BOOKS READ IN 2016
This is the list of books I read last year, with brief comments:
SWANN’S WAY, Marcel Proust, 1913 heavy going; acute; far too wordy; uniqueTHE CORRECTIONS, Jonathan Franzen, 2001 intelligent, funny, dark, cheering, depressing, fresh, humaneBOB DYLAN DREAM: My Life With Bob, Roy Kelly, 2015touching, beautiful, intelligent memoir of an ordinary life roughly contemporary with mine & Dylan’sEMOTIONALLY WEIRD, Kate Atkinson, 2000 sometimes very funny, sometimes too silly (improbability not counteracted by enough comic success), but the main character is likeable & it’s the only postmodern novel I’ve read that works, so that it ends up clever rather than irritatingly clever-cleverVANITY FAIR:A Novel Without a Hero, William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847-8fascinating in its mix of modernity - pioneering C19 realism & an anti-heroine yet using C18 literary devices (which have a touch of postmodernism, we’d feel now); a sweeping satire on money, the class system and snobbery (a word he coined)... BUT! he’s not as deep or heartfelt as Dickens and his characters are mostly less vividDOWNHILL ALL THE WAY, Leonard Woolf, 1967 upper/upper-middle class man of letters and politics, Virginia’s husband, writing this in his 80s; clear and conscientious prose from a very fair-minded man acutely aware of both others’ even greater privilege and the great majority’s lack of it; a real socialist with servantsFUGITIVE PIECES, Anne Michaels, 1997 irksomely opaque start but opens into one of the most articulately heartfelt, intelligent, beautiful & distinctive of booksTHE THUNDERBOLT KID, The Life & Times of, Bill Bryson, 2003auto-Bryson with clunky research padding out a very superficial account of his upbringingTHE LIE, Helen Dunmore, 2014 moving andvivid on rural Cornwall life in 1920 & on the horrors of WWI trench warfare and its afterlife in the narrator’s mind; an intelligent novel yet comfortingly English & traditionalTHE INVENTION OF WINGS, Sue Monk Kidd, 2014 potboiler with a heart, but with none of the originality of "The Secret Life of Bees"FLUSH, Virginia Woolf, 1933 rather good: her language is very alive and without showinessSLANG OF HANDS, Bernhard Widder, 2009 Austrian poems about northern UK; okJOY IN THE MORNING, Betty Smith, 1963 sister of the more famous “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn”; had to give up on it. Too cute, sprightly, implausible & 1950s-sordid: all virginity & sweet-little-woman & manly cigarettes & plucky struggleTHE JOKE, Milan Kundera, 1967 [1992 translation] gloom-inducing portrait of mid-C20 Czechoslovakia & by extension general Eastern European gloom; it may linger, but it was sententious, with terrible attitudes to women, and mostly a pain in the arse to readTHE MOONSTONE, Wilkie Collins, 1868 seldom resorts to dodgy melodrama and overall a work of near-genius; pioneering detective novel, and for the first half, very funny thanks to a captivating narrator figure, old servant BetteredgeNOBODY MOVE, Denis Johnson, 2009 an indifferent contemporary Chandler, or perhaps a pale imitation of Cormac McCarthyANGEL, Elizabeth Taylor, 1957 quiet, superior page-turner about the power of vanity & self-deception, spanning a lifetime; it deepens into pathos as it goesTHE MILL ON THE FLOSS, George Eliot, 1860 tremendous, and so substantial. Early on, its pastorality (if that’s a word) strongly prefigures Hardy; but Maggie Tulliver the child and Maggie the adult seem too much like different people, which is its real flawTO THE LIGHTHOUSE, Virginia Woolf, 1927 lapidary,powerfulmodernism yet with strongly drawn characters and their vivid interaction (with the Chapter17 dinner party as fine as any I know in literature); lively, intensive prose, great clarity and wit. A triumphKNOTS AND CROSSES, Ian Rankin, 1987 first Rebus novel; surprisingly badly written; every character a cliché with a quirk; less than thrilling story; pallid suspenseEARTH, Emile Zola, 1887 good C19 solidity, vivid characters & uncompromising portrait of wretched French peasant life, in which degradation cheats just desserts________
SWANN’S WAY, Marcel Proust, 1913 heavy going; acute; far too wordy; uniqueTHE CORRECTIONS, Jonathan Franzen, 2001 intelligent, funny, dark, cheering, depressing, fresh, humaneBOB DYLAN DREAM: My Life With Bob, Roy Kelly, 2015touching, beautiful, intelligent memoir of an ordinary life roughly contemporary with mine & Dylan’sEMOTIONALLY WEIRD, Kate Atkinson, 2000 sometimes very funny, sometimes too silly (improbability not counteracted by enough comic success), but the main character is likeable & it’s the only postmodern novel I’ve read that works, so that it ends up clever rather than irritatingly clever-cleverVANITY FAIR:A Novel Without a Hero, William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847-8fascinating in its mix of modernity - pioneering C19 realism & an anti-heroine yet using C18 literary devices (which have a touch of postmodernism, we’d feel now); a sweeping satire on money, the class system and snobbery (a word he coined)... BUT! he’s not as deep or heartfelt as Dickens and his characters are mostly less vividDOWNHILL ALL THE WAY, Leonard Woolf, 1967 upper/upper-middle class man of letters and politics, Virginia’s husband, writing this in his 80s; clear and conscientious prose from a very fair-minded man acutely aware of both others’ even greater privilege and the great majority’s lack of it; a real socialist with servantsFUGITIVE PIECES, Anne Michaels, 1997 irksomely opaque start but opens into one of the most articulately heartfelt, intelligent, beautiful & distinctive of booksTHE THUNDERBOLT KID, The Life & Times of, Bill Bryson, 2003auto-Bryson with clunky research padding out a very superficial account of his upbringingTHE LIE, Helen Dunmore, 2014 moving andvivid on rural Cornwall life in 1920 & on the horrors of WWI trench warfare and its afterlife in the narrator’s mind; an intelligent novel yet comfortingly English & traditionalTHE INVENTION OF WINGS, Sue Monk Kidd, 2014 potboiler with a heart, but with none of the originality of "The Secret Life of Bees"FLUSH, Virginia Woolf, 1933 rather good: her language is very alive and without showinessSLANG OF HANDS, Bernhard Widder, 2009 Austrian poems about northern UK; okJOY IN THE MORNING, Betty Smith, 1963 sister of the more famous “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn”; had to give up on it. Too cute, sprightly, implausible & 1950s-sordid: all virginity & sweet-little-woman & manly cigarettes & plucky struggleTHE JOKE, Milan Kundera, 1967 [1992 translation] gloom-inducing portrait of mid-C20 Czechoslovakia & by extension general Eastern European gloom; it may linger, but it was sententious, with terrible attitudes to women, and mostly a pain in the arse to readTHE MOONSTONE, Wilkie Collins, 1868 seldom resorts to dodgy melodrama and overall a work of near-genius; pioneering detective novel, and for the first half, very funny thanks to a captivating narrator figure, old servant BetteredgeNOBODY MOVE, Denis Johnson, 2009 an indifferent contemporary Chandler, or perhaps a pale imitation of Cormac McCarthyANGEL, Elizabeth Taylor, 1957 quiet, superior page-turner about the power of vanity & self-deception, spanning a lifetime; it deepens into pathos as it goesTHE MILL ON THE FLOSS, George Eliot, 1860 tremendous, and so substantial. Early on, its pastorality (if that’s a word) strongly prefigures Hardy; but Maggie Tulliver the child and Maggie the adult seem too much like different people, which is its real flawTO THE LIGHTHOUSE, Virginia Woolf, 1927 lapidary,powerfulmodernism yet with strongly drawn characters and their vivid interaction (with the Chapter17 dinner party as fine as any I know in literature); lively, intensive prose, great clarity and wit. A triumphKNOTS AND CROSSES, Ian Rankin, 1987 first Rebus novel; surprisingly badly written; every character a cliché with a quirk; less than thrilling story; pallid suspenseEARTH, Emile Zola, 1887 good C19 solidity, vivid characters & uncompromising portrait of wretched French peasant life, in which degradation cheats just desserts________
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