2019 Reading Choices & Ratings

Once again here for your consideration are my past year's reading choices, plus simple ratings to indicate broadly what I personally got from each book (rather than what others may have thought).

An (R) next to a title denotes a re-reading.

📖 📖 📖 📖 📖  Truly Special, exceptional.
📖 📖 📖 📖       Very Good and deeply rewarding.
📖 📖 📖             Middling to Good, competent and worthwhile but not special.
📖 📖                   Poor and disappointing.
📖                         Dreadful.
+                            Plus half a rating.

January

Everything Under - Daisy Johnson   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Simon Armitage & Clive Hicks-Jenkins   📖 📖 📖 📖
On the Marshes - Carol Donaldson   📖 📖 📖 + 

February

The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad   📖 📖 📖 📖

Three Poems - Hannah Sullivan   📖 📖 📖 📖 
Battleship Yamato - Jan Morris   📖 📖 📖 +

March

Seven Gothic Tales - Isak Dinesen   📖 📖 📖 📖

Art Objects - Jeanette Winterson   📖 📖 📖 📖 +
A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖

April

Orlando - Virginia Woolf (R)   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖

Lud-in-the-Mist - Hope Mirrlees   📖 📖 📖 +
Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom - Sylvia Plath   📖 📖 📖 +

May

Grayson Perry - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl - Wendy Jones   📖 📖 📖 +

Conundrum - Jan Morris   📖 📖 📖 📖
Spring - Ali Smith   📖 📖 📖 📖
Among the Bohemians - Virginia Nicholson   📖 📖 📖 📖

June

All The Lives We Ever Lived - Katharine Smyth   📖 📖 📖 📖 +

Hour of the Star - Clarice Lispector   📖 📖 📖 📖
Underland - Robert Macfarlane   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖 

July

Hidden Nature - Alys Fowler   📖 📖 📖 📖+

Conversations With Friends - Sally Rooney   📖 📖 📖 +
Unsheltered - Barabara Kingsolver   📖 📖 📖 📖

August

Tokyo Ueno Station - Yu Miri   📖 📖 📖 📖

Horizon - Barry Lopez   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖  

September

To See Clearly, Why Ruskin Matters - Suzanne Fagence Cooper   📖 📖 📖 +

Light - M.John Harrison   📖 📖 📖 📖 + 
The Mother of All Questions - Rebecca Solnit   📖 📖 📖 +
Europa - Sean O'Brien  📖 📖 📖 📖 +

October

The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson   📖 📖 📖 📖 +

Tomorrow Will be Different - Sarah McBride   📖 📖 📖 📖 +
The Education of an Idealist - Samantha Power   📖 📖 📖 📖
Surfacing - Kathleen Jamie  📖 📖 📖 +

November

The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin   📖 📖 📖 📖

A Year Without A Name - Cyrus Grace Dunham  📖 📖 📖 📖 +
Where There's A Will - Emily Chappell   📖 📖 📖 📖
What Time Is It? - John Berger & Selcuk Demirel   📖 📖 📖 📖

December

Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang   📖 📖 📖 📖

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? - Jeanette Winterson   📖 📖 📖 📖 +
Four Quartets - T.S. Eliot   📖 📖 📖 📖 

Happy New Year's Reading

See also: 2018 Reading Choices & Ratings

2018 Reading Choices & Ratings

Choosing what to read can be almost as enjoyable as subsequently reading your selection. Hence I spend a fair bit of time reading book reviews, which in turn hopefully ensures my selection (in which I choose to invest money and time) is as rewarding as I hope. The following are the selections I made throughout 2018, accompanied by an admittedly simplistic rating for each, to indicate to what extent my hopes for each volume were fulfilled.

The rating system, based purely on what I personally got from each book rather than what others may think, is:

📖 📖 📖 📖 📖  Truly Special, exceptional.
📖 📖 📖 📖       Very Good and deeply rewarding.
📖 📖 📖           Middling to Good, competent and worthwhile but not special.
📖 📖                Poor and disappointing.
📖                    Dreadful.

An (R) next to a title denotes a re-reading of a book.


January

The Illustrated Letters of Virginia Woolf - Frances Spalding (editor)   📖 📖 📖 📖
The Dawn Watch, Joseph Conrad in a Global World - Maya Jasanoff   📖 📖 📖 📖
Winter - Ali Smith   📖 📖 📖 📖

February

The Descent of Man - Grayson Perry   📖 📖 📖
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K Le Guin   📖 📖 📖 📖
The Ice Palace - Tarjei Vesaas   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖

Every single page of The Ice Palace fizzes with an extraordinary disturbing electricity - an astonishing read!

March

The Last London - Iain Sinclair   📖 📖 📖 📖
Carpe Diem Regained - Roman Krznaric   📖 📖 📖   (great cover though!)
Wind Resistance - Karine Polwart   📖 📖 📖 📖

April

The Waves - Virginia Woolf   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖
The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen (R)   📖 📖 📖 📖

The Waves just reads like the ultimate, it's not easy to discern all the art on a first read but it is subtly phenomenal.

May

Eagle Country - Sean Lysaght    📖 📖 📖
Painter to the King - Amy Sackville    📖 📖 📖 📖

June

The Rider - Tim Krabbe    📖 📖 📖 📖
Modern Nature - Derek Jarman    📖 📖 📖 📖
The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West    📖 📖 📖

July

The Beautiful Summer - Cesare Pavese  📖 📖 📖 
The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead    📖 📖 📖 📖
Anquetil Alone - Paul Fournel    📖 📖 📖

August

Crudo - Olivia Laing    📖 📖 📖 📖
The Blue Flower - Penelope Fitzgerald    📖 📖 📖
First Light - Geoffrey Wellum    📖 📖 📖 📖
All Among the Barley - Melissa Harrison    📖 📖 📖 📖

September

Autumn - Melissa Harrison (editor)    📖 📖 📖
Normal People - Sally Rooney    📖 📖 📖 📖
Joss - Keith Richardson    📖 📖 📖

October

Lost Japan - Alex Kerr    📖 📖 📖 📖
Rosewater - Tade Thompson    📖 📖 📖
An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro    📖 📖 📖 📖
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K Dick    📖 📖 📖 📖 📖

Blade Runner is great film and I read Dick's book just to understand the source material better. I was totally unprepared for a tremendous book even greater than the film!

November

The Middle Parts of Fortune - Frederic Manning   📖 📖 📖 📖
Selected Poems - Wilfred Owen (with original engravings by Neil Bousfield)   📖 📖 📖 📖 📖

The Folio Society edition of Owen's poetry, released on the centenary of his death one week before the Armistice, is a complete work of art. The uncompromising poetry, the astonishing illustrations and the evocative binding combine three artist's work powerfully - a kind of publishing perfection.

December

Herma - MacDonald Harris   📖 📖 📖 📖
The Western Wind - Samantha Harvey   📖 📖 📖 📖
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner & Three Other Poems - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (with original engravings by Harry Brockway)  📖 📖 📖 📖

Here's to continued great reading in 2019.

See also: Another Year of Reading - In Pictures

Favourite Listening of 2017

Another year and another small set of albums have naturally risen to the top of the pile, identifying themselves as the very best, to me, of those encountered in 2017. I note with interest that all voices in this selection are female, not a conscious choice but perhaps Freud could tell me a reason for it; in the year of grotesque behaviour from Weinstein, Trump and too many males elsewhere it seems appropriate, and where the balance of expressed humanity is right now.


Till April is Dead, A Garland of May – Lisa Knapp (England)


A May-themed album may seem a somewhat niche notion but in the capable hands of Lisa Knapp, who has yet to put a foot wrong in an impeccable musical progression, it is an inspired match to her history and talents. Rooted in the weird and wonderful English folk traditions of May time it is constantly yet subtly and subversively inventive, highly atmospheric, and by turns stirring, elegant and beautiful – as befits the season. Listened to on a soggy January day, finally past the shortest day, it keeps the promise of longer warmer days in morale boosting sight; played loudly and repeatedly on the balmy first of May last year it was an absolute joy.


Snowpoet – Snowpoet (England)
 

Gently jazzy, with a fascinating range of musical textures and pace changes, coupled with intriguing words coming and going that demand repeated attentive listening… It all adds up to something alarmingly addictive and pleasing with some truly magical moments, I can neither leave it alone nor fully explain it! It’s a bit like spending forty fascinating minutes in that disorientating no-mans-land between sleep and awake where it’s hard to fully grasp anything; wonderfully understated yet penetrating and persistent. Snowpoet are fronted by the London-based writing duo of Lauren Kinsella and Chris Hyson, with Lauren performing all the vocals, while versatile musician Chris is augmented by a number of others whose collective creativity and self-restraint are to be (quietly) applauded. This is their debut album from 2016 with a second due out in just a few weeks, I intend to be first in the queue.

(Oh and they are playing a double bill with the incomparable Olivia Chaney in May, just a 20 minute drive away in a hall with fabulous acoustics; this in a week I shall be away so can only admire the perfection of my disappointment – go for me if you can)


Agiorgitiko – Stathis Koukoularis & Martha Mavroidi (Greece)
 

Agiorgitiko is an adaptable red grape variety grown particularly in Greece, for a range of wine production, and like it this album could be considered a staple fruit of the nation. Legendary violinist Stathis Koukoularis is on blistering form alongside soaring young vocalist and lutist Martha Mavroidi as they provide definitive performances of a range of traditional music and song from the Aegean and Asia Minor, along with the single fine self-composed title track. There are no gimmicks or concessions to wider populism, this is unashamedly uncompromised traditional, utterly beautiful, music from start to finish. Savour it in a world of artifice.


Viena – Varttina (Finland)
 

Female Finnish band Varttina have surely been around forever, after all I remember buying their breakthrough album Oi Dai back in 1991 so they must be really quite old (like me) now, right? Not so it seems, unlike me they appear to have access to Dr Who like regeneration powers, with frequent personnel changes meaning they have managed to sustain if not enhance their trademark youthfulness and energy. This was brought home emphatically at a live performance locally just before Christmas, fittingly in the week of the centenary of Finnish independence, when the three current members, arriving late after traumatic travel problems and with no supporting musicians, simply blew away a full house. It’s easy to be beguiled by the traditional costumes and humour (almost slapstick at times) Varttina bring to their live performance which disguise apparently effortless yet formidable vocal strength and skill in perfect synchronisation, coupled with impressive musicianship on kantele and accordion. Prior to independence Finland was part of Russia and those roots are a key inspiration musically, witness this tremendous new album (one of their absolute best, which is saying something given the number they have produced down the years) which has been inspired by visits to the lingering traditional villages and customs of the Viena Karelia (or White Karelia) region on the Russian side of the border. Inventively based on traditional words and melodies Viena provides a wonderful mix of powerful and delicate singing, often moving, and unique to this part of world – and well worth embracing.


A Pocket of Wind Resistance – Karine Polwart with Pippa Murphy (Scotland)
 

Having listened to this a number of times I indulge myself with the fanciful thought that it was released in late November, just too late to be included in any music publications “best of the year“ considerations (and probably too early to be remembered next time round), as an act of charitable consideration for other contenders. So yes, it’s a bit special. How special? Respected author Robert Macfarlane when asked for his best books of 2017 by the Guardian newspaper demonstrated his alertness by majoring on a single volume, the 64 page printed version of essentially the words to this album. Yet both of these productions are subsequent to their profound source, the 2016 Edinburgh Festival theatre production Wind Resistance, a theatre debut for renowned Scottish musician and ex-social worker Karine Polwart. All three incarnations of the work individually and exquisitely capture the natural cycle of Scottish rural life both human and animal, with stunning evocations of the natural world, notably through the migration of geese, and human love, pregnancy and childbirth, the hardships of winter, and no holds barred tragedy. A powerful and imaginative combination of music (composer Pippa Murphy deserves significant credit), natural sounds, song and spoken word including Burns poetry delivers a profound story that goes way beyond a normal musical production. Formidable, utterly humane, and be warned - there may be tears before the end.



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

 

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

Favourite Listening of 2016

Integrity, not a word you hear too much just now in these messed-up times, but it is the one that best unites the music I’ve reached for most in 2016, often for my own sanity. Though never “easy listening” the following provided me with compelling listening; individually impressively creative and often demonstrating the degree of social and environmental conscience and sheer humanity we currently seem so short of…

Maarja Nuut: Une Meeles, In The Hold Of A Dream (Estonia)

 

A lazy person might describe young Nuut as the Bjork of Eastern Europe, since her highly individual fiddle playing and singing certainly reminds of the Icelander’s quirky style. But she is her own unique uncompromising composer, musician and voice, using traditional elements but also pushing things to their limits and subtly using loops and other augmentation to deliver widely varying, sometimes challenging, but always deeply satisfying pieces.

Julie Murphy: Every Bird That Flies (Wales)

 

The latest solo album from Julie Murphy, lodged in deepest Wales, is as immaculate and beautifully contemplative as all its predecessors; just her and a piano with the subtlest of occasional extra accompaniment. The musical and vocal delivery (all in English here as opposed to the Welsh she often uses with band Fernhill) is stripped back to only what is absolutely needed, every word and note counts, and the entirety feels like the most quietly insightful of poetry. Inclusion of lines from Emily Dickinson in one piece is simply at one with the whole. Julie also believes in keeping things local and comprehensively shuns the corporate approach; the album is only available from her directly via bandcamp, is adorned by a photo of one of her own elegant sculptures, and she was kind enough to sign my own copy when asked.

Nyn: Kristi Stassinopoulou & Stathis Kalyviotis (Greece)

 

Nyn means Now, and this stirring album pulls no punches in capturing the current desperate state of affairs in Greece in pulsating manner. Kristi and Stathis make extensive use of both synthesisers and traditional instruments and have a track record of making compelling music that arguably reaches a new height here. Although sung in Greek the entire lyrics and some additional context on Greece’s dire plight are included in English in a booklet that is essential powerful reading.

Vesevo: Vesevo (Italy)

 

The psychology of living right next to a large active volcano is obviously tricky, but something Neopolitans seem to have managed down the years with a certain panache. This seems to infuse local music and song, along with strong socialist principles that continue to be driven by the parlous state of parts of the city and the disadvantaged of Naples. Back in 2000 the superb but fleeting outfit Spaccanapoli produced the landmark album Lost Souls that seemed to come from nowhere and capture the essence of the city with a possibly never-to-be-bettered perfection. Now, two musicians from that band combine with a third into the new Vesevo (Vesuvius), which stunningly showcases the music of Calabria, to the south of the city. With hand drums, fiddle, keyboards, guitar and emotional soaring vocals, it’s evocative, addictive and rather intoxicating.

Geomungo Factory: Imago (South Korea)

 

Let’s see now, this cost a cool £22, took two and half months to arrive from South Korea, and plays for a mere 30 minutes, was it really worth it? The geomungo is a zither-like traditional Korean stringed instrument with a rather percussive sound, which seems to lend itself to vigorous and innovative playing, witness a bunch of young ground-breaking South Korean bands currently taking it to very new places. Geomungo Factory are prominent amongst these, and made a big impact with their first album Metamorphosis (currently virtually unobtainable in the west) and a brief visit to London in 2013. Fortunately a second album has now appeared that I was able to get via the essential Far Side website (www.farsidemusic.com gateway to all musical things Far Eastern), and am delighted to report it is superb. There’s some mad, bad composition and playing here that absolutely stops you in your tracks! Given Metamorphosis was also apparently short it does however seem a missed opportunity that they didn’t release the two albums on one CD at a sensible price, then they really would have a world beater. Note there are other ground-breaking geomungo bands and albums out there, I also have the longer and more affordable Mask Dance by outfit Black String (smartly released in Europe via a German label) which although superbly deranged still doesn’t quite hit the dizzy heights of Imago for me.

Kate Tempest: Let Them Eat Chaos (England)

 

Has anyone got a more appropriate surname right now than Kate? She’s not a singer, she’s not a musician, but some refer to her as a performance poet (though she’s also a prose author). On this album though, she’s simply and appropriately a force of nature. Let Them Eat Chaos is a book length poem that is a stunning read in published form, describing the variously messed up lives of seven Londoners as a vehicle for nailing where our society is right now, before delivering an environmental coup de grace that nature is all too likely to do for real. But the piece is designed to be read aloud and this album is that reading (and rapping), to often powerfully effective musical accompaniment. The result is astonishing and vital; it tells us all exactly where we are right now and what we need to understand before we can even begin to get out of the huge hole we’ve dug for ourselves. This is not background music, this is the main event that demands you pay attention, and the most essential listen of the last year, and today.

See also: Favourite Listening of 2015
                A Year of Reading - In Pictures