Reading List 7

A total of 60 for the first six months of the year (helped by having very little gainful employment for most of the time).

Literature

Oranges are not the Only Fruit — Jeanette Winterson
The Passion — Jeanette Winterson
To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
Travels with my Aunt — Graham Greene
The Corn King and the Spring Queen — Naomi Mitchison
Earthly Powers — Anthony Burgess
Athena — John Banville
The Noise of Time — Julian Barnes
Leo Perutz — Little Apple
Ulverton — Adam Thorpe
The Stone Raft — José Saramago
Sea of Ink — Richard Weihe
Galápagos — Kurt Vonnegut
All Quiet on the Western Front — Erich Maria Remarque
The Man-eater of Malgudi — R. K. Narayan
Sunflower — Gyula Krúdy
Campo Santo — W. G. Sebald
The Bottle Factory Outing — Beryl Bainbridge
Harriet Said … — Beryl Bainbridge
A Quiet Life — Beryl Bainbridge
The Dance of Death — W. H. Auden
The Restraint of Beasts — Magnus Mills
Heaven Forbid — Christopher Hope
The Arabian Nights — trans. Husain Haddawy
Radio Romance — Garrison Keillor
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street — Hilary Mantel
The Plague-Spreader’s Tale — Gesualdo Bufalino
The Tenement — Iain Crighton Smith

Several continuing themes here — the Wintersonathon continues from last year (though I’ve ground to a halt in Gut Symmetries), and the Bainbridgeathon begins. I read A Quiet Life at the same time as the Alan Bennett book below, and they merged into each other in a disturbing/enjoyable way.

More paper books of the early 90s: Ulverton was very different from what I had expected, the interconnected stories reminiscent of a deeper, if less funny, David Mitchell. Heaven Forbid managed to give a believable child’s-eye view with beautiful — and funny — use of language. In The Restraint of Beasts the humour was more Kafkaesque.

All Quiet on the Western Front was a book that I always thought I more or less knew without actually having to read it. Turns out I was wrong.

Trashy

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin — Louis de Bernières
The Black Book — Ian Rankin
Dead Beat — Val McDermid

SF/F

The Bloodline Feud — Charles Stross
Mixed Magics — Diana Wynne Jones
The Inverted World — Christopher Priest
Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days — Alastair Reynolds
Binti — Nnedi Okorafor
Ninefox Gambit — Yoon Ha Lee
The Last Days of New Paris — China Miéville
Consider Phlebas — Iain M. Banks
The Wild Shore — Kim Stanley Robinson

More series — DWJ and Reynolds’ Revelation Space continue, and I’ve started the Culture series again from the beginning. Christopher Priest and Yoon Ha Lee were both new discoveries for me. The former turns out to be one of the grand old men of British SF, while the latter’s book is the first in a series of tough, but rewarding military SF by a queer Korean Texan. A first.

Non-fiction

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot — Robert Macfarlane
Holloway — Dan Richards et al.
Civilization and its Discontents — Sigmund Freud
Introducing Heidegger — Jeff Collins and Howard Selina
Val McDermid — Forensics
The World According to Bob — James Bowen
Black Box Thinking — Matthew Syed
Demystifying Tibet — Lee Feigon
Fire Under the Snow — Palden Gyatso
Quiet — Susan Cain
Hiroshima — Robert Hersey
The Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean — trans. He Zuokang
A Life Like Other People’s — Alan Bennett
Algeria, 1830-2000: a Short History — Benjamin Stora

Fire Under the Snow stood out here for the way it brought the occupation of Tibet to life. The cheerful anger of the author is something to behold. Hiroshima brought home another disaster, although I thought the emphasis on Christian missionaries and converts unfortunate (giving the impression that “the ones like us” matter more). The Old Ways was uneven, but it put me on the track of some other writers, and inspired me to start a series of Edward Thomas books at Distributed Proofreaders.

Gutenberg

The New English Canaan — Thomas Morton
John Holdsworth Chief Mate — W Clark Russell
Pictographs of the North American Indians. A preliminary paper. — Garrick Mallery
How to Teach a Foreign Language — Otto Jespersen
Animal Behaviour — C. Lloyd Morgan
In the Far East — William Henry Davenport Adams

And plans for the rest of the year: finish 100 books for the year (or maybe 104, for two per week); start on All of Shakespeare; and maybe Some of Austen, to be fair-minded; more by Arab/Algerian writers, or at least about about the region.