Reading List 4

I finished 42 books in the second half of 2015. I had a fairly decent spread of (non-mutually exclusive) categories, I think; starting with

Real Books

How to be Both — Ali Smith
High-Rise — J. G. Ballard
The Narrow Road to the Deep North — Richard Flanagan
Freedom — Jonathan Franzen
The President’s Hat — Antoine Laurain
Nocturnes — Kazuo Ishiguro
Canada — Richard Ford
1988 — I Want to Talk with the World — Han Han
So Much for That — Lionel Shriver
Close Quarters — William Golding
Number9dream — David Mitchell
The Ocean at the End of the Lane — Neil Gaiman
The Marriage Plot — Jeffrey Eugenides
Stephen Hero — James Joyce
J — Howard Jacobson
A Very British Coup — Chris Mullin

Joyce apart, one area I’m lacking in here is long-dead authors; I should probably re-start Martin Chuzzlewit. How to be Both was fantastic, while Number9dream was another disappointment from David Mitchell.

SF/F

Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
Surface Detail — Iain M. Banks
The Hydrogen Sonata — Iain M. Banks
A Storm of Wings — M. John Harrison
Chasm City — Alastair Reynolds
Anansi Boys — Neil Gaiman
The Three-Body Problem — Liu Cixin
Weaveworld — Clive Barker
The Quantum Thief — Hannu Rajaniemi

The last of the Culture books were the highlight here. Liu Cixin was an interesting curiosity — not good, but it’s nice to have read some Chinese SF — while Finnish-Scot Hannu Rajaniemi has an admirably uncompromising policy of not explaining anything (explanations always being the clunkiest parts of SF books).

Non-Fiction

A Time of Gifts — Patrick Leigh Fermor
Mani — Patrick Leigh Fermor
Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles — Richard Dowden
King Solomon’s Ring — Konrad Lorenz
The Antidote — Oliver Burkeman
Where do Camels Belong? — Ken Thompson
Consilience — Edward. O. Wilson

I followed in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s footsteps this year — he passed through Bratislava in the 30s, appreciating the storks, then travelled (and settled) in the Peloponnese. Konrad Lorenz, also from this region, had a splendid Germanic sense of humour, and Richard Dowden’s Africa was very familiar from Mozambique.

Children’s

The Merlin Conspiracy — Diana Wynne Jones
The Magicians of Caprona — Diana Wynne Jones
Shadow — Michael Morpurgo

A couple more DWJ; Shadow was horribly manipulative, but interesting background to the experiences of the refugees in Vienna.

Project Gutenberg

A Treatise of Buggs — John Southall
Scottish Poetry of the Sixteenth Century — George Eyre-Todd
Wallace — Blind Harry
Orkney and Shetland Folk — A. W. Johnston
Maternity — Women’s Co-operative Guild
Tea-blending as a Fine Art — Joseph M. Walsh
Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic — Raymond M. Weaver

Most of these I’ve written about as they were posted on Project Gutenberg; the Melville biography has set me off exploring the “other” Melville books, which will help me add to my dead authors.

I’m currently finishing off the final part of Gladstone on Homer; still outstanding from last time are “Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften, On What Matters; something in Slovak”. The first two I have at least started….