Books of 2020 Part 1 (of 1). This is all you're getting this year.

 

It’s several weeks past ‘that time’ of the year, but better late than never, as every now-resigning GOP politician knows all too well. As discussed/confirmed by my two readers (Hi, Mother! And Hi, Mother’s son!) I’m going to do my meagre reading of the last year in one single post, for several reasons: 1, not enough books. 2, not enough shit books to justify a standalone ‘bottom of the year’ post which I otherwise enjoy in normal years. 3, let’s just get it all out of the way quickly so we can move on.

But yes, I read significantly less this year than in previous years. At one point this year I was on track to surpass my previous best of 72 books, and when I looked back on all my notes I found that more than half the entire year’s reading was done prior to April 2020, and once I had commute reading taken away from me and replaced by looking after small children, the tally of books pretty much dried up completely. Hopefully 2021 will offer me more chances to read without significantly marring the relationship I now have with my children. Otherwise I’ll need to resort to ranking the Spot books at the end of the year (“Spot Bakes a Cake” is the best, by the way – this is NOT up for DEBATE). So without further ado here are all the books I managed to get through in 2020…

30) Jake’s Thing – Kingsley Amis
I didn’t get a whole lot out of this. I don’t generally get a life-changing experience from reading any Amis living or dead, but this one felt more than usual like a wild embittered swing not aimed at anything I care about. Our protagonist Jake sees a doctor for help with a lack of sexual potency, and that doctor refers him to a specialist in the area, who then leads Jake into all sorts of new-age trendy sex tests, experiments and group workshops to help him discover his full virility again. Or something. The story gets fairly distracted by the characters and Amis’ observations on men-women relationships and Jake’s own curmudgeonly reflections as he sleepwalks through life. There are wryly amusing parts to this, mainly of the cultural cringe variety where Jake is positioned as a bit of a stick in the mud while the world changes around him. But the few smirks I had were outweighed by far more long and dull diatribes that were not very sharp and not well targeted. Ultimately, I wasn’t really clear on what the point of this book was, and I feel like the only type of person who would be completely taken or engaged with this book would be old academic conservatives like Amis himself, baffled by these newfangled psychological techniques and sexual openness and so forth. This might be a good point to make, if the workshops and experiments described actually existed or seemed realistic beyond being complete fabrications from Amis. He’s basically constructed a large strawman and then proceeds to expect congratulations for tearing it down himself. I think the saving grace - such as it is - is the fact that Amis in his unabashed misogyny does at least allow Jake’s wife Brenda to have a voice and agency throughout the book; she’s given a fraction of Jake’s space on the page, but Amis is worldly enough not to finish this as an old-man fantasy where Jake wins in the end. He’s shown up to be a bit ridiculous in as much as all of these imaginary institutions and new fashions are as well. In an ordinary year that would have been the difference between this being part of my ‘bottom of the year’ post and it being the very bottom, but unfortunately there was no competition for the worst of this year.

29) The Counsellor – Cormac McCarthy
I find it a little weird that this screenplay has been published as a book. I mean I read McCarthy’s play The Sunset Limited but I’m more used to plays in written form than I am to screenplays. Moreover, as a screenplay this is obviously far more visual than The Sunset Limited which was more dialogue-driven and with less license for the director/production designer/cinematographer to do what they want with it. As such I found this quite a stunted experience, where in novel form McCarthy’s visual storytelling is usually precise and detailed, but here it’s reduced to vague visual cues for the crew to construct in their own way. I feel as well though that the screenplay format doesn’t allow for some details of the plot which could be conveyed by body language, facial expressions and so forth. Again in a play you’d make allowances for this in the writing but McCarthy knew - because he’s Cormac McCarthy, and presumably knowing beforehand that Ridley Scott was attached to direct - that Scott would get what he meant and put it all in visual form to tell the parts of the story that are not clearly conveyed through the dialogue. I tried to explain the plot of this to Bec and managed to piece it all together at least for myself, I have no idea if she got what was going on. What I found interesting thematically is that the character of Malkina here felt very familiar in McCarthy’s work, yet I don’t know of an analogue. I guess it’s the familiar sociopath figure from his other works but in this case just happens to be a woman, whereas typically his women figures are peripheral or objects to be admired or pitied. So she at least was an interesting element to the story, although my main takeaway from this is it must be nice to be McCarthy and know that you’ll get some nice book royalties from the screenplay for a (presumably) mediocre film whose casting budget far outstripped its box office takings. I genuinely haven’t seen another screenplay published in this way; possibly because other screenplays share the ignominy of not being written by McCarthy and how dare they.

28) The Chimes – Charles Dickens
I needed something to fill the quarantine gap after the library closed but before my QBD order arrived, so I broke a sacred rule this year (all rules are cancelled anyway, fuck it) and read a second Dickens after A Christmas Carol turned out to be shorter than expected (more on that book later, obviously). This was included in the same volume as it also has the plot of “man has ghostly apparition portending an ill fortune and changes his ways as a result to the benefit of those around him and humanity more generally”. But this honestly felt really convoluted and clunky by comparison, and even by comparison to other Dickens that can always be plodding and seem insincere. One issue with this is that the tone of it seems really sarcastic. When Dickens is quoting the stuffy rich people here and makes comments about how good friends these rich people are of poor folk, and how much they (the rich) care, this may be a hilarious sly joke but in Dickens’ wordy style it loses its sting. Moreover, as much as I make fun of him sometimes for the fact that his characters are either “pure evil” or “unimpeachably good”, this sarcastic tone seems at odds with that philosophy and as such I found it hard to get a really good sense of why these people were necessarily that bad. I just feel like there are too many prosaic subtleties and obfuscations here so I really didn’t get in with the stakes. As a result, the ‘happy ending’ revelation didn’t hit anywhere near as delightfully as that of A Christmas Carol. I didn’t really feel the horror of the spectral revelations here nor the redemptive quality of the change (and nor did I really honestly get why Trotty was at fault here in the first place). I mean maybe I just need a Dickens interpreter to get what’s going on here, but on a first read through it was like swimming through cement for all the clear vision it gave me of the story and the human condition in general.

27) Mr Palomar – Italo Calvino
If truth be told, I’m starting to feel about Calvino like that one-time character in the first episode of Black Books (apparently he’s called “Mr Blackbelly” on IMDb) on Wodehouse, like I’m never really sure if I’ve read this particular collection before or not. I’m also pretty sure that some stories get duplicated across editions, as there are a couple in here I’m sure I’ve encountered at one time or another. Or maybe Calvino’s themes and his humour are just starting to blur into each other a bit after having read so much of his stuff. There’s really only one story in here that genuinely stands out to me, “The Beach” about Mr Palomar’s attempts to cover and then justify his ogling a topless woman at the beach. It’s full of Calvino’s typical objectification but it’s also buffoonish and self-deprecating in a way that makes it fun. Ultimately this short snatch of stories was just another notch in my Calvino belt in the same way that it was for these editors and publishers. It really doesn’t stand out among his oeuvre.

26) More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon
I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this, in the end. It’s essentially structured as a three-part story with each part leaping ahead chronologically from the previous, but all part of the same plot and set of characters. What makes it a bit enigmatic though is that each part has this mystery element where we’re getting to the truth about the central figure in each part (who, significantly for the ability of the story to cohere nicely, is different each time) but it remains unresolved by the end. It was all tantalising and intriguing but by the start of the third part I suddenly felt disconnected from it. It was like Sturgeon had just let me grasp a bunch of grapes and then threw them across the room where I could barely even see them. Yes, the story does eventually get back around to the key protagonists from the previous parts and the new, third, hitherto unexplained protagonist of the third part becomes part of that story, and yes, the whole thing is wrapped up nearly in the end. Yet I felt it became a bit derailed just because there wasn’t any foreshadowing to this new part and new central figure but we’re dropped pretty much at the end of his story and through synaptic readjustments of memory and so forth he’s able to piece together his back story. It should be noted that this is also how part two begins and is structured, but it just disconnected me from being invested in the mystery. Basically I feel like there’s some really interesting themes about humanity and morality and functioning as a society explored here - adroitly even - but it feels like Sturgeon didn’t have a clear idea of where he was going early on, so the final section felt like he tried to do too much in the way of filling in back story, tying up loose ends and proselytising about his philosophy. Just a bit more prolepsis at the start and earlier introduction of these themes rather than leaving the first sections as bereft of details and resolution as they are, that would have more completely tied it together and emphasised the weight of his otherwise pointed thematic interests.

25) The Looking Glass House – Vanessa Tait
I found this a bit of a strange book, sentiment wise. It probably didn’t help that I read this as my comedown after the adrenaline rush of Wolves of the Calla (more on that later), but for a fictionalised account of the true account behind Lewis Carroll’s creation of Alice in Wonderland, it was oddly unmagical. Tait takes as her muse the figure of Mary Prickett, employed as governess to Alice Liddell and her sisters Ina and Edith, and we are early on introduced to Charles Dodgson, a frequent visitor to the deanery of Christ Church Oxford (the dean being Alice’s father). Mary is a strangely ambivalent character, heading into spinsterhood and with a vacillating attitude and temperament towards her diminishing pool of suitors as well as her young wards. Her behaviour throughout the book is also somewhat erratic, going through flights of fancy and capricious spirit. As such I found her a mostly unsympathetic character, which the author Tait (who is Alice Liddell’s great granddaughter, hence her interest in the subject) intends, but it made the novel spent in her company a little emotionally misguided to me. Dodgson AKA Carroll is for all intents and purposes the hero/protagonist here, and Tait imbues him with a morally questionable predilection for young girls, which seems fair enough given the nature of his work and the sources Tait used, but the fact that neither he, nor Alice, nor Mary, come off as ultimately laudable, saps a lot of the joy and wonder out of the “Alice” mythology. I mean, the tale we mythologise about was a fever dream, a laudanum creation, but taking that aside I would have liked a little more whimsy woven around this story to sympathise with the ingenuity of the looking glass world more. It just kind of demystifies the innocent mysticism, and in doing so takes away the innocence without replacing it with anything else besides reality in all its disappointment.

24) Remembering Babylon – David Malouf
I was struck, in digging into another ostensible classic of Australian literature, that yet again the word “paddock” is featured in the opening sentence. Can Australian writers try and write about something other than paddocks, just once? Besides the inauspicious start, this is an alright read. Malouf paints an intriguing and deep portrait of a frontier society here: a group of settlers trying to find their feet and always mistrustful of outsiders. The conduit here is Gemmy, a white castaway from a colonial ship who has spent years living with the Indigenous community before he stumbles upon a colonial settlement and is taken in by one of the local families, where suspicion and prejudice start to rear their ugly head. What disappointed me about this was frankly how abruptly it felt like it ended. The narrative is building to a certain climactic point, and while there is a sort of crucial “choice” made that precipitates the beginning of the end of the story, Malouf then skips ahead in time, and reveals the denouement in a past recount years after the fact. I felt like the tensions, the commentary on colonial society and its many faults, the concept of neighbourly trust vs suspicion, these were all interesting concepts that never got properly examined in depth, in no small way because of the way Malouf chose to wrap it all up. It ends up being more of a story of one outsider’s life rather than a more expansive and insightful commentary about ‘us vs them’ mentality (which it also is, but far more superficially than I’d wanted). His descriptiveness is another limitation which is often the downfall of Australio authors: he needs to be extremely visual because apparently we’ve all never seen Australian landscapes (which is a stupid mindset because literally nobody reads Australian literature outside people who have seen many, many Australian landscapes because we live here). Overall, a good story that could have had far more done with it than Malouf manages.

23) Find Me – Laura Van Den Berg
I picked this up as part of my attempt to read more female authors, but didn’t look at all at the blurb or anything to find out if it was the sort of book that might be enjoyable to read in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. Turns out it’s a story about a mysterious worldwide pandemic, so that was a stroke of genius on my part. One of the main things I got hung up on with this book though is that one of the reviews on the front cover says “earning deserved comparisons to Margaret Atwood” and I honestly can’t think of anything more flaccid to say about this book or this author. Of course she would get compared to Margaret Atwood, because she’s nakedly taking everything from her narrative voice, writing structure to her themes directly from Margaret Atwood’s work, specifically Atwood’s dystopian works. So yeah, I’ll compare her, too: Laura Van Den Berg is no Margaret Atwood. There are certainly some interesting themes explored here, but Van Den Berg can’t quite wrangle the themes or her narrative properly, so her more incisive points are doled out piecemeal through the book, while the story meanders clumsily through flashbacks and reminiscences, philosophical reflection and some imagined fantasies. The setting and focus early on, when our protagonist “Joy” is placed in a special hospital investigating the ‘sickness’, give it an interesting claustrophobic feel but that part of the story never quite reaches an organic climax before Van Den Berg rushes to its conclusion in order to start the second, more personal, journey. Part two has less focus and feels unfocused and undirected, precisely like Joy’s travels across America to try and find her Mother. In all of that the themes are a bit confused and at times forced, which is not simply a case of “she’s no Atwood” since I found the exact same confusion and unfocused themes in Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last,  but the issue here is that she’s so obviously channelling Atwood in the way she weaves non-linear portions and thematic motifs through the book that she fails to find her own voice. I’d be keen to read something that feels more original and personal from her because I don’t think she’s a bad writer, she just isn’t writing herself into her work here.

22) The Red Tenda of Bologna – John Berger
A short little 50-page book that a friend lent me when she discovered I’d never read any John Berger (and more on Berger later), which in her eyes makes me an uncouth philistine. This was a nice little introduction to his writing, consisting as it does of a sequence of pithy observations and meditations on the city of Bologna but also more broadly/vaguely on the life and character of European cities, and the way they can be explored. It’s difficult to extract any great personal resonance from this if only because I’m not personally familiar with the places he writes about here, but I appreciated Berger’s astute visual language and his personal reflections on how ‘discovering’ and ‘getting lost’ tend to go hand in hand while travelling.

21) What Was Left – Eleanor Limprecht
This was a funny kind of book. It appears at first to be a bit of a domestic drama about a new mother unable to cope with the burden of motherhood, but then the mother leaves her family behind and travels around the world trying to come to terms with herself (that’s not a spoiler, she’s already left on page one and then there’s a whole jumping around in flashbacks). The parental dramas and stresses described are all very familiar to me (or at least to Bec), enough that her main problem here – that she doesn’t feel able to ask for more help or unburden herself to those around her – kind of annoyed me. The characters around her do take on this societal pressuring of mothers kind of role which acts as the main barrier, so it makes sense without making it strictly necessary in terms of the plot. Meanwhile the narrative following her on her travels takes on a bit of a familiar Picaresque kind of aimless wandering feel to me, which I tend not to love. But then it’s further compounded by a series of strangely soap operatic encounters with other people coping with loss, abandonment issues plus the overwhelming burden of guilt, who attach themselves in various ways to our central character. It ends up losing a bit of its focus due to what felt like unnecessary sideplots, and the key questions - about the burden society places on women to be in control of everything at once to the people around them - tend to get fogged up a bit only to be brought back into focus at the very end. It’s an engaging read but one that felt a bit lopsided and even flabby at times.

20) The Shell and the Rain: Poems from New India – Compiled by David Cevet
This was another curious loan from my friend Elise who recommended much of my reading in the early part of this year; I feel this one was kind of a challenge to me because I don’t read a lot of poetry but also read a lot of stuff by white men, so this was a deliberate attempt to take me out of my comfort zone. It’s an interesting look at poetic expressions from a different (Indian) culture that I’m only familiar with from prose writings in English. The poems collected here - along with a few essays on the poets, their influences and legacy - are somewhat earthy and sometimes pastoral, but some others have a more modern thematic flavour to them while maintaining the rigid metrical structure of their original Sanskrit. It’s an interesting mix of new and old ideas, and quite a fascinating entry into a literary milieu I haven’t experienced before.

19) The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
This is a very interesting book, but also an incredibly long and tedious one. Ostensibly the “factless autobiography” of an uninteresting account keeper, it takes the form of a long sequence of diary-style observations from his day, with those observations being either literal, or literary, or philosophical musings on the human condition as viewed through his own lens of the dreary quotidian. The main issue with it (and I’ll get to whether it’s really an issue with the book itself) is that there’s no structure or flow to these musings at all, and each one stands on its own without adding to what came before it. Reading through from start to finish becomes fairly tiresome, even while each observation has some value or interesting point to make. It reads a little like Nietzsche in some ways, in that there’s a nihilistic bleakness and an ennui at the heart of it, but also in the sense that I, personally, didn’t really get any profound impact from it even while I can sense the intrigue as I go through. The main point is that this book is such a jumbled mess that I think reading from cover to cover is the wrong way to go, and it’s probably of higher value to keep this book in a lavatory or something and pick a random passage every day to read properly and closely. For me the book was not only a slog but also quite self-indulgent and over-intellectualised because of its aimlessness, yet within there are a lot of curious and unique critiques of the everyday habits we let take over ourselves and our identities. I think there’s definitely value in this book, but I feel the greatest value is in poring over this more closely, and definitely not reading it cover to cover the way I did.

18) Trinity – Louisa Hall
This felt like it should be better than it is. The main reason is that there’s an ambitious scope to the idea, but I don’t think Hall ever realises the potential of that ambition. Ostensibly a series of testimonials from people who encountered or worked with J Robert Oppenheimer throughout his life, the testimonials in question end up being more personal stories about the people telling them, with Oppenheimer only being incidental or even coincidental to some of them. That doesn’t detract from the ambition of this work though, and it brings to mind one of my all-time favourite books, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, in being an interconnected series of personal stories set against the backdrop of the cold war. But unlike DeLillo, Hall doesn’t try very hard to draw out a larger portrait of society from these personal stories; there are touches here and there but I feel most of the testimonials get caught up in their own sense of the personal, so any commentary about wartime, post-war or cold war society end up being largely incidental or coincidental. The portrait of Oppenheimer, somewhat centred around this Rosebud-esque mystery of why he named the A-bomb test the “Trinity” test, ends up feeling a little incomplete too, like the resolution of that Trinity mystery, and I feel like I end up with a fully fleshed out portrait of the characters making these confessions but no clearer a picture of Oppenheimer’s motivations and tortured conscience than I would have from reading a Wikipedia article. Where I think Hall falls short is that she isn’t brave enough to get really down and dirty with her subject matter and ends up with an ambitious vision that’s not quite fulfilled.

17) The Lieutenant – Kate Grenville
I did enjoy The Secret River when I read it a few years ago, but it took me a long time to pick up another Grenville, I think because they all kind of seem part of the same general story where The Secret River is the most famous and influential and therefore others seem like afterthoughts. And honestly this does feel like a considerably lesser work despite being a fresh story and exploring the same ideas with similar depth. The main issue here is that the most insightful of Grenville’s writing is in the relationship between the white settlers and the native Australians. Both in terms of the bad: the mistrust, the hegemony, the racism; and the good, specifically that of the titular Lieutenant Rooke and the natives that he befriends from his isolated point in the new settlement. It just takes a long time to work around to that, since Grenville is interested here in honouring the full story of Rooke (or rather his real-life counterpart where she fictionalises most of the details), and it felt a bit disconnected between the parts, while I never took a particularly keen interest in him as a person. He’s honourable sure, but I don’t feel like Grenville ever really taps into his psychology until that late point in the piece where the natives start interacting with him. It felt like the conflict and his dilemma also ends abruptly, with a climax and then an epilogue, and some questions felt unresolved (like Rooke’s friendship with Silk, which is otherwise a major part of the story). So it took a long time to properly engage me, then left me hanging too quickly, and the majority of the narrative could have happily been truncated to draw out a few small events in greater detail and I’d have been more enthralled.

16) Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower VI) – Stephen King

My reading of this book (my final of the year, and whose completion was the reason for this post being delayed) was interrupted for a couple of weeks by us moving house and my misplacing the book in the move. Maybe that had something to do with my liking this less than the other books in the series, but I also just think this is a more disjointed vision. Like Wizard and Glass it feels like a necessary link in the chain towards the final story, but some of the things that have compelled me through the rest of the series are missing. Firstly this is predominantly set in ‘real world’ America, NYC and New England in various time periods, so it’s missing the old west aspect that is both an entertaining character and the unique point of differentiation of this series compared with King’s other supernatural work. The fact that the characters are all separated by time and space here too means that there are three different storylines. This isn’t necessarily a recipe for disjointedness on its own, but I don’t feel that King did quite enough to make them all enough of a story in their own right. Which leads me to my main dissatisfaction: King talks in his own notes here about readers who were disgruntled by the cliffhanger ending of volume 3 The Waste Lands and while I get that disgruntlement back in the day when you can’t pick up the next book (because it isn’t written yet), I felt it was still a satisfying way to finish, whereas the cliffhanger ending here feels just unfinished, and there are way too many loose ends beyond just “what happens next?”. I don’t want to get into spoilery talk too much but let’s just say the meta-narrative here in particular is one that I really don’t understand where he’s taking it, and I’m not sure I like most of the possible endings of the game he’s playing. Obviously I’ll be grabbing the final volume as soon as I can to see how he finishes it off and ties up all the loose threads he’s tangled in this volume, but on its own merit I’d say this was the least satisfying of the series.

15) Ways of Seeing – John Berger
I ordered and read this due to my same colleague and her love of John Berger particularly as a critic and thinker, and basically I’d never read any of his stuff (including G, a Booker winner that’s somehow eluded me). So this is a really interesting little set of essays – some textual and some purely visual - about the nature of art, how it both interprets and defines aspects of society through its existence. I do wonder a bit about the editing and publishing decisions made here because three of the essays being purely visual – consisting of black and white, fairly low resolution images of strategically ordered examples from classic art and other media -  I do struggle a bit to get the full point when the images are small and monochrome. It’s still interesting, but just harder to discern the exact meaning. The textual/visual essays though are thought-provoking and well argued, providing an insightful explanation of the role visual art plays in history and in the experience of just living. As with any kind of criticism on art, I find Berger and his collaborators here most intriguing in the theorising about what precisely is ‘art’ and how a monetary value equates to aesthetic value, and I’m not sure if he focused on this as much as I’d like (as it’s not his only question to ponder here).

14) Heroes of the Frontier – Dave Eggers
I’m still a little unconvinced by Eggers as a writer. He sometimes seems to take interesting concepts and builds an intricate web of banality around them. I don’t mean that as harshly as it sounds, but The Circle of course disappointed me because I’d been formulating a similar idea for a long time and I found his treatment sadly predictable and pedestrian and not complex or philosophical enough; it was a bit on the nose to focus on the lack of privacy which we already know about. A Hologram for the King is an amusing update on Godot in its premise, but the plotline and characters are quite mundane and straightforward as interpersonal relationships. Now the reason for this preamble - beyond a general sideswipe at white male privilege that leads people to worship writers like Eggers out of all proportion - is to say that this was the lowest concept Eggers book I’ve read, and perhaps for that reason I think I liked it the best. Josie is a mother facing a crisis on various fronts, and as a result has taken her two young kids and escaped to Alaska. That’s the premise in a nutshell. But Eggers reveals the details of her back story in stages: the precise nature of the crises, why Josie feels like she needs to escape and reboot her life, and why our sympathies should lie with her despite her erratic and impetuous behaviour. The picaresque structure of the plot is not my favourite narrative device but its strength here is that the travels and settings and characters she encounters are all learnings and revelations about herself, and the aimless journey she’s on is a journey to rediscover meaning in her life. It’s also a shortcoming though because of the cliches inherent in that picaresque structure and it is on the nose in the way it’s lain out, interspersing travels with Josie’s own reflections. I found it, in spite of seeing the writer at work throughout all this, quite a poignant story, even though I don’t fall in line behind the (white, male) reviewers licking Egger’s feet.

13) All You Need Is Kill – Hiroshi Sakurazaka
This definitely takes the award for biggest discrepancy between quality of title and content. Because this really isn’t as bad or as mindless as the title suggests. Yes it’s very male, action-packed sci-fi but it’s skilfully written and plotted and has some interesting fantastical concepts that raise questions about identity and existence. We’re introduced to Keiji, a soldier about to enter the battle fray against an enigmatic alien enemy, who is killed within a few pages of action, only to come back to life in the next chapter – and it goes on like this. The first time I realised that he had indeed died and been revived my immediate thought was ‘Groundhog Day but with aliens’. But then I realised that Sakurazaka is actually using video games as his inspiration, as Keiji not only comes back to life but jumps back to the beginning of the battle, still with the memories of his previous attempts so that he improves each time. It’s an interesting story, and develops some real pathos in the conclusion while there’s some interesting perspectives on the familiar trope of invading colonising aliens. Is All You Need is Kill the stupidest title imaginable for a very decent bit of writing? Yes. But I was very pleased I saw past that and gave the book the attention it deserved.

12) Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television – Louis Theroux
This was a tough book to get through on the third or fourth month of lockdown. Not that it wasn’t entertaining or interesting, but the story stakes just weren’t there to keep me reading when I didn’t have a commute to read on. I ended up staying up until 1am to read the last hundred pages or so after getting frustrated with how long it was taking me. But I did enjoy this; it’s interesting to get this kind of personal perspective on Louis, because he’s always struck me as a perfect foil for the crazy people he meets on his shows, and it’s curious to get the inner workings of a man whose key talent is using himself as a blank slate or mirror for other people to project onto. His voice is, however, paradoxically unmistakeable here even in written form and even when he struggles to iterate his own identity and what makes his voice unique on TV. It’s also curious to hear him talk - albeit cagily - on his own family situation, his own inferiority complex over his successful older brother Marcel (whose name is no doubt familiar to everybody but nowhere near as immediately placeable as Louis’), and the strange circuitous route that led to him becoming a household name. It’s funny (or is it) to think of Louis as a wannabe comedy writer in his youth, especially given some of his own clumsy attempts at comedy here. I’ll give one example that really grated on me out of all proportion is that he gave the name “Savillegeddon” to the chapter in which the avalanche of revelations regarding Jimmy Saville comes down, when surely even the most basic comedian, creative mind or person who speaks English can see that “Jimmygeddon” is far more parseable as a joke. It’s not a good joke any way but the inept awkwardness of “Savillegeddon” just typifies why this guy couldn’t cut it in a comedy writers’ room. The main issue with this book though, unique to me, is that the two major works that Louis does focus on throughout - his interactions with Jimmy Saville, and his scientology movie - are two of the few Louis documentaries I haven’t actually seen, while those I’m most familiar with - his look at alcohol addiction, and his prison documentary - only really get a mention in passing. So beyond getting a look behind the scenes of Louis forging and finessing his on-screen persona, I didn’t really get the full value of the peek behind the curtain. He does have a charming self-deprecating quality, and it’s that that makes him such a fascinating subject for an autobiography, the man who never really fit in anywhere but whose fascination with how others live is so infectious.

11) On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong
I got loaned this book by the same colleague who loaned me The Shell and the Rain, one week when I hadn’t visited the library, and asked her to surprise me with something good. Amusing now to look back at this simple time when going to the library was a regular part of my monthly routine, and I could just lean on colleagues to easily lend me books with little notice when I hadn't performed that part of my routine. This is indeed good. Ocean Vuong is a poet by trade so he has a very delicate way with words throughout. My only real criticism of this is that it does end up like a protracted poem: it’s expressive and evocative, somewhat stream of consciousness and very personal. But it’s hard to get a real narrative thread here, even within the framing device of being a letter he writes to his mother. It’s variously a confession, a eulogy, a warts and all coming of age (and coming out) story that he is writing, and I’m unclear on whether he expects his mother to read it or not or how she will take it. The language, as mentioned, is very redolent, and his openness and honesty is quite affecting as well. There aren’t really the obvious punchlines and punctuation points in his story and in the drama to precipitate an emotive response but the stream is bittersweet, emotive and impressive.

10) A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
I did feel like I was cheating a bit to be using this as my annual Dickens when I discovered it’s so short and pretty much all of the story beats have been covered in one way or another in all of the adaptations and/or parodies of this that I’ve seen in my life (I hadn’t planned on reading The Chimes as well at the time, and only broke my ‘one Dickens a year’ rule when I ran out of books in lockdown). When I picked it up though I figured Dickens wouldn’t be able to help being Dickens and give me endless exposition into Scrooge’s childhood, his start in business, so much introductory back story on Bob Cratchit and the nature of Tiny Tim’s infirmity, a thorough timeline and analysis on Marley’s death. So honestly, after struggling through the pointless and extravagant Pickwick Papers last year, it was an incredibly pleasant surprise to find that Dickens can actually be an efficient storyteller when he wants to be. Yes, I pretty much knew this story and its emotive resonance beat for beat in minute detail, but it’s revealing to get through it in its original form and feel the germ of so much cultural resonance that this story would have. I feel like its influence is so widespread and keenly felt, not because it’s got the depth or intricacy of his other works but simply because it is so efficiently told, and the emotive catharsis is so enjoyable and impactful. Definitely the easiest read of Dickens, and one of the best. Those two facts may be intimately related, I’m not sure.

9) At Freddie’s – Penelope Fitzgerald
This was a wryly amusing read. Set against the backdrop of the glittering theatre world in 60s London, “Freddie’s” is the name of a well-respected theatre school producing child actors for various Shakespeare plays. The character of Freddie is a notorious firebrand, renowned in the theatre scene and dedicated to the love of it but also impossible to reason with or get the better of in discussions. The story is populated by ambitious and well-meaning types who want to help Freddie, or invest in her school, or fix up her flagging finances, but she has a hilarious intransigence that’s quite charming - mainly because she isn’t incorrigible or unpleasant, just headstrong. The two teachers she hires to look after her wards’ extra-theatrical education form the heart of the story: Hannah, competent pedagogically but indecisive and capricious in her ambitions, and Pierce, who’s the most honest character here because he knows how thoroughly incompetent he is, and has no ambitions beyond getting through the day to day. This is quite a farcical story that, through the heightened comedy of the farce, pokes gentle loving fun at the grand acting traditions and establishments. It’s somewhat low-stakes storytelling, but it’s relaxingly charismatic and witty with some barbs in reserve, and an inclusive and good-natured humour from Fitzgerald.

8) Swimming Home – Deborah Levy
Picked this up on a general ‘read some Deborah Levy’ recommendation, and yeah it was a good, intense read. From the plot structure (family on vacation encounter a mysterious stranger whom they invite into their lives), and the overall aesthetic of uncertain menace that Levy produces, it reminded me a lot of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers. It also shares in common with that novella - the first McEwan I ever read and hence setting the bar for how much he hates people and everything - that it is a short, efficiently unsettling piece of writing. Levy’s prose is more enigmatic and subtle though (in good and bad ways): the characters all have a deeply woven psychology and inner monologue throughout and yet so much is revealed by what they don’t say or what they keep hidden. They’re also intriguingly flawed and ambiguous, from the troubled but erudite stranger Kitty to the comic and pathetic figure of Jurgen the incompetent dreadlocked housekeeper. The central figure here being a poet leads this to being a book both about artistic creation but more broadly about the suffering that often goes hand in hand with the creative process, and dangles the unanswered question of what price we all pay to achieve fulfilment - either artistic or personal - in our lives. It’s a book that took some digesting, given it is so short and sharp but it seems to have stuck with me pretty well as it feels like a warmer version of a similar premise to the McEwan.

7) The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
This was a very interesting read, particularly reading Morrison’s afterword (which I usually wouldn’t) and finding that she has the exact same shortcomings with it 40-odd years after writing it that I was grappling with in reading it. The truth is that this is a profoundly affecting and devastating read philosophically speaking, but I do feel like the structure distracts and detracts from that emotive resonance at times. This was my second Morrison read and, truth be told, I didn’t really fall for or fully comprehend the weight of Beloved, but the struggles of the black girls in this book felt so much more riveting and personal as they grapple with the idea that they are not beautiful, not ideal and are therefore second-rate people by virtue of not have blue eyes and blonde hair like Shirley Temple. Morrison’s prose is very pregnant with meaning, and as such a couple of passages can carry the weight of a lifetime of disappointment and humiliation. However, the deconstructive nature of some sections of this - where she plays with narrative voice, and jumps backwards in time to fill in back stories of characters who felt like side players in the story at the time - felt like side tracks to the main emotional arc even while they were also well told. It was therefore bemusing to read the afterword and know that Morrison herself had regrets about some of these narrative choices. Despite those weaknesses, this remains a profound story of growing up in a world that rejects you at every turn, and with a tighter focus it could deliver that punch with so much more destructive force. On the plus side though, it’s very much reignited my philosophical interest in reading more of Morrison’s work where that interest was previously just smouldering away.

6) The Evil Eye – Joyce Carol Oates
It’s often kind of a harrowing experience reading Oates, and this is certainly no exception. “Four novellas of love gone wrong” is the subtitle here so you kind of know going in that you’re not in for uplifting tales. These surprisingly get increasingly dour as they go on, with the first story of the same title as the book having a sort of Rebecca/Jane Eyre-esque anxiety about it, as the young fourth wife of a successful academic deals with the haunted legacy of his previous marriages. The second, So Near, Anytime, Always is a more ‘coming of age suddenly and brutally’ tale with a naive love affair gone horribly wrong. Both induce strong themes of male control whereby the men in relationships try to assert dominance and control over their partners, but hand in hand with that is a lack of self-control: they lose control of themselves in attempts to control others. The third The Execution takes a different tack and different style with a stream of consciousness type narrative about a son who murders his father in an act of half-retribution for that man’s parental failures but mostly opportunism. The son’s consciousness is certainly a twisted place to spend any time, and again the idea of self-control comes out strongly. The other common thread is of course the idea of eyes, and watching, and tales one and three both involve somebody losing or missing an eye, while all three raise the idea of witnessing, watching and seeing, and how they influence actions. So the fourth, which is all about what people choose not to see, or when the blind eye is turned rather than the evil eye onto actions, is probably the most harrowing and confronting of all. In true Oates fashion she isn’t shy about dealing with taboo topics but also a little bit of wish fulfillment in exacting revenge fantasies on those who deserve it and who seemingly always are let off the hook by a wilfully ignorant society. This is a great and cohesive collection of stories - unpleasant and unsettling to read but undeniably worthwhile.

5) The King’s General – Daphne Du Maurier
I knew nothing about this – and almost nothing about the English civil war in which it’s set – going  in, but picked it up on the strength of Du Maurier’s previous works I’ve read especially Rebecca (my #1 book of 2019). And this was a thoroughly engaging and stimulating read. It reminded me oddly of Gone With the Wind if it were set in the English civil war instead of the American and was somewhat less racist, mainly because the first person narrator Honour Harris has something of a Scarlett O’Hara antiheroine in her, at least early on in her spoiled, selfish youth. Meanwhile the eponymous general, and Honour’s lover, Sir Richard Grenville definitely has a Rhett Butleresque character in that he’s a strong-willed, ambivalent sort of scoundrel but one who has a sense of honour unique to himself and where the love interest seems to understand him better than his own peers. For a while I was quite enthralled in this story because Du Maurier’s enlightened, decorative but free-flowing prose brought this period of history - that has never otherwise interested me - come so vividly to life. I did at one point find this a likely candidate for a second #1 of the year for Du Maurier, because I was enthralled for most of it. I did in the latter stages lose a sense of Honour’s personality and psychology, where it became less clear what was motivating her to follow Grenville around and what she wanted from or for him. He became the driving personality of much of the book, like throughout his life and military career, and while still greatly engaging it simply became a bit more predictable as a war story trajectory, knowing full well that the king’s forces would ultimately capitulate to the parliament. Grenville’s final ‘surrender’ and the way it is brought about though brings a poignant and fitting denouement to a mostly fascinating story I never knew existed.

4) Lying Under the Apple Tree – Alice Munro
I could absolutely have counted this as five books instead of one, comprising as it does five previously published collections of three stories each. But being early in the year I thought I’d be ambitious and call it one (post-COVID edit: fuck shit fuckity fuck). I can certainly see from this why Munro is such a beloved writer. The tricky thing about short stories is to establish pathos in a short stretch of time. Munro achieves this remarkably well throughout, but largely because she takes her time to narrate, rather than trying to be constantly pithy and concise. Kicking off this anthology with the 50-page The Love of a Good Woman is a great way to start, establishing recurrent themes throughout this anthology like the mythologies we weave around our lives and personal stories, the way the human mind wraps itself around mortality, and what I found was the most prevalent thread, the unpredictability and inconsistency of men. That almost feels like it crescendoes in this anthology with the last collection included here being very prominent on the unpredictability in particular, with the last story Free Radicals being a bit of a knife-edge intimate thriller in that way. Chance, along with Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and particularly the devastating Dimensions would be my other highlights here, of course alongside The Bear Came Over the Mountain, the basis for Sarah Polley’s devastating 2006 film Away From Her. In many ways this collection benefits from being selections of Munro stories from such a long span of time, but this is definitely the most intricate and profoundly affecting set of short stories I’ve read, and is worthy of being the highest ranked of the year that I’ve read.

3) Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
This was another delightful read from Spark (can she do wrong?). This is possibly also her most thought-provoking and profound work I’ve read since The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (and there have been quite a few). It tells the tale of a group of ageing friends and acquaintances of a certain social circle (among them writers, poets, theatrical luminaries etc) who begin to receive a series of anonymous phonecalls giving the message “remember you must die”. The mystery of who is behind the calls leads to various theories among them but is also matched by such varied reactions from each of them as they each receive their own calls - from bewilderment to indignant outrage, existential dread to mild amusement. But the calls really only set the scene for Spark’s witty and incisive commentary on ageing and facing mortality. The phonecalls set off a series of settling old scores, as the group all play politics with one another’s wills, seeking to gain advantage on the one hand by sucking up to and flattering those in advantageous positions, while those at advantage use their own will as a weapon to punish or a carrot to entice favours. Others in less fortunate positions resign themselves to mortality with grace, and all the while everybody questions their own and others’ mental capacity given the advancing years and weariness on them all. There’s a great number of running gags throughout this that are always both amusing and strangely upsetting. It’s an eclectic and eccentric cast of characters that Spark imbues with immense life and idiosyncrasy to make the story sparkle brightly with wit and empathy but reach its ultimate conclusion in a way that is quite powerfully poignant but satisfying in a bittersweet and ambiguous way.

2) Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower V) – Stephen King
This was an outstanding read, and probably my favourite of the series so far. There are a few limitations to it, but they’re largely around its effectiveness as a standalone story because it requires a good and recent knowledge of the previous four books, but also leaves a number of questions unanswered for the next volumes. The only other issue is that it does feel a bit like a side quest as part of the ultimate goal of heading to the dark tower. But those are quibbles as the key thing here is that King has taken the extra time as the series has gone on to weave all his different mythologies together, particularly with the ‘retrospective’ Roland origin story in volume IV, so that here he’s completely in his stride. And where I may have issues with King’s writing style at times, there is no doubting his abilities as a storyteller and that is what this comes down to: captivating storytelling. Akin to The Gunslinger, this story has a similar setting and arc to a western; the premise is basically Seven Samurai in that Roland and his posse are roped in to help defend a village from an impending invasion by “wolves”, mysterious beings who come every couple of decades to kidnap the village’s children and the villagers are finally ready to fight back. But King weaves this premise with a lot of his fantastical supernatural and sci-fi elements including a side plot where the characters are transported back to New York City in “our world” and in one sense even envisions this as a meta/spiritual sequel to Salem’s Lot (which may otherwise annoy me except it so happens to be one other King novel I’ve read). There are some fanciful notions, a lot of self-aware toying with narrative coincidences, and some interesting fissures of the fourth wall, but I was completely spellbound throughout this, and given my investment in the lives and fortunes of these characters - both new and old - I was actually quite deflated when I finished this and had to move onto different fare. It’s a brilliant, multifaceted yet intricately complex tale woven by a writer in complete mastery of his characters and his world. Definitely the most whole and the most compelling of the series so far.

I had wondered for much of the year whether Stephen King would get his first #1 book of the year, or indeed if Daphne Du Maurier would become the first writer to get a second, but in fact there is only one possible writer who could deserve such an honour…

1) The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch
This was a fascinating read from Murdoch, but one of the main intrigues was how completely it subverted what I expected as a Murdoch devotee. I’m loath to spoil the experience of encountering this for the first time for others, but it’s hard to express my thoughts without at least structural spoilers. The fact is that the first part of this novel unfolds in very familiar Murdochean fashion: Bradley Pearson is a middle-aged intellectual loner of sorts, very similar to Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea (Murdoch’s previous year-winner, my #1 book of 2014), and like Charles too he attracts a great deal of attachments from other people around him. So much so that it becomes a bit of a farce where Bradley has asserted throughout that he is escaping to a refuge that he keeps wanting in order to write the great novel within him but he repeatedly can’t because he keeps being interrupted by people from his present and past, including his ex-wife and ex-brother in law, to involve him in their dramas. There’s then, in part two a very dramatic 90 degree turn where Murdoch takes it in a very different direction and the second part I kind of struggled with a bit at first; thematically it’s fairly problematic on its own, but it’s also so tonally different from the first part, and Bradley’s desire for solitude suddenly becomes a romantic yearning instead. At this point the narrative takes on a very different kind of intrigue but far more heightened, dramatically, and with far greater stakes than the comedic toing and froing and trivial intellectualising of earlier in the story – and worth noting that while I enjoyed the earlier parts, they were the more predictable Murdoch that only ends up #6 or #7 of my reading year. The story then wraps itself up with a few very sudden and shocking incidents, the finale of which reminds me a lot of the unsatisfying dramatic twist at the end of The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (My #5 book of 2015), only insofar as it feels somewhat out of left field from where we were otherwise heading. But unexpected though the denouement is, there are a LOT of guns that Chekhov’s left lying around this story, and Murdoch has them all fire at once. The resolution after the climax is then so, so brilliant. It completely subverts again everything we’ve just read and renders the story and its characters utterly murky and ambivalent. The morals, the themes, and of course the events all come into question and we’re all left feeling like we’ve had the rug pulled out from under our feet. Ultimately this is an utterly astounding exercise in unreliable narration, but at the same time it’s a deep and incisive exploration of how we may construct our own identity and our own narrative (who dies, who lives, who tells etc.). Murdoch is one of those writers whose wit alone is always enough to land her in my top 10, but this was a really special and brilliantly challenging read and easily worthy of her second win.

One other final afterthought: I had the explicit aim going into this year of reading 50% male and female authors. If you do the count you can see that I failed in this regard once opportunities for reading became more scarce and it ended up 57% male to 43% female. But an interesting note that 8 out of my top ten were written by women, while men made up my entire bottom five.