list
The top albums of 2022. There are - my God - seventeen in total and not a single worthy metal release among them. Crossing my fingers for a New Wave Of British Heavy Metal revival in 2023. Let’s dive in.
Read MoreI 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).
Read MoreAccording 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.
As a rule, humans are impatient. It’s in our nature. We don’t want things later on; we want them now. Like, right now. If we join a karate class, we want the sensei to stop the lesson halfway through, come over to us with their jaw sagging like a shopping bag, tell us they’ve never seen anything like it and bump us straight up to a brown belt. Of course, things like that rarely happen. A wunderkind is called a wunderkind because what they’re doing is nothing short of a miracle. The rest of us Beta-Minuses have to grind away at the things we want to become good at day after day, year after year, until eventually somebody does come up to us and tell us how good we are—and by that time we won’t even believe them, because now we’re deep, deep into it, and we’re aware there is so much we don’t (and will never) know.
If patience is a virtue, then writers are sinners. I didn’t have any patience when I started writing. I thought that by making the decision to write like a maniac each day, I’d be rewarded for my discipline within, say, six months at the maximum. Having a couple of short stories published in semi-professional journals was my goal, along with a semi-finished version of my first novel (a kind of Last Exit to Brooklyn palimpsest that makes every mistake and misstep imaginable). How impetuous that guy was. He jumped out of the blocks, arms swishing back and forth, legs pumping like mighty pistons, one eye on the finish line all the way over there in the distance, another on the crowd he was sure was in attendance just for him. And for a few sweet ignorant strides, everything was perfect. But before long he realised he was coming no closer to the finish line. He was, in effect, running on the spot. All that energy, all that sweat, all those winks to the crowd. For nothing. No publications. No interest. No glory.
So I stopped running and did what I should have done in the first place: I fell to my knees and started to crawl. I jettisoned all my preconceptions, stopped thinking recognition was owed to me, and turned my back on the concept of glory (a terrible reason to ever do anything anyway). I wrote for months and months and months, churning out terrible short stories and working on a second novel. The skin on my knees rubbed away and became bloody. Gravel became embedded in the palms of my hands. My back ached. I spent countless few evenings wondering whether it was worth it. And then, a year later, I had a piece accepted for publication. Five hundred words buried somewhere in an online-only zine. The most modest of modest triumphs. But it was enough. And as I continued crawling, I realised a few things: the skin on my knees had healed. My back didn’t hurt as much. My hands relished the gravel that bit deep into the meat below my thumbs. I kind of liked being down there on the floor.
Now, it’s not easy to remain on the ground. But there are three things you could do to make the experience less painful from the start:
1. Don’t tell anyone you’re writing a novel.
I did the opposite of this. I told family, I told friends, I told anybody who would listen. They questioned me, shouted words of encouragement, laughed, told me they’d ‘definitely buy it’ once the novel came out (because all you have to do is write it, yeah?). Those family members and friends told other people—strangers at parties, in bars and at gatherings, usually when the conversation hit a lull—and there’d be more questions and encouragement and smirking. At some point I found myself thinking that if I failed to produce a freshly bound masterpiece with a foreword by Irvine Welsh and multiple glowing reviews soon, all those people would call me a fraud. Which is bullshit, obviously. The only person who cares what you’re doing is you (and to a lesser extent your partner if you have one, and that’s 80% out of a sense of duty). Your friends don’t care, your family doesn’t care, and the strangers definitely don’t care. They might clap you on the back and grin and cause you to bow your head and stare at the tabletop while the twin flames of pride and embarrassment singe your cheeks, but they’re not thinking of you while you’re battering the hell out of your keyboard or making a breakthrough with a character you’ve hated up to now or sitting in a bath of lukewarm water telling yourself over and over that you’re worthless. They have their own stuff going on. Your drama is a solo performance. Unless you’re George R.R. Martin (or Stephen King when he was writing The Dark Tower), nobody is desperately expecting anything from you. But if you don’t want to feel like they do, stop telling people you’re writing a novel.
2. Give yourself time.
Yeah, it’d be nice to have the same luck as Brett Easton Ellis or Francois Sagan or S.E. Hinton and find an agent and a contract with a publishing house when you’re still in your teens. And it is luck, regardless of how good the writing is. Exactly the right person has to see your words on the page at exactly the right time in their life, in the lives of the prospective audience and in the life of the publishing house that agrees to take a chance on it. Those are some star-aligning odds. What most of us simply have to do is give ourselves time. Time to make every mistake, take dramatic U-turns, leave the manuscript to one side for months at a time, churn out short story after short story until you finally happen upon an idea that is not a dead loss, one that glows, one that—in time—you can tease and turn into a living, breathing piece of readable fiction. Also: Think twice before sending off your query letters to agents. Is it genuinely the right time to do it? Have you actually spent long enough on your art or are you inflating those seven months of graft into something greater? Have you cut any corners along the way? Did you rush that last draft a bit because you just wanted to get it finished? Is your belief in yourself justified or unrealistic? If any of the answers are negative, it would be wise to bury that manuscript for a few more weeks (before giving it another read-through), close that query template file and stop trawling the agencies and publishing houses. They’ll (probably) still be there when you’re actually ready.
3. Don’t be so quick to throw it out there on Kindle.
There are thousands of articles on how the publishing industry has changed and how self-publishing is fashionable, wise and lucrative, all at once. That’s great if you’ve written 18 fantasy novels in the past two years or you’re good at tapping into the werewolf shifter erotica market. But I have the suspicion that self-publishing isn’t actually quite as attractive as people make it out to be. I have another suspicion that most writers would probably chop off a limb to get a traditional contract with a publishing house, but wouldn’t go so far as to cut their hair if self-publishing required it. I wrote an ugly little book with literary aspirations and when I wasn’t able to find an agent I slapped a cover together and put it on Amazon. That, in itself, felt like a failure. I then spent the next six months or so doing virtually nothing to promote it. What I did do every day was look at the book sales and watch how I sold fourteen copies, then five copies, then two copies...one copy...one more...flatline. A few encouraging reviews from friends, but little beyond that. And why should I have expected anything different? I didn’t spend long enough on it and it wasn’t good enough to attract attention, but I was deluded enough to think it would somehow find a cult audience in, I don’t know, Detroit or Calcutta or Tangier. All I managed to do was use up some goodwill among friends by pestering them to buy the book and waste the time of those agents who actually went so far as to read my query letters. Impatience controlled my actions entirely. Instead of crawling along, getting somewhere, I was out of breath miles from the finish line. And that neither feels nor looks good.
So those are the three rules I wish I’d known back at the start of all this. I’m now in my fourth year of being a ‘professional’, as Steven Pressfield refers to it, which is no time at all. And yet I’m writing a blog post about writing. The reason is because I know now that it’s okay to crawl and it’s where I belong, and that gives me the confidence to believe in what I’m writing. Above all, I’m no longer gripped by impatience. There’s no reward for finishing quickly. There are no short cuts. Writing takes as long as it takes, and that’s that.
midnight in a perfect world
