Remove travel, eating out, drinking, the gym, concerts, cinema, exhibitions, projects outside the home and spending time with other human beings from the Equation of Life and you’re left with sub-par streaming services and the power of the written word to sate the grey matter. I read 47 books this year. This is too many. I love reading, but I do hope this won’t happen again. That said, here are the best ones (and a few I wished I’d never picked up).
The Favourites…
Christopher Isherwood - A Single Man
Comparing this to Mr Norris Changes Trains is like listening to Kill ‘Em All and then cueing up Master of Puppets - squint hard enough and you might just recognise that it’s the same author, but the works themselves are worlds apart. I always thought Isherwood’s writing was nothing special and that his reputation rested on having been in Berlin at the right time, but A Single Man has changed that. Painfully elegiac, it made me more terrified of ageing than I already am, but it also drove home once more that some transcendent works of art can only be made by someone staring mortality squarely in the face.
Graham Greene - The Quiet American
Hemingway (mostly) without the bluster and the posturing. Fowler and Pyle are scared and they say so; they don’t sit around drinking German beer and telling each other that they’re magnificent. Also, Greene manages to get his views across on the ‘peaceful’ capitalism of the US without ever making the reader feel like they’ve stumbled into an economics lecture.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Purple Hibiscus
Maybe I’m the last person in the world to read this book. I don’t care. I haven’t been moved by a book in the same way since I read To Kill A Mockingbird when I was 14. Everything about this novel is pitch perfect. I keep thinking about the scene where Ifeoma buys Coca-Cola for Kambili and Jaja the first time they visit, and they only realise afterwards how exceptional it was for her to do that.
Ursula Le Guin - The Dispossessed
I like to name-drop Le Guin into conversations because a. I’m insufferable and b. I read a couple of essays about her when I was doing my Gender Studies degree (see a.). Thing is, I’d never actually read a novel of hers until a friend flung this at me and told me it was ‘communist bullshit’ and that I would like it. And I did. These lines, in particular, are brilliant: “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
Jack Schaefer - Shane
AND THERE WAS SHANE. AND HE WAS GOOD. AND HIS NAME….WAS SHANE.
I’ve never read a novel whose characters announce the name of the protagonist so frequently and reverentially, but each time they did, it sent my heart aquickening and I thought to myself “God, I wish I was Shane, choppin’ up that tree stump but good”.
Jon McGregor - So Many Ways To Begin
The kind of beautiful-but-neglected novel that slips through the cracks and turns up on the shelf of an Oxfam in Nottingham quietly waiting to be bought by some bookworm who remembers that they once read If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. This is the Scottish working-class version of Stoner.
Michael Herr - Dispatches
Every tracer-round-speckled, New Journalism-inflected, marijuana-scented sentence is a treat. On par with The Things They Carried and Chickenhawk for understanding just how messed-up the Vietnam War was.
Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing
I’ve already gushed about this one enough online and offline, so I’ll just say: the chapter about H being made to work in the mines for 10 years after not being able to pay a fine of a few dollars is the stuff of pure nightmare. This is the kind of novel everybody should read.
Jonathan Ammon - Around the Solar System in 80 Days
Independent novels try hard (don’t I know it), but they often fall short, whether in the story or the dialogue or the writing style. This one – which I received after signing up to a list on Goodreads – does everything right (except for the title and cover). It’s witty, clever, well written and fast-paced, and it made a seven-day quarantine in Greece go marginally faster, for which I will forever be grateful to it.
…and the Unfavourites
Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life
No no no no no no. One of the most awful, trite, pointlessly cynical, lazy, verbose, meandering, shocktastic attempts at serious literature I’ve ever encountered. If I want art that explores human suffering, I’ll go ahead and watch some Pasolini or read American Psycho again. What I don’t need is an 800-page slab of torture porn. I cannot fathom how this is nearly universally beloved. It’s like Roger Ebert singling out Hostel and calling it the best movie since Raging Bull. Just awful.
Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall
I can see this is an intelligent book. The writing is beyond anything I could ever hope to achieve, and the amount of research that has gone into this series is admirable. But I couldn’t help shaking the feeling throughout that I was reading around the story rather than seeing it happen before my eyes. Maybe that’s the point. But I gotsta have my narrative front and centre.
Garth Risk Hallberg - City on Fire
I can’t believe I read this and A Little Life in the same year. As if 2020 weren’t miserable enough.
Margaret Atwood - The Testaments
I’m not sure why this book exists. It certainly doesn’t feel like a passion project or an urgent response to present-day issues. More like the most shameless of piggybacking cash grabs. And for The Testaments - which marries an intriguing novella with second-draft fan fiction - to win the Booker Prize….well, I think that sums up how the industry works in a nutshell.
And that’s it. Join me next year when I forget to pay the invoice for this website and it disappears.
