I had big plans for this blog in December, but ah well. This month has somehow completely passed me by.
Favourite books you’ve read this year, anyone? It’s always hard; the most recent are often stronger in the mind, but I think these would have to be mine.
Eliot Weinberger was my favourite ‘discovery’ this year. I’m slowly reading, now, his Works on Paper and Outside Stories, after having devoured Oranges and Peanuts for Sale, An Elemental Thing and Karmic Traces. I could afford to be greedy and read those quickly because there were many more to come, but now I’m painfully aware that I need to make these ones last.
Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. It seems to have become fashionable to find this novel lacking, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s masterly. I mean, really, look at how good she is at telling a story, and telling not just one story but many, and in all different ways. Her imagination is breathtaking, and there is such sparky energy running throughout. I think all that pooh-poohing is sour grapes.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills utterly captivated me. I kept asking myself, What is so intriguing? Why am I so madly turning the pages? I was amazed at how he could write of such quotidian things and make them so imbued with meaning and tension. And at how he could create dialogue and characters in English that sounded so Japanese. The constant diffusing of socially unstable situations through laughter, the ‘high-context’ communication…all of this was somehow represented in a way that made you feel the characters’ discomfort and relief. And there is a scene there that uses simple repetition to explode everything you believed about the narrator and her professed lack of feeling any sense of culpability with regard to her daughter’s suicide. There, two scenes become confused in the narrator’s mind, and the signal that this is happening is through the repetition of one image. Powerful, powerful stuff.
Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw. Another energetic book, an artful autobiography that made me wish I could meet the writer behind it. And the lovely thing about these last two? I was put onto both by blogs, the first by Who killed the pork chops? and the second by Joe Case for The killings blog.
Special mentions go to Rachael Carson’s The Sea around Us, Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family and Kirstel Thornell’s Night Street. All up, I’ve read 59 books this year, and have started many more. I think I might have to make a promise not to start anything new in January, because some of the unfinished ones are in the back of my mind, whispering words of my unfaithfulness…
Happy Christmas! Thanks for reading, and especially thanks to those who’ve taken the time to participate: your comments have always been enlightening and such a joy to read, and it’s been so kind of you to take the time to show me that my thoughts haven’t been completely lost in the ether — thank you.
Happy holiday reading; this blog will swing back into things in Feb, with a few new ideas for how to rearrange the furniture here.








