When I was an undergraduate, a first-year I think, there was a Guardian column with the premise that you could only read 3000 books in your lifetime, and I remember complaining about this to someone who couldn't understand why I found it so annoying. Perhaps I need to concentrate on letting that long-lived annoyance go...
Anyway it hasn't been a vintage reading year, but there have been some very good things. Early in the year, I enjoyed Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire, about what the British did in India. He puts cricket, tea, and something else I forget on the plus side, and points out quite how much damage was done by milking the country of its profits to benefit Britain. I'm pretty sure the other positive thing isn't trains -- he points out the cost that India paid to get them, and how they were only built to make the extraction of resources more efficient.
Paul Beattie's Booker winner, The Sellout, is very funny in an angry way. It's about a black man who ends up reimposing segregation in his black neighbourhood. I like books that are angry and funny. I would like to write an angry funny book myself.
Hideously memorable was Emmanuel Carrère's The Adversary. It's a true story about a man who suddenly murdered most of his family, but it reads like a nightmarish thriller. I can't get out of my head the image of a student who one day doesn't bother to get up for an exam, and whose life then gets more and more complicated as he refuses to confront the consequences of his actions.
I remember enjoying Olivia Manning's Levant Trilogy, which I didn't realise was a sequel to her Balkan Trilogy. I also can't remember much about it now, apart from that I enjoyed it... Perhaps that means I am safe to read the Balkan Trilogy at last?
Lucy Hughes-Hallett's Peculiar Ground is an extremely good novel set in two time periods in the same country estate. This is another sort of book I would love to write.
Mohsin Hamid's Exit West has a pleasantly mythic quality about it. The premise is that doors are opening up in cities, doors that lead to some random other place in the world. It follows a young couple whose city descends from normality into civil-war-ridden chaos, and their experiences as refugees.
Marian Keyes' The Break is classic Keyes, to the extent that I read it twice this year. She writes reliably humane and funny chic-lit, unpretentious but well-written and the best the genre has to offer. It's about a woman whose husband suddenly decides he needs a break from their marriage and sets off round the world, and how this affects her and her teenage children. There's a bit where a young woman has to have an abortion which, as this is Ireland and before the 2018 vote, means that she has to travel to England, with all the expense and stress that involves. I do love Marian Keyes.
Dorothy Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding is brilliant and an excellent revival. It's about the difficult relationship between sisters, one of whom is getting married, to the other's dismay. It's extremely well-written.
Andrew Sean Greer's Less was one of my favourite books of the year. It's about a middle-aged writer who wants to avoid his ex-boyfriend's wedding, so accepts lots of random invitations around the world. It's funny and quietly touching.
Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy was probably my other favourite. It's a memoir by the woman who wrote Rape Joke, and is very funny. It's about when she and her husband had to move in with her crazy parents for a while because of medical bills. Her father is a Catholic priest -- he was ordained and married with children when he converted -- and is very eccentric. Her writing is honest and unobvious -- I particularly appreciate that when people write about religion. As a married man her father is sometimes sent to parishes where the previous priest has abused children, and Lockwood is well aware both of the damages the church can do and of the honest love it can show to a community. Mainly it's just a very funny book though.
Valerie Martin's The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, though not as brilliant as her sinister Property, was very good and not quite what I expected. I think I will seek out other things she's written.
Lydia Millett's Mermaids in Paradise is quite brilliant, perhaps third tying for my favourite. It's about a bright and cynical woman on honeymoon with her lovable jock husband. They discover mermaids in the bay by their resort, and then try to protect them from exploitation. It has an amazing ending.
Jakob Wegelius's The Murderer's Ape will definitely be given to my god-daughter, niece and/or nephew at some point. It's a very readable children's story about Sally Jones, a hard-working and clever gorilla who works as an engineer on a boat. When the captain is imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit she travels over the world trying to clear his name. The book is very nicely presented too, with maps and illustrations of the main characters. It's an excellent adventure story. I like that Pushkin has branched out into publishing books that are less worthy and more fun than their previous fare.
This is the eighth year I've kept track of my reading:
- Total number of books read: 211
- Gender of authors of each book: 74 male (roughly 35%), 137 female (roughly 65%)
- Number of non-fiction: 26 (roughly 12%)
- Number of re-reads: 58 (roughly 27%)
- Number read on Kindle: 92 (roughly 44%)
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