BOOKS READ IN 2015

I seem to have read more books this year than last - and far more than in any recent year before that. I haven't included here the Dylan-related books I've also read or skimmed through during 2015:

THE 8.55 TO BAGHDAD, Andrew Eames, 2004 so badly written it’s absurd that it won an award from the British Guild of Travel Writers, but good subject-matter

LET THE DEVIL SPEAK: Articles, Essays, & Incitements, Steven Hart, 2014 some substantial, brilliantly sleuthed essays

CHATTERTON, Peter Ackroyd, 1987 vivid, absorbing, but the insistent wackiness of every  character is over the top, & really he says nothing about plagiarism, which is his theme

CROW LAKE, Mary Lawson, 2002 completely wonderful novel, fresh and true

THE DOCTOR & MR. DYLAN, Rick Novak, 2014 good on Hibbing, hopeless on humans; it's not about Bob Dylan, and it's a novel

THE ASSASSINATION OF MARGARET THATCHER, Hilary Mantel, 2014 short stories, with a whiff of using up old rejects; 2nd-rate by her standards

HISTORY OF MADNESS, Michel Foulcault, 1961 I gave it up: it's far too clever for me

GREAT APES, Will Self, 1997 I gave this up too: couldn’t stand his interminable showing off or his brutish arsehole-obsessing modernism

REVALUATION, F.R. Leavis, 1936 his least readable book

THE NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS, Joseph Conrad, 1897 a slim volume but very demanding: intensive and poetical, with echoes of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner

JOURNEYS: An Anthology, ed Robyn Davidson, 2001 snotty intro, sloppy edits, and a wayward selection of pieces, in that many aren’t really travel pieces at all

THE HUNGER GAMES [Bk 1], Suzanne Collins, 2008 clever, strongly plotted, decently-written dystopian-world page-turner; understandably a cult best-seller

TO FOLLOW THE LEAD, Annie S. Swan, c1911 appealing simplicity till the regrettable crescendo of god-bothering

THE SAFFRON KITCHEN, Yasmin Crowther, 2006 boring till p60, then a great central patch of affecting drama, and then a long ending of tiresome didactic hokum

THE OUTCAST, Sadie Jones, 2007 strikingly clear prose describing a slew of terrible events; compelling, sensitive, touching, and with strong characters

PRECIOUS BANE, Mary Webb, 1924 I was bereft at finishing this wonderful, beautiful, forcefully-written, unique book: so vivid, poetic, touching, sustained, humbling, sweet-natured - all without any cuteness or arch self-consciousness

THE GOLDFINCH, Donna Tartt, 2013 couldn’t be more different from ‘Precious Bane’ but its equal or better: phenomenally good - vast canvas (centred on a small one...)

FRANKIE & STANKIE, Barbara Trapido, 2003 terrible title and a bit shallow, but funny, fresh and quirky

WRITERS IN HOLLYWOOD 1915-1951, Ian Hamilton, 1990 very solid but afraid to be anything but studious, so too few Hollywood Babylonian anecdotes

THE EDWARDIANS, Vita Sackville-West, 1930 patchy writing; some implausible plot twists & characters; poor dialogue; fascinating material; glad I read it

DO NOT SELL AT ANY PRICE, Amanda Petrusich, 2014 loved it: a necessary look into the avid world of the 78rpm rare record collector; intelligent & humane

THE PAYING GUESTS, Sarah Waters, 2014 riveting, richly imaginative, a tense major work: nearly as good as ‘Fingersmith’ (high praise); so admirable

THE VERSIONS OF US, Laura Barnett, 2015 alluring premise, crap book: all so calculated instead of imagined; in shaming contrast to the Sarah Waters

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Harper Lee, 1960 a book almost everyone read at school but I never did; lovely, though read now - in retrospect - a bit apologist about the very southern racism the book deplores

SKIOS, Michael Frayn, 2012 this is Wodehouse Lite (with similarly ingenious plotting)

THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS, John Boyne, 2006 a clever, touching, unusual, good novel by no means only for Young Readers

WHEN WE WERE THIN, C.P. Lee, 2007 a really interesting social history of the UK music biz 1968-1980s - and a great title

THE MAN IN THE QUEUE, Josephine Tey, 1929 engaging and well-written, except for the purple prose paragraphs designed to prove she’s a Real Writer; the usual whodunit cheat: introducing a surprise relationship we couldn’t have guessed at

SMALL CEREMONIES, Carol Shields, 1976 at times piercing observation in taut, captivating prose; at times I felt oh-for-fuck’s-sake-you-precious-twee-middle-class-wimp

THE TERRIBLE PRIVACY OF MAXWELL SIM, Jonathan Coe, 2010 the terrible title, the awful postmodern ending - both indicative of garrulousness - and in between, a deflating, depressing book; Time Out found it “hugely enjoyable”...

PURPLE HIBISCUS, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2004 completely absorbing novel from a justifiably confident writer creating a refreshing, convincing Africa

THE TRAVELLING HORNPLAYER, Barbara Trapido, 1998 substantial, fiercely intelligent, dexterously plotted but with a horrible and improbable end section

BUDDY HOLLY, Dave Laing, 1971 captivating, modest, refreshing to read again now, full of acute small observations & quite right in its analysis of his influence [I wrote an earlier blogpost about this book]

THE MILLSTONE, Margaret Drabble, 1965 a slim volume in the best sense as well as literally; light touch, swift intelligence, subtlety & gaiety & delicacy of feeling and, now, a fascinating glimpse into pre-Carnaby St 1960s London life

STRAIGHT LIFE, Art & Laurie Pepper, 1994 edn mammoth oral autobiography + others’ testimony, of & to a very contradictory life: rich yet impoverished, creative yet sunk in addiction & its gruesome degradation; and vivid, espically about violent prison life; a hugely more candid autobiography than most

THE END OF THE AFFAIR, Graham Greene, 1951 occasional moments of sharp interest sticking out of the blancmange of dated Catholic hooey

THE L-SHAPED ROOM, Lynne Reid Banks, 1960 marvellous to find so belatedly: brilliantly plotted, vivid characters but subtly drawn, a glorious opinionatedness and such robust intelligence about human feeling and behaviour

THE BACKWARD SHADOW, Lynne Reid Banks, 1970 so very disappointing: contrived, ricketty plotting, shallowed characters who become hard to care about; a plunge into what would now be called Chick Lit

UNDER MILK WOOD, Dylan Thomas, 1954 [posthumous] pioneering but now a smaller thing than its reputation

BHOWANI JUNCTION, John Masters, 1954 powerful, compelling, brave, compassionate book it would be all too easy to dismiss today for its political incorrectness, yet in some ways ahead of its time, and from a really individual writer

THE LAST SEPTEMBER, Elizabeth Bowen, 1929 full of her exceptional brilliance, yet an oddly muted depiction of a crucial period in Irish history and the uncomfortable Anglo-Irish life clung to within it

SKATING TO ANTARCTICA, Jenny Diski, 1997 abiff with intelligence and self-indulgent pawing at the wounds of her appalling childhood; and brilliant, if brief, about penguins

A SPOOL OF BLUE THREAD, Anne Tyler, 2015 much lauded; I was left wondering why

THE DEATH OF THE HEART, Elizabeth Bowen, 1938 another piercing scrutiny

CANADA, Richard Ford, 2012 not a pleasurable  read but a highly compelling and original novel

TIPPING THE VELVET, Sarah Waters, 1998 not a patch on ‘Fingersmith’: far too and-then-this-happened-and-then-this-happened, and too heavily playing the lesbian card - where ‘Fingersmith’ was a masterpiece of plot, character and prose

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT, Charles Dickens, 1843-4 a great start but then filler and comparative failure: the least solid Dickens novel I've read

LONG BEFORE THE STARS WERE TORN DOWN, J.A. Wainwright, 2015 very readable cowboyish novel with a deft structure, though weak on women characters and with an unsatisfying semi-postmodern ending (aren’t they always?)

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BUDDY HOLLY BY DAVE LAING, FROM 1971

I’ve been reading - for the first time since it was new - Dave Laing’s fine little book Buddy Holly, published by Rock Books/November Books in the UK in 1971.

Its atmosphere is, savoured today, soaked in the modesty of the pre-Google age: when we knew we had access to limited knowledge and that finding things out meant taking pains to explore around a subject. Laing’s personal style tends to the beguilingly tentative in any case, but this sense of limitation, of there being room for doubt, of learning being something demanding care and time, is also a symptom of the era.

Perhaps too there was a special compatibility between subject and book because back then there were only a very small number of books about rock music, a subject still regarded with disdain by broadsheet newspapers and the vast majority of publishers. The rock writing of the early 1970s was as far from mainstream as rock’n’roll when The Crickets cut ‘That’ll Be The Day’.

So we may know more about Buddy Holly’s life and work now - and of course we have easy access to hearing every aspirated glottal stop he ever put on tape; but the spirit of the book gets us closer to Holly’s own. It was published only 12 years after that plane crash, and when Dave Laing was only 24: hardly older than Buddy had been. Book and subject occupy a more similar world than ours can do, and comparable niches within it.

One of Laing’s observations, which I’ve not encountered elsewhere, is that Holly differed from the other major rock’n’roll stars in having a long, slow route to success whereas the others found stardom more or less from the start. He failed to get anywhere with the ‘Buddy and Bob’ Nesman Studio sessions at Wichita Falls, and again with the 1956 sessions for Decca in Nashville, returning to Lubbock still an unknown both times:

            “In this Holly is unique, for the first records of most of the young white rock’n’roll singers were their first hits.”

            He could have omitted the word “white”, since the same virtually instant success happened for rock’n’roll’s biggest black stars too, Little Richard and Chuck Berry.

It may be an obvious thing to say, too, as Laing does, that “in most rock’n’roll records...sound dominates meaning” - and that typically a Holly record exemplifies this: “the themes of the words on the page need not necessarily relate to the way the words are sung on the record.” But if this seems obvious, it is at least usefully specific. To say “sound dominates meaning” is a brilliantly economical statement of a truth that applies not just to 1950s rock’n’roll but throughout the whole of pop. I’m drawn towards words, and always have been, and find them infinitely easier to write about than music, yet when I listen back now to 1959-1963 records I bought and thought were great, not only do the words make me cringe but they show me that I never absorbed the verbal import of the words at all then.

I heard them as sounds, and as a kind of expressive colouring for the singer. Only by doing so could I not have found them risible. The last thing the teenage me would have said to my girlfriend was “Bless you - bless every breath that you take”, and yet it splashed through me cheerily enough on the hit single by Tony Orlando, himself only sixteen when he made the record.

(It’s a charming quirk of this book, then, that having insisted on the secondary importance of Holly’s lyrics on his records, Laing pays quite close attention to those lyrics.)

The exception was Elvis, whose records before he came out of the army tended to have lyrics that were either so striking as to break through the sound (‘Heartbreak Hotel’ - and what a sound the lyric had to break through!) or they had meaning that impinged because it augmented and played upon his smouldering image of the dangerous, rebellious sexpot.

Which was, of course, the last thing you could say of Buddy Holly. What he and the Crickets did instead, more significantly, was, as Dave Laing summed up long before most, to open up “new possibilities for guitar-based rock’n’roll groups, and directly [foreshadow] the way many groups of the mid-’60s came to function as self-contained composing and performing units.”

That’s one hell of a prototype to have offered the music, in the early years of rock’n’roll and ever since.

________

To declare an interest - I've known Dave Laing off and on since about the same time this book was published. He was editor of Let It Rock  when we were members of the Let It Rock Writers' Co-operative; he took me in, and we ate toast together a lot, to save me being homeless in London at some point in the 1980s, and in the late 1990s he organised the first Robert Shelton Memorial Conference at Liverpool University at which I was a speaker.