A total of 46 books in the last six months; with the 55 last time, that makes a pleasing 101 for the year. In the spirit of the times, I made an effort to be a bit more diverse in my selections, so 22 of the 46 were by non-white-males.
General Literature
The Devils’ Dance — Hamid Ismailov
Gargantua and Pantagruel — François Rabelais
There But For The — Ali Smith
Queenie — Candice Carty-Williams
Stay With Me — Ayòbámi Adébáyò
Offshore — Penelope Fitzgerald
Fever Dream — Samanta Schweblin
I bought a nice hardback of Gargantua and Pantagruel about twenty years ago, and finally got round to it this time. The lists complemented the ongoing Finnegans Wake very well. Offshore was funnier than I’d expected, while reading Fever Dream was an interesting way to spend Christmas Day.
German
Atemschaukel — Herta Müller
Das Testament des Herrn Napumoceno — Germano Almeida
Der Spaziergang — Robert Walser
Kelwitts Stern — Andreas Eschbach
Jahresringe — Andreas Wagner
Die Nacht, Die Lichter — Clemens Meyer
Ruhm — Daniel Kehlmann
Mittagsstunde — Dörte Hansen
Erzählungen — Thomas Bernhard
German reading was slowed down by the harvesting of vocabulary, but I managed a fair number. Mittagsstunde was brilliant, combining eccentric characters and universal experience. The Thomas Bernhard stories were mostly early works, but already perfectly Thomas Bernhard.
Robert Walser gives some handy instructions for walkers, and shows us all how you do a proper list:
Höchst liebevoll und aufmerksam muß der, der spaziert, jedes kleinste lebendige Ding, sei es ein Kind, ein Hund, eine Mücke, ein Schmetterling, ein Spatz, ein Wurm, eine Blume, ein Mann, ein Haus, ein Baum, eine Hecke, eine Schnecke, eine Maus, eine Wolke, ein Berg, ein Blatt oder auch nur ein armes weggeworfenes Fetzchen Schreibpapier, auf das vielleicht ein liebes gutes Schulkind seine ersten ungefügen Buchstaben geschrieben hat, studieren und betrachten.
Poetry
The Irish for No — Ciaran Carson
Flight — Vona Groarke
Ciaran Carson was a bit over my head, unfortunately — I think a reader would benefit from a closer knowledge of Belfast than I have — but I enjoyed Flight a lot.
SF/F
The Prestige — Christopher Priest
Jerusalem — Alan Moore
Anima — M. John Harrison
Emanon — Monica Sly and Wayne Shorter
2084: The End of the World — Boualem Sansal
The Fifth Season — N. K. Jemisin
Bloodchild — Octavia E. Butler
Again, Dangerous Visions — Harlan Ellison (ed.)
The Wild Road — Gabriel King
Look to Windward — Iain M. Banks
Greybeard — Brian Aldiss
Rosewater — Tade Thompson
The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists — Neil Gaiman
Jerusalem is one of the few books that one can reasonably compare to Ulysses. A history of the world in a story of the slums of Northampton, it’s given me an unexpected urge to visit the East Midlands. Splendid Harrisonesque similes too.
It wasn’t like he placed a lot of stock in dreams as others did, as his dad John had done, but more that they were often smashing entertainment that cost nothing and there wasn’t much you could say that about.
the deep, sincere green that you found on mallards’ necks
Sure, he’s not a pretty boy. He likes to think he’s got a lived-in look, albeit lived in by three generations of chaotic Lithuanian alcoholics who are finally evicted in an armed siege after which the premises remain unused for decades, save as a urinal by the homeless. Then it all burns down in an insurance fire.
Her expression had been like a knife fight between pity and contempt while incredulity looked on and didn’t do a damned thing.
Rotated slowly on a spit of wakefulness and perspiration-glazed, Mick Warren is a hominid kebab that slumber has regurgitated in the dreamless gutter-troughs of an unending Friday evening.
She has a wilfully Carpathian worldview, Alma.
Seen from a long way off his fellow human beings were reduced in meaning and importance, not just magnitude, with their unguessable perambulations become finger-puppet dramas, toy parades enacted only for the entertainment of a bored observer. It occurred to him he’d always had this feeling, unexamined until now, that far away was fictional. Perhaps in time, too. He supposed this was how almost everybody saw things, without being consciously aware of it. He didn’t know if all that other life and that other experience would be remotely bearable if people actually considered it to be as real, as valid, as their own.
The multitude of references in the pieces thus far, whizzing past above Mick’s head, had made him feel like he was being strafed by Melvyn Bragg but this, at last, was one he caught; was one he recognised.
The Wild Road was another surprise: a fantasy novel about cats (really), co-written by M. John Harrison, and with some really good bits amid the slumming:
Cy stared at them resentfully, as if they had interrupted an important message from outer space.
Every so often he stopped to shake out his charred feathers with a noise like dry reeds rustling in the wind. Sometimes he drove his beak into them like a bird who has at last located a live-in adversary of considerable age, evasiveness, and durability.
Mornings so windy the crows had to climb out of the air and into the branches of the trees.
For some pure Harrison I re-read Anima, which has some very characteristic descriptions:
He smelt rank and lively, like a small animal in straw.
one of those pale blue ties with the small white spots you see in the shop next to the men’s lavatories at Euston Station.
His face was thin, already muscular about the mouth from the effort of suppressing some internal tension. His eyes, though, remained clear and childish, and he had a habit of staring at you after he had spoken, as if anticipating some response you could never make.
Men, women and children died in subsidences and premature explosions, of privation, overwork, bad housing, puzzlement, or grief;
someone who looked as if he used to run Butlins was interviewing someone who looked as if he used to run Bulgaria.
Two naive and happy middle-class people embracing on a bridge. Caught between the river and the road, they grin and shiver at one another, unable to distinguish between identity and geography, love and the need to keep warm.
Non-fiction
Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume 1 — Mark Twain
The Journal/Essays/Journey from Essex — John Clare
The Greater Freedom — Alya Mooro
Foundation (History of England Vol. 1) — Peter Ackroyd
John Clare was inspired (as it were) by Jerusalem, in which he figures as a character. The Journey especially was enjoyably odd:
the swallows are flocking together in the sky ready for departing & a crowd has dropt to rest on the wallnut three were they twitter as if they were telling their young stories of their long journey to cheer & check fears
Had a visit from my friend Henderson … we talked about books & flowers & Butterflyes till noon
there is happiness in lolling over the old shivered trunks & fragments of a ruined tree destroyed some years since by lightening & mossing & wasting away into everlasting decay
to bend over the old woods mossy rails & list the call of the heavy bumble bee playing with the coy flowers till he has lost his way — & anon finds it by accident & sings out of the wood to the sunshine that leads him to his mossy nest lapt up in the long grass of some quiet nook — such is happiness
having only honest courage & myself in my army I Led the way & my troops soon followed
I lay down with my head towards the north to show myself the steering point in the morning
the road very often looked as stupid as myself
on the third day I satisfied my hunger by eating the grass by the road side which seemed to taste something like bread
the woman jumped out & caught fast hold of my hands & wished me to get into the cart but I refused & thought her either drunk or mad but when I was told it was my second wife Patty I got in
Foundation combined a lot of chaps and dates with some colour:
Apprentices also had a reputation for being unruly and even violent; one of their favourite games, when they found themselves in a group, was known as ‘breaking doors with our heads’.
Short Stories
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby — Donald Barthelme
All the Rage — A. L. Kennedy
That Glimpse of Truth — David Miller (ed.)
The Doll — Daphne du Maurier
Stone Mattress — Margaret Atwood
Three Short Works — Gustave Flaubert
I’ve continued reading at least one story a day, so that’s at least 365 this year. I liked Stone Mattress much more than the MaddAddam trilogy, so I need to explore further there. About 30 years after reading Flaubert’s Parrot, I finally found out the story of Loulou.
Detective
A Morbid Taste for Bones — Ellis Peters
The Wire in the Blood — Val McDermid
My first and last (for now) Cadfael book really was a load of tosh: The Wire in the Blood was more interesting, but very, very nasty. I haven’t quite got the hang of detective fiction as a genre yet.
Plays
The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising — Günter Grass
Much Ado About Nothing — William Shakespeare
Not much progress on Shakespeare this term, but one more down.
Project Gutenberg
The Happy-go-lucky Morgans — Edward Thomas
The last of my Edward Thomas books for PG was pretty poor as a novel, but included some of his trademark oddities:
If I climbed up into the old cherry-tree that forked close to the ground I could be entirely hidden, and I used to fancy myself alone in the world, and kept very still and silent lest I should be found out. But I gave up climbing the tree after the day when I found Mrs Partridge there before me. I never made out why she was up there, so quiet.
Each autumn a dozen little red apples hung on one of its branches like a line of poetry in a foreign language, quoted in a book.
He was too busy and enthusiastic ever to have become an eater, and he found that walking saved him still more from eating.
The pigeons lay all along under the roof ridge, too idle to coo except by mistake or in a dream.
