case the blurb spoiled MAJOR PLOT POINTS like the blurb of A Passage to India did) and it turned out to be more of exactly the same, but about the French revolution. Her documentarian aesthetic is really out in force here as she mixes historical documents and published materials with ordinary prose and, when the style feels more appropriate, dramatic dialogue form. The issue with this is that she gets bogged down in details throughout this long-winded account of the minutiae involved in a tumultuous time, where instability and large political forces should dictate rapid-fire change and action. But instead of allowing the speed of these events to dictate a more active pace she concerns herself with the quotidian activities of minor historical figures and all the conversations in intricate pointillist detail. I found that by the time of Bring Up the Bodies in particular she'd sharpened her writing a fair bit so the pace of the events as we know them dictated the pace of the story and the authorial licence to draw the full picture is used more efficiently. The fact is there is an utterly compelling narrative hidden here underneath all the bloated longueurs. There are times when she draws entertaining comedy and even farce out of the situation of amateurs floundering around at the mercy of history, and the tragic climax of the book is completely compelling. It just feels like a bit of a shame that she can't be more efficient in telling these details; more of a focused psychological narrative, less of the lurid soap-opera dramas. Just clean up the unnecessary exposition and you have a compelling human drama. Because it's already there, along with about half a book that needn't accompany it.

54) Crazy Rich Asians - Kevin Kwan
I feel bad about having this book at the bottom of the pile, since I only read it because my wife wanted to read it, did, and recommended I read it as well (although, in retrospect, I think it was more so we could discuss and agree on its shortcomings). But the truth is this book ended up annoying me more than it really should have. I know I should assess it purely on its own merits, but the fact is this isn't a book that rewards you with extra details after watching the film adaptation. More importantly, the movie improved this story and the characters in more than a dozen ways. Kwan obviously has good first-hand insight into the world of rich extravagance in Singapore and among the Singapore Chinese community, so he's at his strongest when making commentary on that, on the classist nature of the society, and the interplay between traditional Chinese values (that can be potentially classist anyway) and the new-world snobbishness that emerges from great wealth and privilege. But that commentary was also in the film, while his frequent longueurs naming brands and designers and describing decor and furnishings, well that's just not really my thing although I can appreciate them in their finery in visual form (again, a la the film). The key weakness though is that Kwan doesn't write good or interesting female characters. Rachel is the only figure who's consistent between both versions, mainly because she's the relatable 'fish out of water' conduit into this world, and I think Kwan channels a lot of his own personal shock and awe through her. But Astrid in the book is a weak and fairly pitiful damsel in distress type, who has none of the pragmatic capabilities given to her in the film. She also felt like far more of a sideplot in the book because she doesn't really integrate as much with the wedding party and its festivities (in one way because the film dispensed with the character of Sophie, who is Rachel's comforter at the bachelorette weekend, and cleverly used Astrid for that role instead - this works a lot better with Astrid as a cunning pragmatist), so it felt like a subplot shoehorned in to deal so heavily with Astrid and her husband's infidelity. But the main annoyance here is Eleanor. Firstly there's the fact that the best scene in the film (I don't need to mention what it is because everybody who's seen the film should agree on it) is not in this book, but mainly because there'd be no place for it here. In the book Eleanor is a superficial, petty and ultimately pointless character. She doesn't hold any influence on other characters here, and is not central to any of the conflict. Sure, her entire story arc is trying to break up Nick and Rachel, but her motivations are at best unclear, and at worst just bitchy and petty. In the film they make her a principled, consistent and believable character whose conflict with Rachel is far more nuanced, practical and complex. In the book she's just an older and less believable version of the young catty spoiled girls like Francesca and Mandy. And I found this really lazy characterising. I can see why you'd read this in isolation and feel there's plenty of fodder for a hit movie. But the film only diverges from this in ways that make the story, the relationships and the social commentary significantly better. Apart from that, it offers the same basic story and themes but the book doesn't explore them in anywhere near as interesting a depth as the film. I am conscious I'd be less annoyed at this if I didn't read this after seeing the film, but realistically I can also sense that this really wouldn't be my sort of thing on its own anyway. In that hypothetical scenario where I read this first, rather than being annoyed at the poorly written characters like Eleanor and Astrid, I'd still just find them pointless and shallow. The film just served to starkly define how superficial Kwan's cast is, and how his writing is focused far more on the wealth porn than on the more interesting cultural clash and observations on the nature of family.

Books of 2019 Part 3: 20-11

20) The Festival of Insignificance - Milan Kundera
Kundera is one of those writers that I’ll happily forget about for a while or when thinking about writers I love, yet I always get a great deal of enjoyment when I pick up a new one. This has all his characteristic quirks, but it feels a little glib relative to others that I’ve read. It’s not that his musings on the ‘insignificant’ figures in our lives and throughout modern history aren’t diverting and engaging, but quite simply he condenses them into what is a short and somewhat shallow narrative of friends interacting and socialising around Paris over the course of a few days. So I felt that there were more depths that Kundera could plumb but elected not to, and to keep it more of a few pithy notes and comic fables. It’s an entertaining read but just doesn’t have the profundity of his meatier works.

19) Lean on Pete - Willy Vlautin
Picked this one up for no reason except that the film adaptation was mildly well received - yet I haven't seen the film, don't have a huge interest in it, but just decided to give this a read since I'd at least heard about it. And the fact is it's really quite a good read. It's a depressing, picaresque story that has a lot of The Grapes of Wrath ((my #26 book of 2013) influence on it as Charley, our lead character, drifts from misfortune to misfortune and desperate situation to desperate situation. But it also echoes Steinbeck's clinical detachment; Vlautin isn't hugely interested in explaining Charley's psychology although his character and values are aptly demonstrated through his actions and the dreams he narrates. It's an interesting read as well because all the misfortunes and injustices that do happen to Charley are real-world and the people he meets on his travels are ultimately well-meaning in their various ways (with some exceptions) but Charley's itinerant upbringing and lack of solid family bonds give him a lack of trust and a misanthropy that lead him onto further vagrancy and wayward behaviour when there may be easier options on offer. It's a very bittersweet tale that is also curiously ambivalent.

18) Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut
I always find reading Vonnegut an odd experience. He always strikes me as the kind of intellectually expressive writer over whom first-year literature students - specifically male ones - would get all hot and sweaty. But in full self-awareness mode there's still quite a lot of first-year male literature student in me, and so I always quite enjoy his blend of post-structural literary observation, ironic self-abasement, speculative fiction and schoolboy crassness. It's always offbeat, absurdist and drily amusing with his key shortcoming being a difficulty in structuring some plots. In this non-novel the lack of plot structure is perhaps even more glaring than usual, because there's specifically no direction to this; it's just a collection of autobiographical, semi-autobiographical and fictional observations set around a high-concept sci-fi novel he tried and failed to write. But that just gives Vonnegut licence to write and pass commentary on anything and everything he wants. Some of his observations here are witty and engaging, while some - including his definition of what constitutes visual art and the value placed on it - I found remarkably astute. It's largely a nothingness book overall but it's a fun framework through which to view a collection of writings and skits. And, as uncomfortably as it tends to sit with me, I do find Vonnegut's writing stimulating and entertaining even if it is also juvenile and precocious at times.

17) Stonemouth - Iain Banks
This is kind of a weird book, or my reaction to it is kind of weird. Because I was quite enthralled during the reading of it: it’s a curious crime drama that interweaves the dynamics of a rival crime family saga akin to The Godfather (my #19 book of 2015) with a tale of personal romantic misadventure, all kind of intertwined with a bit of a coming-of-age story. But ultimately I left it feeling a bit unfulfilled, like there was nothing especially interesting or deep at the heart of it, and it felt just a bit like Iain Banks riffing on a handful of stock criminal characters he had in his back pocket, and using the protagonist Stuart as our ‘gonzo’ fish out of water conduit into this Cold War-esque underworld equilibrium. The fact is that the crossroads of the story, the central mystery, and the whole inciting incident that we relive through Stuart’s retrospective flashbacks, are kind of shallow and all tied up in adolescent sexual politics, which is fine as narrative fodder (and indeed the story chugs along very smoothly hence my getting caught up in it) but there’s really nothing else at the heart of this. It’s not got the twisted morality parable that the Godfather presents, nor the meditations on ambition and infamy that Brighton Rock (my #25 book of 2014), for instance, does. It’s really just a story of horny teenagers set against a backdrop of crime syndicates in drizzly Regional Scotland. I guess it's really Banks' skill as a storyteller that makes it work as far as it does, but I just can't reflect back and find anything more than a story I was wrapped up in for a while.

16) My Father's Moon - Elizabeth Jolley
This was a very enigmatic, and quite elusive read, but one I enjoyed a lot. It tells various timelines in the life of Jolley's semi-autobiographical protagonist: while she's at school, as a student nurse during WWII, and later as an unmarried mother trying to work with a small child in tow. I felt like only one of these timelines - the war one - really had a full and deep exploration within this book (which is part one of a trilogy, so I'm hazarding a guess that the other timelines and general life of the protagonist may be explored further in subsequent parts), as well as being the only one that reached a coherent endpoint. So the timeline does a lot of haphazard jumping around, while the narrator could best be described as ambivalent if you're being generous. She does a number of questionable and sketchy things, including some that are fairly malevolent for no obvious reason, and also suffers from a typical first person narrator syndrome where her inner workings are quite elusive. But despite these things, I was quite engaged with the story and also found myself liking and sympathising with the narrator, possibly against my better judgement. I think there's a certain self-aware irony in a lot of what she does, while the emotional crux of the story being tied in the past to her connection with her father or in the future relationship with her daughter, all which makes her ultimately a sympathetic figure even while doing the wrong thing or coming across as selfish or callous. I still don't know if I've got much understanding of the horrors of war, the pathos of being a caregiver in an austere environment, or even her aims and motivations, but despite the lack of answers or outcomes it was an enjoyable read.

15) Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower Part 4) - Stephen King
#ContinuingSeries
Working my way further through this literary minefield. This is an oddly structured book, since it starts where book three left off, in this high-adrenaline meta-Arabian nights kind of scenario where the travellers need to stump a psychotic, suicidal AI monorail with a riddle (yes, really). But then it takes on Roland telling his companions about the instigating events that led him to where he is now, and I was a bit distracted at first thinking it would be a short interlude, whereas in fact it takes up 90% of the novel, all of this volume pretty much dedicated to his flashback narrative. It returns in many ways to the western-sci fi mashup of the first book, in that it is set in a frontier-esque landscape but introduces little elements of fantastical origins throughout so the world-building has an unsettling uncanny familiarity - but not. The story is intriguing and at times really compelling, but I also found it a bit oppressive and claustrophobic when it did start dawning on me that most of the book would be set here. The main reason for this is that there is a complete dearth of laudable characters. It does shift the narrative focus among a number of different players in the story and it feels like there isn't one - beyond our obvious protagonist/narrator and his associates - who is morally 'good', and the narrative tends to paint everybody as either on the right side (and therefore good) or irredeemably evil on the other. This felt a bit oppressive because there aren't any good character arcs beyond Roland's himself, and it started to drag a bit knowing it was only filling in back story and yet being stuck in the company of so many horrible people who you know are - in some way - going to 'win' in the end. By the end of it I felt that Roland's character was better explained and more intimately detailed, so it fulfils its purpose and King does a good job of committing to the themes and the fatalism inherent from the beginning. It just felt like it could have been economised a bit and some of the players' parts in the saga just lightened since there weren't redeemable qualities in any of them. I found the character of Cordelia particularly disappointing, in that she went from simply misguided and ill-intentioned and got more and more evil as the story went on, and the whole time I was hoping that she might take an about face and be the deus ex machina figure our heroes needed. The character who instead comes out of the woodwork later as the surprise saviour only takes that role because they haven't really been mentioned at all since their introduction. That felt a bit of a wasted opportunity to explore a bit more moral relativism by exploring that character's story in more detail where so much time is dedicated to the countless villains who we know are going to continue being bastards. Regardless, in the end it's painted the world in more vivid colour and driven the story to the next important chapter which I'll obviously continue with, but probably not until next year.

14) The Takeover - Muriel Spark
I think by this point I can fully say the main reason I enjoy Spark unfailingly is that you never have any idea what you're going to get when you open one of her stories. This is her at her cruel and biting best; it's like an Iris Murdoch story in that there are lots of characters all intertwined with each other and we're sort of plonked in the middle of it and expected to catch up as we go along. What we get here in this book - which was part two of "Spark's Europe", a collection of stories containing observations about continental Europe, along with "Not To Disturb" (my #33 book of this year) and "The Only Problem" (still to come) - is a ruthless lampooning of the ultra-rich bathing in the luxury and lethargy of Europe. She pokes fun of the byzantine nature of Italian cultural norms by way of their local laws and customs (which reminds me a lot of the likes of Corsican and Sicilian stereotypes), while also portraying a cast of characters of various levels of unsympathetic greed and absurdity. It's ultimately a high farce, where we're never certain of exactly who will be 'taken over' or by whom. The central relationship between the self-serving, generous but naive Maggie and the even-more-self-serving, stupid but crafty Hubert is a strange and increasingly surreal buffet of barbs and frustrating torts. While it is readable as a farce, it's more of a kaleidoscopic mess of ascerbic wit. I feel due to its own byzantine plot structure it doesn't hit the mark dead-on, but the success it does have lies in its many unhinged excesses, so ultimately it's actually kind of a delightful chaos.

13) Mrs Craddock - William Somerset Maugham
This was an interesting read. As the blurb suggested it might, it feels a little bit dated now as the 'class mismatch' at the heart of the story - the wealthy Bertha Ley falls for the lower class Edward Craddock and decides against all the advice of her peers to marry him - doesn't have so much relevance these days. But Maugham manages to draw some interesting themes out of it, and in fact some of the more engaging themes felt potentially unintentional, where Bertha comes across as an intellectual head-in-cloud type not only in her taste in art and music but also in the way she loves and expresses emotion. The conflict between her impassioned and sensitive nature and the down-to-earth and callous Edward's homey, simple character is manifested in interesting ways. It gives way to Maugham's characteristic philosophical meditations on God, the nature of love and humanity's need to strive for something greater. In this case the question kind of lingers a little longer than it did in The Razor's Edge (My #7 book of 2017) for instance, because it quite starkly establishes a simple earthly life in opposition to a pursuit of higher ideals and posits that one may be superior or more fulfilling. Bertha is an interesting and ambivalent conduit to that debate and conflict, and I found my sympathies with her wavering and juxtaposing quite a lot, and that made for an interesting experience.

12) My Cousin Rachel - Daphne Du Maurier
I naturally picked this up after Du Maurier landed the coveted #1 spot of 2018 with Rebecca (despite me already knowing the plot). And this is a very intriguing narrative, all told. For a long time I struggled with it, for the simple reason that our first person narrator Phillip is such an insufferable imbecile. It became apparent quite early on what a naive fool he was, so it began to feel a bit interminable at times as there were 200 odd pages to go and I could only see him digging a wider and deeper chasm for himself to plunge headfirst into. But Du Maurier is obviously no fool, so throughout Phillip's obsessive subservience to a foolhardy love and lack of self-awareness, there is an ongoing mystery as to the real nature of Rachel's character and precisely what happened during her marriage to Phillip's late cousin and confidante Ambrose. For the most part it doesn't seem to matter, because Phillip's foolishness is so singular in its purpose that it's irrelevant whether Rachel was an innocent victim of Ambrose's mania or a malevolent gold-digger - Phillip will direct the own conclusion to the story regardless - but Du Maurier has enough control over her characters and the narrative to keep the plot engaging and moving along until the end. I still kind of cringed throughout as I didn't have a lot of sympathy for our narrator and that led to a few struggles with identifying with the central conflicts, but as a mystery construction it's definitely very enjoyable and ultimately very effective.

11) Persuasion - Jane Austen
#AnAustenAYear? #Unofficially?
It seems everybody I know loves this book, so it felt like the logical next Austen for me to read. I'm now left with only two I haven't read, what will be next year's? I've also seen the BBC adaptation of this with Sally Hawkins as Anne, because Bec saw it and took a great liking to Rupert Penry-Jones who plays Wentworth. So I knew the basic storyline here but, as with any condensed adaptation, the BBC film missed a lot of the detail. There isn't, however, a great deal of detail to the plot: Anne and Wentworth have a history whereby Anne rejected him due to family objections; Wentworth returns and Anne isn't sure about his feelings now that the marriage would be more amenable to her family connections. Given Anne's situation, and her character, there isn't much at stake here, like in Emma (my #60 book of 2017). But where Emma felt facile and vapid to me due to the superfluous plot machinations and lack of character depth, this is far more successful simply because Austen makes love the only stakes that matter here. There's a comfort to the whole scenario; the Elliott family are not well off but they're content; one of the sisters is well married; the patriarch is being courted by someone unsuitable but nothing seems greatly dire. But Anne's regret, and her yearning for a second chance, feels fulfilling and satisfying without anything to lose more than feeling a bit of further regret and resignation. It's a sweet tale in its simplicity, without the need for a huge amount of complexity to the themes.

Books of 2019 Part 2: 30-21

30) The Warren - Brian Evenson
I picked this up purely because it was super short, and read it in a day to up my reading quota a bit. This is a good little bit of short sci-fi. The premise and plot remind me a lot of Duncan Jones' film "Moon": isolated setting with a central character questioning their identity and purpose and attempting in vain to consult with an intelligent computer who may or may not be on their side. I feel like the way this resolves itself becomes a little on the nose: the earlier questioning of identity, purpose and "what defines a person" were quite ambiguous, and in the end the question is changed to be more of a "maybe I'm more human than you" statement, and I would have preferred more ambiguity being left in there. It's not just that the conclusion of the story made it too overt and less subtle, but it felt like Evenson was trying to wrap up this short story neatly and efficiently, but he could have explored these questions longer and deeper without ending it, and I'd have found it quite engaging (although yes, I may not have picked it up if it were longer). The mood, the setting, the enigma of the narrator and their situation, it's all skilful world building and I was on board for a longer and frankly less definitive ride than I ended up getting.

29) Much Obliged, Jeeves - PG Wodehouse
I don't think Wodehouse will ever make a huge impression on me, because I know what sort of hijinks to expect and it's rare for him to deviate from a tested formula or innovate within his own proprietary genre. So it's safe entertainment this, and it gave me multiple chuckles throughout as he's just a witty writer and there's plenty of situational comedy here that hits the right notes to lampoon the upper classes and their foppishness. This particular novel finds Wooster misguidedly getting  involved with politics to help out a friend, while fending off unwanted advances from eligible bachelorettes of his set, trying to avoid accusations of theft, and mostly concerned about a secret "butlers' book" that dishes up all the dirt on servants' masters, himself included. I did find this one ended a bit abruptly and a lot of the climax/resolution of the farcical elements told in recount rather than live action, while it also lacked a bit of the layering of situational absurdities I've enjoyed elsewhere from Wodehouse. Lots of fun but not quite the heights he can reach.

28) The Third Man - Graham Greene
This was an enjoyable read; predictably so. I enjoyed Carol Reed's film (that this was specifically written to become) in a noirish kind of way but don't recall it in great detail. This has the suspense, the mystery and so forth well woven in the way that Greene does, and the difference from the film (as I recall it, I may well be mistaken) is that this places more emphasis on the moral questions at the heart of the protagonist Martins' dilemma, in particular the revelation that his beloved friend could actually be guilty of his crimes and his deciding, in the end, to do the right thing. Some of the dialogue especially later in the book feels more organically Greene, and that made this more enjoyable than just a prosaic version of the plot I've seen on screen although the added interior psychology of the protagonist helped it along as well.

27) The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower Part 3) - Stephen King
#ContinuingSeries
I think this is the least of the Dark Tower series so far, but by no means a poor read. The main issue is probably a general indictment of the third volume in any ongoing series: the narrative is quite fragmented here, and there isn't a strong singular theme running through the parts like there was in The Drawing of the Three (guided by the three tarot cards and the quest for doors between worlds) or like there didn't even need to be with The Gunslinger, because it was all singular world creation. There's a number of different threads to this story, and because King never seemed keen on having this volume conclude the story (he actually offers a post scriptum apology to the reader for it ending so abruptly and inconclusively), there are myriad other threads introduced along the way to continue furnishing this world with characters and ideas and histories. So it feels a little patchy at times, but there are many compelling passages and a stack of fascinating themes explored along the way. My main quibble with this as a read, though, is the sequence in the middle where a character is attempting to make passage between the worlds. With no real prior context we are introduced to a haunted mansion where a 'gatekeeper' is depicted as a demonic monster emerging from the plasterboard while another amorphous demon commits a bestial act of rape on another character. My quibble is not so much in the detail or the experience of reading it (although it is unpleasant. The trouble is the sequence feels out of place here and is more cognate with King's other works. And the sequence can only resolve happily given where we know the story is going, so the fact that it drags on for so long and feels like a pointless, and endless diversion. It reminds me of that Simpsons sequence where Stephen King can't help but be reflexively drawn back into clichéd horror tropes while trying to explore other areas of interest ("It opened the gates of HELL!"). He could have been far more efficient with language and storytelling but he really got bogged down in his charnel mire here. In spite of that passage though, this was another entertaining read and a necessary stepping stone en route to the series conclusion.

26) Chocky - John Wyndham
This was an interesting read, if only because it unfolds very differently to how I'd expected, based on both the premise and Wyndham's previous work that I've read (Day of the Triffids, which I did read in a 'book writeup' year but didn't write it up as I was doing my TIME reading challenge at the time and that was all I wrote up). It's also hard not to view this through the lens of Liu Cixin's Trisolaris trilogy (respectively my #28 book of 2015, my #5 book of 2017 and my #3 book of 2018) because once I got a sense of what's going on here, it's clear that there are very similar themes here to those explored in Liu's trilogy. But where Trisolaris (or extraterrestrial force X in any other similar premise) is undoubtedly a malevolent force, the difference in this novel is that the force is theoretically neutral and, in practice, quite benevolent. As such, the conceit here and the wraparound narrative take on a mild Kafkaesque narrative form as the "what if...?" premise is taken down the logical pathways open to it, culminating in the unforeseen more nightmarish scenario, that is still presented in objective and ultimately no-harm-done terms by the narrator. It's quite a compulsively readable book because I was invested in the innocence of the central character Matthew, the dilemma of his parents when their son is 'possessed' by an invisible friend, but ultimately this was enjoyable just because it was unexpectedly wholesome and sweet. There seems to be a huge life or death or even Armageddon scenario at stake, but everybody in the end is largely well-intentioned and doing the best with what they have.

25) The Children Act - Ian McEwan
This feels a bit like minor McEwan, but only to me. I feel like if I'd come to this as an early McEwan discovery I'd have different thoughts. But I feel I know his milieu so well by now that there weren't any big surprises or revelations here. There was also a feeling I got at one point of  unintended dramatic irony, where a character is assessing the situation and concludes that another character will 'get over it' in time and move on and I wanted to yell: "no, you fool! You're characters in an Ian McEwan novel, that's not how it will play out at all!". The world here is the upper professional classes with our protagonist a prominent judge, renowned for her pragmatic rationales for preferencing individual welfare over metaphysical faith-based considerations. Her dilemmas and quandaries are fairly stock McEwan stuff: putting the personal aside for the greater good, questioning the validity of religious arguments, life/death decisions in the hand of one individual. The ruminations and questions he poses are all intriguing, even gripping, stuff, but there's a sense in reading this that he had certain points that he wanted to make, and at times the narrative gets bogged down in humdrum details where he needs to progress the flow of time along but doesn't know what to do with his characters in the meantime so describes their daily routine to no ultimate purpose. It's possible that the world is just not intricately drawn and I feel he doesn't have a strong personal connection to it, so the value here is only in letting him get his point across with not a huge amount of power or entertainment along the way.

24) The Heart Goes Last - Margaret Atwood
In a similar vein, this really feels like lesser Atwood to be honest, and not just because I kind of 'get' her thing by now. It does have all her great hallmarks in the first half of the book, largely world building in this futuristic post-economic catastrophe world where our protagonists Stan and Charmaine are living in their car while trying to scrounge out what remains of a living. Then they enter an exclusive pseudo-Utopian enclave that's part prison, part gated community, and the narrative becomes quite fragmented and disjointed. It has a sort of wandering style where one leg of the story leads to the next, and so forth, but it ends up going in very different directions than it felt from the get-go and thematically becomes a bit confused. The story from about halfway becomes less about Stan and Charmaine and more about bringing down and defeating Ed, the founder of this Utopian experiment/cult, a character who doesn't really feature much at all except as a figurehead early on in the story (so the ultimate conflict being about bringing him down seems apropo of nothing). And while Atwood seems interested throughout in sexual politics, in negotiations between the 'heart' and more primal urges, the points she seems to be making feel laboured and quite stretched by the ways in which the story goes. It just felt like the focus shifted, and a lot of the world building and character construction/motivation undergoes this 90 degree turn midway; I wasn't bored or that confused by it, but I personally felt my priorities and sympathies in the story shift too much for them to have felt much impact by the story's conclusion.

23) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
(Warning: if you happen to be the one person who hasn't yet read this, I spoil almost everything in the entire plot in this review)
I resisted this for a really unfeasible amount of time. It's just one of those books that, when everybody in the entire universe is reading it and telling me it's amazing, I just put it off until the hype has been actually long forgotten. And then I can view it as an historical document, "fads of recent times". And look, I was quite drawn into this, as many people were. Hosseini has an authentic, honest narrative voice and his waxing nostalgic and sentimental for an Afghanistan of yesteryear; his observations of the Soviet occupation and, later, the Taliban regime, are poignant and wistful. But of course this is less a tribute to a fallen Afghanistan and more a portrait of guilt and redemption, with the key fault lying in the problems and prejudices of Afghan society. I say I was quite caught up in this, but mainly the first half around young Amir and his conflicted relationship with his loyal Hazara servant 'friend' Hassan, as well as his own distant father. I found the first half quite a compelling look at divided loyalties and the mistakes people make as youths that end up echoing throughout their lives. During the 'redemption' part of this narrative later in the piece when Amir returns to Afghanistan, I felt there were a few too many contrivances and conveniences that crept into the plot structure without earning them. Hosseini does his best to lay out Chekhov's gun early, but it did feel like he was quite clumsily and awkwardly telling us "hey, there's a gun here. Look. Gun. I want you to remember that there's a gun here". In particular, Amir's confrontation and final 'battle' with Assef was particularly heavy-handed. Aside from the faux-Dickensian plot machination of "oh this grand Taliban leader who just publicly stoned people to death in a stadium? Turns out... it's actually the bully who tormented Amir and Hassan as a kid!!! *jazz hands*", the fact that Assef does all of the following: he leaves Sorhab in the room with him and Amir; he conveniently forgets/neglects the fact that Sorhab always carries a slingshot with him and that he's an amazing shot with it (despite everybody talking about it constantly); AND prior to entering the room, gives his guards instructions that "if Amir walks out of the room, let him pass" - wow what a string of unfortunate missteps to allow our heroes to escape. I mean, it's all classic dramatic devices and the end goal is still cathartic and satisfying (I should add: there was a potentially hideous contrivance in the symmetry of "Amir and Soraya can't have kids in America, and now Amir is going to Afghanistan to rescue an orphaned child - oh my god will those two dovetail somehow at the end? If only there were a way to make that happen" - this isn't actually treated as a big reveal, and Hosseini merely uses dramatic irony in that Amir is seemingly the only person in the scenario or entire universe who doesn't see it coming), but I couldn't help but notice the emotional gears being turned even while I was caught up in the machine. I can see why it was such a phenomenon, but part of the reason for that phenomenon is that, like The Book Thief, it kind of gives everybody what they want to finish the story.

22) Gould’s Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan
If you're wondering, this book is the reason these writeups are a bit late, as I hadn’t finished this book before Christmas break, and so I didn’t have commute time to commit to reading, and as such there’s kind of a split in this book where I read up to a certain point, didn’t read more than a few paragraphs for over a week, then polished off the last bits in a couple of days in the new year. It’s an interesting, engaging book that has a fair few interesting reflections on Australian history, and the mythologies around colonisation and the convict population. But more specifically the most interesting observations are about the unreliability of history and the narratives coming from those who survived, and those who could tell their stories their own way (I'm reminded of that famously misquoted Churchill epithet "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it"). Flanagan’s framework conceit here is therefore interesting, that he (or an unnamed first person narrator) finds this story by convict William Buelow Gould in an old Salamanca bookshop, then loses it after getting it rebuked by history experts as a clear forgery/fraud, then tries to recreate it word for word himself. That framework is quite bemusing by the end, since Gould’s ostensible narrative has so many points to make about mythology and narratives (who dies, who lives, who tells your story etc) so the fact that the whole thing is an unrealiable recreation of an unreliable narrator’s unreliable memory-based story is quite confounding. The final few paragraphs certainly turn the whole thing on its head, and give it its own power as pure myth-making. But the conceit also had its drawbacks as I was considering it: even taking it as an obvious mythology and/or historical forgery, it just feels like the language and detail that “Gould” includes is far too flowery and nuanced to bear any resemblance to a realistic narrative, and it felt like a heavy-handed read filtered too heavily through Flanagan’s own writing (which I also found a bit too florid in his other work I’ve read - the Narrow Road to the Deep North, my #3 book of 2016 which could have been higher if not for that). It doesn’t quite have the heteroglossia necessary to really place me in that time and place (however made up it was anyway) so it ends up being an interesting read but interesting almost exclusively from an academic standpoint and as an intellectual curiosity. Intriguing and engaging, yes, but without the real emotional attachment or impact that Narrow Road had, and more of an ambiguous perplexing quality overall.

21) Small Gods - Terry Pratchett
I picked this up as a first taste of Discworld, mainly because my friends (especially atheist friends, I believe) have raved about this as a great satire of religion, but also because it seems to be the general consensus that you can read this without much knowledge of Discworld lore and enjoy it on its own. And indeed, I wasn’t lost during it so that was true. Whether it’s really that great a satire I’m not sure about. It definitely is a funny book, and I found plenty of moments that gave me a chuckle or a wry smile. But I felt like I was enjoying the book and the satire more during the early stages, where Brutha is the only person who can hear the great god Om and is therefore the only actual believer in the city dedicated to and named after the god himself. But the plot became a bit convoluted after that; elements like Brutha’s perfect memory, the wandering in the desert, developing his own will and arguing with his god, it felt like there was a singular focus at one point and a number of plot devices get piled on that felt unnecessarily complex. It all came together again in the end, and it’s cleverly constructed plot-wise, but I just found it sharper and clearer in its satire early on, and more fantastical/plot-driven in the middle so it just dragged a little for me (yes, ultimately I guess the problem is I'm just not that big on fantasy per se). It was still entertaining, but I feel like there are more focused and more biting satires out there, and this one feels like it belongs mostly in the broader Discworld universe than necessarily a mirror held up to our own world.

Books of 2019 Part 1: 40-31

Alright, so my usual housekeeping quickly before I dive into this as I'm aware it's no longer actually 2019 and we should forget that the year even happened. The last thing y'all want to do, I know, is spend a long time being reminded of the horrible year 2019 was. And indeed it was a tough year for me, too: a lot of anxiety at work that led to me switching jobs just before my second child was born. As such I didn't power through the reading like I often do so there are a grand total of 54 books I'll be writing up, and at least two of them are kind of cheats even to count them as 'books' at all. So feel free to ignore those two and consider it 52, whatever, I'm not Northrop Frye or anything alright?

As usual the format works like this: I start in the middle and count, in tens, all the way down to number 11. I then jump backwards to count 'up' my least favourite books of the year (from 41-54) and then count down the top ten. I'll be trying to schedule these to post one a day but I'll see what my schedule allows for. And now that's out of the way let's kick off this year's write ups with a classic...

Oh and this year I'm dispensing with my mandatory hashtags but I will include some where needed to contextualise (i.e. continuing on a series, yearly custom, or annual tradition). Assume otherwise that my reason for reading all of these is "picked this up for *insert random reason here* while browsing my local library"

40) White Fang - Jack London
This was an alright read, but I found it like a less efficient version of Call of the Wild (more on that later). In a lot of ways I guess this is a prequel to Call, but also the reverse story trajectory, of a wild dog's journey through hardship into domestication. White Fang's mentality and characterisation are well constructed by London, with plenty of interesting observations about human-animal relationships. But I sometimes found this a bit of a slog where London got a bit bogged down in too much wild animal interiorising. It's kind of his 'thing' that he seems to do, but following Call with this it just felt long and excessively detailed at times.

39) Seeing Red - Lina Meruane
This is a fairly unpleasant, challenging read. These are things I usually embrace and enjoy but I'm still a bit unsure about this. Simply put, it's a (slightly? greatly? not at all?) fictionalised version of the author experiencing diabetes-induced blindness, and her struggle to get an operation to save her sight and reverse the blindness. She struggles with her American insurance company (I raise my Medicare-sustained eyes at this), with the arguments from her Chilean family to have a cheaper, nastier operation back home and with the doctor she's staking all her hopes on. Most of all, she struggles with the dependence on her partner Ignacio who does everything he can to assist her short of being able to restore her sight. The experience of reading this claustrophobic, first-person stream of consciousness narrative can only really be described as visceral as it feels like a relentless bit of body horror as she describes the eyeball haemorrhage over and over again, the experience of having her sight taken from her and her nightmares of not getting it back. In the end I found it, and her, a bit too full-on and I could have used the tacky optimism of a triumph against the odds type midday movie where she has her happy ending. The horrifying crescendo that this story feels like is just very intense, and because it offers no empathy/perspective to the other characters - her mother, Igancio, the doctor - it ends up being just a self-absorbed nightmare with no hope or even pragmatism. It's effective in what it confronts us with but feels mired in its own obsession without offering enough from any other reality from which to judge what we're still seeing.

38) The Girl Who Played with Fire - Stieg Larsson
#ContinuingSeries
More escapist, page-turner stuff here, after the first book in the series landed at #17 in 2017. I feel like Larsson is very good at building suspense, but at the same time I can really see the gears working in this particular narrative. There are very deliberate omissions to heighten the tension, and the mystery around who committed the central murder here is almost put aside in favour of the bigger enigma of Lisbeth Salander and what part she plays in it all. This makes for entertaining, even compelling reading but I also felt like Larsson's proselytising gets a bit on the nose at times. He constantly hammers home the point that Salander has been let down by the men in her life or by the pillars holding up a phallocentric society, or that men in her life can use those pillars to their own advantage and to her detriment. It's all fairly laudable social commentary but Larsson handles it with the subtlety of a repeated brick to the teeth and it felt annoying that the point was being made so obvious to the readers but the characters in the book are kept constantly oblivious. Larsson's lack of subtlety also extends to his character construction; people are either decent, in which case they are on Salander's side or will be, or they're egotistical misogynist creeps, in which case that's all they can ever be. None of this is thematically problematic you understand, but I feel it cheapens his ultimate point when he needs to keep making it. Further, I feel that while he obviously loves Salander and wants to elevate her as his muse, there's a certain fetishisation about her as a 'kickass' heroine and I feel that Larsson's gaze on her is a little too voyeuristic, especially in the overlong opening chapters before the inciting incident. Combined with a few of the same irritatingly glaring plot holes as I found in the first book (long parenthesis alert: see my review of that for my key plot hole; but the most glaring example here is the case of the police leaks to the media. Hedstrom asks his journalist friend to make it "seem as though the leaks are coming from a woman", so the journalist uses a "she" pronoun and the trained, experienced detective/prosecutor is irrevocably convinced by this that the leak is coming from the only woman on his team who has worked as a detective for years, and never once considers the possibility that a simple pronoun is a red herring and ooh I don't know, maybe the leak could be coming from one of two external, unknown consultants brought in from outside the police force about whom nothing is known and before whose appearance these leaks didn't happen?), I'd say this is an overall lesser, less meaningful effort than the first one, but still enjoyable.

37) To Start a Fire - Jack London
This was obviously a very, very short work of about twenty pages appended to the back of the Jack London anthology that included White Fang  and Call of the Wild. It's the first cheat to count it as a 'book' I read, but I'm still going to assess it. This is a good, efficient read from London. Quite dense and powerful in just a short skit of suffering in the tundra, seen through the eyes (of course) of a loyal animal who doesn't quite get what's going on. At the same time London's denouement reveals that the animal's instinct in some ways outweighs man's ability to think around problems so it's a little fable about the power of nature and how animals and their instincts are just superior to ours.

36) Somewhere a Band is Playing - Ray Bradbury
It's nice to look forward to Bradbury after he (surprisingly) landed in my top ten last year. I really find it puzzling that he's known as "Mr Fahrenheit 451" when I found that book so trite and self-righteous and frankly a big circle jerk ("books are actually quite good, AMIRITE person literally reading a book right now!!!" *high five*), but there's a great deal more imagination and quality writing elsewhere in his oeuvre, it seems. This is not his most effective either though, to be honest, but there's a good eerie mood evoked as our narrator enters this strange ghost town and gradually becomes acquainted with its inhabitants and their mysteries. It's honestly kind of Atlas Shrugged lite once the mystery becomes clearer, but I was quite intrigued by the world building and atmosphere of Bradbury's writing before it all got revealed. It ends up also a little bit trite but also bittersweet and effectively wistful.

35) Some Rain Must Fall (My Struggle, Part 5) - Karl Ove Knausgaard
#ContinuingSeries
I'm too invested in this whole series to let my problematic reading of "Dancing in the Dark" (volume 4) stop me getting through it. In many ways, this volume picks up where Dancing left off, with Knausgaard a young and arrogant yet neurotic man, obsessed with women and trying to make a stamp on the world with his writing. The difference is that in this volume (writing both, mind you, from a vantage point of years later with much more life experience) he displays a refreshing and necessary sense of self-awareness: in Dancing he seemed to embody and adopt his own 18-year-old eyes and saw his struggles trying to get laid constantly as perfectly natural and obviously central to existence. Here a lot of the problems he encounters (and brings on himself) are the same but he reflects on them as more caused by his own insecurities and sense of self-effacement; especially when his drinking gets out of control and he becomes querulous or violently impulsive. This book is primarily though about him trying to find his voice as a writer, and reading it now awash with the glow of every single (male) lit critic in the world wanting to massage Knausgaard's toes as the most important human since Aristotle, well there's a nice sense of dramatic irony which I feel is largely unintentional in this context. But reading his peers dismiss his writing as clichéd and watching him struggle to develop germs of ideas into stories, seeing his friends get accepted by publishers and Knausgaard struggling to participate in the thoughtful and provocative discussions in the cafés and bars of Bergen, it feels like we're in on this secret that Knausgaard will soon be universally (by half the population) revered as a demigod when he in fact wrestles with all the same neuroses and insecurities and counterproductive impulses as any of us. The self-awareness is also a crucial point of the autobiography-as-confession here: Knausgaard exhibits some pretty unpleasant attitudes and behaviours especially towards women here but he wallows in his own self-pity at the same time and adumbrates a sense that he will bring about his own ruin through his impetuousness. It's more compelling than the previous volume because of the more mature identity struggles he presents and the magnitude of the dilemmas he often faces here, but there is still undeniably a problematic toxic masculinity that runs through it, without being properly addressed or accounted for.

34) Leviathan 99 - Ray Bradbury
 This is another interesting bit of writing. Not a hugely interesting bit of storytelling because it's quite literally and explicitly Moby Dick but the ocean is space and the whale is a comet. Beyond that it's a very condensed beat by beat recreation of the story (albeit without the hundred-page treatises on ambergris which would be a bit out of place in an outer space setting) , but he writes evocatively and does an effective job of transposing the action to a futuristic setting. The essential questions and themes remain the same, looking at the captain's mad fixation on wreaking revenge on natural forces, and Bradbury's more futuristic viewpoint ponders those questions in a more contemplative and expansive universe. This is an interesting thought experiment as we imagine space exploration and the colonisation if the universe and how we try and bend it to suit our needs. So it's an admirable thought exercise but really it's just Moby Dick in space at the end of the day.

33) Not to Disturb - Muriel Spark
This took a fair while (despite being short) to get into, considering how engaging Spark's irreverent satire usually is. Part of the issue is that the premise of a below-stairs conclave of servants gossiping about their master is quite familiar to me from the likes of Ishiguro's Remains of the Day (my #4 book of 2014) and Henry Green's Loving (Had to do a LOT of digging for this, but it was my #33 book of 2012), but also the sheer number of characters suddenly thrust upon the reader gives each one a very shallow psychology and no time at all to get to know them before the nature of the plot is actually quite far advanced. That isn't the point of the story though, to understand these individuals: rather it is to deliver the chaotic goings-on and machinations of these servants over the course of one night in the Klopstock estate. Once the machine is properly in motion it moves very fast and powerfully with some very amusing farcical sequences along the way. The treatment of "him in the attic" - the mad relative of the Baroness Klopstock who's kept restrained, yes in the attic - is a little too broad for me but Spark's indictment of the wealthy class and the part of public gossip and role of hype and hearsay in delivering narratives is very dry and subtly hilarious. I wouldn't say it's Spark's most successful mainly because it feels a little haphazard and undercooked but there's plenty of life in the pages nonetheless.

32) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
Interesting to read this so many years after I read the sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (so many years, in fact, that I don't have a "My #x book of 20xx" reference for it). Apart from the fact that Huck Finn starts by talking about the exploits of Tom in this book and spoiling the main plot points, this experience can actually be read quite easily with the vibe of a long-overdue prequel, because it does introduce a lot of the same situations and themes that the latter book branched out from and can be enjoyed as providing the detail of those plot points spoiled at the start of Huck Finn. I feel that this isn't that prequel though despite that feeling because this is more of an inchoate work, with less of a strong plot focus and more of a "scenes in the life" kind of feel. I actually found this more problematic in terms of its dealings with race than Huck Finn (despite the latter's gushing use of the n-word instead of the word 'the' or punctuation marks) just because this has a subtler, more insidious insider/outsider attitude. The main villain of the piece, Injun Joe, is offered little character or motivation but the violence and duplicitousness in his character is treated as only natural by the fact that he isn't one of the familiar white townsfolk. Of course it's all delivered through the voice of children which gives it a mildly satirical bite in that it's an indictment of the world conjured up by their own imperfect educations in this community, but it also imbues it with a certain bluntness, because there's no artifice or layered meaning behind it. In spite of the datedness (and some of the language sadly is a little coloured now by modern warping of meaning. Hate to be so immature but a couple of uses of the word "gay" and "ejaculations" just take on very unfortunate connotations in a modern context), this is an entertaining read about the adventurous spirit of youth and how that spirit can lead a boy into deep trouble but also afford opportunities to stand up and save the day.

31) The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
This was a harmless bit of fun, but it does very much feel like the sanitised kids' version of what Lord of the Rings would go on to explore. Funnily enough I wasn't clear in my mind in reading this whether this was actually written as a prequel or whether it came out before Rings. It is the latter case if you didn't know, but the main reason I wondered is because by far the most engaging sequence in this novel is Bilbo's meeting of Gollum and finding the one ring, so it felt like Tolkien leans heavily on that knowing what lore would emerge from it. I've read that 'accommodations' were made to this during or following Tolkien's writing of Rings so it's possible this sequence feels the most fleshed out for that reason. I feel like I would enjoy this more, too, if I'd read it first or as a child like Jez did, because it seems like an inchoate version of the themes of the latter trilogy with ultimately very little at stake here (yes there are lots of life and death struggles but all in the name of 'adventure' and treasure hunting rather than anything broader that affects the world), and some of the narrative is a bit glib where conflicts are dealt with swiftly and easily, in the end without any unpleasant details. It just felt like a slightly dumbed down fantasy novel that may have influenced some writing that came later but would have had far less impact if not for its younger, threefold bulkier brother.