Another Year of Reading - In Pictures

Following the popularity of last year’s post, here again is a pictorial record of my reading from the previous twelve months, to hopefully inspire and motivate your own reading choices. This time it comprises a photograph taken every two months, of the books completed in the preceding period.

Since I finished them, by definition all the included books have merit to my mind (I would have abandoned them otherwise), and I very highly recommend almost all of them. Indeed I have found the quality of writing, depth of insight, originality of ideas, and degree of empathy, inspiration and exhilaration provided by this set of titles frequently quite breathtaking. A number come with their own particular challenges of course, whether of style or content, but that is always part of the deal – if you the reader are not up for that then recognise you may be shutting off a key avenue for the development of your personal understanding, ideas and appreciation.

I only found three titles genuinely problematic, Joyce and Mieville were heavy going for considerable periods, the former also wearingly self-indulgent for spells, and Nabokov’s Lolita comes with a pile of deeply uncomfortable issues that individual readers will need to decide if they wish to engage with. The difficulty I had with the latter book is reflected in the fact that I had to put it aside for nine months while part way through, before returning to complete it last summer, and I recognise that I may have to steel myself for a re-read at some point to try and comprehend why it is held up by many (but certainly not all) to be a great novel – currently I don’t entirely see it.

Everyone comes to a particular book from their own unique situation, with consequent personal baggage and perspective, so draw what you will from the following titles. Many helpful reviews are available online, I particularly recommend those on the Guardian website at www.theguardian.com/books . In an act of gross oversimplification, and at the risk of being a little crass, I have also given each title a rating to roughly indicate what I personally got, that was positive, from each:

 📖 📖 📖 📖 📖          Truly Special/Exceptional
 📖 📖 📖 📖               Very Good and deeply rewarding
 📖 📖 📖                    Middling to Good, competent and worthwhile but not special
 📖 📖                         Poor/Disappointing, borderline whether I finished it
 📖                             Dreadful, by definition not finished and hence doesn't appear
 

January & February

 

Bleak House – Charles Dickens   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖

Autumn – Ali Smith   📖 📖 📖 📖

The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖

The Lonely City – Olivia Laing  📖 📖 📖 📖

Men Explain Things to Me – Rebecca Solnit   📖 📖 📖 📖

 

March & April

 

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce  📖 📖

To the River – Olivia Laing  📖 📖 📖 📖

Love of Country – Madeleine Bunting   📖 📖 📖

Golden Hill – Francis Spufford  📖 📖 📖 📖

Beloved – Toni Morrison  📖 📖 📖 📖 📖

Selected Poems – Emily Dickinson  📖 📖 📖 📖 📖

 

May & June

 

The Balloonist – MacDonald Harris   📖 📖 📖 📖 

Riddley Walker – Russell Hoban   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖

Lord of the Flies – William Golding   📖 📖 📖 📖

The Bricks that Built the Houses – Kate Tempest   📖 📖 📖 📖

Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy   📖 📖 📖 📖

Falling Awake - Alice Oswald   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖
ll account of his final racing season which still leaves him and his readers well in love with cycling and its wonderful culture.
And finally an antidote to all the worlds current frenetic madness, in a fine compilation of the beautiful writings of the under appreciated late Welsh naturalist William Condry. There are times when you need a book like this, found hiding in a shop in Aberystwyth.

July & August

David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet – Thomas Dilworth   📖 📖 📖 📖

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov   📖 📖 📖

My Cousin Rachel – Daphne Du Maurier   📖 📖 📖 📖

Empire of the Sun – J G Ballard   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖

No is Not Enough – Naomi Klein   📖 📖 📖 📖

The Unaccompanied – Simon Armitage   📖 📖 📖 📖

e just out!).
And Iain Sinclair manages to beautifully and gently expand your mind in his unique mysterious way as he eruditely ambles through his childhood haunts on the Gower, embracing creative connections at every turn (Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins, Ceri Richards...).
In stark contrast is Philip Dick's sixties sci-fi masterpiece, or should that simply be alternative history since it describes a post-war America run by the Japanese and Germans who had won. Either way it disorientatingly focuses on a few ordinary lives and small scale events, with an emerging considerable and odd emphasis on Chinese philosophy that develops an unsettling power and a climax strangely reminiscent of 2001. A very sixties example of the drug-fuelled creative process, which certainly stays with you afterwards and keeps you pondering...
 

September & October

 

The Rehearsal – Eleanor Catton   📖 📖 📖 📖

Clay – Melissa Harrison  📖 📖 📖 📖

A Life of Walter Scott – A N Wilson   📖 📖 📖

The Great War and Modern Memory – Paul Fussell   📖 📖 📖 📖

October – China Mieville   📖 📖 📖

In the Cairngorms – Nan Shepherd   📖 📖 📖

 

I then wended my way out of the city on the Thames, courtesy of Rachel Lichtenstein’s atmospheric homage to the Estuary of her books title and her home. A passionate and compelling capture of another marginal place, of land and water, made particularly real through the lives of many of its fascinating current occupants, often in conversation; a genuine treat. It also contains a number of superb quotes from Joseph Conrad that neatly reminded me of the book I had to read next.It is a special pleasure when a book you start in the hope it will be merely good, rapidly blows your mind. Magnificent is the only word for Conrad’s The Mirror of the Sea. It is rare in simply setting out to provide the reader the sense of being at sea in a sailing ship at the end of the nineteenth century, without any single underlying adventure tale or narrative. It’s the only non-fiction by Conrad and is underpinned by the experience and knowledge of twenty years at sea working his way up to captain, and the intellect and sheer writing prowess of one of the greatest authors of all time. Every sentence counts for something, and the wonder, fear, psychology, atmosphere and complexity of every aspect of sailing is covered along with an astonishing level of observation and insight of human nature and the human condition. A captivating read and true classic. There is also a beautiful chapter on the Thames estuary, making for the smoothest of transitions from Lichtenstein’s workNovember & December

 

Bending Adversity, Japan and the Art of Survival – David Pilling   📖 📖 📖 📖

Silence, in the Age of Noise – Erling Kagge   📖 📖 📖

Waverley – Walter Scott   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carre   📖 📖 📖 📖

La Belle Sauvage - Philip Pullman   📖 📖 📖 📖
 


See Also:  A Year of Reading - In Pictures (2016)
                 Favourite Listening of 2017

Books, the Booker, and the fiendish Folio Society

In this world of instant electronic communication and gratification, and inane knee-jerk tweeting, it’s good to remind yourself sometimes of how amazing and rewarding the simple book can be. As a source of knowledge, insight, new ideas and ways of thinking, and for general mind expansion (and yes, entertainment and escape) it’s hard to beat. In the fast-moving world it seems to be often regarded as slow and outmoded, which misses the point that things of real worth take time to be properly expressed and assimilated, and that sustained experiences can ultimately be more rewarding than the short-lived. The media recently reported that the average British home contains just 138 books, most of which are unread; why do these people limit themselves so? Especially given the implication that around half of homes have less than this number.

These thoughts came to the fore during my recent reading of Eleanor Cattons superb, Booker winning, novel The Luminaries which I would recommend to almost anyone. Don’t be put off by the erudite prize, it’s a real page turner of a murder, mystery, and ultimately romance, set in the New Zealand gold rush of the 1860s. Don’t be put off by its Dickensian length of 800 pages either, I got through this a lot quicker than some books a quarter the size. In fact it is remarkably reminiscent of Dickens, with much beautifully atmospheric description and building of characters and place, and set in the same era albeit on the opposite side of the globe – I think he might have approved. It’s also a book that doesn’t insult the intelligence of the reader, building a plot of initially bewildering colour, complexity and angles, dropping snippets of information for the reader to work on, before gradually resolving the whole into focus. I’ll need another read to more fully grasp it, but it’s an impressive and insightful work for someone the young side of thirty and bodes well for the future of literature.

That such a fine piece of work, that can entertain the reader for several weeks or more, is available so affordably is also surely something to cheer; good books are particularly accessible and democratic art forms.

Yet books are also, beyond the words, physical objects of potentially considerable allure - particularly in the hands of certain publishers. While I may like to believe the magic of a book is in the words alone, and hence can be extracted from the tattiest of cheap paperbacks, like many I am susceptible to the seduction of a beautiful edition. In fact I have recently had to admit the grubby truth that a beautiful edition can fundamentally affect my willingness to engage with certain books, and how avidly I read them! Enter the fiendish Folio Society who have produced stunning editions of major works for decades, and who, disturbingly, now seem to know my every weakness and predilection. I love them really of course, not just because of their jaw dropping  publications, but because by succumbing to their charms in a measured and selective way I have found myself contemplating and then devouring highly rewarding fiction that I seem in the last couple of years to have very belatedly developed an insatiable appetite for. For although the house is full of books fiction is very much in the minority and it seems to be time to put that right, so thank you Folio for making this happen.

The fruits of succumbing to temptation! Folio editions may be a guilty pleasure, but a substantial and long-lasting pleasure nonetheless.

It’s also good to note that the Folio Society is not all about the cover; as the Booker prize faltered a couple of years ago when it showed tendencies (since reversed I would suggest) towards putting populism above writing quality, the Folio stepped in smartly with a major new international literature prize which promised no such compromises. Nonetheless its first winner, announced earlier this month in George Saunders Tenth of December, looks a fascinating read; perhaps you really can have your quality cake and read it. Indeed maybe that’s the ultimate definition of a true classic.