Welcome to the sixth instalment of The Year in Books, in which I look back on my last twelve months of reading and indulge myself in a rant here and there.
Having failed on a number of occasions to reach 30 completed books in a year, I decided to lower my expectations this year, and aim for 24. I prefer to think of this as pragmatic, rather than weak-willed.
Anyway, thank you for reading. Whether you’re new to this annual format or an old faithful, I appreciate it. Once again, reading kept me going this year. I started the year recovering from an operation and seeking somewhere new to live. I was then made redundant in February and spent a good few months searching for work.
Professional losses and personal losses have combined to make the year something of a tumult, and reading has been an anchor. Except when I read something I hated.
Fortunately, that’s not how the year began. In my convalescence from an ear operation, I picked up The Way of The World, Nicolas Bouvier’s beguiling tale of exploration from Belgrade to the Khyber Pass in the 1950s. I must be getting old because travel books are increasingly taking my fancy, with the likes of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Iain Sinclair featuring to high praise in previous instalments of this column. Bouvier is every bit as brilliant, and this book – now a cult classic – is a superb account of two young adventurers laying fresh eyes on an ancient world. It makes for an elegiac journey – especially poignant given the violence that has fallen on many of these locations since the book’s publication. Bouvier’s gift for the poetry and minutiae of the everyday make this a profoundly moving and impressive book. A great way to start the year.
Next, more non-fiction: The Years, by Annie Ernaux. I feel like a fraud even trying to judge or analyse this book. This is a 2008 release billed as a ‘collective memoir’, as Ernaux diarises 65 years of French and global history through the lens of her own life in fragments and memories. It is in a way formless, switching between standard diary-entry style chapters and reflections on objects, photographs, news headlines, adverts, films, habits and language. This captures the passing of time in monumental fashion and, as I was reading, I was struck by something relevant still today: that banality of catastrophe, the way seismic historical events are subsumed into the daily shunt of life, work and family. This is a truly staggering piece of writing and I urge any reader to give it a go – I certainly will be seeking out more of Ernaux’s work.
My next book was similar in intent if not in literary accomplishment. The Corner Shop: Shopkeepers, the Sharmas, and the making of modern Britain, by Babita Sharma was a pleasant enough read about the history of the humble British corner shop and how its evolution has both driven and reflected evolutions in social life across this sceptered isle. It is written in what I will generously term accessible prose, and leans heavily on cliches and stock phrases, but does the job. Much like a good corner shop: friendly, no frills, and good for a quick visit.
I finished that one halfway through January. I had flown out the blocks. My pace would soon flag, but not before I raced through Prophet Song, Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning portrait of dystopian totalitarianism. The novel takes place in Ireland, at some unspecified near-future date. The novel’s protagonist is a woman who struggles desperately to keep her family together in a landscape of civil war and rising oppression. It’s the first Booker Prize winner I’ve enjoyed for some time. The sense of rising menace and entrapment grows by the page and it is one of the darkest, most dispiriting books I’ve ever read because I could see seeds of its horrors in our own world. Such is Lynch’s stylistic mastery that despite how heavy and breathless it is, you can’t tear yourself away.
Next up, an early contender for worst read of the year: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. I’m as torn on this as the general discourse seems to be. I thought Yanagihara had a lush, rich way with descriptions of settings and objects. In this she reminded me of Donna Tartt. And Jude’s tale, to begin with, is engaging and profoundly emotionally affecting. But the more it goes on – and Jesus Christ does it go on – appreciation turns to apathy turns to antipathy. ‘Torture porn’ is a criticism often levelled at this book, and I can’t say I disagree. The more Yanagihara puts her protagonist through the ringer, the more you start to wonder: what is the point of all this misery? Perhaps that was her point: good people suffer. But that’s hardly a novel concept, and I mean every bit of the double entendre there. Beautiful as this story sometimes is, overall it leaves you glad to be free of its overbearing misery.
After that chastening experience, I retreated to a safe haven, entrusting myself to the dependable pair of hands that is Ernest Hemingway. The First Forty-Nine Stories is a collection of short stories, most of which I’d read before. Hemingway, as we know, is a great storyteller, conjuring so much with so little. It’s a style that translates well to the short form, and the man’s subjects and themes are wide-ranging: war, love, fighting, boxing, drinking, sailing, fishing, hunting, bullfighting. All the Hemingway classics are here, though as I made my way through the stories – reading one a day – it felt like diminishing returns. The simplicity of his style began to grate somewhat through prolonged exposure, and made some of the stories feel flimsy, or flat. That’s not to say I don’t still love his style and his stories, but not all of the pieces featured here are worthy of his best.
In February, I moved to Camberwell. Two days after we moved in, I was made redundant. With a not-too-bad redundancy payout, I was able to have a few months off work without too much anxiety, although I did eventually have to get another job. But during those halcyon days of freedom, I read quite a lot. There’s a shop in Camberwell called Dash The Henge (which is a shit name for a shop, you ask me) which sells records, t-shirts, and books about music. I dipped in there one blustery March day and bought a copy of Psychomachia by Kirsty Allison. Kirsty is a music journalist, musician, poet, performer and DJ. Psychomachia is her first novel. Brutal in parts, funny in others, it follows wannabe journalist Scarlett Flagg through the seedy, hazy days of the 80s and 90s Shoreditch music scene. Scarlett is a somewhat unreliable narrator, a traumatised, vulnerable and victimised protagonist navigating a dark, drug-fuelled world. It’s frenzied, erratic, and grungy. A decent first novel.
Camberwell also brought me within proximity of a decent-ish library, which meant I could take out books by authors whose 2024 releases I had added to my start-of-year reading list. Obviously the library didn’t have any of these new releases yet, such as Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road. They did, however, have Mayflies, a novel that reads and feels like poetry without ever being overwrought. The novel explores the night that defines that youth of two young boys, before, 30 years on, a tragedy arrives and the joys and costs of love are thrown into stark relief. I particularly loved the dialogue here: both witty and substantial. It fizzes first with teenage energy, then with middle-aged mortality, and also presents textured snapshots of moments in time, from Thatcher’s 80s to post-Brexit Britain. One of the books of the year for me, and I can’t wait to read Caledonian Road.
It was back to the library again for The Satsuma Complex. I’ve spent the last couple of years devouring anything Bob Mortimer is involved in, from Gone Fishing and Athletico Mince to the Would I Lie To You highlights reel that YouTube seems to think I want to watch every single day forevermore. This novel is pleasant enough without being life-changing: it mixes trademark Mortimerian surrealism with a competent crime plot, and makes for a good chuckle or two.
A Scattering and Anniversary: Poems by Christopher Reid was the exact opposite. Written during his wife’s illness and then after her untimely death from cancer, these poems hit very close to home, exploring the adjustment process one goes through when losing a loved one. I was going to re-read it again later in the year when my Grandad passed away, but I couldn’t face it – they made me cry enough the first time. Incredibly moving stuff from Reid.
Like an exhalation after too long under water, A Bright Moon for Fools by Jasper Gibson provided some welcome comic relief. Harry Christmas is the protagonist, a misanthropic blend of Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederation of Dunces and John Self from Money. He drinks and cavorts his way across Venezuela as he tries to escape the ghosts of his checkered past. Spoiler: the ghosts catch up with him, and he must come to terms with the flaws in himself. It is hilarious at times and quite sinister in others – highly recommended.
In April I travelled up to Leeds to help my friends Frank Berry and Matthew Bates shoot their latest short film, See The Mother – which is brilliant and will hopefully be available to watch online at some point. While there, we did a good deal of setting the world to rights and asking each other ‘have you seen this…?’ and ‘have you read that…?’. We watched Inside Llewyn Davis (I fell asleep, though not because I don’t love the film) and Frank loaned me the book on which it is based: The Mayor of MacDougal Street, by Dave Van Ronk. It’s a fascinating firsthand account of the growth of the folk scene in New York through the 50s and 60s. Van Ronk is one of the founding figures of that folk revival, but never quite made it to the heights of your Dylans, your Mitchells and so on. The book is funny, in that Van Ronk’s cutting judgements of others betray a cantankerous but not uncharitable bitterness about his inability to invest himself as a superstar in the Dylan mold. It’s very well written, with a string of evocative stories and genuinely insightful verdicts and the hows and the whys of folk’s great era.
Next I went back to a favourite of mine, Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham. I reviewed this in a previous edition of The Year in Books, since when it has grown in my mind into my favourite ever novel. I decided to re-read to test that theory out and the theory stood strong. A few years on from my first time reading this, its tragedy hit home all the closer. It’s likely that I will read this book at least once a year until my eyes fall out. It is excellent.
After my birthday in April, I had some more Nicolas Bouvier to return to. My brother bought me So It Goes: Travels in the Aran Isles, Xian and Places In Between as a gift. This is much shorter than The Way of the World, containing a few snapshots of different places, rather than the unbroken tale of a long adventure. All of Bouvier’s best features as a writer are at work again here, the keen lyrical portrait of the everyday, the humanitarian’s tender focus on quirks of character. Reading the first essay here, the one that takes place on the Aran Isles, Bouvier’s prose is so vivid and tangible that I could feel the almost apocalyptic chill wafting from the page. I found myself wanting something longer and more in the mold of The Way of the World, but this was excellent nonetheless.
From frozen isles to Electric Dreams. This collection of short stories from the godfather of sci-fi, Philip K. Dick, was published following the release of Channel 4’s Electric Dreams TV series in 2017. The book features short intros for each story from the writers of the television episodes, and gives illuminating insights into how these stories – written in the 50s and 60s – can be reinterpreted for our tech-obsessed, dystopian age. I often wonder what the OGs of sci-fi would think if they were around now. PKD is incredibly prescient in his portrayal of the banality of technological ubiquity and the speed with which his set-ups immerse the reader is deft. He is strongest when imagining spaceship futures – as in The impossible Planet or The Commuter – but stories like The Father-thing felt contrived – closer to R.L. Stine that to Arthur C. Clarke. This collection is, overall, excellent – and best read in conjunction with the TV series, which features some fantastic adaptations.
Last year I read and reviewed Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry, describing it as essentially Cormac Mccarthy with a bit more tenderness involved. The Heart in Winter, by Kevin Barry, is basically the same. A love story of the old west, outlaws, brutal mercenaries, moonshine, pissing rain and mud-caked saloons. All of that. It’s very lyrical and readable and well-paced. Not life-changing, I would argue. But any novel that calls Mccarthy’s best to mind deserves praise. It’s certainly better than Mccarthy’s execrable final novels, so there’s that – must be something in the surname ‘Barry’.
Ticking into summer, I finally found myself a new job. I was also diagnosed with potential gout after not being able to walk properly for about six weeks. So taken together you could say I had a pretty lamentable start to the summer. Luckily, Anne Enright was on hand to provide some literary escape. Her 2020 novel Actress was another library find. It follows the life of an Irish theatre legend called Katherine O’Dell, told from the perspective of her daughter Norah. The prose here is casually stylish, belying a great craft at the structural level of the novel. This is the story of a great and generational celebrity – but from the inside, and it therefore strips the sheen away from glamour to find the human flaws beneath. Here are grief, remorse, resentment, humour, pathos and nostalgia, finely balanced and subtly woven. Enright’s craft is mightily impressive: she manages to tell the story of a daughter’s struggle to escape her mother’s shadow without it tipping into bitterness.
On the recommendation of multiple friends, I chose The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith for my next novel. This is excellent: thrillingly clean crime fiction that does not suffer by comparison with the excellent film adaptation of it starring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. For anyone who needs an introduction: the novels centre on a charming young sociopath named Tom Ripley, who is enlisted by a wealthy businessman to travel to Italy to convince his son – Dickie Greenleaf – to return to the States. Tom manipulates himself into Dickie’s life but finds himself coming under a spell too. Tom is infatuated with Dickie’s lifestyle and things quickly begin to go off-piste, to put it lightly. Highsmith is probably the best crime writer I’ve read at balancing plot-based tension with internal narrative development. I can’t wait to read more by her – although Camberwell Library is going to have to get its act together on the old Highsmith front.
Around the same time, I picked up a copy of Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt by John Cooper Clarke. The collection that made his name as a punk poet du jour, it’s hard not to feel that Cooper Clarke’s originality is dimmed by the wave of imitators that followed. There are excellent moments here, but the schtick wears a little thin after fifty-plus pages of essentially the same poem retooled for a different image. Good stuff, but small doses required.
At the end of July my Grandad passed away. Two days later a terror attack happened in my hometown of Southport, and I watched riots break out down the road from my friend’s house over Twitter. It was a difficult, and odd time. These events caused grief, as you would imagine, and they made it hard to make sense of the world. I turned, not intentionally but perhaps inevitably, to Faith, Hope and Carnage, by Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan. Compiled from a series of conversations between the two over a couple of years, it is a conversational dialogue in which Cave covers a sweeping array of topics and events but, by and large, describes his attempts to understand the world again after the loss of his son. While this does stray at times into wooly New Ageist philosophy, for the most it is profoundly insightful into what grief can do to us, how we can face it, and the ways in which we piece ourselves back together. It came at just the right time for me and served a function which the rest of the books I’ve read this year didn’t (and didn’t need to).
As much succour as I found in Faith, Hope and Carnage, I needed something pulpier and more entertaining for my next read. In August I went to Green Man Festival and had a beautiful time with close friends. I also picked up Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. This is a murder mystery novel, an alternative history thriller that imagines a city in a state run by Native Americans during prohibition-era America. The world-building is rich and Spufford takes the time to give us the texture of this imagined city. Alongside the police procedural element to the story runs a cultural commentary on race tensions and is clearly a response to the situation in present-day America, as much as it is an evocation of the inequality of a century ago. It’s lovingly crafted and contains some great set-piece sequences, functional but smart dialogue and memorable characters with just enough colour to them to avoid becoming cookie cutter. The pacing is a bit inconsistent, and it is perhaps overlong, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
Every year there comes a point where I realise I haven’t read enough books of a certain kind. This year it was books by women. I started the year well in that regard, with a good balance between male and female authors and fiction and non-fiction. But as the year wore on I fell into old habits and comfortable options. That’s why I picked up a copy of Doxology by Nell Zink in September. As the leaves began to carpet the ground I followed the fortunes of a nerdy East Coast family. Their lives and the novel are woven around various political and historical events: 9/11, Trump, and so on. Zink’s prose is pleasurably irreverent at times, marrying the mundane with the absurd. But this novel feels a bit scattered. Zink comes from a background in music journalism and much of the first chapters of the novel feels like a journalist resorting to type: long sections are dedicated to evocations of the New York punk scene in its heyday, and it lacks much dramatic heft. That being said, it wasn’t horrible to read. It felt familiar and the characters well-defined. Again, not life-changing, but a worthwhile introduction to a new (for me) author.
Switching back to old habits next, I went for A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. Like most of Waugh’s work, it is a cynical satire of a certain stratum of wealthy English life in the interwar period. It depicts the break-up of a marriage in the London gentry around this time, brimming with dark humour and pathos. Waugh’s prose really does sparkle, but for me this felt like an uneasy compromise between the best of P.G. Wodehouse’s upper-class comedy of manners and W. Somerset Maugham’s heartfelt explorations of the tragedy of the human condition. And the ending was bizarre.
Concurrently, I flicked through Selected Poems by T.S. Eliot. I spent most of my time reading and re-reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, two poems I studied way back in mists of time at university. These are poems of dazzling intelligence, with hammer-blow lines and all kinds of cultural references that can make them a bit mind-boggling at first. They certainly reward re-reading. Some of the poems here are a bit shit, to be honest. T.S. Eliot was one of the leading figures in the modernist movement of the early 20th century, but there are pieces here that anticipate many of the hallmarks of post-modernism: deconstructive verses, ornate trimmings.Post-modernism – another subject I studied at uni – is really not my bag, and so I found myself frustrated at times during this collection. A bit hit and miss, though I don’t want to use my considerable cultural influence to sully Eliot’s legacy too much, so I’ll say it’s recommended reading, if only for the two big hits.
Finally, I finished The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour, which took me a good couple of months to get through. Subtitled ‘How Capitalism Stole Our Social Life’, the book was initially published in 2019, and the version I read had an afterword added in early 2024. It probes the nature of social media – or what Seymour calls the ‘social industry’ – and how it works to demand free labour of production from all of us who use it. It also investigates the social, political and psychological effects of this technocratic dystopia into which we have been snared, and does it all in an academic but accessible prose style. I enjoyed this and felt cleverer every time I read a few pages. Much of the conceits and assumptions explored here are no longer novel – it has been obvious for some time that social media’s impact in its current form is malign and spilling over to disastrous effect in the real world. But Seymour eschews the obvious conclusions and always has something interesting to say about why this might be the case and how we can begin to address it. The afterword touches on TikTok, which rose to prominence after the first edition of the book was published, and Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover. I’d highly recommend this for anyone interested in the topic, and then I’d recommend deleting any social media you don’t absolutely need.
And that’s it. That’s my reading for the year. I’m currently going through London Fields by Martin Amis – I haven’t read any Amis for a long time, and wanted to delve back into his work as I’m working on my own acerbic, dark comedy novel at the moment. I promise it won’t be sub-Amis pastiche, though. Hopefully, anyway.
If you’re counting, that makes 25 books complete. I succeeded in my reading challenge for once, having set the bar lower this year at 24. I’ll aim higher next year, just so I can fail again – after all, it’s nice to be in one’s comfort zone.
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 2025.
Ta-ra.
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James McLoughlin is a writer from Southport, Merseyside. He has published fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in various places. He is a Creative Editor for New Critique.
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