The best books I've read this year (none of which are from 2019)

According to my best pal Goodreads, I read 33 books this year. I think that may quite possibly be more than at any time since I was a cheeky young scally checking out my local mobile library in between roaming the army estate that I called home. Some of these books were an intense disappointment, either because they had been recommended to me with no small amount of praise, or because I’d been looking forward to diving into some serious literature but instead found clumsy writing, unsympathetic characters, contrived plotting, bloated chapters or themes that left me cold. Let’s name names (why not?): Wanderers by Chuck Wendig, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowrie, The Night Manager by John Le Carré, The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. I’m not saying I thought these novels were worthless; they just weren’t for me (though I think I’ll give Lowrie another go in 20 years when I’m living in my post-food-war bunker).

So what about the best books? I’ve whittled it down to six. These are the ones that left me spellbound, excited, melancholy, fearful. These are books that remind me why I bother to sit down at my computer every day despite nobody having asked me to, that make me want to keep grafting and crafting and deleting and sculpting in the hope that one day I might write something that leaves an impression on somebody in the same way these books have on me.

William Gibson - Neuromancer

You know when you crack open a new novel and you read the first page and you can feel the electricity in every word? When you know this is going to be like something you’ve never read before? When the world-building is so effortless and economical that you could have been living there your whole life already?

That’s Neuromancer for me. Not since Last Exit to Brooklyn have I read a novel so refreshing, so competent, so singular that it rips up everything I thought I knew about writing and encourages me to start again. This is a novel you definitely have to pay attention to - if you let your mind wander while reading, you’ll be hopelessly lost within a couple of paragraphs. Ditto leaving it alone for a few days - once you’re out, it’s so dense that it can be difficult to pick up that red thread again. It’s a challenge to read, but not in the way that the consul’s stream-of-consciousness recollections are in Under the Volcano or Pynchon’s 100 pages of word death are in Gravity’s Rainbow. No, it’s like a good puzzle: initially bewildering, but the more you look and think, the more it begins to take shape, the more blanks you can fill in and the more of a sense of achievement you get when you finish it.

When I was done, I was disappointed only because it was over. This is the first Gibson novel I’ve read, but it won’t be the last.

David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

A friend lent this to me two years ago. I ended up not reading it because it was too large to take anywhere with me, and because I thought it was going to be some kind of homage to Patrick O’Brian. Wrong. This is a novel for linguists: a narrative written in English about a Dutch protagonist, Jacob, plying his trade in 19th-century Japan. Instead of restricting himself to just one language, Mitchell juggles three, and he does it so deftly that it never comes across as clunky or confusing when switching perspectives. It even manages to convey the complexities of register that are inherent to Japanese without once explaining them outright. Added to that is a strange, twisting story that is more like three novellas stitched together with a bit of connective tissue and you have a novel that - once I settled into it - left me in awe.

Rachel Carson - Silent Spring

This book was written nearly SIXTY years ago as a warning about the catastrophic destruction caused by synthetic pesticides, and we’re still using them in record quantities today. Nobody will ever, ever be able to say “but we didn’t know” when the day of reckoning comes (if that ever actually happens; more likely things will keep getting worse, the quality of life will fall massively, and the human population will shrink beyond all expectation, yet the ones remaining will still be kidding themselves that things are fine and that it had to be like this.) This is not an enjoyable read, nor does it - looking at the way things are now - offer grounds for optimism, but it is a necessary one for anybody seeking to understand the reasons behind the climate crisis. Still, the thing that perhaps saddens me most about Silent Spring is that when it was released, many scientists, politicians and industry figures dismissed it as hysterical nonsense purely because it was written by a woman. The arrogance of these men to 1. ignore such a well-presented, meticulously researched tome based on flawed ideas of biological superiority and 2. continue to allow the use of these pesticides despite mountains of evidence pointing to their ability to wipe out animal species and cause cancer in human beings is simply astounding.

Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

By now you may be thinking: Are there going to be any books that aren’t super famous on this list? The answer to that is: no. And here’s the reason why: Between the ages of 15 and 22, I read very few books that weren’t written by Bernard Cornwell, Conn Iggulden, Mario Puzo or Valerio Massimo Manfredi, or that didn’t belong to the Star Wars expanded universe. Ever since then - ten long years on your trail - I feel like I’ve been catching up. And that means genius literature like The God of Small Things have slipped through the cracks up to now. Still, in some ways I’m glad I waited this long before tackling this novel. It’s simultaneously elusive and revealing, ethereal and super grounded in a way that I don’t think I perhaps would have appreciated if I’d read it at a younger age. Roy is somebody who understands how to use words and bend narratives at a level that I will never reach, and somehow I love that and don’t mind - to be this creative, this assured, this GOOD must be a terrible burden.

The trip to the cinema is probably one of the most heartbreaking and brilliant pieces of writing I’ve ever read.

Toni Morrison - Beloved

I spoke to two other people who read Beloved this year and they didn’t like it at all. Too strange, too magical, too fractured. My thought was: isn’t that the point of the novel? Isn’t the point that the psychological effects of slavery are so beyond the typical reader that this is how it has to be conceived for us to gain an inkling of what such an existence would have been like? At least, it is for me. What’s interesting, too, is that Beloved has the same Gothic/pure horror vibe as Victorian novels like The Turn of the Screw and Dracula, except it’s far more terrifying than either because of its basis in an awful reality.

James Baldwin - Giovanni’s Room

Ah, Giovanni, you tempestuous, destructive soul. There are few novels that I’ve read that so perfectly capture what it means to be a young, impecunious, sexually active, frustrated and confused man who thinks the world is turning just for him and who interprets every gesture as something romantic and grand and overwhelming and important, all at once. It just fizzes with post-adolescent energy. I will never not love a book that consists of 1/4 moody dudes drinking red wine, 1/4 Beat Generation banality, 1/4 exotic locales and 1/4 sex. I can even forgive it for its overuse of French. Overall, I don’t think it’s as strong as Another Country (though that novel still bothers me regarding the switch of focus from Rufus to Vivaldo), but it was definitely a joy to read - in a tent on a mountain in the middle of Oman.

Bonus: Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I finally read this after so, so many years of looking at it and skirting around it for fear of not finding it hilarious and thus pissing off half of my circle of friends. But it was hilarious. Also, when I sent a photo of the cover to my friend, she became slightly peeved that it was the US edition, which was compounded by me saying that I found it weird they had changed Arthur Dent to Lance Starsman and that in the US version he drank root beer instead of tea. It took her several minutes to realise I was joking. These rabid fans, eh.

not quite the Café de Flore, but close enough.

Why I don’t use italics to denote foreign words

Brexit, white supremacists in the White House, far right rumblings across Europe, ethno-nationalism. It feels as though humanity is on a knife edge at the moment. We’re standing there in the snow, clinging to the mountain ridge, hoping our footing is strong enough to keep us where we are. But a katabatic wind is buffeting us, our fingers and toes are numb and we don’t know which direction to go in. Wouldn’t it just be simpler to slip over the edge and slide down the mountain into oblivion? To accept that we’re not going to get out of this situation, to give up, to bow our heads to the forces trying to knock us off our perch and let them do it?

Well, no. Of course not.

Any movement or group that spreads hate and discord relies on its ability to create a fear of the Other. Othering individuals, communities and cultures is fundamentally based on the assumption that that which is being othered represents a risk to our way of life, to what we know and understand about our individual or collective sense of Self. Still, these groups aren’t the only ones doing it. In fact, alienation comes quite effortlessly to most of us, even if it isn’t our intention. It happens in our conversations, in the risqué jokes we make among friends and family, in our snap judgements of people on the street, in the influential media we consume, at home and work, in the condescending interactions we have on holiday. It can be conscious or unconscious. The latter is perhaps more damaging than the former—if you don’t know you are othering someone, how can you stop it?

When a foreign word is highlighted in italics—i.e. one that is not part of the language in which the text is being written—it becomes Other. Syntactically, it still belongs to the sentence; semantically, it has been set apart, singled out, left to fend for itself. It has the same effect as placing a big red arrow underneath it. When it has been italicised, your eyes can’t help but stumble over the word. They see it, they stop, they look at it again. They are taken out of the reading experience to consider that single word, to see it as something alien. And then they dive back into the safe waters of the familiar, eyes gliding over the page, devouring the words that haven’t been italicised. When the next italicised word appears, the sense of Other is compounded. They can see it, further down the page, in the next sentence, on the same line. They know it is alien. Perhaps this time they don’t stop to mull it over. They jump over it as though it is an obstacle in the road.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, the notion of Us vs. Them crystallises, becomes the standard. Even if the aim is to highlight the uniqueness of the word, to celebrate it, to signpost it so that the reader won’t trip over it, the result is still one of Entfremdung. If the word is not the same, then it does not belong. If it does not belong, it is not to be wholeheartedly trusted. And if the word cannot be trusted, then the people to whom the word belongs and the culture surrounding it cannot be trusted either.

In The Penguin Modern Classics edition of Burmese Days by George Orwell, there is a brief, but interesting explanation on the use of italics in the novel:

“Almost fifty words have been italicised at every appearance. One effect is that Orwell’s story is presented as he would wish: it is the British who are aliens in this society and the language in which the story must be told—English—is itself alien to the host people.”

Here’s an example:

“The old butler was hurrying from the servants’ quarters, thrusting his pagri on his head as he came, and a troop of twittering chokras after him.

     ‘Earthquake, sir, earthquake!’ he bubbled eagerly.

     ‘I should damn well think it was an earthquake,’ said Mr Lackersteen as he lowered himself cautiously into a chair. ‘Here, get some drinks, butler. By God, I could do with a nip of something after that.’”

The butler is immediately othered through the italicised use of the term ‘pagri’. Instead of adding the suffix ‘headdress’ or receiving an explanation (‘pagri, a turban typically worn by Indian males’, for example), we understand only that the butler has thrust something strange on his head, making him strange by association. This, coupled by the fact that he has no given name other than butler (despite being an ‘old’ butler who has probably been at the clubhouse for a long time) and ‘bubbles’ rather than speaks like Mr Lackersteen, establishes him as an entity that has no real place within the rarified clubhouse atmosphere. In addition, the butler is followed by ‘a troop of twittering chokras’. On first read, it seems as though the chokras are an animal of some kind, perhaps birds (twittering) or monkeys (troop). In actual fact, they are boys employed as servants for the white men at the clubhouse. All we understand, however, is that they are Other.

This is exactly the problem and the power that lies with using italics. It causes immediate alienation, creates a dividing line between host and hosted (or perhaps invaders and invaded). And while Orwell applied this technique to lay bare the hatred, hypocrisy and intolerance surrounding British colonial rule, many other works have no such ambition to fall back on.

Giovanni’s Room is a wonderful, complex novel, a natural successor to the Isherwood novels of the 1930s and a gateway to the gay literature of the 1960s and 1970s. One thing Baldwin does consistently throughout the novel, however, is to mark French words in italics almost to the point of parody. For example:

“He was sitting bundled up in his greatcoat, drinking a vin chaud.”

 And:

“‘I’ll see you later. A tout à l’heure.’”

And: 

“It was observable, through open windows on the quais and sidestreets, that hoteliers had called in painters to paint the rooms.”

 In the three examples above, the italics serve only to keep reminding the reader that the novel is set in France, France, France. There is no social commentary being made here, no attempt to force the reader to contemplate the horrors of colonialism or forced occupation. Baldwin’s intention may have been to put the reader in the shoes of David, the US protagonist, as he seeks to unpick the existential knots binding him to the streets of Paris, but the attempt falls short when one considers that David has been in Paris for over a year and has clearly mastered the language. He is at home in this environment, more so than in the USA, a country to which he has no desire to return. Moreover, the words highlighted are so banal. Vin chaud is simply mulled wine. A tout à l’heure is a repetition of ‘see you later’. A quai is a quay. And an hotelier is...an hotelier (a word used in English since around 1900, according to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary). Why use italics at all?

Compare this to the following passage from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: 

“The bald pilgrims in Beena Mol began another bhajan.

     ‘I tell you, these Hindus,’ Baby Kochamma said piously. ‘They have no sense of privacy.’”

In this example, Roy turns the use of italics on its head brilliantly, choosing to highlight a word in English as a way of underlining the superiority complex of Baby Kochamma, a Christian, when confronted by a group of Hindus. It is not the bald pilgrims who are othered after starting to sing a bhajan (a spiritual song); they are accepted, natural, integrated. Instead, it is the educated, English-speaking Baby Kochamma who is framed as prissy, conceited and out of step with the rest of her environment.

If the intention is not, like in Burmese Days, to reinforce the sense of alienation between the foreign word and the English-language text, I would argue that it is better not to italicise the word at all. If the reader wants to look up the word later (or immediately), then they will, but don’t rely on the typographical equivalent of stringing fairy lights around the front of a house. Embed it within the rest. Make it part of the whole. It’s more constructive to build bridges than to dig trenches. After all, we’re all standing up there, on that knife edge, wondering which way things are going to go. Navigating a safe route down starts with the language choices we make and how we use it with one another.

Home doesn’t have to be something we cling on to like crazy people.