Reading in 2017

In January I read quite a few good things.  The anonymous diary of the fall of Berlin published as A Woman In Berlin was far from light reading.  It's one of those books where you don't mind how very grim it is because it seems so important to know about these things, and probably everyone should read it.  (It was interesting what silenced her in the end.)  On the fiction side, equally vital is Valerie Martin's Property, about a genteel white woman in the ante-bellum South of the US.  The two have a lot in common: a sense of a world so skewed as to be science fiction, although one is fact and the other based on it.  Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others is actually science fiction, the sort that takes ideas and uses them to make humans strange and familiar at the same time.  The title story was filmed as Arrival.

In February, Jessa Crispin's Why I am Not a Feminist was not only very good but very humane.  She's not a "feminist" because she thinks the word too diluted by compromised uses.  But I was pleasantly surprised how much what she said was kind and generous common sense, and then I was ashamed of myself for being surprised, because why shouldn't people be angry and kind at the same time?  The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen was brilliant and very funny, about a Vietnamese man employed by the US, first in Vietnam during the war and afterwards in the US itself.  It reminded me of Catch-22 in a good way -- the same despairing humour with the occasional twist of the knife.  A lot of Muriel Spark's books are funny, but not The Driver's Seat, which is mostly just odd and rather quiet.  Nonetheless it's very typical of her unusual mind.  You read it quickly and easily and then later somehow you feel like you've been punched.  She reminds me of a more subtle but angrier Chris Morris.  I have thought about this book a lot since.

In March I read The Saga of Gösta Berling, by Selma Lagerlöf.  She won the Nobel Prize for literature but I had never heard of her before.  This is a strange crazy book, about a defrocked priest who lives in a rural Sweden that is half myth.  The cover is awful -- do not look at the cover.  I was proud of myself for enjoying At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, by Sarah Bakewell.  It made me want to read more (some) Simone de Beauvoir but then I saw how long The Second Sex is.  Kate Summerscale's The Wicked Boy had an unexpected second half that saw me pressing it on my mother, god-mother, etc. 

In April, East West Street by Philippe Sands was another vital book.  He tells the stories of the concepts of "crimes against humanity" and "genocide" as well as the stories of the people who came up with the terms and of his own ancestors in an understated way.  There's no need to hammer home the point when it comes to the holocaust -- the horror speaks for itself.  C. E. Morgan's The Sport of Kings is crazily over-ambitious but very good.  I also enjoyed Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad but I can't remember much about it now...

May and June seem to have been quiet months in terms of memorable new books.  The Good Immigrant by Nikesh Shukla had some very good pieces in it.  July was better, with Laurie Penny's Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults making me want to write to her from a spontaneous sense of alikeness, an impulse I suppressed.  The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich tells the stories of Soviet women soldiers, and is very good.  Nell Zink's Nicotine is great, but then she just seems to be one of those writers who spring fully-formed from somewhere.  Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction is a well-written and important book about AI algorithms, transparency, and justice.  Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?, by Katrine Marcal, is very good indeed, a feminist (i.e. humane) critique of economics.  Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go is a novel about a family who move between Ghana, Nigeria, and the US.

In August I enjoyed Elinor Lipman's My Latest Grievance, and found David Olusoga's Black and British very interesting.  In September Michael Chabon's Moonglow disconcerted me -- I'm still not quite sure how I feel about it -- and K. J. Parker's Two of Swords serial at last restarted after about a year and a half of emails from Amazon apologising for the delay. 

In October I read Naomi Alderman's The Power, the best book of the year.  I have given it to four people since, and recommended it to others.  It's funny and angry, and the framing letters between two writers are mischievously well done.  It's a proper adult treatment of gender -- it annoys me when people suggest that women are better than men, or that if women ran the world there'd be no nastiness in it, because that is clearly naive and stupid.  This book does not fall into that trap.  I've read stuff by her before and enjoyed it, but I wouldn't have predicted she was going to produce something this good.  Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is also very good, and I enjoyed The Nix by Nathan Hill, though not without some reservations.

In November I followed up a recommendation by Francis Spufford and read The Lindchester Chronicles by Catherine Fox.  These are very good, but you might need to have some acquaintance with Anglicanism to really feel them.  Mary Beard's Women and Power: a Manifesto was very good but I'm not totally convinced it was a manifesto as such.  The great thing about her writing is that she's so clearly not someone who's imagining things or over-egging the pudding, she's someone who looks fairly and sensibly at the world, so that it's tremendously reassuring to hear her rationally point out the weird stuff that's going on.  Modern western culture skews towards gaslighting and negging women into their stereotypical roles, and when Mary Beard points it out you know you're not being paranoid.

In December I unexpectedly came across Ece Temelkuran's Women Who Blow On Knots, in which four women from Tunisia, Turkey and Egypt travel in a dangerous road trip around the Arab Spring -- I don't know why I hadn't heard of it, it's very good.  I also enjoyed Fay Weldon's Spa Decameron.  It's not as rude as the actual Decameron, obviously, because nothing is.  I think we need more modern books based on the Decameron -- I remember enjoying Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills a while ago.  I also started Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, but I'm still reading the third part, so it doesn't count really.  It's very good though it took me a while to get into it, but by the time she got to the Dreyfus Affair I was fascinated.  The Dreyfus Affair made me think of the O. J. Simpson trial, and Cecil Rhodes made me think of Silicon Valley.  Reading it feels healthy, like confronting a fear which you don't really want to admit you have.

This is the seventh year I've kept track of my reading.   

• Total number of books read: 206 (but counting the 15 parts of the Two of Swords that I reread as 2 books)
• Gender of authors of each book: 80 male (roughly 39%), 121 female (roughly 59%) , 0 not sure, 5 anthologies
• Number of non-fiction: 45 (roughly 22%)
• Number of re-reads: 20 (roughly 10%)
• Number read on Kindle: 46 (roughly 22%)