Welcome to the fifth instalment of The Year in Books. For those unfamiliar with the format of this annual review, I run through a list of the books I’ve read during the year, what I thought about them, and generally have a bit of a rant.
For the past couple of years, my goal has been to read 30 books in the year. I’ve failed every time so far. Did I make it this year? Like any good thriller novelist, I’m going to try and string you along on that weak cliffhanger until we get to the end.
But thank you for reading. 2023 has not been a particularly exciting year for me personally. I moved house (flat) a couple of times. I’ll be ending the year recovering from ear surgery. That’s about as adrenaline-inducing as the last twelve months has got. Thankfully, I’m just fine getting my excitement from books, as I always have been.
The first book I read this year was Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos. Not much adventure there, I suppose. This book arose from transcripts of conversations between Michael Imperioli, Steve Schirripa and various guests as they took a trip down memory lane. There are some interesting anecdotes, behind the scenes scoops, writer’s room insights and wiseguy banter here. I haven’t listened to the podcast, but I would hedge my bets that it’s more engaging than the book, which is stripped of the tonality of delivery that would make most of these stories come to life. But hey, whaddaya gonna do?
Next, A Special Providence. This is another masterpiece in humanisation from the writer of Revolutionary Road, one of the best novels I’ve ever read. It explores the identity crisis – or crises – at the heart of postwar America by charting the futile attempts of a mother and her son to find a foothold in a merciless world. There is no one better than Richard Yates at cutting through the delusions of individuals and communities, at skewering pretensions in heartbreaking fashion. Excellent.
I traversed time and space for my next week: Love Marriage by Monica Ali. Having read and enjoyed Brick Lane, I received this as a gift and was excited to get started. Again, Ali is deft at exploring the intersection of relationships, family and culture with heart and humour in equal abundance. This novel could have done with some editing down, condensing certain sections (such as those spent with Yasmin – the protagonist – in her workplace) and cutting some characters altogether, but overall I thought it was great.
Three books in before the end of January. Was I about to smash my target with months to spare? Or would I gas out like an over-eager middle distance runner failing on the final straight? The world was frozen by this time; the flat I was in could not get above 15 degrees even with the heating on, with the result that I was regularly ill at the start of the year, a veritable English Patient. Which, conveniently enough, was my next book. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is written in florid, poetic prose. There are moments of real beauty here, snatched images of deep, fleeting human connection that feel dreamlike. Unfortunately the book itself does not feel fleeting, despite being a fairly average 320 pages long. I can appreciate the craft here, the artistry to the prose, but I found myself counting the pages and very much looking forward to finishing it, which for me is never a good sign for a novel.
I could probably just drop the same review in for my next book, too. Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger was released just six weeks before its companion piece, Stella Maris and eight months before his death. I love Cormac McCarthy, have read most of his novels and would happily list him amongst my favourite novelists of all time. But I really struggled with The Passenger. There is no discernible plot or direction here, and it feels almost deliberately bizarre and confusing. The novel follows a salvage diver, Bobby Western, who is haunted by his father’s contribution to the atom bomb (not Oppenheimer, presumably). The novel switches between Western’s time in bars discussing scientific and philosophical ideas with his various associates, and italicised chapters of his deceased sister’s hallucinatory episodes with an incredibly annoying narrator called the Thalidomide Kid. The novel obviously reflects McCarthy’s growing interest in physics and science during the latter stages of his life, but it left me bitterly disappointed, and in no rush to read Stella Maris.
At the same time, I breezed through a copy of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. This is pamphlet length, an hour’s reading at most. It contains passionate, thoughtful words of advice and encouragement from a great, established poet to a struggling, uncertain one. It’s a really affecting examination of the inner life of an artist, of how one navigates the soul-searching and the solitude and the self-doubt. I will be referring back to this for many years to come.
Next, I returned to a favourite of mine, Austerlitz. W.G. Sebald’s crowning work is one I have reviewed in this column before (2020, if memory serves, which it often doesn’t), so I won’t go into a full review here. I read it again for two reasons: it’s a book I think about quite a lot, because it’s so exquisite, and I had been inspired enough by it to write a novel of my own in the same maximalist style, so I was after inspiration. Safe to say, my own efforts are a pale imitation, but I would once again recommend this book to anyone, anywhere, at anytime. Immediately after, I read Vertigo, also by Sebald. This is his first ever novel, and you can clearly make out the beginnings of the stylistic flair that would come to full fruition in Austerlitz. It’s a disorienting expedition into the disconcerting experience of life that very much lives up to its title, and though it isn’t, for me, on the level of Austerlitz, it is still an incredible feat of prose.
What I often find as I make my way through the year in books is that I am prone to zig-zagging between different styles and genres. I couldn’t imagine reading the same type of book all year, even if I adored that particular type. So, as much as I love Sebald’s work, I felt like I needed to go in a completely different direction for my next book, and who better to row back from maximalist, stream-of-consciousness prose than Mr. Iceberg Theory himself, Ernest Hemingway. A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s memoir of his time in Paris during the 1920s, and mixes musings on the nature of writing and being a writer with details of his first marriage and his associations with other cultural figures of the ‘Lost Generation’ of interwar France, from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein to Ezra Pound and James Joyce. It’s short, stark, and opinionated, and provides a somewhat fascinating and envy-inducing snapshot into a time of unbridled creativity and the romance of life. Of course, all of these figures are damaged in some way or another, and the true value of seeing them through Hemingway’s eyes is that they are shorn of the kind of glamour and cultural cachet with which we normally view them – though this doesn’t diminish them, for me. Instead, it burnishes my admiration for them, these figures who struggled through life as we all do but managed to capture the struggle in such towering works.
Into April now, and from the bistros and cafes of roaring 20s Paris to a world that feels altogether different, despite being set in a very similar time period. Jeeves In The Offing by P.G. Wodehouse is another comic caper set in the country piles of the landed gentry. I floated through this as a calming zephyr through a sunlit vineyard. This time, Bertie Wooster comes unstuck without the inimitable Jeeves to call upon. Featuring a host of returning favourites – including the infamous cow creamer – Jeeves In The Offing is excellent sustenance for those already familiar with Wodehouse’s work, though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for newcomers – start with Life At Blandings or Carry On, Jeeves, I’d say.
The Penguin Book of Classical Myths, by Jennifer R. March is a complete overview of the Greek and Roman myths that underpin so many of our foundational beliefs and stories to this day. It is incredibly well-detailed and March does a great job at rendering them accessible to modern readers with clear, concise summations. But it’s not one to read through from start to finish – that, my friends, is a slog I have been through so you don’t have to. There are so many details here – names, places, connections, genealogies – that it’s almost impossible to retain all of the information. Instead, this makes a great work to refer to as and when needed.
With spring well underway, life in the UK began to get slightly more bearable. A 6-month winter was coming to an end, and I indulged myself in some pulpy detective fiction next, with A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames. Much of this reads like a classy homage to the great LA noirs of the past, like Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy. There are wisecracks, grotesque scenes in the Hollywood hills, and an incredibly dark ending. That ending clashes somewhat with the vaguely comic beginnings of Ames’s story, but it’s nonetheless an incredibly enjoyable read, written with the kind of clarity and flow that is deceptively hard to get right. I believe this is part of a series of Doll detective novels, and I’ll definitely be returning for more.
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor could hardly be more different stylistically. This is one of the great travel stories, and probably up there as my favourite book from this year. Setting out alone from London in 1933, Fermor aims to travel all the way from the Netherlands to Constantinople – on foot. Quite aside from how gruelling this would be anyway, he has decided to do it during a time of increasing tension in Europe, and the spectre of war grows closer as he makes his journey along first the Rhine and then the Danube. Fermor’s work is characterised by remarkable erudition, an ability to make architecture come to life and to analyse the patterns of both the animate and inanimate world with remarkable clarity. One of my primary thoughts while reading this was ‘I wish I knew the names of more things’. But my overriding sense was one of pleasure at taking a journey described by someone with such mastery of both prose and observation. It is not merely a vanity quest either. Fermor’s journey is one that strives towards the destination of freedom, and the context of gathering stormclouds over Europe could not be more fitting to this quest. This is the first of three books charting his journey, and you can bet your bottom quids, reader, that I’ll be writing about the next two in the 2024 edition of The Year in Books.
Refusal Shoes by Tony Saint, next. Saint is a former immigration officer-turned author, and this part-thriller, part-industry exposé leverages that experience for a darkly comic exploration of the world of passport control. Put it this way: it doesn’t make me feel any more sympathetic towards the people who work these jobs, especially at English airports. The plot itself is rather perfunctory here, and the prose largely functional too. But it is elevated by Saint’s genuine insight into this world and his clearly acerbic take on it all, and makes for a swift, involving read.
Next up came another real challenger for my book of the year. Panenka is Ronan Hession’s follow-up to Leonard and Hungry Paul. The plot revolves around the titular Panenka – so nicknamed for missing a crucial penalty against his team’s deadliest rivals 25 years before. Burdened by guilt, self-loathing, pessimism and melancholy, Panenka finds himself presented with a chance at personal redemption. Plagued with blinding, debilitating headaches (‘The Iron Mask’), Panenka attempts to nurture the relationships around him without burdening them with his affliction. This is tender stuff that deals with the disappointments of life and self with remarkable clarity of vision, accepting the need for vulnerability and openness on the road to personal redemption. Every character here is wonderfully well-crafted and it’s a novel that will stay with me for a long, long time.
We’re moving into the summer months now – a time when my reading pace usually slows as the clear azure skies and the packed beer gardens of London lure me in like a hopped-up succubus. But not this year. This year I did read quite a lot in the summer. In beer gardens. And so it was with Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. This was a birthday gift from my brother and fellow New Critique ed. Josh Mcloughlin, and he knows his onions. This novel is set in a remote Polish village and revolves around the character of Janina, a relatable crank and recluse who prefers the company of animals to humans. Dark happenings begin to occur. People in the small, close-knit community turn up murdered, and we stay with Janina as she attempts to unravel what she sees as the conspiracy behind it all. A brilliant book – elements of noir fuse with spirituality and there’s a snarkiness to the protagonist that compels rather than repels. And it asks one of the big questions of life: who, really, has the right to live? Fantastic stuff.
Back in 2020,I read J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. That was an extremely disturbing and affecting book – superlative, but not in an enjoyable way. The essence of literature as social commentary in a truly appalling society. For my next book, I turned to Waiting For The Barbarians, published 5 years before Disgrace. That Coetzee is able to conjure up a mythical epic that contains all the sordid history of civilisation inside 200 pages just burnishes his reputation as one of the preeminent chroniclers of the fallout of colonialism. I enjoyed this more than Disgrace, but it still contains raw, bleak moments that make one, as a reader, feel like a child being stripped of their innocence. This is vital writing, though I wouldn’t recommend reading two Coetzees back-to-back.
Around June, a friend of mine suggested starting a bit of an informal book club. A few of us, sharing a common interest in sci-fi, decided to give it a go. Step forward the first ‘Even Your Nan Likes HG Wells’ book club book: Pavane by Keith Roberts. A ‘pavane’ is a slow, stately, and processional 16th-century dance, tightly prescribed and patterned. It’s an apt title for this novel, which is something of a fix-up of multiple individual short stories (called ‘measures’ in the novel) but nonetheless charts the recurring machinations of history along a vast timeline. I found it hard to tell whether I loved this or hated it. There is a sense of melancholy and nostalgia for what has never been seeping through most of the measures, which I always love. The prose itself is intricate, finely wrought and beautifully lyrical in places, quite functional and process-driven in others. The start is something of a slog, but it gathers breathtaking momentum towards the end. Overall it left its impression on me, and it was fun to read it along with mates and discuss our thoughts on it.
I did, however, go my own way for my next book, stepping back in the world of Wodehouse with Hot Water. Hot Water diverges very slightly from the Wodehousian template in that it is set in France, rather than England, and centres around American characters. Other than that, it delivers as you would expect old Pelhem Grenville to; the delightful characters, scrapes, and convoluted farce are all here, present and correct.
I moved house again at the end of June, meaning I didn’t read much during July as I settled in and enjoyed the sunshine and its enduring invitation to drink. I eased my way through The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever. This was my first Cheever, having first caught wind of him as one of America’s preeminent short story writers of the mid-20th Century. This is his first full-length novel. It’s a stirring, by-turns wry and melancholy family narrative, evoking a kind of modernised and ribald Dickens-eque chronicle. I could also clearly see the origins of a style that would come to influence writers such as Jonathan Franzen, with its chronological scope and postwar America angst. A book worthy of its author’s reputation, and a great new discovery for me personally.
Battle Royale by Koushun Takami couldn’t be more different. This was the second (and so far last) Even Your Nan Likes HG Wells book club book. At well over 600 pages, it is nonetheless written in the kind of YA prose that makes it easy to sail through. Anyone who has seen the Battle Royale film, or indeed The Hunger Games, won’t need the plot explaining. But for those who haven’t: teenagers are forced to participate in a deadly game where only one person lives and wins. The characters are drawn along very black-and-white lines of morality, the narrative criss-crosses between perspectives and there are some pretty gory and ultraviolent scenes. It’s an enjoyable novel, even though I was left with the strange sense that the impact of the violence described was somewhat dulled by the way it was described. It’s a sci-fi/horror classic and explores big psychological themes – such as why people turn on each other – so a must-read for anyone interested in those genres.
I veered wildly once more after this. From the islands of Japan to the streets of Marylebone. Howard Jacobson’s The Act of Love is a strange novel. It details one man’s obsession with creating the conditions for his wife to have an affair. He is a purposeful cuckold. It’s an odd subject matter and contains echoes of the discomfort one feels when reading Lolita. Jacobson’s flair for prose and drawing flawed characters is once more in evidence here, though at times I found the narrative voice somewhat grating, smug. That’s pretty much the point though. Felix Quinn, the novel’s protagonist, suffers from an egoism which ultimately devours his life. Given the subject matter, it feels bizarrely desexualised – starved of any real eroticism by the academic way in which Quinn details the development of his obsession. An odd book, beautifully written, but somehow frustrating for all its accomplishment.
Not so of my next book: Days Without End by Sebastian Barry. Set amidst one of America’s most violent periods – encompassing the Indian Wars and the American Civil War in the mid-19th century – there are shades of Cormac Mccarthy here. But there is too much tenderness to this for that comparison. At its core this is a story of finding your people, and of persevering through the wood-chipper of the world to stay together, somehow. It’s really quite poetic in places, and Barry is masterful at switching between hair-raising action sequences and intimate exchanges without inducing whiplash. The cover is a bit naff though; it looks like the kind of stuff destined for a charity shop bookshelf, never to be looked at twice again. But what’s between the covers is a sparkling, tumultuous tale of the building of America and of identity.
I hadn’t read any Charles Bukowski for probably about a decade. One of the formative voices in my early years as a writer and an angsty teen, I was interested to see how I would react to his work as world-weary, semi-alcoholic down-and-out. So I re-read Factotum, and it turns out it was never really meant for the pie-eyed rock n roll wannabe I was when I was 18, 19, whatever. Bukowski’s work is about what we become on the other side of that, when the dream begins to fade into cold flats and cheap wine and jobs you hate. It’s kind of depressing, but also liberating in a way I didn’t expect it to be. When all you have to think about is survival, the petty worries of the world fade away.
As autumn turned to winter, I began to fall behind schedule on my 30-book challenge. Goodreads chastised me. And I didn’t help myself by opting for number9dream by David Mitchell next. Dense, sweeping, twisting, turning – words that can apply to all of Mitchell’s work. I don’t use them pejoratively, but there was a sense that this time Mitchell’s penchant for fantastical and intricate narrative construction got in the way of the story here, in a way that it didn’t in Cloud Atlas or Ghostwritten. By the end I was fully immersed, but it took me ages to read and if I don’t get to my 30 books by the end of the year, I will be laying the blame down on David Mitchell’s doorstep, enjoyable as this was.
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, next. Another re-read; the first time I read this was, aptly, during a weekend in which my brother and I travelled to Paris, got our interrail tickets nicked, and sloped back to London with our tails between our legs. We didn’t quite find ourselves, like Orwell, slaving away in the bowels of a Parisian hotel or in the queue of London’s interwar ‘Spikes’ begging for bread. But we did sleep rough in the park one night and in a hostel the next. Orwell’s excellence, of course, needs no introduction. Though this is semi-autobiographical, it is every bit as visceral and political as his more famous works of fiction. As I wrote in a previous edition of The Year In Books, about Orwell’s Books vs Cigarettes, it is startling how many of Orwell’s observations about his world could apply to ours. Poverty existing next to plenitude, the perpetuating cycle of hand-to-mouth living, and the myopic incompetence of the British government – the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I could have done myself a favour in pursuit of the magic 30, but I didn’t. Instead I went for Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. By now the winter’s obligations (the pub, Christmas parties, you know the drill) had begun to eat into my reading time quite significantly, and I read this in fits and starts. I also had an operation on my ear (what?) which knocked me out of action for a few days at this juncture, throwing my mission into further jeopardy. Nevertheless, I finished it. This is a classic American story – the internal (and eternal) struggle between the striver and the crook, as furniture salesman Ray Carney doubles as a fence for the various shysters, bent cops and ne’er-do-wells of 60s Harlem. Whitehead is a great storyteller, with a distinctive way of observation and a luminous turn of phrase. He’s also written The Underground Railroad, which I’ll be looking to get my hands on next year.
I’ve also been reading Word Perfect by Susie Dent, a book containing a word or phrase for each day of the year, and the associated etymology and history of that word. I can’t pretend to remember anything about any of these words, if I’m honest, but I was entertained each morning as I drank my coffee. The word for the final day of the year is Kalopsia, which basically means the state of wearing beer goggles, when everyone and everything looks beautiful. It’s a nice sentiment to end the year on, before the gloom of January sets in and you realise the fresh start you were determined to make is going to last about as long as Liz Truss.
I finished the year by fumbling my way through Fictions by Jorge Luise Borges. I began reading this in the fog of confusion immediately following my operation, and I can report that it really is not the ideal book to do that with. Ostensibly a book of short stories, it is probably more accurately summarised as a series of deconstructive essays on the nature of storytelling. Written with the kind of mastery of language that doesn’t really seem to exist anymore, it is at once thrillingly immediate and hard to grasp. Herein are elements of mythology, mysticism, spirituality and infinity, a work short in length but big on ambition.
If you’re counting, that makes 29 books completed. So, I failed my challenge, once again. Goodreads seems to think I completed it though, because it counted Factotum as two books, which is pretty stupid of it given that it was probably the shortest book I read all year.
So there you have it. Thank you for joining me once again for The Year In Books. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. And thank you again from the New Critique team to all of our readers and contributors for another great year.
I’ll be back this time next year. Have a great 2024.
Ta-ra.
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James Mcloughlin is a writer and Creative Editor at New Critique.
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