rather late but here's my list of...
BOOKS READ IN 2018
A
READING DIARY: A Year Of Favourite Books, Alberto Manguel, 2004
many gemlike quotations & a nice restrained chattiness, but he's
often precious, and a bit of a name-dropper.
THE
SECRET LIFE OF COWS, Rosamund Young, 2017 edn Credible &
creditable close long-term observation of cows allowed to live
relatively free lives, yielding much about their quirks, feelings,
behaviour, differences, and levels of trust in the author and her
partners. No word about their responses to being taken for slaughter
by the same people though.
STATION
ELEVEN, Emily St.John Mandel, 2014 A surprising delight: elegaic,
well-written and unusually kindly novel while telling, very
thoughtfully, a tale of dystopian cataclysm; I was sorry to come to
the end of it.
KIM,
Rudyard Kipling, 1901 Strongly written - with British Empire
confidence yet huge respect for, and knowledge of, such variegated
Indian life - and though its long, slow beginning tries the patience
(and no modern child would persevere) it becomes beguiling and
includes too few of the depictions of landscape he does superbly.
RECENT
HISTORY, Anthony Giardina, 2001 Well-written novel in which a
sensitive, observant suburban youth grows up to be a drip.
MURDER,
MAYHEM & MUSIC HALL: The Dark Side of Victorian London, Barry
Anthony, 2015 Thoroughly researched, entertaining account centred
on theatre-world scandals & crime.
DOGS
FROM ALL ANGLES, Nina Scott-Langley & K.R.G.Browne, 1936
Largely hilarious commentaries (sometimes wildly inaccurate, eg re
Bedlington Terriers) & quaint angular drawings.
HALF
AN INCH OF WATER, Percival Everett, 2015 Short stories (a form
I've never liked) in each of which a decent, laconic man living in a
sparse western-state landscape that is described in spare prose
either solves or fails to solve a problem handed to him by someone he
hardly knows.
EUROPE
BY RAIL: The Definitive Guide, Nicky Gardner & Susanne Kries,
2017 Strikingly well-written, thoughtful guidebook not only to
train routes but to countries, cities and landscapes.
THE
ENGLISH PATIENT, Michael Ondaatje, 1992 A major WW2 novel I'd
never read. It's framed with great originality and in prose of
reverberating intensity.
MAGPIE
MURDERS, Anthony Horowitz, 2016 A whodunnit about whodunnits
predictably more concerned to be clever than to be plausible
(postmodernitis). Plus a horribly smug narrator; is this a deliberate
attack on people in publishing, or does he think this woman's ok?:
hard to tell. Tosh.
THE
HOUSE OF MIRTH, Edith Wharton, 1905 In the end a sad story but so
sharply witty in its observations of society I found myself thinking
it made Jane Austen seem myopic.
THE
DEATH OF THE HEART, Elizabeth Bowen, 1938 Penetrating scrutiny
of: a self-suffocating upper middle class 1930s London couple and
their obliviousness to their soon-to-vanish servants; a naive
teenager; lower middle class seaside life; and the wretchedness of a
redundant ex-soldier's poverty & social isolation.
MARCH
VIOLETS, Philip Kerr, 1989 Serviceable detective novel set in
Nazi Germany; hopeless about women characters (and this is not
defensible on period-attitude grounds because he uses a noticeably
more modern voice on other topics).
ORLEY
FARM, Anthony Trollope, 1862 For much of this long novel I felt
that it might well be a great 19th Century novel that somehow no-one
ever mentioned, but in the end it failed at a couple of hurdles,
especially in its surprising insipidity as the young romantic heroine
eventual gains the lover of her choice; but a fine novel all the
same, full of characters, a decent & dramatic plot and a
particularly moving scene of between a loving father and daughter.
A
CRIME IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD, Suzanne Berne, 1997 Strong portrait of
an American suburb in the early 1970s; well plotted, shifting our
view of the child-narrator cleverly as it goes; I appreciated it more
after discussing it later than during the reading.
THE
SINGER'S GUN, Emily St.John Mandel, 2010 Such a compelling story
of crime, conflicted loyalties and love - modern and brilliant (and
very different from 'Station Eleven') from a real writer. So many
strata above workaday crime fiction like the Philip Kerr. She's a
major find.
THE
HEAT OF THE DAY, Elizabeth Bowen, 1948 Patchy but important novel
of WWII London, exploring issues of identity, loyalty and trust, with
passages of improbable dialogue and a habit of awkardly arranged
sentence structure, yet the most superb, hyperreal, inspired
description of the psychology of Londoners in the Blitz.
THE
DISCOVERY OF SLOWNESS, Sten Nadolny, 1983 [English translation by
Ralph Freedman 1987] Beguiling, admirable novel not quite like
anything I've ever read; a fond and ingenious partly fictional
portrait of Sir John Franklin from boyhood to death; sorry I reached
the end.
A
SHILLING FOR CANDLES, Josephine Tey, 1936 Whodunit; useful
display of the class snobberies of England between the wars.
SO
LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW, William Maxwell, 1979 A beautiful novel
of sensitive intelligence, compassion and sense of place (rural
Illinois 1920s-70s); reminded me in these ways of The Other Side of
The Bridge by Mary Lawson.
MR.
NORRIS CHANGES TRAINS, Christopher Isherwood, 1935 Another I'd
never read before. Disliked, early on, the exaggerated portrayal of
Norris and the sordid allusions to S&M, but grew to admire this
short, distinctive novel. Scrupulous portrait of German Weimar
Republic life.
BLIND
CORNER, Dornford Yates, 1927 A preposterous adventure yarn by a
favourite author of my father's, typifying what Alan Bennett calls
"that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread
of good-class tweed through [British] twentieth-century literature."
INTO
THE WATER, Paula Watkins, 2017 It's 90 years later and the crime
thriller is more real, but though it's a page-turner, no one
character is half as vivid or convincing as the narrator in her
terrific 'The Girl On The Train'.
ALL
THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, Anthony Doerr, 2014 Unlike the
characters trapped in WWII, I wanted it to never end: the best book
about the coming of war and war itself that I have ever read; a
beautiful and great novel.
CHASING
THE MONSOON, Alexander Frater, 1990 I'm re-reading this after
many years (having now been to India, though only once). The copious
background research is too often introduced clunkily, but it's
otherwise entertaining and quite funny; there are also large chunks
of autobiography about his own childhood on a similarly rainy island
in Vanuatu.
ABOUT
GRACE, Anthony Doerr, 2005 Had to read this, his first novel; not
as outstanding as t'other, but a very unusual, compelling book,
suffused with a special sadness throughout.
WHEN
A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN, Peter Godwin, 2006 Shaky start but
becomes a well-written, convincing insider's account of watching
Mugabe's Zimbabwe descend into violence, cruelty, stupidity and
waste: an account that blends very skilfully and articulately a
detailed picture of his own white family life with the shameful
detail of national disintegration.
TWO
CARAVANS, Marina Lewycka, 2007 A lovely book: clever,
multi-faceted and funny, but at the same time a vivid education in
the gruesome exploitation of immigrant workers in today's UK.
ALWAYS
OTHER VOICES: Writings on Bob Dylan in the 21st Century, Stephen
Scobie, 2018 An attractive mixed bag, featuring Stephen's
distinctively appealing voice on many topics.
SMALL
ISLAND, Andrea Levy, 2004 Starts so badly I almost gave it up; so
glad I didn't. She has no style but the story she tells is so
multi-layered, so wide-ranging (Jamaica, India in WWII, London 1948)
and uses many character-narrators, all of whom work well except the
first. An important synthesis of many cultural strands told with
sympathy for all sides. Bit soulless, though.
THE
CLEARING, Tim Gautreaux, 2003 He's a great writer, and this is as
memorable a novel as 'The Next Step In The Dance' (1999). He makes a
world so vividly realised here, in such detail and yet with an
elegaic sweep; so atmospheric yet so specific. A novel of such
violence yet so much humanity, a time and place of tough realism
created with unerring poetic prose.
THE
SHIPPING NEWS, Annie Proulx, 1993 A masterpiece. Straight in to
my (unwritten) list of Best 5 Novels Ever Read. Came to the end with
the greatest possible reluctance. Cast adrift, bereft, without it.
AFRICA
EXPLORED: Europeans in the Dark Continent 1769-1889. Christopher
Hibbert, 1982 Efficiently told, well summarised accounts, yet in
some detail, of the extraordinary people who made these dangerous
explorations and the equally extraordinary people they encountered.
THE
TRANSLATION OF THE BONES, Francesca Kay, 2011 A beautifully
written and very English, very Roman Catholic novel mesmerised by the
language of liturgy, set mostly in a barely-present London but
terrific on parent-child love.
JANE EYRE, Charlotte Bronte, 1847 A re-read after many
decades. Remarkable novel, rather better than the more currently
modish 'Wuthering Heights" by her sister and at least as racy in
its time; and in St.John Rivers she has created one of the most truly
loathsome characters in English fiction.
MY
NAME IS LUCY BARTON, Elizabeth Strout, 2016 A short and very
American novel that took me by surprise: I spent the first 75% or so
finding it thin and insubstantial (and the wide high praise for it
inexplicable) and then suddenly I found it very moving indeed.
THE
GREEN YEARS, A.J. Cronin, 1944 Having only read 'The Citadel'
(and that many years ago), and aware that Cronin has fallen heavily
from literary favour in recent decades, I loved and admired this
exceptionally well-written, compelling coming-of-age novel set in a
time-past Scottish town.
THE
BREAKER, Minette Walters, 1998 Whodunit that begins ok but
plummets horribly: dodgy, flat characterisation and toe-curlingly bad
dialogue, especially when her characters are being friendly or
flirtatious. It makes Agatha Christie seem literary.
THE
ACCIDENTAL, Ali Smith, 2006 Rapturous.
RED
BIRDS, Mohammed Hanif, 2018 Starts badly with an uncertain
narrative tone, achieves a clever and inspired central 150-page
portrait of the mad relationship between foreign wars and the refugee
camps & rehabilitation programmes those wars create... and then a
final 70-odd pages so exasperatingly pointless and silly you wonder
why Hanif didn't just delete them.
THE
VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX, Maggie O'Farrell, 2006 Moving novel
written with beautiful clarity and with a glorious main character
whose life is ruined but not quite crushed by her family and the
mores of the age in which she grew up.
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