2022: The Reading Year

Another year, another failed reading challenge. I’ve set a book a week for the last few years, but only hit 50 this year. To be fair I have read some thousand page plus books this year, but there’s no doubt I’m not as quick as I was. Here’s the top 10:

George Orwell: The Road to Wigan Pier. A brilliant polemic that has lost none of it’s raw power since it’s publication. Written with great fury, but a dry humour as well. Orwell is the master at this stuff, really.

James Joyce: Ulysses. Already written a blog post on this extraordinary book, a century after it was published. Very glad to have finally ticked this one off the list.

Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar. A beautiful, heartbreaking tale of a woman’s spiral into depression. Has added poignancy given the fate of the author.

Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian. I feel like a bit of a cheat having McCarthy yet again, but this is his masterpiece. Incredibly brutal, ultra-violent, and utterly compelling. Arguably America’s greatest novelist of the last fifty years.

Michael Punke: Ridgeline. Historical fiction isn’t usually my bag, but hard to argue with this page-turner about the Fetterman massacre in 1860s Wyoming. Unbelievably tense.

Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo. My God, this book is long. And it does meander through French high-society, with lots of talking in sitting rooms. But the first third or so is one of the best things I’ve read in ages, the classic tale of false imprisonment and escape.

Douglas Stuart: Shuggie Bain. I’ve read a few Booker Prize winners this year, and this is the best of them. The destination is inevitable and heartbreaking, but the journey will stay with you forever.

Willy Vlautin: The Night Always Comes. My favourite American author, so any new novel is an event. This 48 hour tale of one woman’s desperate struggles is his darkest yet, but the humanity still shines through. Bleak and beautiful.

Kate Chopin: The Awakening. I thought long and hard about including this, but absolutely deserved. This feminist treatment of marital infidelity is beautifully written, and still amazingly topical and relevant for a book written over a century ago.

James Hilton: Lost Horizon. The last book I read, and another genre, the adventure story, which I seldom read. But this is a great yarn about the mystery of a place called Shangri-La. Philosophical exploration coupled with old-fashioned derring-do.

It was good to tick off a few classics this year, and I’ve tried to read some of the more contemporary prize winners as well. Having a few long-haul flights certainly helped me get through some pages, but always with the slight doubt that I’m not doing enough. Got a busy year ahead personally, will be moving house and possible changing jobs, but I’ll always have time for reading. It;s my constant pleasure.

Happy New Year!

Exploring Again

I wrote in a post a while back about during lockdown, with less new books around to read, I had gone back to some old favourites and even had a meeting of my Germany book club pick up on one that I had studied with my Australian friends a few years ago. My current membership of both groups will be coming to an end on the near future, for different reasons The time difference will make it a struggle to catch up Down Under, and hopefully by next month the German club will be able to meet in person.  Somehow my contribution via Zoom would basically be me saying I can’t hear anyone and asking them to repeat themselves, ad nauseum. So sadly I think, other than when I make a visit, the two groups will go on without me.

Coincidentally, the last two books explored for the German club are ones that I’d read before in other groups, much the same as I wrote in the post linked above. The first was Orwell’s Down and Out, which was lovely to read again. There is something luxurious about reading an enjoyable book second time round, and always a tinge of interest in seeing whether your opinion has changed in the interim. With both books my enjoyment remained the same. Orwell’s dry humour and compassionate storytelling shone through just as bright, and his ability to show empathy for his fellow man remains enormously affecting.  His place in the upper echelons of the British writing canon begun with this book really, and rightly so.

When it comes to William Boyd’s Any Human Heart I think I’m more of a fanboy about it than I was when we read it in Australia in 2016 (my last ever meeting on Australian soil, which adds an extra bit of poignancy.  Somehow fitting, though).  I’m one of those people who will rant about the book endlessly to friends and bore them to tears with it, so you can imagine what I was like in this month’s Germany meeting. I have to say beforehand I was a little nervous of the reception the book might get – there is an awful lot of sex in it! As was rightly pointed out, a personal, warts-an-all journal probably would talk about moments of extreme intimacy, but I was worried that the promiscuity of Logan might be off-putting to some. But happily everyone seemed to enjoy it.

What I noticed most on second reading was how superbly crafted the writing is. It is a sign of the book’s greatness that every section of the journal perfectly captures Logan’s age, the mannerisms and speech and foibles of the teenager or the middle aged married man and so on. It takes a great writer to pull off such a feat, of that I’m certain. And it’s skill adds to the sense of loss you feel once the novel is over, that you have experienced a full life in all its rounded, flawed glory. I sped through the book with a permanent smile on my face, and the fact that I will probably read the book at least another five times in my life fills me with pleasure, I genuinely can’t wait to read it again. I’m in my 40s now, when Logan begins to muse on his mortality, much as I do in my writing and thoughts.  That took more weight than on my first read, despite there only being four years between them. I felt the sadness more, the sense of time slipping through the hourglass. I’m sure on my next read another theme will come to the forefront. A sign of a great book.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea.  A book I can quite openly and happily say I love.

Confederacy of Poverty

I’ve never been a huge fan of the picaresque novel. I enjoy their satirical elements and the style of the anti-hero, but the general lack of character development and story that are usually aspects of the picaresque I find hard to get along with. So I approached our first novel of book club, John Kennedy Toole’s The Confederacy of Dunces, with some trepidation.
But it was mostly unfounded as I enjoyed the novel quite a lot. I can see why it took a lot of effort to be published (Toole’s mother spent over a decade contacting publishers after her sons suicide) as the lack of plot make it a hard sell. The main character, Ignatius Reilly, is a tour-de-force of epic proportions. He is at once arrogant, exasperating, self-indulgent, lazy, emotionally challenged, solitary, frustrating and contradictory. But never anything less than compelling. The episodes of the novel are mostly farcical and to some Ignatius’s ridiculous reactions to anything resembling hard work would come across as annoying. The move teeters on this tightrope throughout, but for me Toole goes up to this line but never quite crosses it. I’ve certainly never read anything quite like Dunces and for that I can only recommend it.
Our second choice was something vastly different – George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris in London. Orwell is known as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and this account of his time struggling with poverty in the early 1920s was a fascinating glimpse into his life at the beginning of his career.
The book describes poverty in superb detail, always with compassion and honesty and a great deal of humour too. Orwell’s travails as a plongeur (waiter, basically) in Paris hotels is a chaotic and often very funny look at the poor underbelly of the Parisian working class. The sheer scale of the chaos and hard work of the plongeurs is almost unbelievable. The long hours and back-breaking conditions are soul-destroying and for very meagre pay. The power of Orwell’s writing brings these scenes to life in a compelling way and also have much resonance to conditions in the hospitality industry today. My partner works in hospitality and some of the scenes Orwell describes, whilst at the extreme end of the scale, are still applicable in today’s industry.
His experiences of homelessness in London are exceptionally well drawn. He underwent a constant cycle of walking between hostels, often for up to 20 miles a day, and surviving on little more than bread and margarine for days on end. The descriptions of starvation reminded me very much of another writer who lived on the poverty line for much of his life, Charles Bukowski. Orwell has that matter-of-fact, dry prose that is the antithesis of Bukowski but still a similarity remains. Whilst this section of the book is challenging and finds Orwell at a low ebb he never loses his compassionate outlook or ability to see hope in his situation. Which is something to admire.