Some of the books I read last year...

[rhythmaning]

Everyone else seems to have produced lists of the books they have read - or started to read - during the last year. As well as a list, though, I want to say a bit about what I thought of them, too; otherwise, for me, it would be like trainspotting - ticking books of a list. I want to remember what I thought when I read them.

And I can't remember everything I have read (though this may be because this is all I have read, or it may be all I can remember).



I read a fair bit, particularly when I am on holiday; and I seem to have been on holiday several times over the last year, especially in the summer - well, through into the autumn as well. I feel like I have read a lot. My reading is quite lumpy: I read in fits and starts. I didn't read much in the months before Easter, nor a great deal in the late autumn. This is what I have read, and what I thought about it. There is no particular order; and I am sure that I have missed some books.

• Good Faith - Jane Smiley. I didn't get into this at all, and I didn't finish it. A tale of adultery and dodgy dealing in the mid south of the USA, I just found it hard work. The main characters were attractive enough (usually when I can't be bothered to finish a book - which used to be rare, but has become more frequent as I have grown older: why waste time reading something you're not enjoying? - usually it is because the characters don't involve me, or interest me), but I kept wanting to shout at them, don't be such a f*cking f*ckwit! Because - jeez, did they keep putting themselves in stupid situations. It was like watching a car crash.
  
  
• The Amber Spyglass - Philip Pullman. This is the last of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy (soon to reach the big screen with James Bond Daniel Craig in one of the starring roles); and I loved it. I finished it whilst I was having a bath, round about Easter, and I felt like I was leaving friends behind. I didn't want it to stop. Images from the three books (and I can't remember if I read the others - Northern Lights, and the Subtle Knife - this year or last year) keep coming back to me, and they feel very real. It might be because I know some of the places well (some of the action features Oxford, where my mother lives and I studied; and key scenes take place in the Botanic Gardens there, which I used to know intimately; I used to steal roses from the Magdalen rose garden, in front of the Botanic Gardens...). But then, much of the action takes place in imagined worlds, and these seemed just as real, and just as compelling. It is full of fantastic images; a real work of the imagination.
  
  
• The Eyre Report - Jasper fforde. This was entertaining, quite funny; light, but intelligent (and with a dark side, too). I borrowed it from my wife. It was enjoyable, well put together, nonsense. I think I shall read more by fforde (sic).
  
  
• blink - Malcolm Gladwell. This was interesting: it is about the way it is possible to make judgements in the blink of a second - something we all do - the way you just know something. Part of the book explained how this was - how we bring our expertise and experience to bear on the small pieces of information we gather in a split second - part of it was when to trust this judgement; and part of it was when not to trust it - when our recognition goes wrong. (This last bit seemed to be when you are in a stressful situation - a car chase, a gun, when fear could cloud your judgement.) It was well thought out, with examples from a wide range of backgrounds; but it did also leave me feeling a bit "so what": it was good to know that we are often right when we make judgements like this - yay! for love at first sight - but ultimately I wasn't sure what would change as a result of my knowing any of this. Maybe I should have trusted my judgement.
  
  
• A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth. I have finally finished A Suitable Boy. I have read a volume a year for the last three years. I thought this was a wonderful book - completely involving; and a different world - a whole range of experiences. There is just so much in it. A kaleidoscope of life, richly populated. The characters are compelling - flawed, all of them, but wonderful. Deeply recommended. (I haven’t done this justice: it is such a rich world that it is hard to describe.)
  
  
• Number Ten - Sue Townsend. I have recentlyread two Sue Townsend books; this and the last Adrian Mole. I enjoyed this more - a satire on Blair, his government and the country they have created, rather well observed although a touch obvious. And there were a couple of glaring, irritating lapses in continuity, which just struck me as sloppy writing and editing. But this was great fun.
  
  
• The Damned United - David Peace. Over the years, I have read a few football books -The Goalkeepers Revenge was a children's book; in adulthood, Pete Davies' record of England's Euro90 campaign, All Played Out, when I like many others suddenly got interested in football again (it is all Gazza's fault); Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, which created a genre in football fan literature (and spawned My Favourite Season - a collection of literary fans' reminiscences: my favourite was fan's record of Raith Rovers' greatest season). The Damned United is the fictional story of Brian Clough's short period as manager of Leeds United. It is a fascinating book - not really about football, it is about people, their relationships, why they do what they do, and how they win or lose. I found it compulsive. (When I bought this book - on a whim: it was cheap in Waterstones - I hadn't heard of it. Now it seems to be all over the place: it was in many journalists' books of the year lists, and it is being scripted for a movie by the guy that wrote the Queen and various tv plays.) Still, if you do like football - well, go and read it.
  
  
• The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom. Kitsch. Smalz. Entertaining - and a very quick read. About five people the narrator met in heaven. (He was dead.) Pretty predictable.
  
  
• Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell. This is a novel with a complex, time-shifting, novel-within-a-novel, circular structure; it comrprises several different pieces, linked together by a variety of themes - the same characters, the same ideas, a birthmark. Each section leads to the next, but there is no overall narrative - it isn't one novel, it is several. I found it quite hard work at first - before I was into the rhythm of it, before I had realised how it worked: just as I got used to one story, it stopped - without resolution - and I had to start another. They got resolved in the end - part of the trick is that each section in the first half of the book is mirrored and resolved in the second half. I wasn't really sure which story Mitchell was trying to tell.
  
  
• The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger. I loved this book. I mean, really loved it. A comedy and a tragedy, the characters seemed real; the central idea - though ridiculous - was carried off with style - and within the world created, it was all consistent. I loved the characters - I fell in love with the female lead (of course), and I wanted to be the male lead. It is very cleverly written, full of interesting characters and problematic situations. And a great deal of music from my era... It is funny and sad, too. I thought this was brilliant (and, when I was reading it, I had thought it would be my choice of book for the year; but it wasn't, in the end).
  
  
• The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides. I read this whilst I was in the middle of nowhere in July: despite trying to keep weight down to a minimum whilst I walked seven miles away from civilisation, I decided I really needed to take a book with me. The idea of not having a book with me was absurd. I read Eugenides' Middlesex last year, and I loved that, so i was prepared to like this, as well. I wasn't disappointed. Although dark, it was also humourous, full of life as well as death, and both happy and sad. I really like the way Eugenides writes - it was very involving. It was a bit strange sitting in the wilderness reading about suicides in suburban USA, though.
  
  
• Freakonomics - Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. This was a fascinating book: a look at the economics of real life; or rather, how real life can be interpreted through economics. Apparently, much of it is flawed - there are other ways of interpreting the data the authors use - but frankly, that doesn't really matter much: what I thought was interesting was that someone was actually asking these questions, and thinking up explanations for the way the world works. Whether the answers are actually right or not seemed to be incidental. Amongst the things they cover are the economics of the drugs trade (which explains why most drug dealers actually live at home with their mothers - most of the profits go to the few people at the top); the economic impact of children's names; why teachers cheat; and so on. It is fascinating - whether true or not is irrelevant.
  
  
• Who Moved My Blackberry(tm) - Martin Lukes with Lucy Kellaway. A satire on business, explored through the emails that Lukes sends. This is a classic. Very funny, but painful too, because it is so real. It captures the banality of management fads (strive!), and should be a salutary warning to us all. Strive!
  
  
• Love and Other Near Death Experiences - Mil Millington. I enjoyed Millington's Things My Girlfriend and I Argue About, except that the novel wasn't half as funny as the stories on his website of the same name. His real life stories were just so absurd, the novel seemed a bit of a let down. His second though - this - I thought was very good, and very funny: I laughed a lot. The end was a touch predictable, but getting there was a real laugh. And any indecisive male will empathise...
  
  
• Forty Four Scotland St - Alexander McCall Smith. Set around the corner (though Scotland Street doesn't have a number 44), and originally serialised in the Scotsman newspaper, this book is an episodic exploration of a certain stratum of Edinburgh society. Part of the fun of it is working out who the real characters are. Some real people turn up - the author Ian Rankin (a neighbour of McCall Smith's), the gallery owner Guy Peploe - so it isn't too hard to identify them. This was enjoyable and light.
  
  
• The Closed Circle - Jonathon Coe. This is the sequel to Coe's wonderful novel The Rotters' Club (which was recently televised, too). And this too was wonderful. Like its predecessor, it captures a certain time very well: the Rotters' Club was set in mid-seventies Britain, the Closed Circle in post-Thatcherite Britain. It was very engaging: full of lost dreams, forgotten lovers and failed promises. Perhaps its mood fitted my middle-aged angst, perfectly.
  
  
• Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction - Sue Townsend. Entertaining, but kind of obvious. Mole is set up as an everyman for our time, but he isn't smart enough for that.
  
  
• Why Do Buses Come In Threes - Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham. Why numbers do what they do. Why mathematics is useful in real life. An interesting diversion. But it didn't really explain why buses come in threes. (An article in the Economist did that a few years ago; but I can never remember the explanation.)
  
  
• A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka. Not really about tractors; but quite a lot about Ukrainians; and a lot about families. The story of an old man's infatuation with a Ukrainian model, and how his daughters cope, this was funny and moving. A lot of it is about how men communicate - beers and machines, it would appear (well, I get the beer; and I do love machines, even if I don't understand how to get them to work properly); and how women communicate; and how men and women don't communciate.
  
  
• The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell. I had really enjoyed blink, so when I saw this on offer, I picked it up. It actually made more sense to me than blink, inasmuch as I could see how what Gladwell was writing about could be applied in practice. Essentially, Gladwell set out to understand how epidemics - particularly cultural epidemics (perhaps a pure interpretation of the meme) - work. There is a lot in this - how networks are formed, how people think, how ideas take hold, how they spread through populations. It is full of interesting stories, little asides, smart observations. It is probably particularly relevant to the internet works - where network is cheap and easy. It seemed more practical than blink; not least because I realised what it was a friend of mine does (they connect people; but that isn't much use as a job description); and why some things work, and some, no matter how good they are, don't; and just why you need marketing people to sell ideas. Kind of.
  
  
• Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman. This is the first Neil Gaiman book I have read, and I really enjoyed it. Creating a world (much like our own; maybe it is our own) where ancient gods are real, it works within the logic established. It is funny, thoughtful and very entertaining.
  
  
• An Italian Education - Tim Parks. I bought this because I thought Tim Parks had written "The Cruel Heart of Italy" (he didn't: that was Tobias Jones). I have also read peices by Parks in Granta (not least a recent description of his commute from Verona to Milan - a hilarious journey). So this was actually the first book of Parks I read, and it was excellent: a description of how his young children grow up in Italy, and what it says about the country: how Italians relate to children, and how children relate to their parents, and how it explains a lot about the way Italy - and Italians - work. Parks has written a lot - some novels, and several books about Italy; I really want to read A Year With Verona, his memoir about being a supporter of an Italian football team.
  
  
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Jonathon Safran Foer. This was my book of the year: a powerful, compelling novel. Ostensibly the story of a boy's search for his father following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre, it is also about communication, and words, and families, and walking. It is disturbing and wonderful: Foer's New York has much in common with the world of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. It is a shocking, magical book; I thought it was brilliant - poetic and moving. Just brilliant.
  
  
• Not the End of the World - Kate Atkinson. Short stories, each story connected to others in the collection through sharing characters or ideas. This was quite interesting, but not brilliant: enjoyable, sometimes challenging. Not the end of the world.