This year, I vaguely thought that it would be nice to read a book a week. Fortunately I spend a lot of time on the trams of Bratislava, which have become my reading room, and (including Audible books) I managed 36 to the end of June:
11 which I would class as ‘general literature’:
I Was Jack Mortimer — Alexander Lernet-Holenia
Charmed Life — Diana Wynne Jones
The Rehearsal — Eleanor Catton
Giving up the Ghost — Hilary Mantel
Breakfast of Champions — Kurt Vonnegut
Waiting for Sunrise — William Boyd
Espedair Street — Iain Banks
Umbrella — Will Self
The Swimming Pool Library — Alan Hollinghurst
The Crow Road — Iain Banks
All Over Creation — Ruth Ozeki
Of these, “Umbrella” stood out for me as one which I would like to read again. This was one of the audio books, and its seamless shifts between different time periods worked very well, thought somewhat disorientatingly, in the format. The difficulty of pausing and moving back encourages you to take each section as it comes and reinterpret it later, rather than stopping to figure everything out.
6 science fiction:
Blue Remembered Earth — Alastair Reynolds
Excession — Iain M. Banks
Inversions — Iain M. Banks
Look to Windward — Iain M. Banks
Against a Dark Background — Iain M. Banks
Light — M. John Harrison
I’ve been reading through the Culture books in (publication) order, and am increasingly enjoying them: there’s more humour than in the earlier books to balance the grotesqueries. M. John Harrison is my SF discovery of the year: bonkers, disturbing, but moving, and any space opera which includes the Circus of Pathet Lao has to be special.
3 general non-fiction:
Forgotten Footprints — John Harrison
Charles Dickens — Claire Tomalin
Help! — Oliver Burkeman
‘Forgotten Footprints’ I read because I was looking for M. John Harrison, and found a book which I’d bought earlier but not read about Antarctic exploration. The writing style is a bit grating (the author is very pleased with John Harrison), but it’s good background for the holiday.
Help! was the surprise discovery, from which I took more notes than for probably all the other books together:
“in Britain, people are three times richer than they were in 1950, but barely any happier”.
“there’s a slight negative correlation between a happy outlook on life and longevity”.
“People underestimate how much they will allow the threat of embarrassment to govern their future choices”.
“the healthiest ration of happy to sad feelings is 2.9:1”.
“if it’s familiar, it hasn’t eaten you yet”.
“in terms of your subjective experience of how time passes … if you’re 40 … your life is 71 per cent over”.
“Paraplegics and lottery winners, a year after become paraplegic or winning the lottery, report broadly similar happiness levels to those they felt prior to their life-changing experience”.
and quoting Schopenhauer:
“there are people who are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art… The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality”.
1 work book:
Big Questions in ELT — Scott Thornbury
Top thought for understanding students: “In order to be a wit in a foreign language you have to go through the stage of being a half-wit”.
The largest group, 15, consists of books which I’ve done for Distributed Proofreaders:
Three Years in Western China — Alexander Hosie
Kinship and Social Organisation — W. H. R. Rivers
The Exiles of Faloo — Barry Pain
Rise of the Russian Empire — Hector H. Munro
The Evolution of Culture and Other Essays — Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers
Plays — Thomas Dekker
Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall — Robert Hawker
Mission to Siam, and Hué — George Finlayson
Mothwise — Knut Hamsun
Bohemia under Hapsburg Misrule — Thomas Capek
Louis Spohr’s Autobiography — Louis Spohr
Garden Cities of To-Morrow — Ebenezer Howard
Twos and Threes — G. B. Stern
Conquest — Marie Stopes
Radiant Motherhood — Marie Stopes
Part of the fun of DPing is that I read books which are not great lost classics, but which show sides of the past which one would otherwise pay little attention to; the Victorian travel books in particular fall into this category. “Conquest” is a stunningly bad play, but it’s good to know what Marie Stopes wrote for fun. “Twos and Threes” is really rather good, however.
