Category Archives: Round-up

Reader’s Report 2023

by Andrew | 1 Comment

As I looked back on the books I read in 2023, I was given pause to think about how I read – in new ways and old.

First, I want to mention strategies I adopted in 2023 that made reading more fun. For example, I cast a drag queen as the central character of an Iris Murdoch novel, and that suddenly made a book about the strained mores of postwar poshos much more interesting.

Of perhaps greater consequence, I used the library probably more than I have since I was a kid. In recent years (decades), I’ve bought far too many books I don’t read and then I feel guilty about them lying in stacks all over the place unread – and that doesn’t include invisible stacks on my Kindle. The library is less risky in that way. I reserve a book at the library, and then wait a week or a month or two, and then it comes and I have three weeks to read it, and that creates a return deadline that focuses my mind. This pattern probably made me read more in 2023 than in many recent years.

Looking back over those books I did complete, though, I wonder if my reading was maybe a bit tame and I missed some of the indie treats and works in translation that I often enjoy most. No writer *really* captured me this year as, eg, Annie Ernaux or Lucia Berlin or Robin Wall Kimmerer have in years before. Could have been me! Perhaps that fixed loan period at the library focused my mind on finishing those sorts of bestsellery or reading groupy books that other readers request and are waiting to read. But even so: there were a lot of books I enjoyed there.

I also did a lot of sampling and skimming this year. If the opening wasn’t clicking, I’d scan the body of the book and skip to the end. Sometimes that’s enough, and library books make wider skimming possible. Skimming: ah! That’s a reading practice to embrace.

Breaking my wrist and having to do exercises three times a day also created extra reading time. (Exercises that allow reading: my kinda.) While the fracture was mending, I found it easier to read hardbacks (the library again) or my Kindle. Paperbacks with tight spines are more work to prop open.

So: I actually read (completed) far more books this year.

Though too: reading isn’t about productivity, is it? So much of my most significant reading is rereading.

I am never sure about the idea of ‘best’ books – best is so subjective, and often boring – so, most recent first, these are the books that probably left most of an impression on me in 2023:

* Paul Murray, The Bee Sting
* Naomi Klein, Doppelganger
* Zadie Smith, The Fraud
* Daniel Mason, North Woods
* Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds
* Tahir Hamut Izgil, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night
* Rachel Pollack, A Walk Through the Forest of Souls: A Tarot Journey to Spiritual Awakening
* Matthew Evans, Soil: The Incredible Story of What Keeps the Earth, and Us, Healthy
* Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer
* Helen Macdonald, H Is For Hawk

I haven’t finished The Bee Sting yet, but on the basis of the first 400 pages, which have consumed me over the last couple of days, its immersive storytelling is a winner.

The standout is probably North Woods. Formally clever, imaginative, poignant. Actually, maybe something did capture my attention this year. I would like to reread it.

Special mention also to Kent Haruf, whose entire canon I completed/reread this year. I think it’s very good to reread your favourites, and he is one of the great prose stylists. Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me surprised me – a lot is missing there, but too I realised, duh, it’s one of those awful child star stories. Other notables were Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, Ada Calhoun’s Also A Poet, M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here, Rebecca Smith’s Rural, Justin Torres’s Blackouts, and Catherine Lacey’s The Biography of X (the last two have a similar feel, and I note both were published by Granta in the UK). Yellowface was fun, and one of the more astute descriptions of publishing I’ve come across in fiction.

I should also mention this year’s ongoing read of Ovid’s Metamorphoses aka Long Ovid. Next we are making a start on the Bible. Our original plans were to read the Old Testament in 2024 and the New in 2025, but we’ve decided simply to finish Genesis in January, then take it from there. I was exposed to the Bible a lot as a child, but I’ve spent less time there as an adult, and I’m curious to see what I remember, and also to think about literary as well as broader influences.

I’m currently listening to My Name Is Barbra – wow, surely the audiobook of the year, all 48 hours of it. Apparently the audio has lots of asides that aren’t in the print/ebook edition. Barbra Streisand is a wonderful narrator.

A special mention also for Bobbie Louise Hawkins, whose story The Child was picked by George Saunders for his Story Club.

Elsewhere, I encountered a LOT of namedropping. Some of it was amusing, some of it was embarrassing, most of it was crammed into three literary memoirs. Writers! As my husband said of one: this reads like a bunch of Instagram captions.

Also elsewhere: some fantastic manuscripts. It’s a real honour to be trusted to read work in progress, and sometimes this raw and unpolished writing enjoys an energy that perhaps only unfinished work can achieve. Hmmm, something for the editor to ponder. I hope these books get finished and find homes with publishers, or get out into the world in some way.

In watching, off the top of my head I enjoyed: The Last of Us, Happy Valley, The Diplomat, Fisk, Wheel of Time, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Reservation Dogs, Slow Horses, and a fantastic series of documentaries on wild dogs. And I’m glad Succession is over. It was too glib for my taste, and reminded me that good writing is about more than lots of shiny surfaces and showing off on social media.

Perhaps the most memorable viewing was Timothy Snyder’s 24-part Yale University lecture series on YouTube on the making of modern Ukraine – which is so much more than that too: a specific take on empire and colonialism and domination and take, relevant in many contexts throughout the world. A camera in a lecture theatre with a brilliant mind communicating brilliantly: sometimes that’s all we need. The words.

Also on YouTube I have recently enjoyed the comedy of Matteo Lane and Bob the Drag Queen. Again, a camera and a sharp mind being quick and very funny: bare brick walls, and words. (Note for sheltered minds: some of these words are also very, um, bawdy.)

Didn’t see a lot of art, but the Mat Collishaw exhibition Petrichor at Kew Gardens is out of this world.

My last post of 2023, on the last day of the year. Look for me on Substack in 2024. And support your local library! I’ve even started recommending books for our library to add to its collection.

And before I go, another mention for my new Zoom masterclasses on writing – to paraphrase one of my musical icons, we start at the very beginning, with Beginnings, on 8 January.

Happy New Year! For some reason, I’m liking the numbers 2 0 2 4. Here’s a pic taken outside Birmingham’s fantastic new library.

 

 

Books Of 2015

by Andrew | Leave a comment

BooksOf20151Jan

I tend to shy away from judgements on published works on this blog (though not elsewhere!), but I thought I’d do my own year-end list of books: books I’ve enjoyed, books that left an impression, books I gained something from. Not all were published this year, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten other books I read in 2015, and this could be a slightly different list were I to write it yesterday or tomorrow.

Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl is perhaps my favourite book of the year. 2015 could go down in literary history as the year I discovered Edna O’Brien. Yay! Love her.  A couple of months after reading, what I remember most: the lyrical prose, the stories of her family and her marriage, the celebs she describes (could be namedroppy in lesser hands, but here they just come naturally and deservedly). I was taken into another world with this book, which is one of my measurements of what a great book should do for me. What a star.

If that book has a contender for my fave, it’s probably Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, which I finally read back in February. A powerful family story, with a strong setting in time and place (Rhodesia in the 70s and 80s) and great political purpose. Searingly good, and so rich and so intense I eked it out a couple of chapters at a time.

Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have A Family is perhaps the novel that consumed me most this year. I can’t quite put my finger on why, as at times I found its central character and a couple of other players a little grating. But then there were other characters who really got under my skin, which makes me think that sometimes we have to set up certain things (grating characters) for other things to work better (characters who get under the skin). They certainly felt real as a result, and worked their magic – the voice and the tone really took hold of me at certain points.

I also enjoyed a reading where Bill Clegg described his process in writing this book: on returning to his hometown after a long time away, he started writing about it. He had a line – She will go – that would end up as the opening sentence of Chapter Two, in fact, but it took four years of accruing many pages in the voices and points of view of an extended community before he landed on the narrative device that would be placed at the start of his book and drive his plot. It took another three years to refine what went in the book (much went out). I think this shows in the deeply felt portraiture of people and place: this was instinctively assembled, bottom upwards, and we really experience a slice of these characters’ lives.

I’d been gripped by Bill Clegg’s first memoir Portrait Of The Addict As A Young Man when it first came out, and, having been impressed by his novel, this year I caught up on his second memoir, Ninety Days, which is about his recovery: whoa! Economical writing, and very powerful in its frankness. A very New York book, too, I thought.

Another economical read was Kent Haruf’s Our Souls At Night. It has a pretty simple setup (oldsters seeking company), and unfolds with a beguiling humour and depth of characterisation, and also a certain darkness. It took me back to the small towns on the plains of Colorado. This is the author’s last novel (he died a year ago), but I still have a few other books of his to catch up on. A lovely feature by him here: ‘The Making Of A Writer’.

Nina Stibbe’s Man At The Helm was probably the novel that charmed me most this year: her characters, her setting (a gossipy Midlands village), and especially her voice. We are there with her and her family in what turns out to be a funny and clever and bittersweet book. Funny is hard to pull off: funny is the mark of a clever writer, and when it’s combined with feeling it’s a powerful thing. And I love that she uses all the words (the effs and the cees), like a good writer should.

Damon Galgut’s In A Strange Room is a strange and unsettling book that held my attention with pretty ordinary events that delivered unexpected turns of suspense. Again, it is the style that wins my praise. He is unafraid to experiment or be something other than obvious, and he does so unpretentiously in a way that seems effortless.

I read a few dreadful (published) books too. I’m usually hesitant about parading harsh judgements on this blog, or even entertaining the idea of dreadful, because my job is about encouraging writers to find their way in the world of writing, and taste is so subjective, anyway – many books I enjoy might in fact be subject to others’ snootiness.

But: I hated A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. It started off so well, and I did admire the book’s management of time – compressing, looping back, opening out as it went along – but I knew things had really gone irretrievably badly when [spoiler!] a character in a wheelchair got pushed down a stairwell by his violent boyfriend, and my visceral reaction was to laugh out loud. I found this book manipulative without being moving, and could not help but compare the misfortunes it melodramatises with any number of real-life stories (e.g., see Alexandra Fuller, above). The book is said to aim for a heightened reality, which sounds like the bold sort of deviation from representative realism that I usually love, but I’m afraid I was not persuaded, perhaps as its fans seem to have identified in very literal and mawkish ways with its cast of cartoonish characters.

It was its reception that probably confounded me most, especially on Twitter, where it sometimes felt as if emotional cripples – stunted by the limits of 140 characters, and craving reaction – were live-tweeting their readings. (Later, I imagined some of these readers were the same people tweeting that London Spy was the best and most heartbreaking thing on telly, even after that last – that word again – dreadful episode; it too had started so well …) So many publishing successes nowadays seem to be twysterically generated.

Maybe I’d not have felt so strongly about A Little Life had I not read the quote from the Atlantic saying this might be the ‘great gay novel’. Ultimately it felt to me like misery-porn for self-hating homos, a ghoulish fantasy for faghags who prefer their gay men as victims, abusers, consumers, or pastry chefs. Eventually I saw sense prevailing among some readers, such as discussion with Scott Pack on his blog. Daniel Mendelsohn’s exacting review in the New York Review of Books (as well as his even more exacting response to a letter from the book’s editor) must rank as one of the most thoughtful pieces of criticism I read in 2015 (and not just because I heartily agree with it). In a year in which personal attacks and trolling have continued to pollute social media, I resisted sharing my own negative responses so publicly. But eventually I thought that it felt pollyanna-ish not to speak about something I felt strongly about, and I note I’ve written more about it here than any of the books that I enjoyed; perhaps this is in fact my book of the year?! Much can be formed in provocation and opposition. And I did at least end up loving-to-hate this book, I guess!

I increasingly think that volumes of short stories should not be read all at once, and I’ve continued to read the short stories in Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins, which I started in 2014. I’m bowled over by her voice and style and sense of place. And in a year where so much discourse in identity politics has been marked by righteousness, I particularly liked how Watkins’s essay ‘On Pandering’ raised questions rather than sought offence.

I’m still working through the most excellent catalogue for the most excellent Celts exhibition at the British Museum, and I’m also a few chapters into Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes (I often read nonfiction in fits and starts). I also enjoyed many pieces I read on or via Literary Hub.

Another great discovery was Lynda Barry. I’d read about her before, but not read any of her books. Syllabus, which gathers together her classroom notes for a course she teaches on creativity at the University of Wisconsin, is called life-changing by its publisher, and I think the hyperbole is warranted. It was also refreshing for me to read something where so much of its energy came through illustration rather than words, and it prompted me to read others of her books: What It Is, Picture This, and One! Hundred! Demons! I should write a review for Syllabus on this blog sometime. Yay! All hail Queen Lynda! I also want to read more widely in graphic novels and memoirs.

While discussing books on writing and creativity, I should mention The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne, which I’m still working through (on pause till I finish my close reading of Silence of the Lambs, which it will discuss in detail as a case study). And I am also pleased that Ursula Le Guin’s Steering The Craft is now more widely available in a new edition.

Further special mentions go to two debut novels coming in 2016 that I was lucky to read as advance proofs: Joanna Cannon’s The Trouble With Goats And Sheep and Kit De Waal’s My Name Is Leon. Both have children as protagonists, and each delivers a certain unexpected bite, but they work their wonders in different ways. Both, I now realise, also have period settings in the Midlands (70s and 80s), which I think is very good indeed: we need more strong Midlands voices in contemporary fiction (okay, Nina Stibbe is another one too – yes, maybe I’m biased). I’d not be surprised to see either of these engrossing novels as prizewinners or book club selections, and I look forward to seeing what comes next from their authors.

There were a number of books I did not get to. I hope in the near future to read Sanjeev Sahota’s Year Of The Runaways and Marlon James’s Brief History Of Seven Killings and Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen; this was a good year for the Booker, it seems. Also Oliver Sacks’s memoir On The Move; his column in the New York Times was another moving read. And maybe sometime soon I’ll get to Elena Ferrante – I confess to starting the first volume several times now, and finding the translation a bit stiff.

I’d also hoped to finish Moby-Dick this year, nay this summer, but other things came along (not least, its mid-Victorian style of rambling and musing, which has its moments, but I’m wanting me some STORY). I’m 40 per cent of the way in, and finally (FINALLY) we’ve met Ahab and had a mention of the whale. More anon (I hope), though for now I think I’m going to take a breather with Anne Tyler’s newest book A Spool Of Blue Thread.

And I realise I still (after three serious goes) have not finished The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro; I was really looking forward to this, and thought it sounded like the sort of literary fantasy I should have enjoyed, but what I did read just didn’t grab me (and I only have sixty pages left to go – which says a lot): sometimes a bit heavy-handed, often a bit lacking (in spark? in magic?). Plus I am tired of the patronising conversations about genre fiction by literary authors and their readers.

The novels I’ve listed as enjoying here have been on the whole pretty straightforward works of realism. People and places and voices were what seemed to count in my reading. No plot-rich pageturners this year, or historical blockbusters, or escapes into fantasy: no Goldfinch, no Burial Rites, no new George R.R. Martin.

Despite my love of novels and short stories, I think the works of fiction I enjoyed the most in 2015 all appeared on television. Game of Thrones continued to entertain and surprise, and I’m looking forward to see how it departs further from the books in 2016. I’m currently watching the second season of Transparent, whose characters at first irritated the hell out of me, until I really fell for them. So Jewish and so Californian, and so many of the joys and misunderstandings of relationships and family life are drawn with truth. And The Bridge also gave surprises, especially beyond the usual resolutions of a police procedural drama – the last hour of the third series was the best hour of telly (and fiction) this year.

Happy New Year!

This Week: Plotting And Swearing

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Rose and Pistachio cake

This week:

* I continued to read Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting And Writing Suspense Fiction, which is first-rate and should be of value to any fiction writer; just about any work of fiction needs to take into consideration pacing and suspense.

* I read Nina Stibbe’s Man At The Helm: ooooo, good. Funny yet dark, and I love her swearing. We must use all the words. (We must ditch the idea of offence.)

* I watched RuPaul in bed with Joan Rivers (again!) for further reinforcement in my belief in swearing; hear him describe his mother. (We must use all the words, etc.) (We miss you, Joan.)

* I despaired of trolls of various types. (We must learn from history, use all the words, ditch the idea of offence.) In reading discussions about Charlie Hebdo and Ron Silliman’s defence of Vanessa Place earlier this month, I found myself more passionately in favour of freedom of speech than I ever expected.

* I remember seeing Salman Rushdie speak in Boulder once. He said, ‘The right to be an asshole is part of the first amendment.’ To which I might add, thinking about conceptual writing: ‘The right to disappear up your own asshole is also part of the first amendment.’

* I contemplated the end of my Facebook holiday after reading this response from Mariella to a letter about the glossy self-editing of social media.

* I was horrified to hear how they’re teaching writing to kids in the schools! Maybe we should ditch the idea of a National Curriculum entirely, and teach kids in the manner of the school where Tilda Swinton sends hers.

* I read the #Charlestonsyllabus (though not all the books on it – yet …) and thought how history must be the most important subject to teach in schools (truths + critical thinking + writing + civics).

* I agreed that historical fiction doesn’t only have to be realist.

* I watched the pilot of The Man In The High Castle.

* I flew a rainbow flag instead of a Confederate one.

* With my American friends, I celebrated same-sex marriage finally being recognised across the USA. Not before time!

A good writing experiment: writing a syllabus for a cause of your own or a school of your own creation.

Garden inspiration of the week: pictures of this tiny but beautiful urban garden in Stoke Newington.

Earthly pleasure of the week: I followed a fantastic recipe for a yogurt and apricot loaf cake (I added half a grated Bramley apple, rose petals, chopped apricots soaked in rosewater, hazelnuts and pistachios, as well as cinnamon – and probably something else or two …). See pic above.

Round-up, 13 November 2012: Ballot Design, Accents, Trends, Why British Students Can’t Write, Sendak

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Among the many angles in the coverage of last week’s US election, the story that fascinated me the most was ‘Ballot Design With Todd Oldham’ from the New York Times. The experts say maybe millions of votes have been lost over the years because of poor ballot design. And I had no idea that the Florida ballots with the hanging chads were such a MESS (I love their comparison!). Wow, typography is THAT important. I still find it horrifying that the world’s superpower’s voting systems are so inconsistent; surely this is too important for such variation to be permitted in things such as voting machines (paper vs electronic), in the ballot design? If this happened in the developing world, the righteous West would be crying outrage. I’m all for decentralisation, but this is chaos. Makeover time!

Talking of typography, enjoy the pleasures of calligraphy in this short film about designer and artist Seb Lester.

I’m experimenting with dictation software (Dragon on my iPad), so I found this story about Midlands accents confounding an expensive phone system at Birmingham City Council quite amusing.

From the Guardian: is crime fiction the new fashion in young adult fiction?

And from a blog I stumbled across, a good overview of trends in horror fiction.

From the American Reader, one of the more thoughtful pieces of coverage of the Penguin/Random House merger.

Which we are told is necessary to balance out the ever increasing powers of Amazon. Which doesn’t pay much tax either. I have found myself shopping at Amazon less and less this year. Okay, I might have to(?!) do my ebook of short stories there, and I am sure could save on various titles I might instead buy, e.g., at the Open Book in Richmond. But at what price: my soul, for a couple of tight-fisted quid, and crappier royalties to the writers? In you have any doubts, just watch the BBC coverage of the parliamentary grilling of the man from Amazon (he say no).

Just happened to watch The Young Apprentice candidates create cookbooks last week. Fun to see a primetime take on publishing, and I thought the kids did well (among the squabbling – some of the young women were notably obnoxious). The funniest moment for me was when the Waterstone’s buyer got so defensive about a seventeen-year-old saying their customers were middle-class. Out of the mouths of babes. But also: if you want to publish, learn to spell, or at least find someone who can.

Talking of, an oldie I recently came across: Sarah Churchwell asks in the Independent why British students can’t write like Americans. Duh, because they’re not taught how to?! Just saying. Sarah, I share your outrage. A North American correspondent points out that Americans can’t write either. Well, you can’t make it learn, but you can at least take a horse to water.

But what if the wells of academia are dry? Universities are so concerned with learning outcomes and maximising impacts and institutional targets that sometimes you wonder where teaching fits in. In the Guardian Andrew Motion attacks the government’s mercantile attitude to universities, and it’s not before time. It’s not just the government; it’s often the universities themselves too that prize the values of the market over the ideals of learning. Also from the THE is the original article launching the Council for the Defence of British Universities. Good luck to them.

Finally, the Believer interview with Maurice Sendak is super. His cranky comments about the death of publishing and the evil of ebooks were taken out of context all over. Read at the source; any curmudgeonliness must be experienced in the larger space of that rich, intelligent, funny voice.

Round-up, 2 November 2012: Boulder, More Ebooks, Slow Books, and Fair Use

by Andrew | 1 Comment

It was great to be in Boulder this last week. I caught up with many dear folk, including various former students and teachers who’re now just good friends. I also spoke on Bobbie Louise Hawkins and publishing in two different classes at Naropa, drank lots of tea, bought even more, read tarot cards, was driven through a snowstorm (eek!), beheld winter wonderland mountains, heard all about feeding baby squirrels from a chum who’s a volunteer at Greenwood Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, bought books at my spiritual home slash favourite bookshop in the whole wide world, and also acquired a super little brass deer (super heavy too) from an antique (junk) shop in gold town turned casino town Central City. The little brass deer, who’s currently lying on the mantelpiece (lazy slut), has a special name, but I’m saving that for a story. But best of all it was great to be around all those creative friends, and feel that here, thousands of miles away, we’re all still connected.

In other reports:

From Publishing Perspectives, Have We Already Reached ‘Peak E-Book?’ contains some interesting analysis of ebook readerships and consumption. (But I am worried: even in US style, aren’t those closing quotes supposed to go before the question mark?! Must check my Chicago Manual. Okay, I thought so – it should be … Reached ‘Peak E-book’? And myself, I prefer ebook over e-book. Ack.)

While I was at Publishing Perspectives (I love that site), I came across an older article that is well worth a read in this month of NaNoWriMo: Good Books Are Worth The Wait. But do NaNoWriMo anyway – it can really help with discipline and your writing process. But later, be realistic, and think about the value of sloooow.

And finally, from Andrew Shaffer, links and round-up on the protectionist estate of William Faulkner: Faulkner Estate Suing Sony Over Use Of Single Quote. Extraordinary.