Books I Read in 2020
Moon Palace - Paul Auster
A bunch of motifs appear again and again in Auster's novels: bibliophiles, symbolic character names, lives stripped back to hermetic solitude, wild coincidence. This is a slow, sad, serious-minded book travelling across a century of American history, lingering over books and paintings and failure, flickering between quiet realism and Beckett-y weirdness. I like Auster's smooth cool prose and hanging around with his obsessions, but The Music of Chance, The New York Trilogy and The Brooklyn Follies are all better than this.
The High Window - Raymond Chandler
Chandler is just the best at hard-boiled detective noir. As ever, you have a deliriously complicated plot (quick version: a valuable antique doubloon has gone missing and a lot of people linked to it are getting murdered) and wonderful, nasty, funny prose. But this is also Chandler as yearning, bleak romantic, with his detective as a "shop-soiled galahad", the one decent man trying to do decent things in an irrevocably broken world. It's a sadder, more human book than the other two Chandlers I've read, and that probably makes it a better one.
Expletives Deleted - Angela Carter
A collection of brief essays, mostly book reviews. As sharp and interesting and trenchant as you'd expect, perhaps its best feature is introducing a bunch of fascinating-sounding books, such as Milorad Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars" (a pseudo-academic encyclopedia of entirely fictional history), or Walter De La Mare's "Memoirs of a Midget" (a sentimental melodrama about a surreally tiny person).
The Arabian Nightmare - Robert Irwin
An English traveller explores 15th century Cairo, hearing of a curse whose sufferers feel as if they are constantly waking up, trapped in an endless labyrinth of dreams. Perhaps the traveller is suffering from this curse - it’s unclear, but reality is certainly fraying and wobbly... It’s very much in the Borges/Calvino box of bookish postmodern fantasy. Grubby, sinister medieval Cairo is a rich setting, but the really impressive thing about this book is that it *feels* like an unsettling dream: all looping rhythms, shifting identities, and meanings just out of sight.
Seven Surrenders - Ada Palmer
If you're even vaguely interested in science fiction, you should be reading Ada Palmer. She's so damn good. This is the second in her planned four-book Terra Ignota series about a far-future utopian earth on the verge of collapse. You've got a wild stew of 18th century philosophy, almost parodically tangled political intrigue, properly fascinating explorations of gender, and some of the most heart-in-mouth setpieces you could hope to read. It's a dense river of *stuff* and sometimes you've just got to let it rush over you, but there's nothing else like it.
Them - Joyce Carol Oates
I didn't care for this. Normally I like Oates' sprawling, aimless, maximalist style, but previously I've only read her gothic horror (a bunch of her short stories, and "The Accursed" which is an A++ horror novel about demons and America's foundational racism), or gothic horror masquerading as historical realism ("Blonde", which is a fictionalised biography of Marilyn Monroe, and also a vast unsettling nightmare). This is Oates doing literary realism, about the lives of a poor urban american family, and it's still sprawling, aimless, and maximalist, but it's also grindingly, unrelentingly miserable: poverty is a trap and every possible exit is slammed shut as soon it opens. The endless, depressing monotony of the book is probably a deliberate effect, but it doesn't stop it being a slog.
Swamplandia! - Karen Russell
This is such a strange, murky, beautiful, sad novel. The Bigtree family run a tacky alligator-wrestling tourist-trap theme park in the Florida everglades. As they slowly run out of money, the daughters of the family end up trapped in a magic-realist narrative full of ghosts and seances and the underworld, while the son takes a job in a rival theme park - a bland capitalist monstrosity straight out of George Saunders or David Foster Wallace. It deals gracefully with all sorts of Big Themes: grief and identity and family and genre and politics and the loss of innocence. But mostly it's a wonderfully written book with a drenched, muddy sense of place.
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness - Richard Yates
Mid-twentieth century short stories about sad people: a father on a TB ward whose marriage is breaking down, a child lying to everyone around him in a desperate bid for popularity, failed novelists and failed teachers and failed office workers. They are precisely, subtly written, often very short, extremely easy to read. The difficulty comes with having to plunge, again and again, into these deep wells of misery: Yates is extremely good at hitting you with instant surges of empathy. It's a voyage into a quietly broken America.
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
So many classic ghost stories build to a shock, the grand revelation, the unambiguous arrival of the supernatural. It says a lot for Wharton's method that one of her most unsettling conclusions involves the discovery of a letter with writing too faint to read. The emotions may be intensely felt here, but Wharton's ghosts are hints and whispers: sometimes we meet them before we realise they are ghosts, sometimes they're only mentioned and never appear, sometimes it's left unclear how real the ghosts are. This is a collection of stories about settled Edwardian privilege, and the vague shadows of unknowing that threaten to unsettle it.
Sealed - Naomi Booth
I'm glad I read this before the pandemic kicked off, and I *really* wouldn't advise anyone to read it if they are pregnant or planning to become pregnant any time soon, because this book is a wiry sphere of crackling anxiety about plagues and childbirth. It's a short horror novella about a couple who have moved to an isolated Australian town. They will soon be having a baby, but their relationship is strained by the prospective mother's fears about a new disease, which seals over all the openings of a living body with skin. The government is responding incompetently, possibly covering up the extent of the illness. The book is tense, paranoid and horrible, and much more thoughtful than this schlocky summary makes it sound. I like it a lot. But depending on your resilience, maybe it's worth waiting until the world makes more sense before diving into it.
The North Water - Ian McGuire
What if Cormac McCarthy was fun? This is a rollicking, blood-soaked adventure containing three separate fights with polar bears. Here, a disgraced army doctor ends up in a cat-and-mouse duel with a grotesque murderer on board a 19th-century whaling ship, all told in thick, grotty prose. It's full of the stench and texture of deeply researched history, but the intensity is turned up to an almost cartoonish degree: it's too thoughtfully put together to be pulp, but it has the verve and swagger of the best pulp.
The Slynx - Tatyana Tolstaya
Pet theory that I've never actually done the research for. Anglo-American SF is descended from the pulp magazines of the 20s through the 40s, and therefore has elements (for better or worse) of children's stories, mass-market populism, and fealty to scientific accuracy buried deep in its dna, and even when loads of Anglo-American SF explicitly pushes against these elements, it does so self-consciously. Central/Eastern European SF never had that lineage, and so is much more unselfconscious about being literary or fantastical - this gets us people like Lem, the Strugatskys, or Pelevin. And also, this book, with an amazing blurb claiming that it "reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride". Nothing sounds more in my wheelhouse. That being said this was - surprisingly hard work? It's a dense grab-bag of fantastical post-apocalyptic ideas - all weird mutants and warped professions and scarred laughable dictatorships. But despite all this surface glitter it was a bit of a dispiriting aimless trudge? Maybe I just wasn't in the mood.
The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig
I read Zweig's novella "Chess" last year, and it was a perfect thing: an elegant game of a book that slowly descends into boiling political trauma. None of the other novellas in this collection are at the same level, but they're all set in the same world: a jewelled, poised, early 20th century mitteleuropean bourgeoisie tormented by storms of passionate emotion. Everyone is having affairs, wracked by guilt and jealousy, but they're being very polite about it. Zweig's writing was the inspiration for the Grand Budapest Hotel, but he doesn't have its lightness or wit. He does, however, have the same melancholy nostalgia for a bright, vanishing world.
The Hopkins Manuscript - R.C. Sherriff
The cosiest apocalypse you've ever read, and an unexpected delight. Edwardian science fiction in which the scientific community realises the moon is about to crash into the earth, probably destroying all life. The narrator is an amateur astronomer and breeder of prize chickens: charmingly pompous, essentially decent, and naively unaware of how this news is going to change everything. It is, of course, a metaphor for the first world war, and the way England sleepwalked into hell. But it's also a quiet, sad, beautiful story about the way people face change and death.
The Giant, O'Brien - Hilary Mantel
Odd, brief historical fiction. A slippery story of two men in 18th century london: an Irish giant, defined by romance and myth and the stories of the past, and a coldly psychopathic doctor, an avatar of science who wants to study the giant's corpse. It feels vague, sketchy, a dream that doesn't quite come together. I couldn't quite bite into what it was trying to do.
Nights at the Circus - Angela Carter
There's... almost too much to talk about here? A bewildering, explosive phantasmagoria, about a circus aerialiste with enormous wings and the journalist who follows her around Europe. It's full of incident and bawdiness and riotous games of language and narratives within narratives within narratives. The rules of its reality shift unexpectedly, from tall tales to outright surrealism. Identities are violently effaced, self-expression and political revolution burst outwards. It's... exhausting? Not in a bad way, but you do have to hang on and trust it. I enjoyed The Magic Toyshop and the Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann more, but they're not necessarily better, just easier to navigate.
Mostly Hero - Anna Burns
A short story, really, but Faber published it as a book on its own, so it counts. A superhero tries to take down a supervillain, while his mind-controlled girlfriend unconsciously tries to kill him. There are two levels of postmodern trickery here. Firstly, almost no one has names, instead referred to entirely by their function ("hero", "femme fatale" etc): the narrative is hollowed out, reduced to a structure - or a ritual, an oblique comment on how superhero stories work. It also blurs the line between the superhero stories, detective stories, fairy tales and folktales - everything laid out as the same clean archetypes. In case any of this sounds difficult, it's worth pointing out that the whole thing is funny and bouncy and cynical. It's absolutely playing in the same waters as writers like Bathelme or Coover, but I do prefer Barthelme's company.
Exhalation - Ted Chiang
Beautifully crafted, old-fashioned science fiction short stories. Chiang usually starts with a big idea (a machine that can communicate with parallel universes, a world where creationist beliefs are provably true, mechanical people investigating their own biology) and then tests and prods it with enough rigour that it blossoms into new shapes. For the most part, these are stories for the head not the heart, much more interested in concepts and systems than people. But there's enough energy and imagination here that it never feels like the series of academic exercises it occasionally approaches.
Mr Palomar - Italo Calvino
Only vaguely a novel - an imagined character looks at the world around him, and writes essays about what he sees. Some of these essays are beautiful, profound. Some feel dry and strained. This being Calvino, there's maximum formalism here: each of the 27 essays are arranged into a taxonomy of themes, all following predetermined patterns. Sometimes this book is a lovely bejewelled thing, sometimes it feels like you're watching the inner workings of a calculator.
A Dead Man in Deptford - Anthony Burgess
A historical novel about the life of Christopher Marlowe, all dense and grubby and exuberant. If you enjoy Cool Blasphemy as much as I do, there's plenty of that here. The only other Burgess I've read is A Clockwork Orange - and this has the same use of weird alienating language to create a weird alienating world - except here it's renaissance english not future youth slang. Did I enjoy it? Well, I really liked the first third, and then the March lockdown hit, and suddenly I wasn't in the mood for deliberately difficult books, and it mysteriously became dull and frustrating. So I had a bad time with most of it, but I think that's my fault and the world's fault, not the book's.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh
A wealthy, depressed, misanthropic woman decides to medicate herself so that she can sleep for an entire year. This is all happening in the New York of late 2000, early 2001, the shadow of what's coming always half visible. It's a bristly, spiky, witty novel, full of good jokes with rarely more than half an eye on the misery at its core. There's an elusive, winking ambiguity of tone here: my wife read it as a realist novel, I read it as a playful postmodern fantasy, I don't think either of us is wrong.
Rusty Brown - Chris Ware
A meticulously detailed graphic novel about daily life in a small Nebraskan town. It starts with a schoolchild and then spins out to characters who appear in corners of each other's stories. There are the standard concerns of realist literary fiction here: the failures and frustrations and desires of seemingly ordinary lives. But really, the most exciting stuff here is the buckets of audacious formalist trickery: stories running in parallel across the same pages; a character's life told with each page representing a year; a character's science fiction novel intertwining with their everyday existence. Mundanity stretched and warped by the ways it is presented.
The Methuen Book of Modern Drama: Plays of the '80s and '90s
Or, more accurately, one play from the 80s and four from the 90s. All five are big, loud, and formally experimental. Two of them are examples of in-yer-face theatre: Mark Ravenhill's "Shopping and Fucking" with its grubby amorality rushing at you like a flashier (shallower?) Pinter, and Sarah Kane's "Blasted", to which the most appropriate reaction is just saying "bloody hell" over and over - it's bracingly, impressively horrible - I can't begin to imagine how you'd stage it, or what it would feel like to be in the audience. Martin McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" is similarly spiky and uncomfortable, but doesn't have the spectacular overbearing verve of the other bits of his work I've seen: it's a tight small-scale fable about abuse and mental illness in rural ireland. Caryll Churchill's "Top Girls" feels like the one that loses the most by being on the page rather than stage: the fantastical breaches of realism read like schematics for how to create a sense of crackling energy, rather than being imbued with crackling energy themselves, and all the sophistication of its debates and discussions probably need actors for the drama to be felt. Terry Johnson's "Hysteria" (the only one of these plays I was previously familiar with) is just a riot: a scrambled farce that is somehow also an examination of Freud's work - Stoppardian in its non-stop cleverness. All in all, the book filled a bunch of gaps in my knowledge, and served as a reasonable substitute to actually being able to go to the theatre.
China Dream - Ma Jian
A satire about a bureaucrat working to roll out mind-control technology that will make China's population view its history and future with joyous positivity. The bureaucrat, meanwhile, tries to deal with the contradictions between his mission and his nagging memories. It's not subtle, but it is effective - a short sharp look at the ways totalitarianism lies about itself, from a writer in exile whose books are illegal in his homeland.
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
An absolute joy. The perfect novel for lockdown in that it is 1) 1200 pages long, and will therefore keep you going for a while, and 2) about someone who is Very Very Angry about being kept indoors. Its age and reputation made me expect something worthy, or challenging, but it's not that at all - it's just a huge rollicking party: a nineteenth century Batman, full of secret bases and wily criminials and bloody secrets. I love revenge stories, especially the bit where the revenger pulls off his mask and reveals himself to his victim: Edmond Dantes does this *four times*. The Robin Buss translation in the penguin edition is smooth, slick, modern, relentlessly readable, and in his notes he warns that most other English editions in print use an archaic bowlderised translation that should be avoided.
Exit West - Mohsin Hamid
A magnificent novel. Magical doors open up around the world, linking countries together. Passing through the doors allows you to move from country-to-country undetected, creating unmonitored immigration and potential routes of escape for those in poverty, or inhabitants of warzones. There's a beautifully rendered love story in here, but what surprised me most was how (despite its litfic reputation) it was essentially an SF novel: the doors aren't an allegory, or a magical quirk in an otherwise realist setting. They're a new development in a fully realised world, and the book is interested in seriously considering the social and political ramifications of that development.
The Obelisk Gate - N.K. Jemisin
The middle volume of the Broken Earth trilogy. Jemisin is great at clearly drawn characters with complicated motivations, vivid worldbuilding with weird aesthetics, fascinating and tactile magic systems, strong action scenes and political sophistication. But this does suffer from middle-volume wheel-spinning: it feels a bit like everyone is standing in place waiting for the plot to get going. I liked it, but I think it's exemplary commercial genre fantasy, not necessarily the transcendent work of serious importance that it is for a lot of critics.
The Stress of Her Regard - Tim Powers
A horror novel where Byron, Shelley and Keats fight vampires. And with that summary, I'm already completely won over. In my third year of university I got properly obsessed with Byron, and this is a book that really lets you nerd out about this stuff. Look, it's an action scene involving *John Cam Hobhouse*! It's the Carbonari, the revolutionary group that Byron joined when he was living in Ravenna, except it turns out they're a secret society dedicated to fighting the supernatural! There's the same level of geekishness about Keats and Shelley, and also a serious respect for their poetry, which is surprising in what is essentially a pulp novel about taking down monsters. It's imperfect: too long, structurally unsteady, and it massively underserves Mary Shelley. But I was delighted by it.
Braised Pork - An Yu
A quiet, whispery ghost of a novel. A young woman in Beijing finds her husband dead in a bathtub, and she deals numbly with both her grief and the slow-blossoming freedom of her escape from a difficult marriage. And while this absolutely works as a piece of realist fiction, it’s also very much not that - it's suffused with hallucinatory, magic-realist passages, which increase in density and importance as the novel moves towards a folkloric conclusion in Tibet. Strong stuff, but weirdly difficult to remember when you've finished with it
Plays One - Dennis Kelley
A selection of plays. The first two, "Debris" and "Osama the Hero" aren't great - they're straining to be edgy and shocking, but the strain is visible and - with the exception of a few moments - end up scattered and juvenile. The other two plays are stronger. "After the End" has essentially the same plot as 10 Cloverfield Lane - it's an unnerving, unpleasant, tense play about two people trapped together in a bunker, apparently after the apocalypse. "Love and Money" is a wonderful, horrible thing - a formally exuberant, deeply empathetic play about the corrosive effects of debt.
Hollow Shores - Gary Budden
A decent enough collection of short stories that circle around the author's obsessions. The english landscape, birdwatching, occasional flashes of folklore, the 1980s punk scene, and middle aged men who are grumpy about politics. It's totally acceptable, and it goes down smoothly, but the prose is ordinary and it feels a little self-indulgent? There's nothing wrong with it, but there's so much amazing horror-adjacent literary short fiction being written right now (off the top of my head Helen Oyeyemi, Daisy Johnson, Julia Armfield...) that this feels insessential.
The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories - Arthur Machen
HP Lovecraft crossed with Oscar Wilde, full of witty turn-of-the-century dandies suddenly faced with the horrors of the cosmos. Be warned, though, that it's not nearly as fun as it sounds. Machen has many strengths, but he can't plot, and every character is the same as every other character. Individual stories are often imaginative, strange, or frightening - and the title story is remarkably modern and remarkably unpleasant. But reading them in bulk is a monotonous excercise - a dry catalogue of the weird.
Laurus - Eugene Vodolazkin
For the most part, this is a historical novel about a russian healer, who is sometimes an empirically minded herbalist, and sometimes a chaotic holy fool who casts out demons and lives in poverty on the streets. It also plays with anachronism, its seemingly immortal protagonist sweeping through time, but it would be wrong to overemphasise these more fantastical and postmodern elements: they squat at the corners of a book which is - for the most part - a serious attempt to see the world through the medieval mind. It's also a deeply religious book - a serious look at sainthood and faith. Austere and meditative and worthwhile.
Collected Ghost Stories - M.R. James
As a general rule, I don't re-read. There are too many books, and I don't read fast enough. But the last time I read any M.R. James in bulk was when I was... eleven? And I didn't even read it all then. I've gone back to a bunch of his stories in anthologies since, and seen a bunch of adaptations. But one of my reading projects over the last few years has been to slowly get more knowledgeable about ghost stories, so it seemed important to cover the Big Towering Important Canonical Source. Anyway, in brief:
He's very very good
Reading all of these together probably isn't the best way to do it? It's his life's work, it's not meant to be wolfed down.
Top 3: 3) The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, 2) Number 13, 1) Casting the Runes
I love how nerdishly, joyously enthusiastic these stories are about old books and antiquarian pursuits.
I can't think of another book more full of Freudian repressed sexuality? Horrors keep happening in bedrooms, and there's a frankly ridiculous amount of torn clothes and hairy mouths.
It's interesting how physical and dangerous James's ghosts are. For so many authors, ghosts are shadows, images, memories, mysteries. James's ghosts can be any of these, but they're also Coming To Get You.
I kind of prefer Robert Aickman
Rosewater - Tade Thompson
A science fiction novel set in Nigeria in the 2060s. A huge alien lifeform has arrived - it has mysterious healing powers and a town has sprung up around it. It has also created a fungal network allowing some humans in its proximity to access psychic powers. The book is full of vivid world building - the aesthetics of its wilder ideas are a lot of fun, but they don't get in the way of its grounded African future. I just wish it didn't throw so many action scenes at the page - for every great idea, there's a moment when the plot has to stop for yet another dull fistfight.
How to Argue with a Racist - Adam Rutherford
Non-fiction from a geneticist, looking into the science behind race: drawing a distinction between race as a cultural concept and the (much more limited) evidence of genetic differences between populations. It's extremely lucid, readable and well argued, calmly demolishing the pseudoscience used by white nationalists and revealing a world that is much more interesting and complicated. I don't read much science-writing, but the clarity, brevity and political importance of the book mean that I'd comfortably recommend this.
Motherless Brooklyn - Jonathan Lethem
A hardboiled noir novel, with a protagonist who has tourettes. Anyone writing this kind of book (great prose, tough crimes, convoluted, tropey) is in the shadow of Chandler, and Lethem isn't Chandler. But this is still a strong example of the form, and the writing about tourettes is particularly good. There are also lengthy sections about Prince albums, which double as some of the best music criticism I've ever read.
Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo
Look, you don't need me to persuade you to read this - the booker prize is probably enough. But this was a fair way outside my usual wheelhouse (I don't read much realist contemporary fiction) and I thought this was blindingly, jaw-droppingly good. It tells the interconnected stories of various black british women and non-binary people, all from very different class backgrounds, at very different ages, living very different lives. It goes in depth into the politics of gender, sexuality, race and class - and all of this might sound a little worthy, but the book is so *alive* with propulsive, poetic prose, oceanic wells of empathy, and fiery, honest optimism: its patchwork of stories coalescing into a glittering history of twentieth century britain. Amazing amazing amazing stuff.
Mr Fox - Helen Oyeyemi
So on one level this is a novel about an author and a character he invented, locked in a duel to the death, with the author's wife caught in the middle. On another level this is a feminist retelling of the Bluebeard story. On yet another level, all of this is just a framing device for a selection of (often fantastic) short stories. Oyeyemi's books sometimes feel like mazes - you can be tracing a thread of meaning through them without being sure if you will bump into a dead end - and it's sometimes hard to see where it draws the line between being constructively ambiguous and irritatingly vague. But if I came out of this feeling like it was less than the sum of its parts, many of the parts were fantastic - especially a bizarre extended section set at a boarding school training boys to be perfect husbands.
The Will to Battle - Ada Palmer
I'll say what I've said about the rest of the books in this series. Ada Palmer is incredible, and if you're at all interested in Science Fiction, you should be reading her: this is, as ever, maximalist, dense, full of polymath cleverness, and huge amounts of fun. Here, a world which hasn't experienced conflict within living memory is about to be plunged into war - the great powers scrambling to ready themselves before the inevitable happens. It's very good at the dread and melancholy of a planet on the edge.
Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire - Akala
A memoir, a history, and a carefully researched polemic. This is a vital book about the black experience in Britain - vivid, angry and thoughtful about inequalities in the justice and education systems, and particularly useful if, like me, you are more familiar with how these problems manifest in the US than in the UK. I'm less sure about it when it gets into foreign policy: he talks about "the great journalist John Pilger", and is extremely complimentary about the Beijing government, and, well, let's just say these aren't my politics. But overall, this is useful, eye-opening stuff.
The Stone Sky - N.K. Jemisin
The third in the Broken Earth trilogy, and comfortably my favourite of the three. Partly because this is where its politics are at their most messy and intricate, but mostly because of the *scale* of the thing. If the second volume felt like it was spinning the wheels a bit, this one goes into overdrive, jumping through aeons of time, with planet-spanning wizard battles and convincingly felt fate-of-the-species stakes. It's sort of like those Doctor Who series finales where everything is bigger than everything else, and it does a good job of making its ending unpredictable but satisfying.
Muscle - Alan Trotter
A postmodern hardboiled noir parody/pastiche, from the perspective of two hired thugs. The prose is great, with all the wild metaphors you'd hope for, and there's a lot of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in its DNA - minor characters sitting on the sidelines of the main story while reality breaks down. It really lets rip with its stories-within-stories, written by a fictional pulp sf writer. There's something about noir that gets postmodernists excited: maybe its clarity as pure genre without referent in the outside world; maybe it's that there isn't much other pop fiction so distinctive on a sentence level. If you're after something like this, I'd suggest Auster's New York Trilogy first. The Coover novel "Noir" is also interesting here - messy, chewy, textured, and uncomfortable.
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil/ In Persuasion Nation - George Saunders
As close as Saunders gets to being a pure Science Fiction writer - most of these stories happen in warped, messy futures or in bizarre, gloopy realities following science-fictional rules. The novella "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil" is very Stanislaw Lem - weird inhuman creatures enacting a political allegory on an exaggeratedly tiny scale. But most of the stories here are closer to Vonnegut - distressing, violent, cruel comedies that occasionally roll onto their back to display a sentimental underbelly. The most impressively unpleasant is "Brad Carrigan, American", about characters inside a tv show retaining its audience by shifting from realism to lurid grotesquerie.
Electric Eden - Rob Young
A history of English folk music in the 20th century - from song collectors like Cecil Sharp, to the advent of folk clubs, and out through folk rock. If you're even vaguely interested in this stuff then it's wonderful - it drove me to so many albums I hadn't encountered before, and gave me renewed appreciation of a bunch of stuff I thought I knew well. It's also great at showing how forward thinking and international this music has always been (DADGAD tuning was first developed so its inventor could better jam with Moroccan musicians! The acoustic guitar only shows up in english trad about 15 years before the electric guitar does!), how the "authenticity" or "purity" of English folk music is always an illusion. It starts to run out of steam in its last hundred pages: there was clearly not much happening in folk in the 80s and early 90s, and Young starts looking at disparate and disconnected artists: it's hard to see what Kate Bush, Talk Talk or the Ghost Box label have to do with the story he's telling, and the book ends a few years before the late 90s/2000s revival brings us Bellowhead, Eliza Carthy, Seth Lakeman and all the rest of that particular flowering.
Beloved - Toni Morrison
When you don't click with a book regarded as one of the best novels of the twentieth century, the best policy is to assume this is your fault and not the book's. Beloved is a haunted house story about the legacy of slavery, and one which spurns any horror or ghost story conventions. It's a knotted, introverted novel, difficult to approach without being pushed back by tangled language and deep suffering. For me, it was difficult work without much reward - but I'm assuming that I'm wrong, that coming to it at a different time would have yielded different results. The other Morrison I've read was Song of Solomon, which had profundities I found easier to unlock.
77 Dream Songs - John Berryman
I think we can all agree that The Hold Steady are the greatest rock band of the 21st Century. In "Stuck Between Stations", Craig Finn sings
The devil and John Berryman took a walk together.
They ended up on Washington talking to the river.
He said 'I've surrounded myself with doctors and deep thinkers.
But big heads with soft bodies make for lousy lovers.'
There was that night that we thought John Berryman could fly.
But he didn't so he died.
And I've had that verse (along with pretty much every other Hold Steady lyric) stuck in my head for more than a decade, so I figured I should probably get round to reading some Berryman. The first thing I had to do here was get rid of my ingrained former-english-literature-student habit of needing to understand every poem. Unless you're sitting down at a desk with reference books, that isn't going to work here - they really do drift by like dreams, with sudden startling bolts of meaning striking among incomprehensible scratches of words. And when you're tuned in to it all, it's... bracing? This is a writer baring all the raw private flickerings of his subconscious, and sometimes that's his grief and depression, but sometimes it's his misogyny and racism, and yeah, one imagines that this would have had a somewhat different critical reception if it had been written today. Overall I found it a fascinating, often powerful thing, but I wouldn't blame anyone for avoiding it.
House of Leaves - Mark Z Danielewski
There was a point when this was on track to become a classic haunted house novel, but it hasn't aged well. A family discover that their home has a shifting floor plan, and contains infinite, hungry labyrinths. This story is apparently the plot of an imaginary documentary, and is told to us through by an academic commentary on that documentary - a commentary with shifting font sizes, mutating text layouts, multiplying and unstable footnotes. And this commentary is *itself* a story within a story - it's a sinister manuscript discovered by a struggling tattoo artist experiencing his own haunting. Games within games within games: the long expeditions into the labyrinth are superbly creepy, and you have to give it points for ambition. But the whole thing is infected by a forced 90s edginess - all sexism, drugs, and rock and roll, a laddy confusion between maturity and excess. It is also wildly self-indulgent and overlong, which is arguably part of the fun, but it's a very particular sort of fun.
The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories - Ed. William Trevor
An education, really. I was only familiar with the work of three of the 37 authors in here, and had only read one of the stories before. The consistency of great stuff is extremely high. Most exciting discovery was Frank O'Connor: he's got two deceptively small, deadpan stories in here, and they both open up into vertiginous wells of consequence. William Trevor's "Death in Jerusalem" was also a highlight: two brothers, one a priest, take a trip to the holy land, and they don't know how to bridge the enormous gap between their lives - it's an uncomfortable sad thing that has stuck fast in my head. I was also very much into Sheridan le Fanu's high-quality ghost stuff and William Carleton's storm-wracked night. It's interesting how the nineteenth and early twentieth century sections have a range of genres: horror, comedy, folk-tale, experimental modernism - but as you move through the twentieth century everything becomes social realism.
The Sword & Sorcery Anthology - Ed. David G. Hartwell & Jacob Weisman
You know what has disappeared? Florid, archaic language in fantasy pulp. If you read stories about Conan the Barbarian, or Jirel of Joiry, or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, part of the appeal - or at least the aesthetic - is textured, declamatory, purple prose. Moorcock does this a little bit, and there's obviously the occasional revivalist (Gene Wolfe and Jeffrey Ford both have fun with that here) but by the time you get to George RR Martin, Sword and Sorcery prose is defined by flat clarity. As for the stories in here, some are great, some are terrible - and part of the narrowness of the theme means a certain sameyness in the selection (there's always going to be someone killed by a sword and someone casting a spell, there will probably be a monster, it will take around 30 pages), though there's an admirable dedication to showing some diversity of both setting and author in what tends to be quite a white and male genre.
Fever Dream - Samanta Schweblin
Extremely creepy stuff. A woman lies in a hospital bed, and a child (not hers) sits beside her, asking her questions. As the dialogue proceeds, it's unclear what has happened, but we know it's something terrible, and potentially supernatural. For as long as this short novel remains suspended in this state of unknowing, it's fantastic, with high tension and high threat. It collapses a bit at the end, the answers nowhere near as interesting as the questions, but while it's running fast it runs well.
Attrib. And Other Stories - Eley Williams
These are precise, glittering short stories, obsessed with language games and the precise functioning of words in a way that reminded me of early Stoppard. They take a single idea (the lyrics of a song, a specific painting, syesthesia, foley work) and fire puns and flights of fancy at it until the idea has been exploded into something new - there aren't many plots here, and these these often feels like playful essays from imaginary perspectives. I guess you could consider them inconsequential, but only if you ignore their tidal waves of cleverness.
Central Station - Lavie Tidhar
Sort of a novel, sort of a selection of linked short stories, set around a vast spaceport in future Tel Aviv. The stories bounce between different SF subgenres: there's cyberpunk, space opera, military sf, robot stories, gothic romance... and I'm not sure whether this is a metatextual attempt to explore the functions and structures of different forms, or if its just having fun jumping between different types of traditionalism. Characters and families appear again and again through the stories, you end up with a quietly optimistic picture of a community - watching its food, work, faith and art as it moves through time.
Night Theatre - Vikram Paralkar
An absolutely fantastic ghost story. A master surgeon runs a small, underfunded clinic in rural India. One night, a family arrives at the clinic - they are dead, but if the surgeon can repair their wounds before morning then they will be able to return to the land of the living. It's a great hook, and the novel makes brilliant use of it - a small cast of deep multifaceted characters, an evocative sense of place, high tension hyper-detailed medical procedures, a plot that keeps twisting and tightening and expanding in scope, political anger and surprising profundity. I would thoroughly recommend.
Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
It's taken me a surprisingly long time to get round to reading Murakami, and it's everything I'd hoped. Two linked narratives: an adult with learning difficulties and the ability to talk to cats leaves his comfortable life to go on an idiosyncratic quest; a teenage boy has run away from home and takes up residence in a library. Both are implicated in the same murder. There are spirits, prophecies, and a lot of much harder-to-define weirdness, all told in cool, precise prose. It's compelling - believable characters caught in an ever expanding web of dream-logic. And life in the library is brilliantly evoked, a very specific kind of heaven.
Snow - John Banville
The only other Banville I've read (The Book of Evidence) was a knotty, murky, linguistically dense book that reminded me of Nabokov. This is different - a straightforward, plainly told country house whodunnit, with a body in the library, an eccentric detective and a small group of stock suspects. There's a little bit of subversion - this is set in the Ireland of the 50s, and it uses its form to explore the period - the Protestant aristocracy in a majority Catholic country, the drinking culture, the political influence of the church. It's well done, but it's not surprising - the small, clockwork worlds of murder mysteries tend to work as a microcosms of their societies by default. Also, while the snowbound manor house and predictable rhythms suggest comfort reading, there's a bunch of harrowing and upsetting stuff in its final third.
Reality and Other Stories - John Lanchester
A slightly gimmicky book - formally classical ghost stories, each of which has a modern technological twist. There's two genuinely great short stories here - one about an apparent haunting in a gadget-drenched house, another about an elderly relative's emergency call button. But there's a lot of nonsense too - a story about a reality tv house that turns evil feels 25 years out of date, and I'm sorry but I can't truly respect anything that contains a haunted selfie-stick. It also never goes beyond the aesthetics and basic functions of technologies, never examining unsettling ways they change how we live and think.
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
Believe the hype. "Infinite flooded labyrinth full of vast halls of weird statues" is an aesthetic I'm always going to love, and one of the many strengths of Piranesi is that it gives you time to just hang out in an extraordinary place. I'm also always into books where characters use science to work out the rules of impossible fantasy worlds. The plotting is pretty extraordinary - without anything as obvious as a Big Twist, the story contorts and expands until - by the end of the book - all your perspectives have shifted. It starts out as spectacle and ends as a warm, hopeful, human, honest thing.
Night Walking - Matthew Beaumont
A cultural history of the London streets at night, from the middle ages to the Victorian era. It's primarily a literary history - chapters tend to focus on the lives and work of specific writers. It's also consistently left wing - suspicious of law enforcement and private property. I found it quite hard work - it's pretty dense - but worth it: tracking the development of nightlife, policing, prostitution and homelessness across centuries.
Metropole - Ferenc Karinthy
A very specific vision of hell. A linguist gets on the wrong flight, and ends up in a city where he can't decipher the language or find a way out. The city is overly loud, overly crowded, chaotic and impersonal. Every possible exit he can find, every possible clue, proves futile. It's an oppressive, exhausting book, and fantastically well done - full of extraordinary setpieces (an incomprehensible ritual in a vast religious building is a highlight). It provides a new way of thinking about cities: how their shapes and structures work when drained of meaning.
A Voyage to Arcturus - David Lindsay
Bizarre Edwardian science fiction. It's similar to CS Lewis's space trilogy: a comfortable Englishman travels to an alien planet and takes part in various allegorical scenes. But where CS Lewis's novels were allegories for Christianity, this is an allegory for some sort of... spiritual freudian nihilism? The protagonist meets strange being after strange being, murdering a large number of them, his body warping with new organs as he hunts for something that might be a god and might be a devil. The early sections of the book feel like they're rumbling with weird repressed sexuality, but as it goes on you realise that there's no repression here - Lindsay knows exactly what he's doing. A book blasted into strangeness by the psychic aftershocks of the first world war.
By Force Alone - Lavie Tidhar
What a delightful mess. Initially, this seems to be a grim and gritty retelling of the Arthurian legends - a pungent post-roman Britain with battles full of blood and mud and creative swearing. But then you end up with quotations from Goodfellas and the X-files and Trainspotting, a Lancelot who knows Kung-fu, the Fisher King ruling over a science-fiction post-apocalyptic wasteland. Arthuriana has always been a cross-cultural mashup (see, for instance, how the most delightfully weird stuff in Malory's grail quest comes from a collision between secular romance and pious religious fables), and Tidhar leans into that. But that's not all! There's a remarkably deep nerdiness about the source texts here (Sir Dagonet! Morgause and Morgana as separate entities! Stuff that rewards familiarity with Wagner's Parsifal! Stuff that only otherwise shows up in Geoffrey of Monmouth, which I don't know at all!) And if that wasn't enough, this is also... a cynical satire of contemporary popular nationalism? Anyway, I love it, it's probably not for everyone.
The Methuen Book of 21st Century British Plays - ed. Aleks Sierz
An interesting mixed bag. In "Blue/Orange" by Joe Penhall, two doctors on an underfunded mental health ward decide on the fate of a patient who may or may not be severely ill: it swings between political despair and brutal interpersonal contact - good, intense stuff. "Elmina's Kitchen" by Kwame Kwei-Armah and "Gone too far!" by Bola Agbaje are both realist plays about the black British experience. The former, set in an independent restaurant under the shadow of gang violence, is an intricate tragicomedy that probably needs to be seen live for the jokes to land or the suffering to hurt. The latter is about two brothers, one who has been living in Nigeria, the other in England, experiencing all the messiness of multicultural identity in modern London - it has a light touch but still digs deep into complex ideas. "Realism" by Anthony Neilson is the sort of wild surrealism I usually enjoy - the weird scrappy thoughts of a boring day transformed into chaotic images. But it's inconsequential, and a white writer including a lengthy recreation of the Black and White Minstrel show, and then adding a snotty author's note insisting that the scene "should not be omitted on the grounds of offensiveness alone" is more than a bit unpleasant. "Pornography" by Simon Stephens is probably the one I enjoyed most - as a series of monologues, it works well on the page, and it's formally dense: an exploration of the week of the 7/7 bombings (and Live8, and the UK winning the 2012 Olympics bid) through the voices of characters who correspond to the lines of the As You Like It "Seven Ages of Man" speech. It's spiky and weird and thoughtful.
Salt Slow - Julia Armfield
Remarkably good short stories, mostly fantasy and horror: an epidemic of insomnia coincides with people's sleep manifesting as quiet, clumsy ghosts; a house of modern post-grad students build a Frankenstein; a human girl has a wolf for a sister; a pregnant woman and her partner sail through an apocalyptic sea-scape. It's interesting that this ends up with a dour cover, being sold in the Literary Fiction section of the bookshop: more than anything it reminds me of the short fiction of China Mieville. These are short, sharp, spooky, and beautifully written.
Underland - Robert Macfarlane
Non-fiction about things that happen underground. Mostly caves and cavers, but also mines, physics experiments, glaciers, the networks of fungus that allow forests to communicate with themselves... occasionally it's overwritten, bordering on pompous, facts left aside for poetic reveries. And it's oddly mystical - the author carries a variety of talismans with him on his journeys. But it's also fascinating and evocative. The detailed descriptions of caving deaths are harrowing, and to be honest so are the descriptions of the author's own experiences travelling through mazes subterranean passages. The best chapter is the one on the Paris Catacombs - the extreme weirdness of days of illegal travel through the unlit claustrophobic corridors on which the city is built.
LoveStar - Andri Snaer Magnason
Icelandic Science Fiction, this is pretty great. A single, amazon-esque corporation has taken over every function of human society - death, love, work, politics. A young couple has been "calculated apart": the system has found that they aren't each others' perfect soulmates and is using every method to break them up. A brutal satire of the way tech companies tell us they're building a utopia while locking us into nightmares, it moves towards an apocalyptic conclusion. It's also consistently funny, in a bitter, hollow way.
The Princess Bride - William Goldman
If you've seen the movie, this will be very familiar - it's pretty much identical, beat for beat. But the movie is fun, and therefore so is this - all swashbuckling, witty repartee, and glittering artifice. There's a fun frame narrative - supposedly this is a lost European classic, which Goldman has abridged, cutting out "the boring bits" - the editor will intrude semi-regularly to tell you what is supposedly missing. It's a nice joke, but don't expect postmodernist formal invention here - this is a gentle escapist fantasy with good swordfights.
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories - ed A.S. Byatt
A nicely varied selection, mixing the traditionally literary with comedy, ghost stories, and the odd bit of Science Fiction. Unlike the Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (which I read earlier this year) I was familiar with a lot of the writers - and the stories I enjoyed most were usually by writers I already knew I liked (Thomas Hardy, HG Wells, GK Chesterton, Angela Carter, TH White). There's also a fair bit of social realism, and stories where people have complicated emotions in small rooms, all of which were beautifully done, but not really my thing (see VS Pritchett, Rosamond Lehmann, HE Bates, Elizabeth Taylor...). There were also some nice introductions to authors I hadn't read before: John Fuller, with a couple of short, sharp bursts of weirdness; Ronald Firbank with an exuberant Wildean story about high society and magic; Ian McEwan with a dense, disturbing piece of supernatural horror.
How to Extricate Yourself - Laura Theis
Laura is a friend of mine, and this book of her poetry is absolutely fantastic stuff. The poems often start off feeling smoothly conversational - maybe charming or whimsical - until the bottom falls out and you see all the rolling depths beneath. It's full of poems that feel like scenes or perspectives from imaginary folktales, as if you could look around the corners and see the whole story rolling outwards. It's also extremely funny - sudden barbed jokes smuggled in unexpectedly.
The Haunted Man - Charles Dickens
My fourth year running of reading a Dickens Christmas novella in December. This one is great: good jokes, amazing prose, buckets of pathos, superb descriptions of the weather, a spooky ghost. Structurally, it's a straight copy of A Christmas Carol - you get the miserable status quo in the first third, a supernatural intervention in the middle third, and a joyously christmassy final third as the supernatural intervention gets out of the way. If I was nitpicking, I'd say that the precise nature of the ghostly curse is a bit vague and overcomplicated, and that Redlaw, the central character, doesn't really deserve his torturous haunting. Still, if you want to read one of Dickens's Christmas books, and A Christmas Carol is overfamiliar, this is the one I'd go for.
Teatro Grottesco - Thomas Ligotti
Very very good horror short stories. I've read a couple of Ligotti's earlier collections ("Songs of a Dead Dreamer" and "Grimscribe"), both of which were great, but sometimes felt like he was doing hallucinatory cover versions of famous tropes. This is much more distinctive and personal: all urban decay, abandoned amusement parks, poorly attended theatrical performances in empty back rooms, masks and puppets, long passages of nihilistic philosophy. The story "Gas Station Carnivals" feels *exactly* like my bad dreams. Recommended to all fans of confronting hostile, incomprehensible entities in a meaningless, degraded universe.
Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
A farcical satire of journalism, about a nature correspondent sent to a nascent East-African warzone, bumbling around good-naturedly surrounded by cynical, opportunistic reporters. It's beautifully constructed, full of lovely wodehousian turns of phrase, and sharp and spiky about the relationship between newspapers and the truth. But! It's also consistently, aggressively racist. All the black characters are either idiot rubes, duplicitous schemers, or both. Their English skills are used as a punchline, and several of the white characters use slurs pretty much constantly. The Christopher Hitchens introduction to the Penguin edition makes a half-hearted stab at defending the novel, but for all its strengths, it's going to leave a nasty taste in the mouth.
In the Country of Last Things - Paul Auster
I end the year where I began it, with early-career Paul Auster. This, interestingly, is pretty much a straight Science Fiction novel, though I don't know if Auster realised he was writing SF. An unnamed city in an unnamed country has fallen in some unclear way - much of the infrastructure is gone, violence is rife, almost everyone is homeless and unemployed. There's more fantastical stuff going on as well - there are bizarre and elaborate suicide cults, the government is burning corpses for fuel, and there's some sense in which the map of the city is unstable, buildings and streets changing locations and unseen, unexplained explosions in the distance. Into this chaos, a young woman makes a picaresque, doomed journey to find her brother. If this isn't up there with Auster's best stuff (which is an admittedly high bar), it's still pretty excellent: brief and evocative, the hellishness mitigated by Auter's usual cool, clean, precise prose.