Tag: reading

I love books and I love lists of fun things and I’ve just found this website, Broke and Bookish, which has top ten book lists every Tuesday! The most recent one was post your top ten books of 2017.

I’ve reread a lot of things this year so it’s good to go back and look at what’s stood out so far, among old and new favourites. In chronological order of when I read them, because that’s the way my mind works.

1. Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

This book has been talked and written about a lot since Trump was elected, since it’s apparently about ‘his’ voters – disadvantaged, frustrated, rural, white people. The nostalgia is strong. There is a theme of: we were violent and poor in the past but at least we had a work ethic! Vance seems to blame the welfare state and drugs for ruining his people’s sense of purpose, but he is also scathing of parents treating their kids badly, not putting enough emphasis on education, and allowing potential to be wasted out of disinterest or a kind of reverse snobbishness.

2. The year of magical thinking by Joan Didion

At the beginning of the year everyone seemed to be talking about Joan Didion in that infuriating way of presuming everyone knows who she is and what she does. So I decided to read her and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t read her before. This book is a beautiful, surprisingly lucid account of the grief after her husband dies and her daughter is very sick. I’ve read a couple more since this one but Magical Thinking remains at the top.

3. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

An old favourite. I haven’t read much of Coetzee in a while because the most recent one (The Childhood of Jesus) was very disappointing. It was good to return to this. It amazes me when protagonists can be unlikable without making the novel unlikable. His characters seem to have more than three dimensions – is it possible to have a six-sided character? Because that’s what they are.

4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Another old favourite that I read while in Winchester, as seeing Austen’s grave made me want to reread her. This was the first Austen I read and while I have since come to prefer Persuasion, I am appreciating P&P more and more as the TV show grows distant in my memory. The TV show is awesome, but there are extra layers in the novel – and I’m possibly liking Lizzie less and less without Jennifer Ehle’s bright eyes to make her inspiring.

5. The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin

I read this year’s ago and had it mind as a great Toibin book. I’ve felt the more recent ones – Brooklyn, Nora Webster – were missing something which Blackwater and The South had. A deeper immersion in life, perhaps. Other than a random flashback section at the beginning which I didn’t like, this was as good as I remembered. Families in all their tense, judgmental love, complicated by the fear and grief of AIDs and the moodiness of the Irish seaside.

6. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

A new book! It was listed for the Bailey’s Book Prize this year. I have this idea in my head that I don’t like sci-fi, and then I realise most dystopians are counted as sci-fi and I love a good dystopia. A flu epidemic, unlike anything that’s come before, wipes out 90% of the population. What I loved was how the structures of modern life were adapted despite the lack of modern conveniences – I mean, of course an airport would be a great place to set up a community, even without electricity. I should see how far away Gatwick is for when the apocalypse strikes.

7. Blindness by Jose Saramago

Another dystopia and one I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. I’d heard great things about it, and although it took some time to get into the style (no names, rare paragraphs, no dialogue tags, long long sentences), it’s reputation is well deserved. What would happen if everyone went blind? What a question, even without all the disturbing allegorical layers to it. The chaos is quick and brutal and disturbingly believable. I don’t think Saramago has much faith in governments and after reading two dystopias in a row, I might not either.

8. Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey

This movie came out and everyone started talking about it, but I didn’t realise it was a YA novel from a few years ago. Small Australian country town in the sixties, prejudice and frustration and cricket – it all feels very recent and could easily have been set now. The mother was thoroughly unlikable, full of petty anger and tending towards masochism, and I can’t wait to see Toni Collette play her in the movie (when I get round to it).

9. Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Another new one. This is on lists of ‘best debuts in 2017’ so I thought I’d give it a go (I am trying to read more debuts). It’s about two university students in Dublin who befriend an older, semi-famous couple, and begin a mixed-up mess of relationships with them. All the characters were so enigmatic, and while that seems a little unbelievable, it also felt like one of those cliques of famous people a la the Bloomsbury group or Taylor Swift’s posse.

10. Reading like a Writer by Francine Prose

I’m cheating a bit with this one because I haven’t quite finished, but it is amazing. It’s just really good examples of different types of writing – and writing that is good for different reasons – with super enthusiastic analysis of why it’s so good. It encourages readers/writers to slow down and sink into words, which I have been finding hard lately. Writing and reading frenetically around full-time work does not scream ‘spend an hour on each sentence!’ so this is a really good reminder which I will have to read over and over again. I also love that the author’s name is ‘Prose’.

Suggestions for the second half of the year are very welcome!

 

 

 

 

I read some great books this year but all up it was a slightly scatty, underwhelming year. For the first time in a long time I found myself finishing books and not knowing what to read next, which lead to starting and stopping many books I would normally enjoy simply because I was not prepared for them.

• The lost dog – Michelle de Kretser
• Boyhood island – Karl Ove Knausguaard

The third and most disappointing of the My Struggle series.

• We need to talk about Kevin – Lionel Shriver

I’ve been meaning to read this for a long time and it didn’t disappoint. There were many lines that struck me, in particular: “To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay.” Controversial, but it struck a chord with me.

• Catcher in the rye – J.D. Salinger
• Snow – Orhan Pamuk
• Adela Pankhurst: the wayward suffragette – Verna Coleman
• An evil cradling – Brian Keenan

Keenan’s experience as a hostage in Lebanon in the eighties. A story that I was too young to know about at the time but which I now find incredible.

• Why I am not a Christian – Bertrand Russell
• Story of the lost child – Elena Ferrante
• Persuasion – Jane Austen

Forever my favourite Austen.

• Climbing the coconut tree – S.C. Karakaltsas
• A spool of blue thread – Anne Tyler
• Divergent – Veronica Roth
• Room – Emma Donoghue

A highlight of the year. So absorbing that my 30 minute train trip just didn’t feel long enough.

• Sparrow migrations – Cari Noga

Another highlight and comforting that it started as a self-published novel. Several stories linked by the Hudson river crash and sparrows.

• The strays – Emily Bitto
• Hideous kinky – Esther Ford

I read this while we were in Morocco, which felt fitting. Told from the point of view of a child whose mother is a wandering hippy on the Moroccan trail in the seventies.

• Great expectations – Charles Dickens
• All the light we cannot see – Anthony Doerr

Every time I read a story about the second world war I think I can’t possibly read another one that sheds more light, and yet I do. There are so many nuanced experiences outside those of the camps and they continue to intrigue me.

• The door – Magda Szabo

I found this on a list of best translated fiction. It’s incredible and Emerence is a character I’ll never forget. See the New Yorker article here.

• Why not me? – Mindy Kaling
• Not that kind of girl – Lena Dunham
• 20 fragments of a ravenous youth – Xiaolu Guo
• Silas Marner – George Eliot

I was only disappointed that this was so short. It is an incredibly succinct story of the interweaving of lives and how we see people.

• The garden of evening mists – Tan Twan Eng

I wanted to love this, and the second world war information about Malaysia was interesting but the actual writing I found over the top.

• First love, last rights – Ian McEwan
• The history of love – Nicole Krauss
• A little life – Hanyu Yanagihara

Everything is just so big in this novel. The violence is nauseating and the characters often frustrating, but it is a must-read.

• Insurgent – Veronica Roth
• Still Alice – Lisa Genova
• The wandering falcon – Jamil Ahmad
• A god in ruins – Kate Atkinson
• Olive Kitteridge – Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout was the best thing about this year! I feel like I’m lowered into her novels in a glass sphere, the characters are so real that it is easy to believe I am simply visiting them for a time.

• Purple hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Anne of Green Gables – Lucy Maud Montgomery
• The Burgess boys – Elizabeth Strout
• The eye of the sheep – Sofie Laguna
• North and south – Elizabeth Gaskell

 

• Farewell to the East End – Jennifer Worth
• Dark places – Gillian Flynn
• In the woods – Tana French
• The girls – Emma Cline

I kept seeing this on lists of books to read in 2016, so I did. It’s a fictionalised account of the Manson murders, and it was engaging until the writing style got a bit much. Still, an amazing debut.

• Emma – Jane Austen
• Notes on a scandal – Zoe Heller

The best unreliable narrator I’ve ever read. Completely fascinating.

• A murder is announced – Agatha Christie
• Dancing in the dark – Karl Ove Knausguaard

Fourth in the series and it made me look forward to the fifth. I’m a fan once again.

• Moments of reprieve – Primo Levi
• Waiting for the barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
• The lonely city – Olivia Laing

The third of Laing’s books, and I loved it. Non-fiction about how loneliness informed the art of artists including Edward Hopper. Heart-breaking and optimistic at the same time.

• My name is Lucy Barton – Elizabeth Strout
• Slammerkin – Emma Donoghue

I’m not usually one for historical fiction but this was great. Three years of a teenage girl’s life as she goes from prostitution in London to servitude in a Welsh country house.

• Amy and Isabelle – Elizabeth Strout
• Reckoning – Magda Szubanski
• A streetcat named Bob – James Bowen
• And all of Harry Potter, of course.

See previous years’ lists here.